“The scene was grand and solemn,” an American soldier later wrote. “All the adjacent hills smoked as though on fire, and bellowed and trembled with a perpetual cannonade.… Fences and walls were knocked down and torn to pieces.” Brush fires scorched the soles of Hessian shoes; Heister’s troops held their cartridge boxes above the flames as they pressed up the slope. A two-gun American battery—possibly commanded by young Hamilton—threw a few answering rounds until an enemy cannonball struck one carriage “and scattered the shot about, a wad of tow blazing in the middle,” Haslet reported. “The
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