1757] Activity of Montcalm 129 ridiculed for occupying the troops at Halifax in planting vegetables for the use of the sick and wounded in the looked-for siege of Louisbourg, and in practising siege-operations-a better and healthier alternative surely than the other one of drinking and idleness! The dilatoriness lay with the English government in despatching an expedition to an open harbour on the 5th of May that should have sailed rather on the 5th of March. Loudon has perhaps a greater blunder to answer for, namely, that of entering on a campaign which, at a critical moment, removed him with the cream of his troops from operations of more vital import. He had not reached New York before the error was brought home to him by a despatch-boat laden with the disastrous news that Fort William Henry had fallen in lamentable fashion and that the waterway from the Hudson to Montreal was in the hands of the French. While Loudon, as the lampooners said, was "planting cabbages" in Nova Scotia, Montcalm had vigorously thrown himself on the weakened frontier of New York. Dazzled by his brilliant achievement at Oswego, hundreds of western savages had flocked to his standard at Montreal, while the so-called Christian Indians of Canada needed no such incentive to take up the hatchet. Ticonderoga or Carillon, at the head of Lake Champlain, was to be the rallying-place; Fort William Henry, thirty miles off at the head of Lake George, the point of attack. The French commander, on his side, was not free from personal annoyances. Vaudreuil, the governor, as a native-born Canadian, was jealous both of him and of his friends. The French troops on their part had no love for their Canadian brothers-in-arms. The civil administration from top to bottom battened on corruption. The Church claimed immense privileges, and was sometimes troublesome. But in the matter of making war these were trifles compared with the cumbrous and complex machinery that existed across the English frontier. There were no fanatical, jealous, parsimonious, or ignorant legislators to be consulted, no supplies to be voted. The King found the money; the colonists were at any rate anxious to fight, however they might differ on other matters; and when the commander-in-chief gave the signal, every Canadian, without hope of pay, was ready to march with the French regiments, only anxious to prove his perennial though vain boast, that he was a better soldier than the regulars and equal to three Englishmen. 8000 men, including six royal regiments and a large body of the marine or colonial regulars, were at Ticonderoga in July. Montcalm was there himself, with the able De Lévis as second in command. At the far end of the long, narrow, mountain-bordered lake in Fort William Henry, lay Colonel Munro with some 2000 men, nearly half of them raw militia recruits. Fourteen miles behind him, on the Hudson at Fort Edward, General Webb, commanding in Loudon's absence, had a still smaller number of still worse troops. In his rear C. M. H. VII. 9 130 Capture of Fort William Henry [1757 lay Albany and the English settlements, quaking with a fully justified trepidation and sorely weakened in their former faith in the invincibility of the mother-country. The story of the capture of Fort William Henry and its ghastly sequel is one of the dramatic episodes with which this period of American history abounds, though it can only be treated in brief outline here. Montcalm, with the help of boats and bateaux, experienced little difficulty and no opposition in bringing his motley but effective host and formidable artillery to the raw clearing of the forests, not a stone's throw from the lake shore, where the doomed fortress awaited its fate. His summons to surrender, coupled with a significant hint that the 1800 Indians with him, if exasperated by resistance, might prove uncontrollable, was curtly rejected by Munro, who did not wholly despair of help from Webb. The garrison, which contained Otway's regiment (the 35th), was outnumbered by nearly four to one, and in average quality was at an even greater disadvantage. The British artillery was miserably inferior to that of the enemy, and the garrison was encumbered with women and children and a long sicklist. Webb, who was responsible for the posts which kept the road to Albany open, had sent from Fort Edward all the men he could spare to Munro. To have faced the French in the open with less than 2000 raw militia, and at the same time left Fort Edward at the enemy's mercy, would have been most hazardous. Yet Webb has been widely blamed for his inaction, probably on the principle followed by Loudon's critics of "once wrong always wrong," for he had made mistakes before. Through a week the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, and the wild war-whoops of the Indians woke fierce echoes in the mountain gorges round Lake George. The defenders' ammunition was nearly exhausted, their wretched cannon had burst or were dismounted. Sickness was raging, and the French trenches, armed with heavy artillery, had been pushed close to the ramparts. Entirely surrounded, cut off from supplies, Loudon being on the Atlantic and Webb hemmed in, Munro agreed to the inevitable capitulation. Canada could scarcely feed her own people and troops; accordingly the garrison, under the promise of not serving for eighteen months, were to be safely escorted with their movables to Fort Edward. But all French subjects taken since the war began were to be restored; each prisoner so delivered was to release from his parole a member of the garrison. The fort was then abandoned for a large entrenchment near by which had been included in the defence. It was at the evacuation of this temporary refuge that the bloody scene was enacted which has stained Montcalm's memory. The Indians, though they had joined in the agreement, could not tolerate the sight of vanquished enemies marching off, not merely with their lives and scalps, but with their clothes, arms, and small possessions. The outrage began with a scuffle; the war-whoop was raised; and a hundred 1757] Massacre of the garrison 131 tomahawks flashed in the air. A scene of wild confusion followed; the captive garrison had little means of resistance but unloaded muskets. The sick, with the women and children, were among them, and numbers of these fell instant victims to the fury of the savages. The escort was culpably insufficient, and proved heartlessly indifferent. Montcalm was thoroughly acquainted with the Indian nature, and detested its brutality while he recognised the value of his indispensable allies. When the catastrophe due to his carelessness occurred, he and his officers threw themselves into the tumult and exerted all their powers of persuasion and intimidation to stop the plunder and slaughter. The troops on guard, chiefly Canadians, callous to Indian excesses, would risk nothing. The French, more especially their officers, though late on the scene, behaved like men. Nearly a hundred of the weaker persons, however, had been butchered; 600 were made prisoners by the savages, and had to be redeemed at various later periods by French money; while numbers stripped of their clothes, fled to the woods, and found their way eventually to Fort Edward. Montcalm's mistake cost the French, as well as its more immediate victims, dear; for the English, with just reason, repudiated their part of an agreement which had been broken in such ruthless fashion. The guns and contents of Fort William Henry were carried to Canada; the fort itself was destroyed; and French craft plied on Lake George with as much impunity as on Lake Ontario. This winter of 1757-8 was a gloomy one for the English in America, whether colonists or soldiers. The French, firmly seated on the Ohio, were still hurling the Indians on the reeking frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, whose older settlements showed a remarkable lack of spirit. In the North the horrors of a greater war were detailed in hundreds of rural homesteads by disbanded soldiers who were without laurels to glorify their tales. The faith of the colonies had been greatly shaken, though unjustly, in British troops, and much more. reasonably in British generals. The latter, on their part, had cause to complain of many things and were not backward in their complaints. But they were shortly to be relieved; for Pitt was now in power. indeed, at this dismal season could have dreamed that within three years the French power in America would have virtually ceased to exist. France, indeed, was now at the zenith of her success. Her failure as a true colonising power, however, is significantly illustrated by the fact that the Canadians, satiated as they were with glory, were almost starving, in a fertile country occupied for a century and a half. Yet, still land-hungry, France was grasping at a continent. Few, The train Pitt had risen to supreme power in the preceding June. of the late disasters had then already been laid, and he had to take the consequences and profit by them. By the new year the magic of his inspiration had begun to work; and the agents of his vigorous policy, both at home and abroad, were feeling the influence of his lofty 132 Pitt in power [1757-8 enthusiasm. France was not merely to be checked in America; she was to be crushed and evicted. It was there he clearly saw, and not in the vast and endless turmoil of European strife, that the quarrel between France and England was to be decided. It was unfortunate for France that almost at the moment when a great man possessed of these convictions stepped to the helm in England, French colonial interests should have changed hands with a precisely opposite result, and that ministers who had backed up the able conductors of the Canadian forward policy, with both sympathy and supplies, should have given place to others who shut their eyes to the future and failed to see the "handwriting on the wall." Two French fleets, however, were already fitting out in Toulon and Rochefort respectively, for the carriage of troops and supplies to Canada. Pitt sent squadrons to check them, with the result that the one at Toulon could not get out, while the other was driven on the rocks. Pitt's American programme for the year 1758 differed from that of the preceding one in nothing but the men and methods by which it was to be carried out. Louisbourg was to be attacked by one force, Ticonderoga by another, Duquesne by a third; in short, the three chief pivots of French influence were to be destroyed. In the selection of his officers Pitt threw precedent to the winds, ignored seniority, rank, and influence, and had regard to merit alone. To Forbes, a brave and capable soldier, was given the task of avenging Braddock; Loudon was abruptly recalled; and (Pitt's only mistake) Abercrombie, his second in command, was left in his place. For the conquest of Louisbourg, the most important task of all, he recalled Amherst, then a colonel, from Germany. His brigadiers were also men of comparatively humble rank, Lawrence and Whitmore of proved efficiency and American experience, and lastly James Wolfe, the eventual hero of the war. Wolfe was of Anglo-Irish stock, though born at Westerham, the son of a general who had served under Marlborough, and was now thirty years of age. Ever since Dettingen, where at sixteen he served as adjutant to his regiment, he had seen much service on the Continent and in Scotland. Without fortune or interest of the kind then useful he had forced his way to the command of a regiment at two-and-twenty. The heart of a lion beat in his sickly and lanky frame. Underneath his red hair and pale homely face was the cool quick brain of a military leader, matured by studious application rare enough in the soldier of any period, while a quenchless spirit, fired with a high ambition for the glory of his country, shone through lustrous blue eyes that went far to redeem the shortcomings of face and figure. In the hapless expedition against Rochefort, in the preceding years, Wolfe had reaped what scanty credit was to be gained. For years he had been chafing at the inactivity of peace, and had been forced to content himself with making his regiment the best disciplined in the British service. Now his chance had come. 1758] The fall of Louisbourg 133 Eleven thousand men and an ample train of artillery set out in February, convoyed by Admiral Boscawen and a strong fleet. So terrible was the weather that it was the 10th of May before they reached Halifax, where a few regulars and militia joined them. For nearly a week in early June fleet and army lay tossing off the surflashed coast, where Louisbourg, "the Dunkirk of America," the pride of France, armed to the teeth, lay frowning between a shaggy desert and a tumbling foggy sea. The embattled town was flanked by an almost land-locked harbour where a French fleet lay in doubtful security, though it added 3000 sailors to a somewhat larger number of regulars, who, with the armed members of a hardy civic population of 4000, formed the garrison. A million sterling had been recently spent on strengthening the fortifications, now a mile and a half in circumference. 250 cannon and mortars gaped defiance from the walls, while the landing-places on the adjacent coast had been fortified for immediate occupation. After much difficulty and at considerable risk, a landing was effected on July the 9th, in the face of a raging surf and a storm of grape and round shot. Wolfe, lately an invalid at Bath, and since tortured by weeks of sea-sickness, led in the foremost boat. Leaping into the surf, cane in hand, he headed the leading files against the opposing battery and carried it at the bayonet's point. The whole force was then landed, the French outer defences driven in, the heavy artillery and stores brought on shore, and the siege formally commenced. There was no lack of energy now. Admiral and general for once worked in full accord. The trenches were pushed rapidly forward and the terrific fire of British artillery "served," in the words of a French officer, "with an activity not often seen," played havoc with the masonry, while a constant stream of bombs left the defenders, in a short time, not a spot in which they could with safety lay their heads. A sally in force was defeated and driven back. Wolfe was conspicuously active, now heading a charge, now erecting fresh batteries on the harbour side, and working big guns with joyous energy. It was a gallant defence, too. Drucour, the governor, behaved with infinite spirit; and his wife is said to have mounted the ramparts and personally animated the men who manned them. But by July 24th only four guns were feebly answering the roar of Amherst's artillery, and the place was a heap of ruins. The ships in the harbour were burned or taken, and there was no option but unconditional surrender, though even now the French officers were anxious to fight to the last. But the populace dreaded retaliation for the barbarities of the French Indians and insisted on capitulation. 5637 French soldiers and sailors were delivered up and sent prisoners to England. The greater part of the population was shipped to France, and 240 guns with a large supply of arms and stores passed to the victors. The news was received in England with transports of joy. Bells pealed and bonfires flared, while |