What made things still worse was the intense, penetrating cold. General Greene noted that for 6 or 8 days early in January “there has been no living abroad.” Only on 1 day of that month, as far south as Philadelphia, did the mercury go above the freezing point. All the rivers froze solid, including both the Hudson and the Delaware, so that troops and even large cannon could pass over them. Ice in the Passaic River formed 3 feet thick, and, as late as February 26, the Hudson above New York was “full of fixed ice on the banks, and floating ice in the channel.” The Delaware remained wholly impassable to navigation for 3 months. “The oldest people now living in this country,” wrote Washington on March 18, “do not remember so hard a Winter as the one we are now emerging from.” [Illustration: _The Pennsylvania Line campground in 1779-80, with a hospital hut in the foreground._ From a recent painting in the park collection.] LACK OF ADEQUATE CLOTHING. Not even good soldiers warmly clothed could be expected to endure this ordeal by weather without some complaint. How much more agonizing, then, was such a winter for Washington’s men in Jockey Hollow, who were again poorly clad! A regimental clothier in the Pennsylvania Line referred to some of the troops being “naked as Lazarus.” By the time their huts were completed, said an officer in Stark’s Brigade, not more than 50 men of his regiment could be returned fit for duty, and there was “many a good Lad with nothing to cover him from his hips to his toes save his Blanket.” As late as March, when “an immense body of snow” still remained on the ground, Dr. Thacher wrote that the soldiers were “in a wretched condition for the want of clothes, blankets and shoes.” SHORTAGE OF PROVISIONS AND FORAGE. Still more critical was the lack of food for the men, and forage for the horses and oxen on which every kind of winter transportation depended. December 1779 found the troops subsisting on “miserable fresh beef, without bread, salt, or vegetables.” When the big snows of midwinter blocked the roads, making it totally impossible for supplies to get through, the army’s suffering for lack of provisions alone became almost more than human flesh and blood could bear. Early in January 1780, said the Commander in Chief, his men sometimes went “5 or Six days together without bread, at other times as many days without meat, and once or twice two or three days without either ... at one time the Soldiers eat every kind of horse food but Hay.”