A great historian has asked, When did this Spanish war end?[158] and the answer is that it ended imperceptibly in the gradual annihilation of the contending armies by yellow fever. The French fleet was driven back to France by it, the Spaniards were left defenceless by it, the English were palsied for attack by it. There was indeed desultory fighting, not without incidents of signal gallantry, between the colonists of Carolina and Georgia and their Spanish neighbours in Florida, but the operations were too trifling to merit record in this place. The one gleam of light in the whole dark history is the heroic voyage of Anson, who had been sent round Cape Horn, with some vague idea that his fleet and Vernon's should co-operate in attacks on Central America. In Anson's fame the Army also has some faint though melancholy share, for about three hundred Chelsea pensioners, weak, aged, and infirm, were barbarously driven on board his ships, nominally to man them, but in reality only to find at sea the grave which past service should have ensured them on English soil. Whether with Anson or with Vernon, whether on the Atlantic or the Pacific, the war had nothing but failure and death for the red-coats. It remains to say something of the human share in the catastrophe of the expedition to Carthagena. Wentworth has hitherto been made the scapegoat for every misfortune, and it is probable that he must remain so; yet the blame of the avoidable disasters must not be laid wholly to his charge. So far as he had been tried up to the time of his command he had proved himself a diligent and painstaking officer; he had been installed as Cathcart's second by Cathcart's own request, and could he have remained a subordinate would probably have done well enough. Though lacking experience of active service, in or out of the tropics, he did his best to make good the deficiency by consulting those officers who knew more than himself. He tried his hardest to work in concert with the naval officers, and never wrote home a word of complaint against Vernon until he had endured his arrogant and overbearing tone for more than a year. But his own training, like that of his men, had been mechanical only, and he could neither rise above the stiff formalities of his profession himself, nor raise his men above them. It will be seen that this same mechanical training could produce astonishing results on the familiar battlegrounds of Flanders, but it was out of place on the Spanish Main, as it was soon to prove itself out of place on the Ohio. Again, poor workman though Wentworth was, the tools to his hand were not good. He himself had only with great difficulty taught six of his regiments the rudiments of discipline in the Isle of Wight. His regimental officers were, without exception, young and inexperienced, while some few of them, who had obtained commissions through political jobbery, are described as the most abandoned wretches of the town.