or anybody else who has seen it
carried on here."

His provincials displeased him, not without reason; for the greater part
were but the crudest material for an army, unruly, and recalcitrant to
discipline. Some of them came to the rendezvous at Carlisle with old
province muskets, the locks tied on with a string; others brought
fowling-pieces of their own, and others carried nothing but
walking-sticks; while many had never fired a gun in their lives.[647]
Forbes reported to Pitt that their officers, except a few in the higher
ranks, were "an extremely bad collection of broken inn-keepers,
horse-jockeys, and Indian traders;" nor is he more flattering towards
the men, though as to some of them he afterwards changed his mind.[648]

[Footnote 647: _Correspondence of Forbes and Bouquet, July, August,
1758_.]

[Footnote 648: _Forbes to Pitt, 6 Sept. 1758_.]

While Bouquet was with the advance at Raystown, Forbes was still in
Philadelphia, trying to bring the army into shape, and collecting
provisions, horses, and wagons; much vexed meantime by the Assembly,
whose tedious disputes about taxing the proprietaries greatly obstructed
the service. "No sergeant or quartermaster of a regiment," he says, "is
obliged to look into more details than I am; and if I did not see to
everything myself, we should never get out of this town." July had begun
before he could reach the frontier village of Carlisle, where he found
everything in confusion. After restoring some order, he wrote to
Bouquet: "I have been and still am but poorly, with a cursed flux, but
shall move day after to-morrow." He was doomed to disappointment; and it
was not till the ninth of August that he sent another letter from the
same place to the same military friend. "I am now able to write after
three weeks of a most violent and tormenting distemper, which, thank
God, seems now much abated as to pain, but has left me as weak as a
new-born infant. However, I hope to have strength enough to set out from
this place on Friday next." The disease was an inflammation of the
stomach and other vital organs; and when he should have been in bed,
with complete repose of body and mind, he was racked continually with
the toils and worries of a most arduous campaign.

He left Carlisle on the eleventh, carried on a kind of litter made of a
hurdle slung between two horses; and two days later he wrote from
Shippensburg: "My journey here from Carlisle raised my disorder and
pains to