We may be properly said to be between hawk and buzzard

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 204.  The British have just won the Battle of Long Island and Washington has to confront whether and how to defend Manhattan Island given Britain's fleet.  

Where the British would strike was as uncertain as it had been from the start. What Washington feared most was an attack from the rear, in the vicinity of King’s Bridge, and having convinced himself that this was Howe’s intention, he began moving troops there. General Heath warned that the enemy might land on the coast of Westchester County, beyond the Harlem River. Everything depended on reliable intelligence, Washington told Heath, and he had none. He urged Heath to “leave no stone unturned” or spare any expense in finding out all he could as soon as possible.

“We think (at least I do) that we cannot stay,” Joseph Reed wrote again to his wife, “and yet we do not know how to go, so that we may be properly said to be between hawk and buzzard.”

Reed, who seemed older and wiser than his years, had tried always to take a large, philosophical view of life’s travails, and this, in combination with a natural cheerfulness and a strong, analytical mind, had put him at the head of the legal profession in Philadelphia while still in his early thirties. But it was a struggle now for him to offer even a fragment of hope. It was the sluggards and skulkers, the tavern patriots and windy politicians, who evoked a wrath he could not contain.

When I look round, and see how few of the numbers who talked so largely of death and honor are around me, and that those who are here are those from whom it was least expected…I am lost in wonder and surprise…. Your noisy sons of liberty are, I find, the quietest in the field…. An engagement, or even the expectation of one, gives a wonderful insight into character.

Though an observer only through the Battle of Brooklyn, Reed had been with Washington throughout. For six days there had not been time even for a change of clothes, and, like Washington, he had had no sleep for several nights. Whether he could continue to bear up under the strain and fatigue, as Washington seemed able to do, remained to be seen.

Esther, as she wrote, hoped he would come home to be with her at the birth of their fourth child.