owards the
provincials their attitude was one of tranquil superiority, though its
tranquillity was occasionally disturbed by what they regarded as absurd
pretension on the part of the colony officers. One of them gave vent to
his feelings in an article in the _London Chronicle_, in which he
advanced the very reasonable proposition that "a farmer is not to be
taken from the plough and made an officer in a day;" and he was answered
wrathfully, at great length, in the _Boston Evening Post_, by a writer
signing himself "A New England Man." The provincial officers, on the
other hand, and especially those of New England, being no less narrow
and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local
patriotism, and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and
importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a
resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome. This
feeling was far from being confined to the officers. A provincial
regiment stationed at Half-Moon, on the Hudson, thought itself affronted
by Captain Cruikshank, a regular officer; and the men were so incensed
that nearly half of them went off in a body. The deportment of British
officers in the Seven Years War no doubt had some part in hastening on
the Revolution.

What with levelling Montcalm's siege works, planting palisades, and
grubbing up stumps in their bungling and laborious way, the regulars
found abundant occupation. Discipline was stiff and peremptory. The
wooden horse and the whipping-post were conspicuous objects in the camp,
and often in use. Caleb Rea, being tender-hearted, never went to see the
lash laid on; for, as he quaintly observes, "the cries were satisfactory
to me, without the sight of the strokes." He and the rest of the doctors
found active exercise for such skill as they had, since fever and
dysentery were making scarcely less havoc than the bullets at
Ticonderoga. This came from the bad state of the camps and unwholesome
food. The provincial surgeons seem to have been very little impressed
with the importance of sanitary regulations, and to have thought it
their business not to prevent disease, but only to cure it. The one
grand essential in their eyes was a well-stocked medicine-chest, rich in
exhaustless stores of rhubarb, ipecacuanha, and calomel. Even this
sometimes failed. Colonel Williams reports "the sick destitute of
everything proper for them; medicine-chest empty; nothing but their