rabble. By the advice of Montcalm the English stove their rum-barrels;
but the Indians were drunk already with homicidal rage, and the glitter
of their vicious eyes told of the devil within. They roamed among the
tents, intrusive, insolent, their visages besmirched with war-paint;
grinning like fiends as they handled, in anticipation of the knife, the
long hair of cowering women, of whom, as well as of children, there were
many in the camp, all crazed with fright. Since the last war the New
England border population had regarded Indians with a mixture of
detestation and horror. Their mysterious warfare of ambush and surprise,
their midnight onslaughts, their butcheries, their burnings, and all
their nameless atrocities, had been for years the theme of fireside
story; and the dread they excited was deepened by the distrust and
dejection of the time. The confusion in the camp lasted through the
afternoon. "The Indians," says Bougainville, "wanted to plunder the
chests of the English; the latter resisted; and there was fear that
serious disorder would ensue. The Marquis de Montcalm ran thither
immediately, and used every means to restore tranquillity: prayers,
threats, caresses, interposition of the officers and interpreters who
have some influence over these savages." "We shall be but too happy if
we can prevent a massacre. Detestable position! of which nobody who has
not been in it can have any idea, and which makes victory itself a
sorrow to the victors. The Marquis spared no efforts to prevent the
rapacity of the savages and, I must say it, of certain persons
associated with them, from resulting in something worse than plunder. At
last, at nine o'clock in the evening, order seemed restored. The Marquis
even induced the Indians to promise that, besides the escort agreed upon
in the capitulation, two chiefs for each tribe should accompany the
English on their way to Fort Edward." He also ordered La Corne and the
other Canadian officers attached to the Indians to see that no violence
took place. He might well have done more. In view of the disorders of
the afternoon, it would not have been too much if he had ordered the
whole body of regular troops, whom alone he could trust for the purpose,
to hold themselves ready to move to the spot in case of outbreak, and
shelter their defeated foes behind a hedge of bayonets.
Bougainville was not to see what ensued; for Montcalm now sent him to
Montreal, as a special messenger to carry news of the victory. He
embarked at ten o'clock. Returning daylight found him far down the lake;
and as he looked on its still bosom flecked with mists, and its quiet
mountains sleeping under the flush of dawn, there was nothing in the
wild tranquillity of the scene to suggest the tragedy which even then
was beginning on the shore he had left behind.
The English in their camp had passed a troubled night, agitated by
strange rumors. In the morning something like a panic seized them; for
they distrusted not the Indians only, but the Canadians. In their haste
to be gone they got together at daybreak, before the escort of three
hundred regulars had arrived. They had their muskets, but no ammunition;
and few or none of the provincials had bayonets. Early as it was, the
Indians were on the alert; and, indeed, since midnight great numbers of
them had been prowling about the skirts of the camp, showing, says
Colonel Frye, "more than usual malice in their looks." Seventeen wounded
men of his regiment lay in huts, unable to join the march. In the
preceding afternoon Miles Whitworth, the regimental surgeon, had passed
them over to the care of a French surgeon, according to an agreement
made at the time of the surrender; but, the Frenchman being absent, the
other remained with them attending to their wants. The French surgeon
had caused special sentinels to be posted for their protection. These
were now removed, at the moment when they were needed most; upon which,
about five o'clock in the morning, the Indians entered the huts, dragged
out the inmates, and tomahawked and scalped them all, before the eyes of
Whitworth, and in presence of La Corne and other Canadian officers, as
well as of a French guard stationed within forty feet of the spot; and,
declares the surgeon under oath, "none, either officer or soldier,
protected the said wounded men." The opportune butchery relieved them of
a troublesome burden.
A scene of plundering now began. The escort had by this time arrived,
and Monro complained to the officers that the capitulation was broken;
but got no other answer than advice to give up the baggage to the
Indians in order to appease them. To this the English at length agreed;
but it only increased the excitement of the mob. They demanded rum; and
some of the soldiers, afraid to refuse, gave it to them from their
canteens, thus adding fuel to the flame. When, after much difficulty,
the column at last got out of the camp and began to move along the road
that crossed the rough plain between the intrenchment and the forest,
the Indians crowded upon them, impeded their march, snatched caps,
coats, and weapons from men and officers, tomahawked those that
resisted, and seizing upon shrieking women and children, dragged them
off or murdered them on the spot. It is said that some of the
interpreters secretly fomented the disorder. Suddenly there rose the
screech of the war-whoop. At this signal of butchery, which was given by
Abenaki Christians from the mission of the Penobscot, a mob of savages
rushed upon the New Hampshire men at the rear of the column, and killed
or dragged away eighty of them. A frightful tumult ensued, when
Montcalm, Levis, Bourlamaque, and many other French officers, who had
hastened from their camp on the first news of disturbance, threw
themselves among the Indians, and by promises and threats tried to allay
their frenzy. "Kill me, but spare the English who are under my
protection," exclaimed Montcalm. He took from one of them a young
officer whom the savage had seized; upon which several other Indians
immediately tomahawked their prisoners, lest they too should be taken
from them. One writer says that a French grenadier was killed and two
wounded in attempting to restore order; but the statement is doubtful.
The English seemed paralyzed, and fortunately did not attempt a
resistance, which, without ammunition as they were, would have ended in
a general massacre. Their broken column struggled forward in wild
disorder, amid the din of whoops and shrieks, till they reached the
French advance-guard, which consisted of Canadians; and here they
demanded protection from the officers, who refused to give it, telling
them that they must take to the woods and shift for themselves. Frye was
seized by a number of Indians, who, brandishing spears and tomahawks,
threatened him with death and tore off his clothing, leaving nothing but
breeches, shoes, and shirt. Repelled by the officers of the guard, he
made for the woods. A Connecticut soldier who was present says of him
that he leaped upon an Indian who stood in his way, disarmed and killed
him, and then escaped; but Frye himself does not mention the incident.
Captain Burke, also of the Massachusetts regiment, was stripped, after a
violent struggle, of all his clothes; then broke loose, gained the
woods, spent the night shivering in the thick grass of a marsh, and on
the next day reached Fort Edward. Jonathan Carver, a provincial
volunteer, declares that, when the tumult was at its height, he saw
officers of the French army walking about at a little distance and
talking with seeming unconcern. Three or four Indians seized him,
brandished their tomahawks over his head, and tore off most of his
clothes, while he vainly claimed protection from a sentinel, who called
him an English dog, and violently pushed him back among his tormentors.
Two of them were dragging him towards the neighboring swamp, when an
English officer, stripped of everything but his scarlet breeches, ran
by. One of Carver's captors sprang upon him, but was thrown to the
ground; whereupon the other went to the aid of his comrade and drove his
tomahawk into the back of the Englishman. As Carver turned to run, an
English boy, about twelve years old, clung to him and begged for help.
They ran on together for a moment, when the boy was seized, dragged from
his protector, and, as Carver judged by his shrieks, was murdered. He
himself escaped to the forest, and after three days of famine reached
Fort Edward.
The bonds of discipline seem for the time to have been completely
broken; for while Montcalm and his chief officers used every effort to
restore order, even at the risk of their lives, many other officers,
chiefly of the militia, failed atrociously to do their duty. How many
English were killed it is impossible to tell with exactness. Roubaud
says that he saw forty or fifty corpses scattered about the field. Levis
says fifty; which does not include the sick and wounded before murdered
in the camp and fort. It is certain that six or seven hundred persons
were carried off, stripped, and otherwise maltreated. Montcalm succeeded
in recovering more than four hundred of them in the course of the day;
and many of the French officers did what they could to relieve their
wants by buying back from their captors the clothing that had been torn
from them. Many of the fugitives had taken refuge in the fort, whither
Monro himself had gone to demand protection for his followers; and here
Roubaud presently found a crowd of half-frenzied women, crying in
anguish for husbands and children. All the refugees and redeemed
prisoners were afterwards conducted to the intrenched camp, where food
and shelter were provided for them, and a strong guard set for their
protection until the fifteenth, when they were sent under an escort to
Fort Edward. Here cannon had been fired at intervals to guide those who
had fled to the woods, whence they came dropping in from day to day,
half dead with famine.
On the morning after the massacre the Indians decamped in a body and set
out for Montreal, carrying with them their plunder and some two hundred
prisoners, who, it is said, could not be got out of their hands. The
soldiers were set to the work of demolishing the English fort; and the
task occupied several days. The barracks were torn down, and the huge
pine-logs of the rampart thrown into a heap. The dead bodies that filled
the casemates were added to the mass, and fire was set to the whole. The
mighty funeral pyre blazed all night. Then, on the sixteenth, the army
reimbarked. The din of ten thousand combatants, the rage, the terror,
the agony, were gone; and no living thing was left but the wolves that
gathered from the mountains to feast upon the dead.
[Footnote 2: The remains of Fort William Henry are now crowded between a
hotel and the wharf and station of a railway. A scheme has been set on
foot to level the whole for other railway structures. When I first knew
the place the ground was in much the same state as in the time of
Montcalm.]
[Footnote 3: Now the site of Fort William Henry Hotel, with its grounds.
The hollow is partly filled by the main road of Caldwell.]
[Illustration: MONTCALM.
Aged 29.]
BATTLE OF TICONDEROGA.
In 1758, the English commanders, incensed at the loss of Fort William
Henry, resolved to retaliate by a strong effort to seize Ticonderoga. In
June, the combined British and provincial force destined for the
expedition was gathered at the head of Lake George under General
Abercromby, while the Marquis de Montcalm lay around the walls of the
French stronghold with an army not one fourth so numerous.
Montcalm hesitated whether he should not fall back to Crown Point. It
was but a choice of difficulties, and he stayed at Ticonderoga. His
troops were disposed as they had been in the summer before; one
battalion, that of Berry, being left near the fort, while the main body,
under Montcalm himself, was encamped by the saw-mill at the Falls, and
the rest, under Bourlamaque, occupied the head of the portage, with a
small advanced force at the landing-place on Lake George. It remained to
determine at which of these points he should concentrate them and make
his stand against the English. Ruin threatened him in any case; each
position had its fatal weakness or its peculiar danger, and his best
hope was in the ignorance or blundering of his enemy. He seems to have
been several days in a state of indecision.
In the afternoon of the fifth of July the partisan Langy, who had gone
out to reconnoitre towards the head of Lake George, came back in haste
with the report that the English were embarked in great force. Montcalm
sent a canoe down Lake Champlain to hasten Levis to his aid, and ordered
the battalion of Berry to begin a breastwork and abatis on the high
ground in front of the fort. That they were not begun before shows that
he was in doubt as to his plan of defence; and that his whole army was
not now set to work at them shows that his doubt was still unsolved.
It was nearly a month since Abercromby had begun his camp at the head of
Lake George. Here, on the ground where Johnson had beaten Dieskau, where
Montcalm had planted his batteries, and Monro vainly defended the wooden
ramparts of Fort William Henry, were now assembled more than fifteen
thousand men; and the shores, the foot of the mountains, and the broken
plains between them were studded thick with tents. Of regulars there
were six thousand three hundred and sixty-seven, officers and soldiers,
and of provincials nine thousand and thirty-four. To the New England
levies, or at least to their chaplains, the expedition seemed a crusade
against the abomination of Babylon; and they discoursed in their sermons
of Moses sending forth Joshua against Amalek. Abercromby, raised to his
place by political influence, was little but the nominal commander. "A
heavy man," said Wolfe in a letter to his father; "an aged gentleman,
infirm in body and mind," wrote William Parkman, a boy of seventeen, who
carried a musket in a Massachusetts regiment, and kept in his knapsack a
dingy little note-book, in which he jotted down what passed each day.
The age of the aged gentleman was fifty-two.
Pitt meant that the actual command of the army should be in the hands of
Brigadier Lord Howe, and he was in fact its real chief; "the noblest
Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the
British army," says Wolfe. And he elsewhere speaks of him as "that great
man." Abercromby testifies to the universal respect and love with which
officers and men regarded him, and Pitt calls him "a character of
ancient times; a complete model of military virtue." High as this praise
is, it seems to have been deserved. The young nobleman, who was then in
his thirty-fourth year, had the qualities of a leader of men. The army
felt him, from general to drummer boy. He was its soul; and while
breathing into it his own energy and ardor, and bracing it by stringent
discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service and gave it
new shapes to suit the time and place. During the past year he had
studied the art of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in
their scouting-parties, sharing all their hardships and making himself
one of them. Perhaps the reforms that he introduced were fruits of this
rough self-imposed schooling. He made officers and men throw off all
useless incumbrances, cut their hair close, wear leggings to protect
them from briers, brown the barrels of their muskets, and carry in their
knapsacks thirty pounds of meal, which they cooked for themselves; so
that, according to an admiring Frenchman, they could live a month
without their supply-trains. "You would laugh to see the droll figure we
all make," writes an officer. "Regulars as well as provincials have cut
their coats so as scarcely to reach their waists. No officer or private
is allowed to carry more than one blanket and a bearskin. A small
portmanteau is allowed each officer. No women follow the camp to wash
our linen. Lord Howe has already shown an example by going to the brook
and washing his own."
Here, as in all things, he shared the lot of the soldier, and required
his officers to share it. A story is told of him that before the army
embarked he invited some of them to dinner in his tent, where they found
no seats but logs, and no carpet but bearskins. A servant presently
placed on the ground a large dish of pork and peas, on which his
lordship took from his pocket a sheath containing a knife and fork and
began to cut the meat. The guests looked on in some embarrassment; upon
which he said: "Is it possible, gentlemen, that you have come on this
campaign without providing yourselves with what is necessary?" And he
gave each of them a sheath, with a knife and fork, like his own.
Yet this Lycurgus of the camp, as a contemporary calls him, is described
as a man of social accomplishments rare even in his rank. He made
himself greatly beloved by the provincial officers, with many of whom he
was on terms of intimacy, and he did what he could to break down the
barriers between the colonial soldiers and the British regulars. When he
was at Albany, sharing with other high officers the kindly hospitalities
of Mrs. Schuyler, he so won the heart of that excellent matron that she
loved him like a son; and, though not given to such effusion, embraced
him with tears on the morning when he left her to lead his division to
the lake. In Westminster Abbey may be seen the tablet on which
Massachusetts pays grateful tribute to his virtues, and commemorates
"the affection her officers and soldiers bore to his command."
On the evening of the fourth of July, baggage, stores, and ammunition
were all on board the boats, and the whole army embarked on the morning
of the fifth. The arrangements were perfect. Each corps marched without
confusion to its appointed station on the beach, and the sun was
scarcely above the ridge of French Mountain when all were afloat. A
spectator watching them from the shore says that when the fleet was
three miles on its way, the surface of the lake at that distance was
completely hidden from sight. There were nine hundred bateaux, a hundred
and thirty-five whaleboats, and a large number of heavy flat boats
carrying the artillery. The whole advanced in three divisions, the
regulars in the centre, and the provincials on the flanks. Each corps
had its flags and its music. The day was fair, and men and officers were
in the highest spirits.
Before ten o'clock they began to enter the Narrows; and the boats of the
three divisions extended themselves into long files as the mountains
closed on either hand upon the contracted lake. From front to rear the
line was six miles long. The spectacle was superb: the brightness of the
summer day; the romantic beauty of the scenery; the sheen and sparkle of
those crystal waters; the countless islets, tufted with pine, birch, and
fir; the bordering mountains, with their green summits and sunny crags;
the flash of oars and glitter of weapons; the banners, the varied
uniforms, and the notes of bugle, trumpet, bagpipe, and drum, answered
and prolonged by a hundred woodland echoes. "I never beheld so
delightful a prospect," wrote a wounded officer at Albany a fortnight
after.
Rogers with the rangers, and Gage with the light infantry, led the way
in whaleboats, followed by Bradstreet with his corps of boatmen, armed
and drilled as soldiers. Then came the main body. The central column of
regulars was commanded by Lord Howe, his own regiment, the fifty-fifth,
in the van, followed by the Royal Americans, the twenty-seventh,
forty-fourth, forty-sixth, and eightieth infantry, and the Highlanders
of the forty-second, with their major, Duncan Campbell of Inverawe,
silent and gloomy amid the general cheer, for his soul was dark with
foreshadowings of death. With this central column came what are
described as two floating castles, which were no doubt batteries to
cover the landing of the troops. On the right hand and the left were the
provincials, uniformed in blue, regiment after regiment, from
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Behind them all came the bateaux, loaded with stores and baggage, and
the heavy flat boats that carried the artillery, while a rear-guard of
provincials and regulars closed the long procession.
At five in the afternoon they reached Sabbath-Day Point, twenty-five
miles down the lake, where they stopped till late in the evening,
waiting for the baggage and artillery, which had lagged behind; and here
Lord Howe, lying on a bearskin by the side of the ranger, John Stark,
questioned him as to the position of Ticonderoga and its best points of
approach. At about eleven o'clock they set out again, and at daybreak
entered what was then called the Second Narrows; that is to say, the
contraction of the lake where it approaches its outlet. Close on their
left, ruddy in the warm sunrise, rose the vast bare face of Rogers Rock,
whence a French advanced party, under Langy and an officer named
Trepezec, was watching their movements. Lord Howe, with Rogers and
Bradstreet, went in whaleboats to reconnoitre the landing. At the place
which the French called the Burned Camp, where Montcalm had embarked the
summer before, they saw a detachment of the enemy too weak to oppose
them. Their men landed and drove them off. At noon the whole army was on
shore. Rogers, with a party of rangers, was ordered forward to
reconnoitre, and the troops were formed for the march.
[Illustration: Sketch of the country round Tyconderoga]
From this part of the shore[4] a plain covered with forest stretched
northwestward half a mile or more to the mountains behind which lay the
valley of Trout Brook. On this plain the army began its march in four
columns, with the intention of passing round the western bank of the
river of the outlet, since the bridge over it had been destroyed.
Rogers, with the provincial regiments of Fitch and Lyman, led the way,
at some distance before the rest. The forest was extremely dense and
heavy, and so obstructed with undergrowth that it was impossible to see
more than a few yards in any direction, while the ground was encumbered
with fallen trees in every stage of decay. The ranks were broken, and
the men struggled on as they could in dampness and shade, under a canopy
of boughs that the sun could scarcely pierce. The difficulty increased
when, after advancing about a mile, they came upon undulating and broken
ground. They were now not far from the upper rapids of the outlet. The
guides became bewildered in the maze of trunks and boughs; the marching
columns were confused, and fell in one upon the other. They were in the
strange situation of an army lost in the woods.
The advanced party of French under Langy and Trepezec, about three
hundred and fifty in all, regulars and Canadians, had tried to retreat;
but before they could do so, the whole English army had passed them,
landed, and placed itself between them and their countrymen. They had no
resource but to take to the woods. They seem to have climbed the steep
gorge at the side of Rogers Rock and followed the Indian path that led
to the valley of Trout Brook, thinking to descend it, and, by circling
along the outskirts of the valley of Ticonderoga, reach Montcalm's camp
at the saw-mill. Langy was used to bushranging; but he too became
perplexed in the blind intricacies of the forest. Towards the close of
the day he and his men had come out from the valley of Trout Brook, and
were near the junction of that stream with the river of the outlet, in a
state of some anxiety, for they could see nothing but brown trunks and
green boughs. Could any of them have climbed one of the great pines that
here and there reared their shaggy spires high above the surrounding
forest, they would have discovered where they were, but would have
gained not the faintest knowledge of the enemy. Out of the woods on the
right they would have seen a smoke rising from the burning huts of the
French camp at the head of the portage, which Bourlamaque had set on
fire and abandoned. At a mile or more in front, the saw-mill at the
Falls might perhaps have been descried, and, by glimpses between the
trees, the tents of the neighboring camp where Montcalm still lay with
his main force. All the rest seemed lonely as the grave; mountain and
valley lay wrapped in primeval woods, and none could have dreamed that,
not far distant, an army was groping its way, buried in foliage; no
rumbling of wagons and artillery trains, for none were there; all silent
but the cawing of some crow flapping his black wings over the sea of
tree-tops.