The Glorious Cause - Jeff Shaara [173]
They were still soldiers, and the camp was still the vulnerable home of an army whose enemy was barely twenty miles away, and so the official duties would continue. Provosts and lookouts and pickets were still posted, guarding against a sudden assault by the enemy, or keeping watch on those who might attempt to desert. Washington could not stop the desertions, of course, knew that any man who feels a festering passion for going home will somehow find the means of escaping the army. They would leave mostly at night, some slipping away from the outposts, some from the cabins themselves. Many would not go far before the cold and snow and their own wretched weakness would drag them down, some freezing to death in the roadways, found by patrols the next day. Others would never be found, would stumble into gullies deep with soft snow, swallowed up by the frozen misery they were so desperate to escape.
Despite the loss of numbers, Washington had begun to detect some new form of camaraderie. Each cabin was its own small community, and when one man did not return from his night watch, the others would make good use of the small bit of vacant space while cursing the man’s weakness. It was rarely infectious, a man’s desperate escape regarded more as a tragedy. It was better to learn a man’s character now, in the camp, than on the line when you might have desperate need for his musket. The men who kept to their duty understood that a deserter was less likely to find his way home than to suffer a lonely death. There was simply nowhere to go, no place close enough to offer sanctuary where a man could find any better protection against the weather than the cabins at Valley Forge.
Few had coats, and the shoes that were still serviceable could not stand up to the constant freezing and thawing that came with the daily routine. Most of the men had worn through their pants and shirts, many could only wrap themselves in what remained of blankets. In each cabin, the man whose lot it was to make the march to the frozen outpost would be dressed by the men around him, each man contributing some small bit of protection, anything that might help their comrade survive the watch.
Despite the hard winter, despite the blasts of wind that swirled the snow, in a few short weeks, what had once been a bare grassy plateau cut by a few ravines, was now a town. Washington’s army had constructed more than a thousand wooden structures, great long rows of cabins spread out over a camp that was nearly two miles long.
WASHINGTON MADE A DAILY INSPECTION, RODE ALONG THE TRAMPLED snow-packed lanes, through great clouds of black smoke from the low chimneys. The men had built cabins for more than just their own quarters, and beyond the rows of barracks were other structures, a blacksmith shop, supply sheds. There were larger cabins as well, what had quickly become vastly overflowing hospitals.
More than a year ago he had ordered the army to construct a central hospital facility in the small Moravian town of Bethlehem, a means of bringing together as many doctors and other volunteers whose sole duty was the care of the sick and wounded. But Bethlehem was fifty miles from Valley Forge, and unless a man was suffering from smallpox, or some other ailment that might endanger the entire camp, it was impractical to risk such lengthy transport. The tragic alternative was the structures they had built at Valley Forge, and very soon the hospital cabins were places to be avoided, the source of nightmarish stories of fever and dysentery, of men dying in their own filth. But avoiding the hospitals did not always erase the horror, and the awful sounds would echo across