By the first of December he already foresees that he cannot last long.
"Next Christmas, please God, I shall be at Merton; for, by that time, with all the anxiety attendant on such a command as this, I shall be done up.

The mind and body both wear out." As autumn drew towards winter, the bitter cold went through his feeble frame, and in the wild weather he was "always tossed about, and always sea-sick." "We have had a most terrible winter," he writes, even before the New Year.

"It has almost knocked me up.

I have been very ill, and am now far from recovered; but I hope to hold out till the battle is over, when I must recruit." "My heart, my Lord, is warm," he tells Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War, "my head is firm, but my body is unequal to my wishes.

I am visibly shook; but as long as I can hold out, I shall never abandon my truly honourable post." He feared also blindness.