The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [63]
On his way to Ticonderoga, Robbins stopped at Fort Edwards. The hospitals were full, so sick men at that garrison were housed in the fort’s bakery. The minister had apparently written to Lewis Beebe that he was on his way back, despite the grave warnings of Dr. Potts about risking his life. Dr. Beebe greeted Robbins upon his arrival at 7 a.m. and had a bread and cheese breakfast with him. He then gave Robbins a tour of the Ticonderoga hospitals and the medical tents outside the fort. One large camp was at a nearby post named Mount Independence, across the lake from Ticonderoga, where hundreds more lay ill. The Fifteenth Massachusetts, with fifer John Greenwood, was camped there.
The minister was eager to hold a large prayer meeting in order to preach the word of God. On Wednesday night, September 4, after much planning and at his urging, officers gathered a huge crowd of several thousand men, healthy and sick, on the parade ground in the middle of the fort. Lit torches surrounded the area. There were so many men in the crowd, including his friend Dr. Beebe, that those at the rear could not see the minister. They shouted at him that their view was blocked by the huge assemblage of troops. The drummers from the regiments there volunteered to stack up their drums in two long lines, on top of each other, to form two pyramids about ten feet in height. The men then carried out a wooden platform and placed it on top of the two rows, connecting them.
The Rev. Robbins was pleased with the ad hoc stage, certainly the largest and highest he had ever stood on. Holding his Bible with great care, he then carefully climbed up the wall of drums to the top of the platform and there, with all able to see him, both his feet planted gingerly on the wooden platform, he preached the word of the Lord, his voice loud and vibrant, his figure illuminated by the dozens of burning torches against the star-filled sky. Thousands listened in rapt attention, their eyes looking upwards at the minister, his voice booming and his arms flailing in his animated sermon, the heavens themselves his backdrop.
Nonplussed, Robbins decided to give another robust sermon to another large crowd to calm the men the following night. He scribbled in his journal that day, “Enjoy through great mercy good health in the midst of sickness and death all around me,” and in the evening preached with great power to his assemblage of soldiers. He read from the prophet Joel: “A day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm.” Then, adding a small touch of politics and patriotism to his preaching, he exhorted the men to be brave, that “we could rejoice in the Lord, who could turn our mourning into joy.”
The sermon did little good, however, and two days later, after visiting the ever-mounting number of sick in the rancid hospitals and listening to enlisted men grumble about the war, he wrote in his journal that “our regiment is in a most miserable condition; I could wish they were all dismissed.” By Friday, September 13, the situation at Ticonderoga had deteriorated even further in Robbins’s eyes, just as it had for his friend Beebe. “The groans of the distressed in the camp are real affecting,” Robbins wrote, adding that out of 237 men in one regiment, 197 were sick and unfit for duty. Robbins then jotted down notes about his meeting in a hospital ward with a young man from Massachusetts who was dying. Robbins wrote,