The actual evacuation began at three o’clock on the morning of June eighteenth, and the entire British army was on the New Jersey side of the Delaware by ten o’clock. Washington had so closely calculated the movement, that General Maxwell’s brigade and the New Jersey militia were already at work burning bridges and felling trees across the roads, in order to delay Clinton’s march and afford an opportunity for attacking his retiring columns. General Arnold, whose wound still prevented field service, entered the city with a strong detachment as the British rear-guard left. Twelve miles of baggage-train, loaded with everything of army supplies that could be heaped upon wagons, formed the long extended caravan which accompanied nearly eighteen thousand British veterans as they returned to New York, whence they had started only eleven months before. The capture of the American capital and the destruction of the American army had been their fondest desire. Now, they shrunk away from the same American capital as from a pest-house. There was no longer an eager search to find Washington. To make the earliest safe distance from his presence, or his reach, was the incentive to the speediest possible travel. It was no longer the destruction of that one principal American army that engrossed thought and stimulated energy; but how to save the British army itself, for efficient service elsewhere. And Washington, although fully appreciating the British situation, did not know the fact that the British cabinet were actually discussing, at that very time, the propriety of transferring all active operations to the more sparsely settled regions of the South. The movements in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as those of Burgoyne, away from the sea-coast, recall an emphatic communication from General Howe, which contained this practical statement: “Almost every movement in America was an act of enterprise, clogged with innumerable difficulties. A knowledge of the country, intersected, as it everywhere is, by woods, mountains, water or morasses, cannot be obtained with any degree of precision necessary to foresee and guard against the contingencies that may occur.”