With but 55,000 troops in hand and surrounded by the united Austrian and Russian armies aggregating a quarter of a million men; Frederic the Great availing of a swamp, a few hills, a rivulet and a fortified town, constructed a battlefield upon which his opponents dared not engage him.
This famous camp of Bunzlewitz is one of the wonders of the military art. It also is an illustration of the inability of the Anglo-Saxon to reason; for to this day many who wear epaulets, accepting the dictum of a skillfully hoodwinked French diplomat at the siege of Neisse, (Dec., 1740) commonly assert that “the great Frederic was a bad engineer.”
Washington compelled the British to evacuate Boston, merely by occupying with artillery Dorchester Heights, the tactical key of the theatre of action and thus preventing either ingress or egress from the harbor.
At Trenton the Hessian column was unable to escape from Washington’s accurate evolutions, on account of being imprisoned in an angle formed by the unfordable Delaware river.
At Yorktown, the British army under Lord Cornwallis was captured entire, being cut off from all retreat by the ocean on the right flank and the James river in rear.