The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [52]
Private Lemuel Roberts began his retreat just as hundreds of the pusfilled pocks exploded on his skin, even growing inside his ears. He wrote in his journal that he was racked with pain and misery. By the time his regiment reached safety in Sorel by boat, “my pock had become so sore and troublesome that my clothes stuck fast to my body, especially to my feet; and it became a severe trial to my fortitude to beat my disorder and assist in managing the boat.”9
Lewis Beebe found himself in Sorel at the opposite end of the world from his former life. The bright, twenty-six-year-old doctor had, in just a few short years, achieved some distinction as a general practitioner in Sheffield, where he had moved after graduation to start his practice. Life was good. Beebe had become a welcome member of the community. He had married Lucy Allen, the sister of the fabled Ethan Allen, head of the Green Mountain Boys, on September 20, 1774.
His golden life unraveled rather quickly once the war began. His wife, in her early twenties, died on June 10, 1775, and he plunged into a lengthy depression. Ethan Allen had gained fame by capturing Fort Ticonderoga from the British with Benedict Arnold in the spring of 1775, but shortly afterwards Allen was captured in a daring but failed attack on Montreal and sent to England, where he was hailed as Britain’s most illustrious prisoner of war. Beebe decided that leaving his hometown, and memories of his wife, for a stint in the army might help him recover emotionally and he volunteered in the spring of 1776. It seemed like a logical choice. His patriotic brother-in-law was surely an inspiration for the doctor. Beebe had also been friendly with John Brown, a political radical at Yale. He joined a Connecticut regiment and was assigned to join forces en route to reenforce an American army already reeling from a severe defeat at Quebec in the winter.
Beebe and Rev. Robbins might have met in Sorel, rapidly filling up with sick troops, that first day that Robbins arrived in May 1776. If not, they met shortly afterwards because both of their journals, and the journal of Rev. David Avery, another chaplain, indicate that Beebe and Robbins became friends and often traveled and dined together at the homes of local residents or with officers in their tents. Beebe wrote that he listened to and admired Rev. Robbins’s sermons; Robbins wrote of his meals with the doctor. Both men were healers. Robbins, a man of God, had arrived in war-torn Canada to spiritually heal the souls of men who were fighting and dying. Beebe had reached Canada not only to physically heal the men badly wounded in the battles there, but to attempt to save soldiers trapped in a brutal smallpox epidemic. Now, caught in the middle of a landmark military disaster and a massive, uncoordinated, frantic retreat, with dozens of men arriving in Sorel with their bodies ravaged by the smallpox and other illnesses, the two young healers would have their hands full.
The other doctors were pleased to greet Beebe. They had been overwhelmed by the volume of soldiers being carried into their hospitals. Surgeons used to treating a few men each day found themselves standing in the middle of temporary hospitals set up in barns or large tents with several hundred men around them and more being carried in each hour, many groaning from their wounds and illnesses.
Dr. Beebe began his work on a Wednesday, three days after his arrival, treating fifty patients in the general hospital at Sorel, where within weeks a total of more than thirty-three hundred sick men would be in hospitals,