The Glorious Cause - Victory or Death

Three days before Christmas 1776, a doctor visiting headquarters watched George Washington scratch the same two words on scraps of paper, over and over. Victory or death. Days later that was the countersign for the most reckless thing he had yet attempted: 2,400 freezing men, eighteen guns, and a river running with ice. This is the story of the ten days that saved the Revolution, told from inside them — a Hessian colonel who would not dig a trench, an artillery train hauled across the Delaware because cannon fire in weather muskets will not, a line of soldiers with the legal right to walk home standing silent while the drums beat for volunteers, and a general who rode to within thirty yards of the British muzzles and sat there while both sides fired. Trenton. Assunpink. Princeton. And a British colonel writing home that spring to say that the men his army had laughed at all year had become something else.