Losses in battle, by sickness or desertion, or other causes, had brought his dismembered forces down to a total of 10,000 men, of whom 3,500 only were now under his immediate command, the rest being with Lee and Heath. And the work of disintegration was steadily going on. Always hopeful so long as there was even a straw to cling to, Washington seems to have expected that the people of New Jersey would have flown to arms, upon hearing that the invader had actually set foot upon the soil of their State. Vain hope! His appeal had fallen flat. The great and rich State of Pennsylvania was nearly, if not quite, as unresponsive. Disguise it as we may, the fire of '76 seemed all but extinct on its very earliest altars, and in its stead only a few sickly embers glowed here and there among its ashes. The futility of further resistance was being openly discussed, and submission seemed only one step farther off. In one of his desponding moments Washington turned to his old comrade, Mercer, with the question, "What think you, if we should retreat to the back parts of Pennsylvania, would the Pennsylvanians support us?" Though himself a Pennsylvanian by adoption, Mercer's answer was given with true soldierly frankness. "If the lower counties give up, the back counties will do the same," was his discouraging reply. "We must then retire to Augusta County in Virginia," said Washington, with grave decision, "and if overpowered there, we must cross the Alleghanies." A volume would fail to give half as good an idea of the critical condition of affairs as that brief dialogue. [Sidenote: Cruelties to prisoners.] First and foremost among the many causes of the army's disruption was its losses in prisoners. Not less than 5,000 men were at that moment dying by slow torture in the foul prisons or pestilential floating dungeons of New York. Turn from it as we may, there is no escaping the conviction that if not done with the actual sanction of Sir William Howe, these atrocities were at least committed with his guilty knowledge.[1] The calculated barbarities practised upon these poor prisoners, with no other purpose than to make them desert their cause, or if that failed, totally to unfit them for serving it more, are almost too shocking for belief. It was such acts as these that wrung from the indignant Napier the terrible admission that "the annals of civilized warfare furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison ships of England." This method of disposing of prisoners was none the less potent that it was in some sort murder. Washington had not the prisoners to exchange for them, Howe would not liberate them on parole, and when exchanges were finally effected, the men thus released were too much enfeebled by disease ever to carry a musket again. In brief, more of Washington's men were languishing in captivity in New York than he now had with him in the Jerseys. And he was not losing nearly so many by bullets as by starvation.