Winter at Valley Forge

The Continental Army marched into Valley Forge on 19 December 1777, about 12,000 men, twenty miles from the British in Philadelphia. They built some 2,000 log huts in a matter of weeks, drilled under Steuben from March, and endured a winter of short rations, sickness and mud. Roughly 2,000 died of disease before spring, most of them in the huts and hospitals rather than in the snow. The army that marched out in June 1778 was hardened, better drilled, and about to fight the British to a standstill at Monmouth.

Pieter Bruegel painted The Hunters in the Snow in 1565 as one of a series on the months; it hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Three hunters and their dogs trudge over a rise in the left foreground with their backs to us, and the ground falls away beneath them to a whole valley of frozen ponds, rooftops and tiny skaters. It is often called the first great winter landscape in Western painting.

Three Continental soldiers come down the wooded slope at the left, seen from behind, muskets slung, one in a blue coat, one wrapped in a blanket, one carrying an armful of firewood, a thin dog at their heels. Below them the encampment spreads across the whole valley: rows of log huts trailing chimney smoke, a regiment drawn up on the parade ground, wagons and horse teams hauling timber, and a stone house with the flag flying beside it. The Schuylkill runs gray along the far side under a low pewter sky.

Bruegel's hunters were coming home with almost nothing. So were these men, every day, for six months, and the army came out the other side.