A BIVOUAC IN THE FOREST.
Through the night, meanwhile, Montcalm and his men had been working
like demons.
The stone fort of Ticonderoga stood far out on a bluff at the head of
Lake Champlain, its base descending on the one hand into the still
lake-water, on the other swept by the river which the British had
been trying to follow, and which here, its rapids passed, disembogues
in a smooth strong flood. It stood high, too, over these meeting
waters; but as a military position was next to worthless, being
dominated, across the river on the south, by a loftier hill called
Rattlesnake Mountain.
Such was Ticonderoga; and hither Montcalm had hurried up the
Richelieu River from the north to find Bourlamaque, that good
fighter, posted with the regiments of La Reine, Bearn, and Guienne,
and a few Canadian regulars and militia. He himself had brought the
battalions of La Sarre and De Berry--a picked force, if ever there
was one, but scarcely above three thousand strong.
A couple of miles above the fort and just below the rapids, a bridge
spanned the river. A saw-mill stood beside it: and here Montcalm had
crossed and taken up his quarters, pushing forward Bourlamaque to
guard the upper end of the rapids, and holding Langy ready with three
hundred rangers to patrol the woods on the outer side of the river's
loop.
But when his scouts and Indians came in with the news of the British
embarking on the upper shore, and with reports of their multitude,
Montcalm perceived that the river could not be held; and, having
recalled Bourlamaque and broken down the bridges above and below the
rapids, withdrew his force again to Ticonderoga, leaving only Langy's
rangers in the farther woods to feel the enemy's approach.
Next he had to ask himself, Could the fort be defended? All agreed
that it could not, with Rattlesnake Mountain overtopping it: and the
most were for evacuating it and retiring up Lake Champlain to the
stronger French fort on Crown Point. But Montcalm was expecting
Levis at any moment with reinforcements; and studying the ridge at
the extreme end of which the fort stood, he decided that the position
ought not to be abandoned. This ridge ran inland, its slope narrowed
on either side between the river and the lake by swamps, and
approachable only from landward over the _col_, where it broadened
and dipped to the foothills. Here, at the entrance to the ridge, and
half a mile from his fort, he commanded his men to throw up an
entrenchment and cut down trees; and while the sappers fell to work
he traced out the lines of a rude star-fort, with curtains and
jutting angles from which the curtains could be enfiladed.
Through the dawn, while the British slept in the woods, the Frenchmen
laboured, hacking and felling. Scores of trees they left to lie and
encumber the ground: others they dragged, unlopped, to the
entrenchment, and piled them before it, trunks inward and radiating
from its angles; lacing their boughs together or roughly pointing
them with a few strokes of the axe.
In the growing daylight the _chevaux-de-frise_ began to look
formidable; but Bourlamaque, watching it with Montcalm, shook his
head, hunched his shoulders, and jerked a thumb toward a spur of
Rattlesnake Mountain, by which their defences were glaringly
commanded.
Montcalm said, "We will risk it. Those English Generals are
inconceivable."
"But a cannon or two--"
"If he think of them! Believe me, who have tried: you never know
what an English General will do--or what his soldiers won't.
Pile the trees higher, my braves--more than breast-high--
mountain-high if time serves! But this Abercromby comes from a land
where the bees fly tail-foremost by rule."
"With all submission, I would still recommend Crown Point."
"Should he, by chance, think of planting a gun yonder, I feel sure
that notion will exclude all others. We shall open the door and
retreat on Crown Point unmolested."
Bourlamaque drew in a long breath and emitted it in a mighty _pouf_!
"I am not conducting his campaign for him," said his superior calmly.
"God forbid! I once imagined myself in his predecessor's place, the
Earl of Loudon's, and within twenty minutes France had lost Canada.
I shudder at it still!"
Bourlamaque laughed. Montcalm had said it with a whimsical smile,
and it passed him unheeded that the smile ended in a contracting of
the brows and a bitter little sigh. The fighter judged war by its
victories; the strategist by their effects. Montcalm could win
victories; even now, by putting himself into what might pass for his
adversary's mind, he hoped to snatch a success against odds.
But what avails it to administer drubbings which but leave your foe
the more stubbornly aggressive? British Generals blundered; but
always the British armies came on. War had been declared three
years ago; actually it had lasted for four; and the sum of its
results was that France, with her chain of forts planted for
aggression from the St. Lawrence to the Ohio, had turned to defending
them. His countrymen might throw up their caps over splendid
repulses of the foe, and hail such for triumphs; but Montcalm looked
beneath the laurels.
The British, having slept the night in the woods, were mustered at
dawn and marched back to the landing-place. Their General, falling
back upon common sense after the loss of a precious day, was now
resolved to try the short and beaten path by which Montcalm had
retreated. It formed a four-mile chord, with the loop of the river
for arc, and presented no real difficulty except the broken bridge,
which Bradstreet was sent forward to repair.
But though beaten and easy to follow, the road was rough; and
Abercromby--in a sweating hurry now--determined to leave his guns
behind. John a Cleeve, passing forward with his regiment, took
note of them as they lay unlimbered amid the brushwood by the
landing-stage, and thought little of it. He had his drill-book by
heart, relied for orders on his senior officers, and took pride in
obeying them smartly. This seemed to him the way for a young
soldier to learn his calling; for the rest, war was a game of valour
and would give him his opportunity. Theoretically he knew the uses
of artillery, but he was not an artilleryman; nor had he ever felt
the temptation to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. His cousin
Dick's free comments upon white-headed Generals of division and
brigade he let pass with a laugh. To Dick, the Earl of Loudon was
"a mournful thickhead," Webb "a mighty handsome figure for a
poltroon," Sackville "a discreet footman for a ladies' drum," and the
ancestors of Abercromby had all been hanged for fools. Dick, very
much at his ease in Sion, would have court-martialled and cashiered
the lot out of hand. But John's priestly tutors had schooled him in
diffidence, if in nothing else.
His men to-day were in no pleasant humour, and a few of them--
veterans too--grumbled viciously as they passed the guns.
"Silence in the ranks!" shouted the captain of his company; and the
familiar words soothed him, and he wondered what had provoked the
grumbling. A minute later he had forgotten it. The column crawled
forward sulkily. The shadow of Howe's loss lay heavy on it, and a
sense that his life had been flung away. They had been marched into
a jungle and marched back again, with nothing to show for it but
twenty-four wasted hours. On they crawled beneath the sweltering
July heat; and coming to the bridge, found more delays.
Bradstreet and his men had worked like heroes, but the bridge would
not be ready to carry troops before the early morning. A wooden
saw-mill stood beside it, melancholy and deserted; and here the
General took up his quarters, while the army cooked its supper and
disposed itself for the night in the trampled clearing around the
mill and in the forest beyond. The 46th lay close alongside the
river, and the noise of Bradstreet's hammers on the bridge kept
John for a long while awake and staring up at the high eastern
ridges, black as ink against the radiance of a climbing moon.
In the intervals of hammering, the swirl of the river kept tune in
his ears with the whir-r-r of a saw in the rear of the mill, slicing
up the last planks for the bridge. There was a mill in the valley at
home, and he had heard it a hundred times making just such music with
the stream that ran down from Dartmoor and past Cleeve Court.
His thoughts went back to Devonshire, but not to linger there; only
to wonder how much love his mother would put into her prayers could
she be reached by a vision of him stretched here with his first
battle waiting for him on the morrow. He wondered, not bitterly, if
her chief reflection would be that he had brought the unpleasant
experience on himself when he might have been safe in a priest's
cassock. He laughed. How little she understood him, or had ever
understood!
His heart went out to salute the morrow--and yet soberly. Outside of
his simple duties of routine he was just an unshaped subaltern, with
eyes sealed as yet to war's practical teachings. To him, albeit he
would have been puzzled had anyone told him so, war existed as yet
only as a spiritual conflict in which men proved themselves heroes or
cowards: and he meant to be a hero. For him everything lay in the
will to dare or to endure. He recalled tales of old knights keeping
vigil by their arms in solitary chapels, and he questioned the far
hill-tops and the stars--What substitute for faith supported _him_?
Did he believe in God? Yes, after a fashion--in some tremendous and
overruling Power, at any rate. A Power that had made the mountains
yonder? Yes, he supposed so. A loving Power--an intimate
counsellor--a Father attending all his steps? Well, perhaps; and if
so, a Father to be answered with all a man's love: but, before
answering, he honestly needed more assurance. As for another world
and a continuing life there, should he happen to fall to-morrow, John
searched his heart and decided that he asked for nothing of the sort.
Such promises struck him as unworthy bribes, belittling the sacrifice
he came prepared to make. He despised men who bargained with them.
Here was he, young, abounding in life, ready to risk extinction.
Why? For a cause (some might say), and that cause his country's.
Maybe: he had never thought this out. To be sure he was proud to
carry the regimental colours, and had rather belong to the 46th than
to any other regiment. The honour of the 46th was dear to him now as
his own. But why, again? Pure accident had assigned him to the
46th: as for love of his country, he could not remember that it had
played any conspicuous part in sending him to join the army.
The hammering on the bridge had ceased without his noting it, and
also the whirr of the great hands-driven saw. Only the river sang to
him now: and to the swirl of it he dropped off into a dreamless,
healthy sleep.