t their lives
without any equivalent result, and veteran battalions were worn down by
fruitless exertions of valour, and by a series of most brilliant
successes which produced no permanent result. On the other hand,
although the French had landed a small army under the Marquis de la
Fayette, the American forces were mostly ill-disciplined and
disorganised, and although it cannot be said that they were favourable
to the English, they were discontented with the treatment they were
receiving from their own government, many of them being ill-paid,
ill-clothed, and often but scantily fed. The unsuccessful attempt of
the French fleet to enter the Chesapeake was also a great damper to the
patriot cause.

At this time the American forces were separated into as many divisions
as the English. General Greene commanded in the Carolinas, the Marquis
de la Fayette was in Virginia, and watched the banks of the James River,
to prevent the further advance of the British in that direction, while
General Washington himself remained with another army in the north, his
head-quarters being Newport in Rhode Island. Soon after this General
Phillips died, and General Arnold, greatly to the disgust of our
officers, who did not at all like serving under him, would have had the
command, had not Lord Cornwallis arrived with his army from the south at
Portsmouth.

Such was the state of affairs on shore. At sea the British arms were in
most instances victorious. While the Marquis de la Fayette was hovering
about General Arnold in the hopes of cutting him off by land, the French
expedition to the Chesapeake, concerted at Rhode Island by Monsieur de
Ternay and the Count Rochambeau was, as I have described, defeated by
the fleet of Admiral Arbuthnot. The British also were collecting a
large fleet to be ready to encounter one which was expected on the coast
of America from the West Indies under the Count de Grasse.

The war was no longer confined to one between England and her revolted
colonies, but we had now the French, Spaniards, and Dutch to contend
with on various parts of the American coasts, and mighty fleets were
collecting to contest with us as of yore the sovereignty of the seas.
I, for one, looked forward with the greatest satisfaction to an
engagement with either the Spaniards or the French, the hereditary
enemies of England. I regretted at the same time that the Americans had
adopted the dangerous expedient of calling in their ass