For these two prejudices we were to pay very dearly. They not only brought into the struggle a bitterness which was needless and to be deplored, but, as things turned out, they reacted very unpleasantly on ourselves. It was bad enough to be worsted by those whom the meaner and more foolish among us regarded as of lower clay; it was still more mortifying for old soldiers, who had learned their drill in the barrack-yard, to find that it went for little in face of the immensities of that unknown continent; and that among the forests of the Hudson or in the marshes of the Savannah our military art was of far less value than the power to shoot straight, or to lay an ambush after the Indian fashion. Owing to these two prejudices the lessons we had to learn in the war were the more painful. Not that our poor fellows did not fight. Believe me, they fought with the most dogged courage—sometimes when the only powder they had was the powder on their queues, and the steel or the clubbed musket was their only weapon. But the others fought too and stubbornly—what else could we expect? They were of our blood and bone; they, too, were Britons. And they were in their own forests, on their own rivers,—which seemed to be seas to us—they were fighting for their homes and barns and orchards. Whereas we were twelve weeks from home, ill-fed, ill-found, and ill-supported, scattered over hundreds of leagues, and lost in pathless wilds that grew more hostile as outrage on the one side or the other embittered our relations. The first half of the war was fought in the northern colonies. It ended sadly, as all remember, in our surrender at Saratoga, and in the retreat of General Clinton from Philadelphia to the sea-coast. After that, the fighting was transferred to the south, to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. We took Charles Town, we defeated the Continental Army at Camden, we had South Carolina in our hands, we looked hopefully towards the north. And then, in the late summer of ’80, when the south seemed to be in our hands, the country on all sides rose against us as by magic and the war took on a new and more savage character. But enough has been said by way of general preface.