The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [55]
Others had to fight on while the smallpox festered in their bodies. Bayley Frye, a novice soldier who was made a colonel in order to get him to volunteer for a dangerous mission, found himself coming down with pox during the first week of May. Pustules began to appear on May 10. A few days later, very sick, he was ordered to take a village of four houses that held thirty-three men, women, and children. In the fight that ensued he nearly fainted from the pox several times. He could not move quickly and was badly injured.13
Dozens of men fleeing the Quebec disasters arrived in Chambly daily. New orders countermanded old ones within hours. Many had been wounded and others had smallpox.
Dr. Beebe, overworked and overwhelmed, was an angry young physician. He had nothing but disdain for the officers in the Continental Army that he had met in just two weeks at Sorel and Chambly. On the day when the officers ordered as many men as possible to parade at Chambly, over twelve hundred, most of them barely able to walk, Beebe scrawled sarcastically in his journal, “Had we a Washington or a Lee to take the command from a set of haughty, ambitious aspiring miscreants who only pride in promotion and honor, we might have hopes of regaining Quebec.”
He was even unhappier about his treatment of General Thomas, who had taken a turn for the worse after all the outward appearances of recovery. Thomas suddenly became ill and died of the pox in his bed at Chambly just after the sun rose on the morning of Sunday, June 2, a distraught Dr. Beebe at his bedside. What enraged Beebe was that the general, a doctor, might have been saved by being a recipient of the very smallpox inoculations that he had outlawed.
On the day after Thomas’s death, Beebe took a count of the men in the Chambly barns suffering from smallpox and put the number at just over three hundred. He and others had apparently secretly inoculated them, against Thomas’s wishes, while the general was in bed and Beebe hoped that they would all survive. They would not. On the very next day, a man died of the pox, his entire body covered with pus-filled pocks. No one would go near his corpse for fear of catching the disease themselves and the man had to be buried without a coffin. The standard set of pallbearers could not be found to carry the body to a grave and it had to be dragged there. “The stupidity of mankind in this situation is beyond all description,” wrote Beebe, who watched the way that the soldiers passed from the earth—without any dignity.
The next day Dr. Beebe visited an officer who had become his friend, Colonel Reed of New Hampshire, who had lost so many men in his regiment to the pox. Now he found to his dismay that Reed, too, had the smallpox. On his way back to his lodging, Beebe encountered a soldier whom he despised, a “little, great, proud, self-conceited, foppish quack.” The man haughtily asked Beebe if he had any physic [medicine] to give him because he did not feel well. The doctor, angry about all of the men sick and dying under his care, and now Colonel Reed, too, snapped at the soldier, “I have plenty of physic, but God damn my soul if I’ll let you have some.” Then he turned abruptly and walked away.
Two days later, on Friday, one man died of smallpox, one of colic, and one of a fever. Beebe and other doctors struggled to keep the soldiers in the barns alive. He was furious about the spartan, temporary hospitals, the dearth of medicine, and the uselessness of traditional medical practices. He wrote that night that he was “moved with compassionate feeling for poor, distressed soldiers; when they are taken sick, are thrown into this dirty, stinking place, and left to take care of themselves, no attendance, no provision made, but what must be loathed and abhorred by all, both well and sick.”
On Sunday, two men under his care died of smallpox and two more passed away from the disease on Monday. That same fatal