engaged

a sane man, disguise its triviality in cold military terms. The total forces engaged at the Chippewa had been less than five thousand—a clash which, for the past twenty years on the continent, would have been considered a skirmish rather than a battle.
In the campaign that had finally defeated Napoleon, culminating in the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig, more than half a million men had met on the field.
Splendid, yes—certainly!—the pluck of Captain Houston and Lieutenant Driscol and their men at the Capitol. But what did it really come down to, in the harsh, brutal, realistic terms of political geography? One thousand men armed with a few cannons kept a small invading force with no artillery to speak of from taking Washington, D.C.
Splendid, splendid. No doubt many fine poems and songs would be written to commemorate the event. The fact remained that Napoleon had brought seven hundred field guns to Leipzig—but the Allies had fielded twice that number. Just as the fact remained that no sane man gave even a moment's thought to the possibility that the United States might land an army on British soil to threaten London.
Adams sighed, left off his pointless study of the treaty—he had every clause in it memorized by now—and rose from his desk. Then he moved to a window that faced to the west, toward the Atlantic and his nation beyond.
He was forty-five years old, and had spent many of those years living in Europe. As a student, an assistant to American diplomats—his father among them, before John Adams became the second president of the United States—and then later as a diplomat himself. The son of the second American president had often, as a young man, sat at the dining table with its first, listening carefully to George Washington's