He was prepared for Clinton’s choice of the alternate movements. Although one division had been advanced in the direction of the Hudson River, Generals Greene, Maxwell, and Stark, with Harry Lee’s cavalry, and a strong force of militia, had been left in position near Springfield. Few battles of the American Revolution have received less attention, as among the decisive battles of the war, than that of Springfield, N.J. And yet few were more strikingly illustrative of the strategic wisdom with which Washington had planned the successful prosecution of the war, as early as 1776. On the morning of the twenty-third, at five o’clock, the British army, having crossed from Staten Island in two columns, began its advance. (See maps, “Battle of Springfield,” and, “Operations in New Jersey.”) Its force consisted of five thousand infantry, nearly all of their cavalry, and eighteen pieces of artillery. General Clinton, with the right wing, advanced along the Springfield road with vigor, but deliberately, as if this were his principal line of attack. Upon approaching the first bridge near the Matthews House, he was obliged to halt until his guns could gain a suitable position, since Colonel Angel’s Rhode Island regiment, with one gun, commanded the bridge over the Rahway, and occupied an orchard which gave good cover. At first, the British guns were aimed too high and did little execution. By fording the stream, which was not more than twelve yards wide, Angel’s position was turned, so that he was crowded back to the second bridge, over a branch of the Rahway, where Colonel Shreve resisted with equal obstinacy and bravery. By reference to the map it will be seen that General Greene, as well as Dickinson’s militia on a slight ridge in the rear of Shreve, was admirably posted for reserve support. Angel lost one-fourth of his men and was ordered to fall back, with Colonel Shreve, to the high ground occupied by Generals Maxwell and Stark, near a mill. Colonel Dayton’s Regiment was also distinguished for its gallant conduct. Washington Irving refers very pleasantly to the part taken in the action by Chaplain Caldwell, whose church had been burned on the twenty-fifth of January and whose wife had been killed on the sixth of June, as follows: “None showed more ardor in the fight than Caldwell the chaplain, who distributed Watts’s psalm and hymn books among the soldiers when they were in want of wadding, with the shout: ‘Put Watts into them, boys!’”