The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [54]
Just after sunset, after two days of slow and arduous traveling, Dr. Beebe and General Thomas arrived in Chambly. Thomas felt well enough to walk a half-mile to his lodging, listening to an array of both news and rumors about the trouble at Quebec as he moved. Doctor Beebe was at his side. The next morning, following more treatment from Beebe, General Thomas told the physician that he felt much better, and over the next few days his pustules began to shrink and his condition visibly improved. Beebe began to think that the general might survive the attack. His spirits were lifted at the new health of his most famous patient.
The condition of others with smallpox did not improve. Dr. Beebe began to treat more soldiers trying to fight off smallpox while laying in horse barns amid dirty hay and dung. The large wooden barns that creaked at night from the wind and were overwhelmed by heat in the daytime appeared to be large ovens in which men were roasting from the heat and dying of the pox. There was a nonstop cacophony of weeping, moans, and sheer misery that surrounded the doctor as he worked throughout the day in the barns. Beebe wrote of the men there ceaselessly groaning from pain:
The most shocking of all spectacles was to see a large barn crowded full of men with this disorder, many of which could not see, speak, or walk—one, nay two, had large maggots, an inch long, crawl out of their ears. [Pustules] were on almost every part of the body. No mortal will ever believe what these suffered unless they were eyewitnesses. It was almost sufficient to excite the pity of brutes.
Rev. David Avery was an obstinate man who would ask Dartmouth College for his tuition back because, he charged, he received no education there. The chaplain had traveled to Ticonderoga and Crown Point with Beebe in the winter. Avery possessed an iron constitution and was never sick, despite being surrounded by illness. He visited those barns at Chambly, too. He wrote, “The sick were in horse stables just cleared of dung . . . laid on the floors of the stinking stables.”
Those who survived those barns, and other wretched hospitals, described their illnesses and desperate efforts to overcome them in graphic detail. Simon Fobes survived his pox in a Quebec prison. He wrote, “When the pock was coming out in seventy to eighty of our number, a fever very high and no water to drink, the men drank their own urine which made the fever rage too violently to be endured. Our flesh seemed a mass of corruption. At the same time, we were covered with vermin. When we were a little recovered, we were moved back to our former prison without any cleansing or changing of our apparel. Our clothing was stiff with corrupted matter.”11
Many of the men coming down with the smallpox were in mid retreat in the region and could neither rest or obtain inoculation. They were stuck and had to fight their way out of Canada and out of the grips of the epidemic. One was Bayze Wells, of Connecticut. He started to break out on May 7 while staying overnight at a farmhouse. He did not want to remain, ill, and be taken prisoner, so the next morning he climbed into a bark canoe and, with others, paddled several miles downriver to meet his regiment. He remained there for a week, becoming sicker, and then they had to flee. The entire group left in canoes and Wells, like the others, had to paddle as fast as he could all night. He felt dizzy throughout the evening and into early morning and, just after dawn, fainted in the canoe. He had to be carried the rest of the day in a cart and finally managed to make it to a hospital.
Many died on the retreat. One soldier, Charles Cushing, estimated that thirty captains alone had perished