DQUARTERS]

Yet we are not to imagine him at any time free of difficulties. With
December began his troubles with the Connecticut troops, whose
enlistment had expired. In spite of previous promises to remain until
their places were filled, and against orders to leave their weapons,
many of the Connecticut men tried to slip away, guns and all. Washington
frequently speaks of them in his letters of the first half of December.
In securing their return he was well aided by the officers, and by the
aged but still energetic Governor Trumbull, who heard of the actions of
his men with "grief, surprise, and indignation." Trumbull called the
assembly of Connecticut together to consider the situation, but action
was forestalled by the people of the different towns. The hint that the
soldiers had best return voluntarily, lest they be sent back with a
feathered adornment that nature had not provided, was sufficient to
hurry most of them back to their service.

No sooner had this matter been smoothed over, than Washington had to
meet the general situation, when on the first of January most of the
enlistments would expire. For some weeks he had been anxiously watching
the returns of the enlistments, and the figures frequently plunged him
into depression. On the 28th of November, finding that but thirty-five
hundred men had enlisted, he wrote: "Such a dearth of public spirit,
such stock-jobbing, and such fertility in all the low arts to obtain
advantages of one kind or another, in this great change of military
arrangement, I never saw before, and pray God's mercy I may never be
witness to again." A week later he found himself under obligations to
give furlough to fifteen hundred men a week, in order to satisfy them.
To fill their places and those of the Connecticut troops, he called on
Massachusetts and New Hampshire for five thousand militia. By the middle
of December scarcely six thousand men had enlisted, and on Christmas Day
only eight thousand five hundred. On New Year's Day his army, which was
to have been at least twenty thousand men, was not quite half that
number.

Under such circumstances many a weaker man would have thrown up his
office or abandoned his post. Washington stuck to his task. If Howe
would but remain inactive, the laggard country would in time retrieve
itself. As a matter of fact, many of the soldiers, after a brief period
of liberty, returned of their own accord to the standard. We find at
least one case in