Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/55

 Rh night, and the under-officer must give up his weapons to the landlord, lest the recruit should get them away from him and use them against him in the night. In the morning he must get them back, see to the loading and priming, dress himself, and be ready for his journey before the clothes of the recruit are brought to him. The recruit must enter a house, or a room, first; he must come out last. At meals he must sit behind the table, next the wall. If he shows signs of being troublesome, the straps and buttons must be cut from his breeches, and he must hold them up with his hands.

A good dog, trained to the business, will be very useful to an under-officer under such circumstances. If an under-officer is unfortunately obliged to kill or wound a recruit he must bring a paper from the local magistrate. But no document will excuse the escape of a recruit, an accident which the Prussian military imagination refuses to consider ever necessary.

The men collected to serve in America were of various qualities from a military point of view. They were all received and examined by an English commissioner, generally by Colonel Faucitt, who had negotiated the treaties, at the seaports before shipment, and while some of the regiments were pronounced excellent, others were found to be partly made up of old men and boys, unfit to endure the fatigues of a campaign. Some soldiers were rejected for these causes, especially in the latter years of the war, when good men were growing harder to get in many of the states.

It is not easy, from the documents before me, to judge what chance a private soldier had of promotion