[Waves breaking, ship's rigging creaking] Voice: I needed all my courage and tenderness to keep my resolution of following my husband.

Besides the perils of the sea, I was told that we would be exposed to be eaten by the savages, and that people in America lived upon horse flesh and cats.

Baroness Friederike Riedesel.

Narrator: When German General Friedrich Adolph Riedesel left Europe in 1776 to join General Burgoyne's northern campaign, he had left his pregnant wife and two small daughters at home.

But as soon as she could, after her third daughter was born, Baroness Riedesel crossed the Atlantic with all three girls.

In mid-August, she caught up with her husband and Burgoyne's army at Fort Edward.

Voice: In the beginning, all went well.

We cherished the sweet hope of a sure victory and of coming into the promised land.

And when on the passage across the Hudson, General Burgoyne exclaimed, "The English never lose ground," our spirits were greatly exhilarated.

[Baroness Riedesel] Narrator: On September 13, 1777, two days after Washington's defeat at the Battle of the Brandywine, General Burgoyne's army in New York began streaming across the Hudson near Saratoga on a bridge of boats covered with planks.

Officers and men, women, children, horses, cattle, wagons, field-pieces-- it took three days for it all to cross.

Waiting for them some 10 miles south of Saratoga were General Horatio Gates' 6,900 Continentals and 1,300 militia, dug in along Bemis Heights, a broad plateau anchored on the right by the Hudson River and sheltered on the left by craggy wooded bluffs.

Colonel Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish volunteer for the Americans, had chosen the site and laid out brigade encampments, breastworks, and artillery emplacements all along the Heights for 3/4 of a mile.

Patriot cannon commanded the river road to Albany.

Officers had a clear view of the rough terrain across which the British would have to march-- deep ravines and dense woods, broken here and there by half-cleared farmers' fields.

Most of Burgoyne's Native scouts had left him by now, so while he knew the Americans were somewhere ahead of him, he had no way of knowing how many they were or precisely how they were positioned.

On September 19th, he resolved to find out and then try to drive through the rebel lines.

He divided his force into three columns.

Scottish General Simon Fraser, with nearly 3,000 troops, set out to pinpoint his enemy's flank, hoping to locate high ground from which to fire on the rebels.

2,200 soldiers under German General Riedesel approached along the river road.

Burgoyne himself led the middle column-- some 1,700 soldiers--to assault what he guessed was the center of the American lines.

Watching from Bemis Heights, General Gates was content to wait.

This was his first battlefield command, and he was a careful, cautious man.

Both Fraser's and Riedesel's columns stalled, but Burgoyne's men managed to make it through the forest to a clearing named Freeman's Farm, where General Benedict Arnold and Daniel Morgan's riflemen went out to engage them.

[Musket fire] Atkinson: General Burgoyne asks for reinforcements.

Riedesel, who's a very fine commander, immediately sends some reinforcements up from the river to hit the Americans in the American right flank.

And this successfully stops the American momentum.

This First Battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Freeman Farm, it's a draw, basically.

You can say that the British have been successful in that they have held onto the ground, but for the most part, it's inconclusive.

Narrator: Burgoyne had not located the main rebel positions on Bemis Heights, and had lost 591 men, nearly twice as many as the Patriots had lost, and, unlike General Gates, Burgoyne had no realistic prospect of replacing them.

♪ Voice: I was an eyewitness of the whole affair and shivered at every shot, for I could hear everything.

I saw a great number of wounded.

And what was still more harrowing, they even brought three of them into the house where I was.

[Baroness Riedesel] ♪ Woman: Imagine what a battlefield looks like after a battle.

It has a lot of bodies.

It has a lot of blood and gore.

And it was the job of women to go in and take care of those bodies, to clean them up, to identify them, if they could, to see over the burial of bodies.

Part of the work of war is dealing with death.

Voice: Although we repulsed them with loss, we ourselves were much weakened.

The bodies of the slain were scarcely covered with the clay.

And the only tribute of respect to fallen officers was to bury them by themselves, without throwing them in the common grave.

So destruction comes with rapid wings, and ruin rushes on like a whirlwind to sweep the best officers, and sometimes almost entire battalions, from their strongest foundations.

Roger Lamb.