Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/319

 Rh advising the states to declare all deserters and prisoners free from militia duty, and to forbid their serving as substitutes in the militia. On the 29th of the same month a singular scene is said to have taken place at Cambridge. Some Brunswick officers caught a deserter, one of the prisoners on Prospect Hill. He was making off to Watertown, where Colonel Armand had a recruiting station. The poor wretch was brought back to camp, and, as he was the first that had been caught, it was determined to make an example of him. He was tied to a post and flogged with a rod, three hundred strokes. His hair was then cut off, and he was dishonorably dismissed from the service. The Americans are said to have looked calmly on, but to have received the man with kindness after the punishment, and led him away in triumph. Eelking gives no authority for this story, and we may hope that it is apocryphal. At any rate, the punishment, if it really took place, did not prove very effectual, for some fifty Brunswickers deserted in the course of the next five months, and the loss of men from desertion during the journey to Virginia was heavy.

Some of the desertion among the prisoners was only apparent. The German captives sometimes left the dreary huts in which they were confined and wandered away, in hopes of reaching New York, or one of the British armies. On the 18th of May, 1779, Governor Clinton writes to Washington concerning “an alarm on the frontiers of Ulster County, occasioned by the appearance of about one hundred Indians and Tories. They were joined at this place by