He wheeled and galloped to the rallying of the troops.  At this moment Hamilton rode up.  He had ridden through the engagement without a hat.  It seemed to him that he could hear the bubbling of his brain, that the very air blazed, and that the end of all things had come.  That day of Monmouth ever remained in his memory as the most awful and hopeless of his life.  An ordinary defeat was nothing.  But the American arms branded with cowardice, Washington ignobly deposed, inefficient commanders floundering for a few months before the Americans were become the laughing-stock of Europe,—­the whole vision was so hideous, and the day so hopeless in the light of those cowardly hordes, that he galloped through the rain of British bullets, praying for death; he had lost all sense of separate existence from the shattered American cause.  He did not perceive that Washington had reached the column, and resolved to make one more appeal to Lee, he rode up to that withered culprit and exclaimed passionately:—­

“I will stay with you, my dear General, and die with you!  Let us all die here, rather than retreat!”

Lee made no reply.  His brain felt as if a hot blast had swept it.

“At least send a detachment to the succour of the artillery,” said Hamilton, with quick suspicion.  And Lee ordered Colonel Livingston to advance.

At the same moment some one told Hamilton that Washington was in the rear, rallying the troops.  He spurred his horse and found that the General had rallied the regiments of Ramsay and Stewart, after a rebuke under which they still trembled, and was ordering Oswald to hasten his cannon to the eminence which his aide had suggested to Lee.  Hamilton himself was in time to intercept two retreating brigades.  He succeeded in rallying them, formed them along a fence at hand, and ordered them to charge at the point of the bayonet.  He placed himself at their head, and they made a brilliant dash upon the enemy.  But his part was soon over.  His horse was shot under him, and as he struck the ground he was overcome by the shock and the heat, and immediately carried from the field.  But the retreat was suspended, order restored, and although the battle raged all day, the British gained no advantage.  The troops were so demoralized by the torrid heat that at sunset both Commanders were obliged to cease hostilities; and Washington, who had been in the saddle since daybreak, threw himself under a tree to sleep, confident of a victory on the morrow.

“I had a feeling as if my very soul were exploding,” said Hamilton to Laurens, as they bathed their heads in a stream in the woods, with the bodies of dead and living huddled on every side of them.  “I had a hideous vision of Washington and the rest of us in a huge battle picture, in which a redcoat stood on every squirming variety of continental uniform, while a screeching eagle flew off with the Declaration of Independence.  But after all, there is something magnificent in so absolutely identifying yourself with a cause that you go down to its depths of agony and fly to its heights of exaltation.  I was mad to die when the day—­and with it the whole Cause—­seemed lost.  Patriotism surely is the master passion.  Nothing else can annihilate the ego.”