At length the medical men themselves began to feel the pestilence, and the casualties among them so reduced their number (for the most attentive suffered first) that the requisite attendance could not be given, and death strode amongst the sick unchecked. The delirious, the dying, and the dead, were all indiscriminately huddled together, and sometimes mixed up with their groans, might be heard the cries of some poor fellow undergoing a course, not of medicine, but of cat-o’-nine-tails, which in many instances were resorted to by the medical gentlemen to beat out what they could not cure. Many and many a sick soldier has been accused of skulking, while his thin, cadaverous, wan, fevered countenance alone has dared to belie the charge, made by his tyrants. But happily this was not general. I remember going one day to the hospital to see my servant, a worthy, honest Yorkshireman, named Jackson, who at this time was also suffering under the dreadful malady. I had to pass through several wards before I arrived at that in which he was; such a sight I never witnessed before. The raving maniac, in all the degrees of delirium, made the room ring again, and effectually withstood any attempt on the part of the sick only, to keep them from annoying the sleeping. I particularly noticed one, a sergeant-major, sitting upright on the mattress. He was haggard and worn to a skeleton, with a beard of at least three weeks’ growth. The wild and unsettled glance of his eye told at once, that the old soldier was delirious: his mind, however, was actively at work, and he was drilling an imaginary regiment, in the most pressing yet deliberate manner. I stood to listen to him. At length he was interrupted by a brother sufferer in an adjoining pallet. In an instant he summoned an hospital orderly and in the same imperative tone, bade him go immediately and bring the Provost, that he might inflict summary punishment on the delinquent, who had thus dared to commit such a breach of discipline, as to interrupt him in the performance of his duty. The orderly was actually on the point of obeying his orders, when I informed him his patient was not in his right senses. The sergeant seemed a veteran, who had seen service; and from the manner in which he had delivered his word of command, was no doubt well qualified to put a regiment through its manœuvres. The mortality amongst the troops increased to a frightful extent in some regiments, as many as a dozen or fifteen dying of a day, and the duty of attending the dead to their last home became so fatiguing that it was at last done away with altogether. The bodies were carried from the hospitals in cart-loads. The surgeons staggered through sickness and laboured under a want of medicines. At length it was whispered about that the bread had been poisoned; finally the report became so loud, as to cause one general thrill of horror, and immediate steps were taken to discover the agents in so fiendish an affair.