Ten Prayers That Changed the World by Jean-Pierre Isbouts

Author:Jean-Pierre Isbouts [Isbouts, Jean-Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1645-9
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

A SMALL ANIMAL SCURRIES AWAY UNDERFOOT, momentarily startling Washington’s horse. His eyes follow it as it plunges in the undergrowth, leaving a trail of tiny feet in the snow. How amazing, he wonders, that these creatures can live in this cold. How do they forage? How do they protect themselves from sleet and snow? His men, even his sturdy Virginians, can’t do that. Soldiers need warm clothes and proper barracks to survive a January in Pennsylvania, with cots and stoves and chimneys. Not the drafty huts that, in desperation, they have built for themselves with whatever material they can get their hands on: trees, brush, boulders, mud—even picket fences pulled from farmhouses nearby.

By now the delegates of the Continental Congress, stationed in York, should be fully aware of his condition. His officers have made sure of that. “There is a danger that the famine will break up the army,” Jedediah Huntington has written in one letter. “Many of the troops are destitute of meat,” James Mitchell Varnum has warned in another; “horses are dying for want of forage.”

Alas, so far the missives have not had the desired effect. If anything, they have worked against him: one congressional faction is now calling for his removal. They say, Why not give Horatio Gates the supreme command? After all, he scored a big victory, at the Battle of Saratoga last October, while Washington was flailing about in Germantown, to little effect.

He sighs deeply, shifting in the saddle. In truth, it’s not the fault of Congress. Not all of it, anyway; he knows that. There are storage depots all along the eastern seaboard piled high with clothing, provisions, and ammunition, but there isn’t enough transport to carry them to Valley Forge. And even if there was, the heavy wagons can’t get through, not when rain and wet snow have turned the roads into quagmires. Relief will come, but only in a trickle; and until then, he has to find a way to keep his men alive and his army in being.

What infuriates him, more than anything else, is that not more than 14 miles from here, the British Army is comfortably ensconced in villages and farmhouses, and even the lowest grenadier is enjoying a hot supper by day and a dry bed of feathers at night. That, in fact, is very much part of the problem. The local farmers prefer to barter with the British, who pay in hard coin. All that he, Washington, can offer them is printed Continental notes of dubious value, backed by neither silver nor gold. Is there anything that can be done to restore the credit of our currency? he wonders. Its depreciation is now so bad that a wagonload of it is not enough to purchase a wagonload of provisions!

Still stewing on the problems that bedevil his mind, he enters a clearing—and suddenly reins in his horse. He doesn’t know why. It feels as if he has entered a different space, as if some unseen hand has stilled him in his tracks.

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