On October 12, Colonel Enos and the rear guard reached the Twelve Mile carrying place. The army that had set out from Fort Western with nearly twelve hundred men could now muster only nine hundred and fifty well men. And yet they were only beginning the most perilous stage of their journey. All about them stood the dark and silent wilderness, through which they were to make their way for sixteen miles, to reach the Dead River. In this dreaded route there were four carrying places. The last was three miles long, a third of which was a miry spruce and cedar swamp. It took {24} five days of hardest toil to cut their way through the unbroken wilderness. Fortunately, the hunters shot four moose and caught plenty of salmon trout. Now began the snail-like advance for eighty-six miles up the crooked course of the Dead River. Sometimes they cut their way through the thickets and the underbrush, but oftener they waded along the banks. Then came a heavy rainstorm, which grew into a hurricane during the night. The river overflowed its banks for a mile or more on either side. Many of the boats sank or were dashed to pieces. Barrels of pork and of flour were swept away. For the next ten days, these heroic men seemed to be pressing forward to a slow death by starvation. Each man's ration was reduced to half a pint of flour a day. The old adage tells us that misfortunes never come singly. The rear guard under Colonel Enos, with its trail hewn out for it, had carried the bulk of the supplies; but, after losing most of the provisions in the freshet, he refused any more flour for his half-starved comrades at the front. On October 25, the rear guard having caught up with Greene's division, which was in the worst plight of all, encamped at a place called Ledge Falls. At a council of war held in the midst of a driving snowstorm, Enos himself voted at first to go forward; but afterwards he decided to go back. So the rear guard, grudgingly giving up two barrels of flour, turned their backs, and, {25} in spite of the jeers and the threats of their comrades, started home. Greene and his brave fellows showed no signs of faltering, but, as a diary reads, "took each man his duds to his back, bid them adieu, and marched on." Just over the boundary between Maine and Canada there was a great swamp. In this bog two companies lost their way, and waded knee-deep in the mire for ten miles in endless circles. Reaching a little hillock after dark, they stood up all night long to keep from freezing. Each man was for himself in the struggle for life. The strong dared not halt to help the weak for fear they too should perish. "Alas! alas!" writes one soldier, "these horrid spectacles! my heart sickens at the recollection."