Soldiers on both sides in the war for American independence faced great hardship and danger. Pay was poor — often nonexistent in the American army — and amenities few and far between. Disease was a normal accompaniment to eighteenth-century military life, carrying off many more men than did enemy bullets. What is remarkable is how well the soldiers fought, despite the daily miseries of their existence. Pride and conviction carried the soldiers through, expressed in a devotion to comrades, regiments, and, for many of the Americans, the revolutionary ideal embodied in the new republic.