Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/71

 and tactics savored strongly of the school of Falstaff. Many Harvard graduates have left on record their contempt for the whole business. The Reverend Samuel Nowell (H. C. 1653) complained in his Artillery Sermon of 1678 that the companies drilled “all in a huddle and ridiculously disordered.” Eight years later his classmate, the Reverend Joshua Moodey, sought by his exhortations “to revive our Military Discipline, and the Spirit of Souldiery, which seems to be in its wane.” Even when the frontier towns were seriously threatened by the Indians in 1695, Nathaniel Saltonstall (H. C. 1659), in command of the garrison at Haverhill, resigned his commission in disgust, saying: “I have laboured in vain; Some go this, and that, and the other way at pleasure, and do what they list.…I may not, and cannot, hold out longer, with the usage I meet with.” A letter written by Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Wainwright (H. C. 1686) during the Port Royal Campaign of 1707 shows that the morale of the New England troops and the capacity of their officers were then dangerously low. Of the capture of Louisburg in 1745, Dr. William Douglass remarked irreverently that “the Siege was carried on in a tumultuary random Manner, and resembled a Cambridge Commencement.” The news-