These men had been five days on the journey from Isle aux Noix, five days of broiling sun in a cloudless sky. The bateaux were sieves, hurriedly built to begin with, and therefore badly built. Water stood ankle deep in them, making them hard to row. Because of the scarcity of healthy men, there were only two oarsmen for each bateau—and they had little time for bailing, and less to tend their miserable freight: time for nothing except to push at their heavy oars.

So these bateaux crawled in toward Crown Point, as sick-appearing as the men they carried. They moved as slowly as the hour hand on a chronometer, and there seemed to be no end to them. They crept along the shore, all day long, all through the night, and all the next day as well.

Looking at the shapeless figures that were lifted from those boats, I marveled that life remained in any of them. For five days they had wallowed in bilge-water with nothing to protect them from the sun. Their only food was raw pork and musty flour—the worst of all possible foods for men in their state.

They had no clothes except the rags in which they lay; and these, unwashed and unchanged, were caked to the suppurating pustules that covered them, from head to foot, like dreadful swollen coats of mail, so that their slightest moves wrenched at their sores and ripped their flesh.

The Point was filled with the animal howlings of these festering men: their inflamed skins torn as if by red-hot tweezers: blind from the swelling of their faces: their tongues and lips like scorched leather, dark brown and hard, so that coherent speech, even, was denied them.

I spent my days and nights at the landing place, thinking that when the last of the sick had arrived, I might help myself to boats; and I thought those three thousand moaning, half-dead soldiers would never cease coming over that rocky bank, like an army of the damned, flayed and blasted by the devil himself.

It’s easy to speak of three thousand sick men, but not so easy to understand the meaning of the words; for three thousand smallpox cases seem like all the sick in the world.

Even when all three thousand were stowed at last in rude shelters at Crown Point, with no medicines to ease them and no nurses to tend them, I was still unable to get boats; for those that brought the sick had instantly pushed off again and headed back north, the weary oarsmen dragging at their sweeps as if their arms had turned to wood and grown to the handles. There was no rest for them while men were still left in the steaming swamps of Isle aux Noix, with nothing to prevent Burgoyne’s regiments from hacking them to pieces.