and usually futile. It might
be said of Washington, too, that he should not have kept an army so far
in front of his lines behind Brooklyn Heights facing a superior enemy,
and with, for a part of it, retreat possible only by a single causeway
across a marsh three miles long. When he realized, on the 28th of
August, what Howe had achieved, he increased the defenders of Brooklyn
Heights to ten thousand men, more than half his army. This was another
cardinal error. British ships were near and but for unfavorable winds
might have sailed up to Brooklyn. Washington hoped and prayed that Howe
would try to carry Brooklyn Heights by assault. Then there would have
been at least slaughter on the scale of Bunker Hill. But Howe had
learned caution. He made no reckless attack, and soon Washington found
that he must move away or face the danger of losing every man on Long
Island.

On the night of the 29th of August there was clear moonlight, with fog
towards daybreak. A British army of twenty-five thousand men was only
some six hundred yards from the American lines. A few miles from the
shore lay at anchor a great British fleet with, it is to be presumed,
its patrols on the alert. Yet, during that night, ten thousand American
troops were marched down to boats on the strand at Brooklyn and, with
all their stores, were carried across a mile of water to New York. There
must have been the splash of oars and the grating of keels, orders given
in tones above a whisper, the complex sounds of moving bodies of men.
It was all done under the eye of Washington. We can picture that tall
figure moving about on the strand at Brooklyn, which he was the last
to leave. Not a sound disturbed the slumbers of the British. An army
in retreat does not easily defend itself. Boats from the British fleet
might have brought panic to the Americans in the darkness and the
British army should at least have known that they were gone. By seven in
the morning the ten thousand American soldiers were for the time safe
in New York, and we may suppose that the two Howes were asking eager
questions and wondering how it had all happened.

Washington had shown that he knew when and how to retire. Long Island
was his first battle and he had lost. Now retreat was his first great
tactical achievement. He could not stay in New York and so sent at once
the chief part of the army, withdrawn from Brooklyn, to the line of the
Harlem River at the north end of the island. He reali