Friday, February 16, 2018

A startling discovery

To Charles Willson Peale, walking among [the American soldiers in Washington's army] by the light of the next morning on the Pennsylvania shore, they looked as wretched as any man he had ever seen. One had almost no clothes. "He was in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So "disfigured" was he that Peale failed at first to recognize the man was his own brother, James Peale, who had been with a Maryland unit as part of the rear guard.

(from 1776, by David McCullough)

No comments: