The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [62]
Soldiers remembered the deceased with great reverence. Lamenting the loss of the majority of privates in a company, Private John Henry wrote that “they were originally as elegant a body of men as ever came into my view . . . beautiful boys.” Men fondly recollected the elegance of the last rites of the Catholic church and the comfort the priests gave to those about to take their last breath. James Melvin, a private from Massachusetts, survived the smallpox. He was quartered with other Americans in a Quebec monastery following the failed attack there. On January 19, the evening after a day-long snowstorm, Melvin watched as the last rites were administered to a French soldier he knew who had been ravaged by the disease.
He recalled, “The nuns came and read over him, afterwards the priest came in; then they fetched in a table covered with a white cloth and lighted two wax candles about three feet long, and set them on the table. The priest put on a white robe over his other garments and the nuns kneeled down, and the priest stood and read a sentence and then the nuns a sentence and so they went on some time; then the priest prayed by himself; then the nuns, and then the priest again, then they read all together a spell, and finally the priest alone; then the priest stroked the man’s face and then they took away their candles and tables and the man died.”2
The parents of those who passed away were not angry, but proud. Matthew Patten, of Bedford, New Hampshire, said of his son John, who died along with so many others at Île-aux-Noix, “He was shot through his left arm at the Bunker Hill fight and now was dead after suffering much fatigue to the place where he now lies in defending the just rights of America to whose end he came in the prime of life by means of that wicked, tyrannical Brute of Great Britain.”3
Dr. Lewis Beebe had become bitter and raged about everything that he saw. In his nightly journal he complained that amid all of the suffering at Ticonderoga men stole money and food from sick soldiers and that officers argued over promotions as men were buried. He said the officers, whom he had come to despise, had established themselves as national champions at swearing. “In short,” he angrily observed, “they laugh at death, mock at hell and damnation and even challenge the deity to remove them out of this world by thunder and lightening.”
The doctor was just as unhappy with the drunkenness he found everywhere, among officers as well as the enlisted men. He never criticized enlisted men whom he loved, saving his barbs for the officers. “Drunkenness is a great beauty,” he wrote of the officers, “and profanity an ornament in an officer. The whims, caprice, and vanity of this set of beings is ridiculous to the last degree. Children are not often guilty of such scandalous behavior.”
He found several targets for his most sarcastic remarks. One officer he loathed was Major Joseph Cilley of New Hampshire, whom, he said “rightly named, is a very silly man.” He lambasted most of the chaplains, calling the Rev. Ichabod Fisk, a former school classmate, “a great blunderbuss of the gospel.” He condemned others for spending their time trying to land better-paying jobs at larger parishes back home instead of tending to the sick. He wrote of one boring chaplain that if he stayed away longer, “They will in all probability regain their former health and spirits.”
But there was one minister whom he did admire, his friend Rev. Ammi Robbins, who remarkably was back again for a third tour of duty. Robbins had recovered at home and waved off pleas from his own doctor and friends that he remain there and forget about the war. They had warned him that he