ant home in
Virginia which he did not allow himself to revisit until nearly the end
of the war. The land of a farmer on service often remained untilled,
and there are pathetic cases of families in bitter need because the
breadwinner was in the army. In frontier settlements his absence
sometimes meant the massacre of his family by the savages. There is
little wonder that desertion was common, so common that after a reverse
the men went away by hundreds. As they usually carried with them their
rifles and other equipment, desertion involved a double loss. On one
occasion some soldiers undertook for themselves the punishment of
deserters. Men of the First Pennsylvania Regiment who had recaptured
three deserters, beheaded one of them and returned to their camp with
the head carried on a pole. More than once it happened that condemned
men were paraded before the troops for execution with the graves dug and
the coffins lying ready. The death sentence would be read, and then, as
the firing party took aim, a reprieve would be announced. The reprieve
in such circumstances was omitted often enough to make the condemned
endure the real agony of death.

Religion offered its consolations in the army and Washington gave much
thought to the service of the chaplains. He told his army that fine as
it was to be a patriot it was finer still to be a Christian. It is an
odd fact that, though he attended the Anglican Communion service before
and after the war, he did not partake of the Communion during the
war. What was in his mind we do not know. He was disposed, as he said
himself, to let men find "that road to Heaven which to them shall seem
the most direct," and he was without Puritan fervor, but he had deep
religious feeling. During the troubled days at Valley Forge a neighbor
came upon him alone in the bush on his knees praying aloud, and stole
away unobserved. He would not allow in the army a favorite Puritan
custom of burning the Pope in effigy, and the prohibition was not
easily enforced among men, thousands of whom bore scriptural names from
ancestors who thought the Pope anti-Christ.

Washington's winter quarters at Valley Forge were only twenty miles from
Philadelphia, among hills easily defended. It is matter for wonder that
Howe, with an army well equipped, did not make some attempt to destroy
the army of Washington which passed the winter so near and in acute
distress. The Pennsylvania Loyalists, with dark days soon to come,