The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [11]
The British harassed the regiments of Greenwood and others in similar fashion, their regulars often firing at Continental Army sentries. Few were hit, but the shooting was relentless. One private, Sam Haws, reported that he was fired at by the “wicked enemy” just about every day that he worked as a sentry in August 1775. 10 Many of the nervous sentries, Greenwood said, bribed others into taking their post with half a pint of aniseed water, a popular liquid.
The British shot cannonballs at the Americans, too, but most of these did little damage. The cannon fire intrigued the young teenaged soldiers. Greenwood recalled, “The British were constantly sending bombs at us, and sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens. These shells were mostly thirteen inches in diameter and it was astonishing how high they could send such heavy things. I have often seen them strike the ground when it was frozen, and bounce up and down like a foot-ball and again, falling on marshy land, they would bury themselves from ten to twelve feet in it.”
Greenwood knew men who dug the shells, now with burned-out fuses, from the ground, ripped the fuses off, and poured the powder that was inside into kegs for musket use. Once a British cannonball arced through the night sky and landed right in front of a building housing Greenwood and about two hundred other men. One of Greenwood’s teenaged friends in his company, Private Shubael Rament, seventeen, saw it coming through the air. He raced from the door of the building into the yard, stopping it as it rolled along the ground, and managed to pull the fuse out before it went off, saving the lives of the men inside.
Chapter Three
CAMP LIFE
Life in camp outside of Boston was busy for Greenwood. George Washington had been appalled at the disorder of both the men and the camp when he first arrived, but within a month his tough discipline and dozens of daily orders concerning construction and cleanliness had turned the Boston camp into a military city. The men slipped easily into routines that would be seen in every camp in every year of the Revolution. The enlisted men rose at dawn, and often before it when sentries misjudged the rising of the sun. The days were filled with work, performed individually or in work gangs. Large and bulky earthworks of dirt, stone, and wood, often constructed around camps, required long weeks of labor.
Crews gathered and cut firewood throughout the war so that food could be cooked and men kept warm. Huts and tents were frequently repaired, especially during the fierce winters. Men who were quartered in civilian homes, usually officers, were ordered to help keep those houses clean and assist with chores. Men fed the thousands of horses that accompanied the army. Enlisted men took turns standing guard over the camp as sentries. Squads of men were sent to fish for food or to shoot game. Soldiers from seafaring areas were asked to build small ships or whaleboats for transportation and battle. Some of the enlisted men cooked for the men in their homes or barracks—usually with one cook for every twelve men—and some were assigned as guards at hospitals.
All soldiers like to complain and the men of the first American army were no different. The enlisted men, who had joined what they thought was the military business, were especially unhappy toiling in construction. Later in the war, the soldiers at Morristown were ordered to spend much of their time building a huge earthworks fort to repulse a British attack that did not come in four years. The exhausted enlisted men, displacing tons of dirt, trees, and shrubs, mockingly nicknamed the structure “Fort Nonsense.” One soldier involved in the construction of Fort Washington, in New York, sneered that the only wounds he had suffered during the entire