His enemy was in a plight hardly better than his own.  Autumnal rains, uncommonly heavy and persistent, had ruined the newly-cut road.  On the mountains the torrents tore it up, and in the valleys the wheels of the wagons and cannon churned it into soft mud.  The horses, overworked and underfed, were fast breaking down.  The forest had little food for them, and they were forced to drag their own oats and corn, as well as supplies for the army, through two hundred miles of wilderness.  In the wretched condition of the road this was no longer possible.  The magazines of provisions formed at Raystown and Loyalhannon to support the army on its forward march were emptied faster than they could be filled.  Early in October the elements relented; the clouds broke, the sky was bright again, and the sun shone out in splendor on mountains radiant in the livery of autumn.  A gleam of hope revisited the heart of Forbes.  It was but a flattering illusion.  The sullen clouds returned, and a chill, impenetrable veil of mist and rain hid the mountains and the trees.  Dejected Nature wept and would not be comforted.  Above, below, around, all was trickling, oozing, pattering, gushing.  In the miserable encampments the starved horses stood steaming in the rain, and the men crouched, disgusted, under their dripping tents, while the drenched picket-guard in the neighboring forest paced dolefully through black mire and spongy mosses.  The rain turned to snow; the descending flakes clung to the many-colored foliage, or melted from sight in the trench of half-liquid clay that was called a road.  The wheels of the wagons sank in it to the hub, and to advance or retreat was alike impossible.

Forbes from his sick bed at Raystown wrote to Bouquet:  “Your description of the road pierces me to the very soul.”  And a few days later to Pitt:  “I am in the greatest distress, occasioned by rains unusual at this season, which have rendered the clay roads absolutely impracticable.  If the weather does not favor, I shall be absolutely locked up in the mountains.  I cannot form any judgment how I am to extricate myself as everything depends on the weather, which snows and rains frightfully.”  There was no improvement.  In the next week he writes to Bouquet:  “These four days of constant rain have completely ruined the road.  The wagons would cut it up more in an hour than we could repair in a week.  I have written to General Abercromby, but have not had one scrape of a pen from him since the beginning of September; so it looks as if we were either forgot or left to our fate."[663] Wasted and tortured by disease, the perplexed commander was forced to burden himself with a multitude of details which would else have been neglected, and to do the work of commissary and quartermaster as well as general.  “My time,” he writes, “is disagreeably spent between business and medicine.”

[Footnote 663:  Forbes to Bouquet, 15 Oct. 1758.  Ibid., 25 Oct. 1758.  Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758.]