bitter hostility of the inhabitants towards the British. Not content with resenting real outrages, which were far too abundant, they never ceased flying to the Duke with frivolous and groundless complaints; and so disobliging were the authorities that Lord St. Helens, Ambassador at the Hague, tried for two months in vain to find places where the British might be allowed to establish additional hospitals. On
Nov. 27. the 27th of November the infantry in British pay numbered twenty-one thousand and the sick nearly eleven thousand; and when a man was ordered to hospital his comrades would exclaim, "Ah, poor fellow, we shall see thee no more, for thou art under orders for the shambles." On one occasion five hundred invalids were embarked from Arnheim in barges under charge of a single surgeon's mate, without sufficient provisions, without even sufficient straw, and brought to Rhenen, where they were left on board for want of sufficient space to admit them to the hospital. A Dutch gentleman counted at one time the bodies of forty-two men who had thus perished of neglect in the barges and had been thrown out dead on to the bank. Meanwhile the rascals who bore the name of surgeon's mates charged forty thousand pounds for wine for the sick, and, not content with robbing the State by themselves drinking what was supplied, actually plundered the helpless patients committed to their care. Such was the economy of Dundas's military administration—to obtain recruits by the offer of lavish bounties, to break down their health by giving them insufficient clothing, and to contract with scoundrels so to maltreat them, medically, that they should not recover.[1]
- ↑ Narrative of an Officer of the Guards, ii. 89-91; York to Dundas, 27th November 1794; Harcourt to York, 15th December 1794.
