Arnold opened his mouth as if to say something more. Then he closed it tight, whirled his horse, made a half circle, set it at the fence and cleared it. Cheering and laughing, Morgan’s men tore down the rails and went pelting into the forest after Arnold.

… I have heard it said that Arnold was drunk that cold October afternoon—that he was mad with blood-lust—crazed by the injustices heaped on him by Congress and by Gates, and so was able to perform prodigies.

The folk who say such things reveal their ignorance of battle; their unacquaintance with the effects of liquor; their total incomprehension of the clarity of brain and the sureness of hand and eye required of a leader who acts as Arnold did.

A seaman, befuddled with drink, wrecks his ship in a crisis: an intoxicated soldier gives the wrong orders when able to give them at all: a drunken horseman, attempting such a race with death as Arnold rode, would tumble in the dust before he had more than started.

The truth is this: all his life Arnold was a performer of prodigies—a man who saw how to do, and freely risked his life to do, what other men said could not be done; and to small and common minds a performer of prodigies must always seem a little mad or more than a little drunk. But if ever a man had all his senses, and had them in the highest degree, it was Arnold in that second Battle of Saratoga—the one some call the Battle of Bemis’s Heights, and others the Battle of Stillwater.

There was a cutting through the forest—a road along which the British had brought their troops and guns when marching to the wheat field. We hurried down it after Arnold—a human river, dun-colored in the gathering gloom that had come with a threatening sky and the lateness of the day. It was a river that flowed with the noises of a turbulent stream—with the jouncing of powder horns and cartridge boxes: the screaking of belts and chafing of musket straps: the thudding and rustling of hurrying bodies. Like a storm-fed torrent it murmured and rattled, thumped and clattered, clanked and grunted, roared and rushed.

We came out of the woods into a long and shallow valley. It was a cleared valley, blocked by two low hills; one fairly close at hand: the other a quarter mile beyond the first. Up the slope of the nearer hill climbed small figures, some scarlet and white: others blue and white. They were the remnants of the proud detachment we had blasted from the wheat field.

Ahead of us the road wound through the stumps of the cleared land: then turned and vanished between the two low hills. On the summit of each of the two hills were breastworks, stockades, trenches: on the nearer hill, trees had been felled to make an abatis.