The routine of camp life is not without interest as tending to show what was the temper of the men under circumstances of unusual trial and hardship. They were housed in tents, most of which proved rotten and unserviceable, or in booths, which they built for themselves out of poles and green boughs cut in the neighboring woods. The relief parties, told off each day for work in the trenches, were marched to their stations after dark, as the enemy’s fire swept the ground over which they must pass. For a like reason, the fatigue parties could only bring up the daily supplies of provisions and ammunition to the trenches from Gabarus Bay, after darkness had set in. By great good-fortune, the weather continued dry and pleasant; otherwise the bad housing and severe toil must have told on the health of the army even more severely than it did, while work in the trenches would have been suspended during the intervals of wet weather. Spirit of the Army. A force like this, composed of men who were the equals of their officers at home, not bound together by habits of passive obedience formed under the severe penalties of martial law, could not be expected to observe the exact discipline of regular soldiers. It was not attempted to enforce it. Not one case of punishment for infraction of orders is reported during the siege. But officers and men had in them the making of far better soldiers than the ordinary rank and file of armies. There were men in the ranks who rose to be colonels and brigadiers in the revolutionary contest.[22] The hardest duty was performed without grumbling; the most dangerous service found plenty of volunteers; and Pepperell himself has borne witness that nothing pleased the men better than to be ordered off on some scouting expedition that promised to bring on a brush with the enemy. This spirit is plainly manifest in the letters which have been preserved. In one of them Major Pomeroy tells his wife that “it looks as if our campaign would last long; but I am willing to stay till God’s time comes to deliver the city into our hands.” The reply is worthy of a woman of Sparta: “Suffer no anxious thoughts to rest in your mind about me. The whole town is much engaged with concern for the expedition, how Providence will order the affair, for which religious meetings every week are maintained. I leave you in the hand of God.” There is not a despatch or a letter of Pepperell’s extant, in which this dependence upon the Over-ruling Hand is not acknowledged. The barbaric utterance that Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions would have shocked the men of Louisburg as deeply as it would the men of Preston, Edgehill, and Marston Moor. The conviction that their cause was a righteous one, and must therefore prevail, was a power still active among Puritan soldiers: nor did they fail to give the honor and praise of achieved victory to Him whom they so steadfastly owned as the Leader of Armies and the God of Battles.