Happy Birthday!

229 years ago, the most literate bunch of citizens in the world decided that they did not need to have George around anymore. So the selected another George to lead their pathetic, under supplied, under trained, and non-military, army against the most powerful army in the world. In the begining they got the hell kicked out of them. They lost every engagement. 50% of the country didn't even want to be seperated from England. The British army however began to note that the insurgents did not play by the book.
The insurgents would attack convoys of British supplies moving between towns. They would snipe soldiers off horses. They would, in short, fight dirty. Some British soldiers would even get scalped by the insurgent fighters.
The British kept adding more and more troops. They occupied all the major cities, but the countryside was out of control.
While the british soldiers were the best, their commanders were hauty, snobs, who thought themselves invicible. Particularly Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. He wrote his wife often of the privations of war, while traveling with thirty wagon-loads of personal effects and keeping several mistresses.
Burgoyne decided to invade New England from Canada. At first his troops proved quite sucessful. Then his supply lines were attacked and burned. Then the insurgents started to destroy the infrastructure. They chopped down trees to block the roads and flooded farm land to his front so his troops had no place to forage. Still the insurgents were continously pushed back and out faught by the better trained British troops.
Yet in the end, due to continued sniping, sabotage, and privation, Burgoyne and his grand plan was stopped. He finally through his forces, who were demoralized from sloging through bogs, clearing timber from roads, and dodging terror tactics, at the rebels holding Bernis Heights at the Second battle of Saratogo and was defeated. For his disasterous campaign he was recalled from America, he served as Commander in Cheif of Ireland, grew even more wealthy and was given a state funeral, with hero's honors in Westerminster Abbey. His men, who had sufferd and faught so well in a distant land, were kept starving in America, under the command of numerous lords, for another 3 years until they were surrounded and forced to surrender enmasse at Yorktown. Their leader that day was Lord Charles, Earl Cornwallis, who returned to England to a heros welcome. He spent the rest of his career putting down other rebellions with more success, having learned his lesson in America. Needless to say many of the British soldiers who had suffered in America were shipped to other areas of the Empire to suffer and die in those lands. They never got to Westminster Abbey.