“You don’t?” Major Brown cried. “It has this to do with it! It’s contrary to law for General Arnold—–”

“I’ll answer your question,” I said. “I’ve got another despatch to carry, and it won’t stand delay. I was a sea captain.” I had an itch to ask them for their own qualifications, but dared not—which is what the army does to most.

They glowered at me.

“Sir,” I said to Colonel Hazen, “I’d like a receipt for that despatch.”

When he ungraciously gave it to me, I went out of the fort on the run and without saluting. All four were emphatically what Cap Huff called pig-nut officers—all rind and a little meat, and that worthless. I knew next to nothing about them; but I was sure of two things. They hated Arnold because he hadn’t found them competent, and had let them see he knew their incapacities; and to my mind Arnold alone was worth all four of them stirred together, with another ten thousand like them added to the mixture.

… Because of the thousands of smallpox sufferers that had poured back on us from Sorel, and the tales of starvation, defeat and desertion that had reached us daily from Sullivan’s camp, I expected to find something terrible when I reached it. It might have been worse; for although the men in sight were thin and dejected-looking, they were clean shaved, and their hair and breeches were tied, showing they were subject to discipline.

Nonetheless the camp at Sorel was miserable. It occupied the sandy marsh where the Richelieu runs into Lake St. Peter. The broad St. Lawrence lay before it, the far shore lost in a heat haze; and against the haze quivered distant marshy islets. The air was moist and stagnant, and had the smell of a dirty water-butt on a hot day—foul and sickish.

Through and over everything seemed to run a faint yet shrill moaning. This was the sound of the countless mosquitoes with which the country swarmed.

Yet the place was orderly. Two hundred brown bateaux lay in regular ranks along the river; three schooners and a pair of cumbersome flat-bottomed gundelos were tied up among them, like five curlews looming above a flock of sandpipers. The camp itself was neat, and enclosed with earthworks and trenches. Behind the earthworks, close to the water’s edge, were five cannon, three of them great guns and two just big enough to kill geese.

All around me, as I rode through the wretched shelters under which this pauper army lived, were the Pennsylvania troops I had seen entering St. John’s two weeks before. Already the uniforms that had shone so brightly against the brown Richelieu were faded and tattered, and the men themselves had the look of being tattered in spirit.