The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [104]
In early afternoon of December 24, Christmas Eve, all work on the huts for the Massachusetts men, and for thousands of others, was halted.
In a journal note, Wild wrote of the construction shutdown, “There was some misunderstanding.” It was a line that would come to represent all of the travails of the Continental Army during that historic and disastrous winter at Valley Forge.
Chapter Nineteen
PRIVATE ELIJAH FISHER AND THE AGONY OF VALLEY FORGE
The American Revolution had been a hard war for Elijah Fisher. The private from Attleboro, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Continental Army for eight months along with his five brothers. At seventeen, the tall, thin Elijah was the youngest. He had joined the army right after the battles of Lexington and Concord, full of love of his country and anger at the British. He soon found himself directly in the line of fire when his regiment was ordered to defend Bunker and Breed’s Hills on June 17, 1775.
Thirteen months later, in late July, 1776, after he reenlisted for a year, he came down with a severe case of the putrid fever, which nearly killed him as the army moved from Boston to New York to defend the city. The fever kept the private in bed in a home turned into an army hospital. The medical care provided him, and all the men in hospitals, was minimal, but he survived the fever. Fisher did not feel much better five weeks later when he was released from the hospital, but insisted on rejoining his regiment and did so, despite a sharp pain in his side that remained with him for a long time. Fisher missed the British rout of the Continental Army at Long Island while he was in the hospital, and missed another catastrophe when he arrived back with the army. His regiment did not travel with Washington to White Plains, but was ordered to hold Fort Washington on the northern tip of Manhattan. Fisher’s pain in his side became unbearable, however, and a doctor ordered him to another hospital at Kingsbridge, fifteen miles north of the city. He was moved to another hospital in Newark, New Jersey, shortly after his arrival in Kingsbridge and missed the crushing defeat at Fort Washington, in which nearly three thousand Americans were taken prisoner.
Fisher was moved to a private home in Newark after a period of several weeks as the hospital filled up with wounded and sick soldiers. The man he moved in with took him to the residence of a local doctor. The physician was not home but his wife tended to Fisher’s medical needs. She asked Fisher what was wrong with him. After a short explanation of the fever and the pains in his side, the doctor’s wife told Fisher that she knew from experience that he exhibited all the symptoms of kidney troubles. She nodded knowingly and informed him that she knew how to treat him. She mixed a handful of horseradish roots with a tear dish full of mustard seeds in a quart of gin and told him to drink a glass of the concoction every morning. The mix, a standard potion for kidney ailments in the era, worked. The pain in his side that had caused him so much agony for weeks subsided and Fisher was back with the army nine days later.
There was grim news for him upon his return, however. He visited one of his brothers and learned that another brother, Enoch, had died ten days before. The stress of the news may have aggravated Fisher’s kidney and the throbbing pain in his side returned. Horseradish roots and mustard seeds did him no good this time and the pain worsened within days. Despondent over his brother’s death and his own poor health, the private asked for and obtained a discharge and went home to Massachusetts. Friends and relatives in Attleboro assumed