There was much debate at Valley Forge as to the prospect for the future.When we look at available numbers during the war we appreciate the view of a British officer that in spite of Washington's failures and of British victories the war was serious, "an ugly job, a damned affair indeed." The population of the colonies--some 2,500,000--was about one-third that of the United Kingdom; and for the British the war was remote from the base of supply.In those days, considering the means of transport, America was as far from England as at the present day is Australia.Sometimes the voyage across the sea occupied two and even three months, and, with the relatively small ships of the time, it required a vast array of transports to carry an army of twenty or thirty thousand men.In the spring of 1776 Great Britain had found it impossible to raise at home an army of even twenty thousand men for service in America, and she was forced to rely in large part upon mercenary soldiers.This was nothing new.
Her island people did not like service abroad and this unwillingness was intensified in regard to war in remote America.
Moreover Whig leaders in England discouraged enlistment.They were bitterly hostile to the war which they regarded as an attack not less on their own liberties than on those of America.It would be too much to ascribe to the ignorant British common soldier of the time any deep conviction as to the merits or demerits of the cause for which he fought.There is no evidence that, once in the army, he was less ready to attack the Americans than any other foe.Certainly the Americans did not think he was half-hearted.
The British soldier fought indeed with more resolute determination than did the hired auxiliary at his side.These German troops played a notable part in the war.The despotic princes of the lesser German states were accustomed to sell the services of their troops.Despotic Russia, too, was a likely field for such enterprise.When, however, it was proposed to the Empress Catherine II that she should furnish twenty thousand men for service in America she retorted with the sage advice that it was England's true interest to settle the quarrel in America without war.Germany was left as the recruiting field.British efforts to enlist Germans as volunteers in her own army were promptly checked by the German rulers and it was necessary literally to buy the troops from their princes.One-fourth of the able-bodied men of Hesse-Cassel were shipped to America.They received four times the rate of pay at home and their ruler received in addition some half million dollars a year.The men suffered terribly and some died of sickness for the homes to which thousands of them never returned.German generals, such as Knyphausen and Riedesel, gave the British sincere and effective service.The Hessians were, however, of doubtful benefit to the British.It angered the Americans that hired troops should be used against them, an anger not lessened by the contempt which the Hessians showed for the colonial officers as plebeians.
The two sides were much alike in their qualities and were skillful in propaganda.In Britain lurid tales were told of the colonists scalping the wounded at Lexington and using poisoned bullets at Bunker Hill.In America every prisoner in British hands was said to be treated brutally and every man slain in the fighting to have been murdered.The use of foreign troops was a fruitful theme.The report ran through the colonies that the Hessians were huge ogre-like monsters, with double rows of teeth round each jaw, who had come at the call of the British tyrant to slay women and children.In truth many of the Hessians became good Americans.In spite of the loyalty of their officers they were readily induced to desert.The wit of Benjamin Franklin was enlisted to compose telling appeals, translated into simple German, which promised grants of land to those who should abandon an unrighteous cause.The Hessian trooper who opened a packet of tobacco might find in the wrapper appeals both to his virtue and to his cupidity.It was easy for him to resist them when the British were winning victories and he was dreaming of a return to the Fatherland with a comfortable accumulation of pay, but it was different when reverses overtook British arms.Then many hundreds slipped away; and today their blood flows in the veins of thousands of prosperous American farmers.
