Cap was wasting his efforts. The truth was that next to no courage or confidence was left in the entire army; and no matter what Cap might have said to the militiamen, they would have gone on stealing from those fleeing settlers the provisions, blankets and kettles their own government was unable to provide.

On every side we heard the lies that had turned the bulk of the army into an apprehensive, dejected, beaten horde: that had been carried to all parts of our eastern country by deserters and by the militia who drifted away like smoke, so that the whole land was smitten with hopelessness and black depression, as by a plague.

Schuyler [the lying whispers ran] Schuyler’s to blame! Schuyler’s a coward … Schuyler’s a thief … Schuyler’s a traitor! Schuyler took the silver bullets.… Schuyler stole the bread from the army.… Schuyler bought us horse-meat and charged for prime beef.… Schuyler’s a papist.… Schuyler has Negro blood in his veins.… Schuyler takes opium and can’t be depended on in an emergency.… Schuyler’s feeding us poison to make us sick.… Schuyler’s issued flints that won’t strike fire.… He’s put sand in our powder.… He’s moving us back so he can corner us in a box we’ll never get out of.… He’ll let us be trapped in a place where we can’t fight!

How many of those tales originated with the British, I had no way of knowing; but every last one of them was pure invention, and I was certain that one person busy with such inventions and the distribution of them was Marie de Sabrevois. Day after day the men deserted. Day after day militia companies went shambling off, deaf to the curses of Schuyler and Arnold and the few whose courage was unshaken.

I fell into a fevered lethargy, partly due to the condition of my wound. Doc Means clung to me, apparently worrying less about the parlous state of the army than over what might happen if a regular army doctor should get his hands on me. “Why,” he said in that quavering voice of his, “they’d put a salve on you that would plug up both ends of the wound, just like plugging putty into the muzzle of a musket. You know what happens when you do that?”

I said the musket was apt to explode.

“Apt to explode!” Doc cried. “Apt to explode! Why she just up and busts wide open!” So he kept me away from the doctors, and I must admit that the cold water he dabbled on my shoulder a score of times a day seemed to keep my hurt from growing worse.