The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [61]
Lewis Beebe apparently drove Robbins all the way home—distance of one hundred forty miles from Ticonderoga in a simple wagon over narrow dirt roads—and either bought, rented, or borrowed a horse. He rode the rest of the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and visited Dr. Sergeant, his personal physician, who cured him with five days of treatments with vinum antimonial, administered three times a day, and plenty of rest. Dr. Beebe never thought of staying home for good, as he might have, and returned to the army as soon as he felt better. He did so despite his growing attraction to Margaret Kellog, the daughter of a prominent family in Sheffield, whom he must have seen again on his medical leave.
Endless Misery
Beebe’s journey back to Fort Ticonderoga was constantly halted by rainstorms. He shrugged them off, starting to think like the soldiers he was treating. “The bravery of good soldiers consists in enduring hardships and fatigue with patience,” he said of his travails. On Wednesday, July 28, he was stuck at Fort George, where he visited the hospital and found it jammed with seven hundred men. Officers then took him to the fort’s graveyard. There were three hundred fresh graves, all dug within the last month. “It was melancholy, indeed, to see such desolation made in our army,” Beebe wrote.
The staggering number of dead in the graveyard, most from smallpox, was the first sign that the American army’s situation had grown much grimmer in the weeks that the doctor had been away. He was greeted by even starker sights when he made it back to Ticonderoga. More men had arrived there and the death rate had climbed to ten per day. He learned, too, that Horatio Gates was fearful of a British attack and had ordered Benedict Arnold to build a small navy to battle British warships if they ventured onto Lake Champlain.
Beebe told his superiors that half the men in his own regiment were unfit for duty not just with smallpox, but dysentery, jaundice, diarrhea, rheumatism, scurvy, piles, lumbago, and putrid fever, and that for many their situation was “truly dangerous.” Dysentery raged throughout the camp, he told them, and yet he had run out of medical supplies to treat it and had to listen to the troops yell at him, and other doctors, because they could not obtain any help.
It was the smallpox that worried Dr. Beebe, though. He warned, “It has brought many to the grave and will many more unless immediately discharged.” The number of sick had swollen so much that it was no longer possible to treat all of them in the hospitals at Ticonderoga. Small villages of tents were set up outside the fort where those with diseases, fevers, and smallpox were sent until beds were available in the hospital, made so when men died and were dumped in the graveyards. Now there were no more open graves, but merely open pits into which a dozen or more corpses were tossed every morning. “Hard fortune to have so many sick on hand at one time. But harder for those who are sick to be crowded into dirty, lousy, stinking hospitals enough to kill well men,” he seethed in early August.
One soldier who had been very ill, and convinced he would die, hid the knife from his dinner plate and, a few hours later, took his life by slitting his throat. One evening Beebe watched men carry a corpse out of a tent. They told him that the man had been eating dinner. He took one long breath, then another, then he fell forward, dead, his face hitting the beefsteak on his plate.
Beebe was convinced now, after yet another depressing tour of his hospitals, that the men with smallpox, even though put in special wards, were infecting everyone else. He suggested simply sending them home to die with their loved ones. He also had to contend with the lack of medical manpower to treat the sick and dying. The doctors who had labored so courageously were coming down with fatal illnesses themselves. Some died and some were laid up in bed, unable to work. The few doctors remaining now had to take on all of the