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Privates were responsible to cook their own meals. Provisions, sent from England, were often not fit to eat, by the time it
reached the men. More men died from disease caused by poor diet and nutrition than they did from the bayonet or ball of the
enemy musket. Woman got ½ the rations of a man and children got ¼ the rations of a man.
If a boy was tall enough to join the line, he received full rations and was trained for the eventual day he would join
the army in the footsteps of his father.
The Rations of a Man - link
Now you’re probably wondering why there weren’t any woman in the army.
That’s because the men thought that the women weren’t strong enough to hold a musket for unknown amounts of time.
There were women following the army, however. These women were known as official camp followers. There was a lottery for soldier’s
dependants and if you were lucky enough, you got to go to Canada with your husband. The odds were 6 out of every 100 men in
a company could bring their wife along on campaign. Also if a husband died while in service, either in battle or of his wounds,
his wife had 48 hours to remarry someone from the army or had to leave the army. The army could ill afford to supply another
mouth to feed without seeing a benefit.
The Making of a Regiment - link
Where did they sleep you
say? They either slept in a drafty old barracks building while in a fort or a 6-foot by 6-foot tent while stopped while on
manoeuvres. The tent had 5 to 6 people in it including all their gear. That drafty old barracks that held up to about 100
people that’s where the 6 women and their children usually slept, the wife in the bed with the husband and the children
on the floor under the bed with a bunch of dirty old rats. A thin blanket was
the only thing to separate the family from the rest of the troops. In
the army shoes were issued in threes so if one shoe wore out they would have another one for backup. They could also rotate
the shoes much like the way we rotate the wheels on our cars today, because the shoes were not made left and right, but could
be worn on either foot. These were rotated regularly, to achieve the greatest
amount of use from them. These shoes were extremely uncomfortable.
Not all of the time did things work out for the men firing; sometimes the gun would get stuck or not even fire. One
of the mishaps even has its own nick name. This nickname is “a flash in the pan”. This “flash in the pan”
happens when the gunpowder in the pan explodes but the gunpowder at the bottom of the barrel does not ignite. To prevent the
mishap of burning their face they would grow sideburns. An expression that came from guns is “lock, stock, and barrel”.
Lock, stock and barrel meant that they bought or sold everything they had or the traders had.
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