ents. If a man could re-enlist and again
secure a bounty, he would gain more than if he enlisted at once for the
duration of the war.

An army is an intricate mechanism needing the same variety of agencies
that is required for the well-being of a community. The chief aim is, of
course, to defeat the enemy, and to do this an army must be prepared to
move rapidly. Means of transport, so necessary in peace, are even more
urgently needed in war. Thus Washington always needed military engineers
to construct roads and bridges. Before the Revolution the greater part
of such services had been provided in America by the regular British
army, now the enemy. British officers declared that the American army
was without engineers who knew the science of war, and certainly the
forts on which they spent their skill in the North, those on the lower
Hudson, and at Ticonderoga, at the head of Lake George, fell easily
before the assailant. Good maps were needed, and in this Washington
was badly served, though the defect was often corrected by his intimate
knowledge of the country. Another service ill-equipped was what we
should now call the Red Cross. Epidemics, and especially smallpox,
wrought havoc in the army. Then, as now, shattered nerves were sometimes
the result of the strain of military life. "The wind of a ball," what we
should now call shellshock, sometimes killed men whose bodies appeared
to be uninjured. To our more advanced knowledge the medical science of
the time seems crude. The physicians of New England, today perhaps the
most expert body of medical men in the world, were even then highly
skillful. But the surgeons and nurses were too few. This was true
of both sides in the conflict. Prisoners in hospitals often suffered
terribly and each side brought charges of ill-treatment against the
other. The prison-ships in the harbor of New York, where American
prisoners were confined, became a scandal, and much bitter invective
against British brutality is found in the literature of the period. The
British leaders, no less than Washington himself, were humane men, and
ignorance and inadequate equipment will explain most of the hardships,
though an occasional officer on either side was undoubtedly callous in
respect to the sufferings of the enemy.

Food and clothing, the first vital necessities of an army, were often
deplorably scarce. In a land of farmers there was food enough. Its
lack in the army was chiefly due to bad transpo