“Our going into winter quarters, instead of keeping the field, can have been reprobated only by those gentlemen who think soldiers are made of stocks and stones and equally insensible to frost and snow; and, moreover, who conceived it easily practicable for an inferior army, under the disadvantages we are known to labour under, to confine a superior one, in all respects well appointed and provided for a winter’s campaign, within the city of Philadelphia, and to cover from depredation and waste the States of Pennsylvania and Jersey.  But what makes this matter still more extraordinary in my eye is that those very gentlemen—­who well know that the path of this army from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge might have been tracked by the blood of footprints, and that not a boot or shoe had since been issued by the commissaries:  who are well apprised of the nakedness of the troops from ocular demonstration; whom I myself informed of the fact that some brigades had been four days without meat, and were unsupplied with the very straw to save them from sleeping on the bare earth floors of the huts, so that one-third of this army should be in hospitals, if hospitals there were, and that even the common soldiers had been forced to come to my quarters to make known their wants and suffering —­should think a winter’s campaign and the covering of these States from the invasion of an enemy so easy and practical a business.  I can assure those gentlemen that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to keep a cold, bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets.  However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked and distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them, and from my soul I pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve nor prevent.

“It is for these reasons that I dwelt upon the subject to Congress; and it adds not a little to my other difficulties and distress to find that much more is expected of me than it is possible to perform, the more that upon the ground of safety and policy I am obliged to conceal the true state of this army from public view, and thereby expose myself to detraction and calumny.”

The letter completed, the man took up the tallow dip, and passed from the cramped, chilly room in which he had sat to a still more cold and contracted hallway.  Tiptoeing up a stairway, he paused a moment to listen at a door, then entered.

“I heard your voice, Brereton, so knew you were waking.  Well, Billy, how does the patient?”

“Pohly, massa, pohly.  De doctor say de ku’nel ’ud do fus-class ef he only would n’t wherrit so, but he do nothin’ but toss an’ act rambunctious, an’ dat keep de wound fretted an’ him feverish.”

“And fret I will,” came a voice from the bed, “till I’ve done with this feather-bed coddling and am allowed to take my share of the work and privation.”