The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [103]
The court-martial proceeding kept the company in the village all morning and they did not leave in time to reach Mount Holly that day. They arrived the next and finally slept in a thick woods outside of the town.
In order to surprise the enemy, the troops were awakened at 3 a.m. The First Massachusetts, with the rest of the army, trudged ten miles in the dark to Moorestown, loaded their muskets, set up pickets, and waited for reinforcements before attacking the British there. But the intelligence the rebels received was wrong. The British had left the area long ago and were already back in Philadelphia.
Wild and his regiment remained in a wooded area outside of Moorestown all of that day, Wednesday. On what the sergeant wrote was a “very cold and raw” Thursday morning, the men departed for a Delaware River crossing into Pennsylvania. The bone-chilling weather of Thursday vanished overnight and Friday morning brought very warm weather and sunshine, a crazy meteorological mix that would plague the army all winter. At 9 p.m., the men crossed the river on ferries and camped at a juncture between two roads that someone with a sense of humor had dubbed Crooked Billet. The next day the pleasant weather disappeared and a bad storm hit the area; it was so severe that the men stayed in their tents the entire following day, trying their best to stay dry as sheets of rain fell on the region. During the next few days, the temperatures rose and fell and the winds increased and decreased as the men went about routine camp chores in the uncertain climate.
Twenty-four hours later, on December 5, Wild noted that the company’s supplies were vanishing. “We drew some fresh beef and flour,” he noted, “but had nothing to cook in. Was obliged to broil our meat on the fire and bake our bread in the ashes.”
The missing supplies alarmed Wild, but he dismissed his worry the next day when someone found an iron kettle for cooking. They were lucky. Throughout Pennsylvania that week and the following week, soldiers complained that their supplies had not been replenished, blankets and coats had not arrived on schedule, and the usual shipments of food, much as they complained about its quality, were nowhere to be found. None of the officers knew why winter coats and other clothing on order for months had not been delivered and no one knew where to find very needed shoes. On December 10, Wild and a sergeant, needing coats as badly as everyone else, walked throughout the camp looking for clothing but did not find any.
Their situation worsened on December 12, when they crossed the Schuylkill River and camped in a wooded area as thick flakes of snow began to fall—hard. The men were told to either pitch their tents or cut down trees and construct lean-tos for cover as the storm worsened. Crews were told to cut down trees for firewood. But they could not do so. “We had no tents nor axes to cut wood to make fires. It was a very bad snowstorm,” said Wild, one of many to notice that the tools they required were also missing.
Some men did manage to build lean-tos and start fires during the week they camped there, but a wind caused flames from a campfire to burn down two of the lean-tos and the men who had planned to sleep in the destroyed structures had to sleep on the ground in the snow with no protection at all. The snowstorm, and days of steady rain that followed, kept the men in their camp in the middle of the forest, unable to travel to wherever the army would spend winter.
They celebrated Thanksgiving on December 18, as ordained by Congress, following another snowfall. It was a disappointing holiday and a harbinger of the winter that was to come. “We had but a poor Thanksgiving,” wrote Wild. “Nothing but fresh beef and flour to eat without any salt and but very scant of [beef ].”
On December