it was the natural plan of battle for Howe to adopt under the
circumstances. If, then, our general had only taken sufficient
precaution to meet it!

Early on this foggy, warm morning of the 11th the British were in
motion. There was no hurry for Knyphausen, but Cornwallis's men had a
long, hard march before them. At five o'clock they set off, leaving
behind them all encumbering baggage, even their knapsacks. Turning
northward, they took the road which, pursuing a direction generally
parallel with the Brandywine, reaches the west branch of the creek at
Trimble's Ford. Howe himself rode with them. He was mounted, Townsend
says, "on a large English horse, much reduced in flesh"--thanks to short
rations on shipboard. Thirteen thousand men, the whole left wing of the
army, marched in this column. Hidden by the forests and hills, as well
as by the mists of the morning, they had moved several miles on their
way before any word of their march reached the Americans across the
creek, only three miles away.

Cornwallis having gone, Knyphausen presently took up his share of the
morning's work. At nine o'clock, or thereabout, he pressed forward on
the road toward Chad's. The opposing force between him and that place
was mainly Maxwell's command of riflemen and light infantry, whose main
body, about a thousand strong, lay upon the high ground a mile west of
the ford, but whose scouting-parties the British advance-guard speedily
encountered. A party of scouts, indeed, tradition says, had ventured to
Johnny Welsh's tavern, almost in the very embraces of Knyphausen, and
there, in cheerful disregard of precaution, had tied their horses in
front, and were making merry with the apple whiskey and New England rum
of the bar-room. Surprised thus, the patriot bacchanals ran for their
lives from the back door and escaped through the fields, emptying their
guns in one sputtering volley that wounded one of their own horses left
in the hands of the enemy.

A little farther, however, the riflemen began to fire upon the advancing
British, though, pressed by the heavy column, they fell slowly back
toward Maxwell's main body. From behind the clumps of trees, the hedges,
the walls and the houses they aimed at the invaders, and harassed, if
they did not impede, their march. The "Old Kennet" meeting-house and its
graveyard walls gave them another and yet more favorable ambush. But by
ten o'clock the fighting had become more serious. Maxwell, pressed b