The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [56]
The good doctor then learned that a regiment badly afflicted with smallpox—the majority of the men were sick and barely able to walk— had just been ordered to travel by boat to Sorel, a distance of fifty miles. Beebe called the decision “ridiculous” and then scrawled at the end of his journal entry for that long and melancholy day, “It is enough to confuse and distract a rational man from becoming a surgeon to a regiment.”
Chapter Eleven
DEATH BECOMES A DAILY VISITOR
During the second week of June, Dr. Beebe continued his medical practice—treating the sick, extracting teeth, watching men vomit after he gave them purge-inducing medicine, and inoculating hundreds of soldiers arriving at Chambly. He heard dozens of macabre stories from the men in the beds under his care. One dying enlisted man told him that he had been an ordained minister back home, but had been dismissed from his congregation over a sexual affair he had conducted with his maid. Disgraced and afraid to face anyone in his community, he joined the army. And he would soon be dead. “This is the fate of war,” Beebe wrote, “one rises and another falls.”
The camp was thrown into chaos by the sudden arrival of Benedict Arnold, who was still smarting from his losses in Canada and the chaotic retreat. Arnold now walked with a pronounced limp from the leg wound he suffered in the attack on Quebec on January 1. The physician saw him as an egomaniacal incompetent and one of the main causes of all the sickness and dying that surrounded him.
“The great Arnold arrived here yesterday and began to give his inconsistent orders,” Beebe wrote. With great cynicism, he added that “with his great pity for the sick,” Arnold ordered food allowances for those ill or with smallpox in the barns to be cut in half, along with reduced rations for the rest of the army as a food-supply crisis emerged. Arnold said that food was low, but his edict infuriated the physician. “In this order is discovered that superior wisdom which is necessary in a man in his exalted station,” Beebe sneered.
The following day the camp at Chambly was hurled into confusion when news arrived that the two-thousand-man army under William Thompson had been badly beaten on June 8, 1776, at the battle of Three Rivers and was in full retreat, all of the men scrambling toward either Sorel or Chambly, chased by both the British and hundreds of Indians. The British were able to recruit Indians in Canada and New York because the Indians feared losing their homes and land if the colonists were victorious. On June 14, John Sullivan ordered Sorel evacuated. Sullivan ordered the army to retreat one hundred miles south to Île-aux-Noix, an island in the Richelieu River just north of the entrance to Lake Champlain.
Dr. Beebe wrote sarcastically that he had no fear now that Benedict Arnold was in charge. “Being favored with such superior men for generals, what may not be expected from this army, when so much attention has been paid by the Continent to make their circumstances so agreeable and comfortable under all their disadvantages in this wilderness? Surely conquest, victory, and glory must attend us.”
On Monday, June 17, Dr. Beebe, with his boats full of sick soldiers and hundreds more infected with dysentery, malaria, and smallpox, arrived at Île-aux-Noix at 3 p.m. as part of the mad dash south into New York state. Île-aux-Noix contained one large farm at its center, but the rest of it was filled with insect-infested swamps. It was wholly unsuitable to any military compound, much less home for an entire army on the run. Beebe and everyone else who landed on the island were shaken by what they found there. He wrote in his journal, “I