While I drank, Verrieul asked again the whereabouts of Cap’s home.

“My home?” Cap said. “My home? Well I’ve usually lived most any place, or thereabouts; but if I hadn’t ever lived nowhere, I’d rather live wherever that is than here! I’d get up right now and go there, too, if it wasn’t for expecting Stevie!”

I think that was the case with most of the men on Isle aux Noix that night. They would have gone home or anywhere else if they could—if there had been boats to carry them, and any manner in which they could have stolen the boats; and if they had not been held where they were by circumstances beyond their control.

That, I think, is the case in all wars: at some time or other, everyone would run away if he dared. I know that I would have helped myself to a boat and got away somehow, if Arnold had not said he wanted to see me; for more and more I felt an urging within me to find Nathaniel and Ellen Phipps.

… All through the night we longed for daylight; but when daylight came, we would have been glad to go back to the darkness again, because of what we saw around us.

Isle aux Noix is a flat pancake of an island, a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Near the middle of it were a house and a barn and a few out-houses grouped around a heap of manure that seemed ancient enough to have been piled there in the days of Champlain himself. Plowed fields surrounded the house; but the rest of the island was lowland and brush.

In Cap Huff’s opinion it was a floating island, anchored to the bottom of the river by the roots of the bushes; and he stuck to this idea because no matter how hard the rain fell, the surface of the island always remained six inches out of water. If it had been a solid island, Cap insisted, it would have been six feet under water after we had been there a short time; for it seemed to be a custom of Canada to have thunderstorms every night—storms so violent that the island shook beneath us when the thunder claps were overhead. We would do better, Cap said, to live at the bottom of a well where, comparatively, we’d be nice and dry.

On this marsh were eight thousand men—eight thousand American soldiers, or men who had once been soldiers. Two thousand of them had smallpox; and two thousand sick men, crowded together in a small space, is a staggering number.

The six thousand who were not sick when they arrived were weary beyond all telling; for no weariness compares with the exhaustion that follows failure; few things are more weakening than the condition of mind that men get into during a retreat.