Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/551

] their barracks, or were lodged in the houses of the neighboring farmers; and nearly three thousand men were thus rendered incapable of bearing arms. Sadly in want of even straw, to render their huts fitted, in this slight degree, for the occupancy of human beings, the soldiers, overwhelmed with lassitude, enfeebled by hunger, and benumbed with cold, in their service by day and by night, had no other bed in their huts except the bare and humid ground. This cause, joined to the others that have been related, propagated diseases : the hospitals were as rapidly replenished as death evacuated them; and their administration was no less defective in its organization than that of the camp. The unsuitableness of the buildings in which they had been established, the excessive penury of every kind of furniture, and the multitude of sick that crowded them, speedily produced its natural result. The hospital fever broke out in them, and daily swept off the vigorous and more active, as well as the feeble and worn-down defender of his native land.

It was not possible to remedy this sad state of things, by needful changes of linen, for they were utterly unprovided in this respect; nor by a more salubrious diet, when the coarsest was scarcely attainable; nor even by medicines, which were either absolutely wanting, or of the worst quality, and adulterated through the shameless cupidity of the contractors: for such, in general, as has been justly said, has been the nature of these furnishers of armies, that they should rather be denominated the artisans of scarcity; they have always preferred money to the life of the soldier. Hence it was, that the American hospital resembled more a receptacle for the dying than a refuge for the sick: far from restoring health to the diseased, it more often proved mortal to the well. This pestilential den was the terror of the army. The soldiers preferred perishing with cold in the open air, to being buried alive in the midst of the dead. Whether it was the effect of inevitable necessity, or of the avarice of men, it is but too certain, that an untimely death carried off many a brave soldier, who, with better attentions, might have been preserved for the defence of his country in its distress.

Certainly nothing could be imagined to equal the sufferings which the American army had to undergo in the course of this winter, except the almost superhuman firmness with which they bore them. A small number, it is true, seduced by the royalists, deserted their colors, and slunk off to the British army in Philadelphia; but these were, for the most part, Europeans, who had entered the continental service. The true-born Americans, supported by their patriotism, and by their profound veneration and love for Washington, displayed invincible perseverance; they chose rather to suffer all the extremes of famine, and of frost, than to violate, in this dark hour of peril, the faith they had pledged to their country. Had Howe possessed enterprise enough to attack the patriot army at this time, disastrous must have been the consequences. Without military stores, and without provisions, how could the