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Chapter 16
1757, 1758

A Winter of Discontent

Loudon, on his way back from Halifax, was at sea off the coast of Nova Scotia when a despatch-boat from Governor Pownall of Massachusetts startled him with news that Fort William Henry was attacked; and a few days after he learned by another boat that the fort was taken and the capitulation "inhumanly and villanously broken.  " On this he sent Webb orders to hold the enemy in check without risking a battle till he should himself arrive.   "I am on the way," these were his words, "with a force sufficient to turn the scale, with God's assistance; and then I hope we shall teach the French to comply with the laws of nature and humanity.   For although I abhor barbarity, the knowledge I have of Mr.  Vaudreuil's behavior when in Louisiana, from his own letters in my possession, and the murders committed at Oswego and now at Fort William Henry, will oblige me to make those gentlemen sick of such inhuman villany whenever it is in my power.  " He reached New York on the last day of August, and heard that the French had withdrawn.   He nevertheless sent his troops up the Hudson, thinking, he says, that he might still attack Ticonderoga; a wild scheme, which he soon abandoned, if he ever seriously entertained it.  

Webb had remained at Fort Edward in mortal dread of attack.   Johnson had joined him with a band of Mohawks; and on the day when Fort William Henry surrendered there had been some talk of attempting to throw succors into it by night.   Then came the news of its capture; and now, when it was too late, tumultuous mobs of militia came pouring in from the neighboring provinces.   In a few days thousands of them were bivouacked on the fields about Fort Edward, doing nothing, disgusted and mutinous, declaring that they were ready to fight, but not to lie still without tents, blankets, or kettles.   Webb writes on the fourteenth that most of those from New York had deserted, threatening to kill their officers if they tried to stop them.   Delancey ordered them to be fired upon.   A sergeant was shot, others were put in arrest, and all was disorder till the seventeenth; when Webb, learning that the French were gone, sent them back to their homes.  

Close on the fall of Fort William Henry came crazy rumors of disaster, running like wildfire through the colonies.   The number and ferocity of the enemy were grossly exaggerated; there was a cry that they would seize Albany and New York itself; while it was reported that Webb, as much frightened as the rest, was for retreating to the Highlands of the Hudson.   This was the day after the capitulation, when a part only of the militia had yet appeared.   If Montcalm had seized the moment, and marched that afternoon to Fort Edward, it is not impossible that in the confusion he might have carried it by a coup-de-main.  

Here was an opportunity for Vaudreuil, and he did not fail to use it.   Jealous of his rival's exploit, he spared no pains to tarnish it; complaining that Montcalm had stopped half way on the road to success, and, instead of following his instructions, had contented himself with one victory when he should have gained two.   But the Governor had enjoined upon him as a matter of the last necessity that the Canadians should be at their homes before September to gather the crops, and he would have been the first to complain had the injunction been disregarded.   To besiege Fort Edward was impossible, as Montcalm had no means of transporting cannon thither; and to attack Webb without them was a risk which he had not the rashness to incur.  

It was Bougainville who first brought Vaudreuil the news of the success on Lake George.   A day or two after his arrival, the Indians, who had left the army after the massacre, appeared at Montreal, bringing about two hundred English prisoners.   The Governor rebuked them for breaking the capitulation, on which the heathen savages of the West declared that it was not their fault, but that of the converted Indians, who, in fact, had first raised the war-whoop.   Some of the prisoners were presently bought from them at the price of two kegs of brandy each; and the inevitable consequences followed.  

"I thought," writes Bougainville, "that the Governor would have told them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them brandy.   I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes beheld.   On the fifteenth, at two o'clock, in the presence of the whole town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him.  " The Intendant Bigot, the friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and another French writer says that they "compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their children.  ” Bigot declares that guns, canoes, and other presents were given to the Western tribes before they left Montreal; and he adds, "they must be sent home satisfied at any cost.  " Such were the pains taken to preserve allies who were useful chiefly through the terror inspired by their diabolical cruelties.   This time their ferocity cost them dear.   They had dug up and scalped the corpses in the graveyard of Fort William Henry, many of which were remains of victims of the small-pox; and the savages caught the disease, which is said to have made great havoc among them.  

Vaudreuil, in reporting what he calls "my capture of Fort William Henry," takes great credit to himself for his "generous procedures" towards the English prisoners; alluding, it seems, to his having bought some of them from the Indians with the brandy which was sure to cause the murder of others.   His obsequiousness to his red allies did not cease with permitting them to kill and devour before his eyes those whom he was bound in honor and duty to protect.   "He let them do what they pleased," says a French contemporary; "they were seen roaming about Montreal, knife in hand, threatening everybody, and often insulting those they met.   When complaint was made, he said nothing.   Far from it; instead of reproaching them, he loaded them with gifts, in the belief that their cruelty would then relent.  

Nevertheless, in about a fortnight all, or nearly all, the surviving prisoners were bought out of their clutches; and then, after a final distribution of presents and a grand debauch at La Chine, the whole savage rout paddled for their villages.  

The campaign closed in November with a partisan exploit on the Mohawk.   Here, at a place called German Flats, on the farthest frontier, there was a thriving settlement of German peasants from the Palatinate, who were so ill-disposed towards the English that Vaudreuil had had good hope of stirring them to revolt, while at the same time persuading their neighbors, the Oneida Indians, to take part with France.   As his measures to this end failed, he resolved to attack them.   Therefore, at three o'clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Belêtre, wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small picket forts which they had built as places of refuge.   These were taken one by one and set on fire.   The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with their barns and outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie, the magistrate of the place.   Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Belêtre, unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, and then made a hasty retreat.   Lord Howe, pushing up the river from Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned slaughter-field.   Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed up the results with pompous egotism: "I have ruined the plans of the English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried consternation and terror into all those parts.  ”

Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in September to Quebec, a place more to his liking.   "Come as soon as you can," he wrote to Bourlamaque, "and I will tell a certain fair lady how eager you are.  " Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again to the same friend: "My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the latter being the worse.  " To his wife he says: "The price of everything is rising.   I am ruining myself; I owe the treasurer twelve thousand francs.   I long for peace and for you.   In spite of the public distress, we have balls and furious gambling.  " In February he returned to Montreal in a sleigh on the ice of the St.   Lawrence, a mode of travelling which he describes as cold but delicious.   Montreal pleased him less than ever, especially as he was not in favor at what he calls the Court, meaning the circle of the Governor-General.   "I find this place so amusing," he writes ironically to Bourlamaque, "that I wish Holy Week could be lengthened, to give me a pretext for neither making nor receiving visits, staying at home, and dining there almost alone.   Burn all my letters, as I do yours.  " And in the next week: "Lent and devotion have upset my stomach and given me a cold; which does not prevent me from having the Governor-General at dinner to-day to end his lenten fast, according to custom here.  " Two days after he announces: "To-day a grand dinner at Martel's; twenty-three persons, all big-wigs (les grosses perruques); no ladies.   We still have got to undergo those of Péan, Deschambault, and the Chevalier de Lévis.   I spend almost every evening in my chamber, the place I like best, and where I am least bored.  "

With the opening spring there were changes in the modes of amusement.   Picnics began, Vaudreuil and his wife being often of the party, as too was Lévis.   The Governor also made visits of compliment at the houses of the seigniorial proprietors along the river; "very much," says Montcalm, as "Henri IV.   did to the bourgeois notables of Paris.   I live as usual, fencing in the morning, dining, and passing the evening at home or at the Governor's.   Péan has gone up to La Chine to spend six days with the reigning sultana [Péan's wife, mistress of Bigot].   As for me, my ennui increases.   I don't know what to do, or say, or read, or where to go; and I think that at the end of the next campaign I shall ask bluntly, blindly, for my recall, only because I am bored.  ”

His relations with Vaudreuil were a constant annoyance to him, notwithstanding the mask of mutual civility.   "I never," he tells his mother, "ask for a place in the colony troops for anybody.   You need not be an Oedipus to guess this riddle.   Here are four lines from Corneille: 

   "'Mon crime véritable est d'avoir aujourd'hui
    Plus de nom que … [Vaudreuil], plus de vertus que lui,
    Et c'est de là que part cette secrète haine
    Que le temps ne rendra que plus forte et plus pleine.  '

Nevertheless I live here on good terms with everybody, and do my best to serve the King.   If they could but do without me; if they could but spring some trap on me, or if I should happen to meet with some check!"

Vaudreuil meanwhile had written to the Court in high praise of Lévis, hinting that he, and not Montcalm, ought to have the chief command.  

Under the hollow gayeties of the ruling class lay a great public distress, which broke at last into riot.   Towards midwinter no flour was to be had in Montreal; and both soldiers and people were required to accept a reduced ration, partly of horse-flesh.   A mob gathered before the Governor's house, and a deputation of women beset him, crying out that the horse was the friend of man, and that religion forbade him to be eaten.   In reply he threatened them with imprisonment and hanging; but with little effect, and the crowd dispersed, only to stir up the soldiers quartered in the houses of the town.   The colony regulars, ill-disciplined at the best, broke into mutiny, and excited the battalion of Béarn to join them.   Vaudreuil was helpless; Montcalm was in Quebec; and the task of dealing with the mutineers fell upon Lévis, who proved equal to the crisis, took a high tone, threatened death to the first soldier who should refuse horse-flesh, assured them at the same time that he ate it every day himself, and by a characteristic mingling of authority and tact, quelled the storm.  

The prospects of the next campaign began to open.   Captain Pouchot had written from Niagara that three thousand savages were waiting to be let loose against the English borders.   "What a scourge!" exclaims Bougainville.   "Humanity groans at being forced to use such monsters.   What can be done against an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes, swift as the lightning? It is the destroying angel.  " Captain Hebecourt kept watch and ward at Ticonderoga, begirt with snow and ice, and much plagued by English rangers, who sometimes got into the ditch itself.   This was to reconnoitre the place in preparation for a winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his schemes, fell to the ground.   Towards midwinter a band of these intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close to the fort, leaving tied to the horns of one of them a note addressed to the commandant in these terms: "I am obliged to you, sir, for the rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me.   I shall take good care of my prisoners.   My compliments to the Marquis of Montcalm.  " Signed, Rogers.  

A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge.   About the middle of March a report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among the slain.   This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had suffered a crushing defeat.   Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward, sent a hundred and eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied.   Rogers commanded the whole.   They passed down Lake George on the ice under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts, pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of the western shore.   On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body of Canadians.   The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the English were coming.   On this they sent out scouts, who came back breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe tracks.   The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west upon the valley of Ticonderoga.  

Towards three o'clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a point nearly west of the mountain that bears his name.   The rough and rocky ground was buried four feet in snow, and all around stood the gray trunks of the forest, bearing aloft their skeleton arms and tangled intricacy of leafless twigs.   Close on the right was a steep hill, and at a little distance on the left was the brook, lost under ice and snow.   A scout from the front told Rogers that a party of Indians was approaching along the bed of the frozen stream, on which he ordered his men to halt, face to that side, and advance cautiously.   The Indians soon appeared, and received a fire that killed some of them and drove back the rest in confusion.  

Not suspecting that they were but an advance-guard, about half the rangers dashed in pursuit, and were soon met by the whole body of the enemy.   The woods rang with yells and musketry.   In a few minutes some fifty of the pursuers were shot down, and the rest driven back in disorder upon their comrades.   Rogers formed them all on the slope of the hill; and here they fought till sunset with stubborn desperation, twice repulsing the overwhelming numbers of the assailants, and thwarting all their efforts to gain the heights in the rear.   The combatants were often not twenty yards apart, and sometimes they were mixed together.   At length a large body of Indians succeeded in turning the right flank of the rangers.   Lieutenant Phillips and a few men were sent by Rogers to oppose the movement; but they quickly found themselves surrounded, and after a brave defence surrendered on a pledge of good treatment.   Rogers now advised the volunteers, Pringle and Roche, to escape while there was time, and offered them a sergeant as guide; but they gallantly resolved to stand by him.   Eight officers and more than a hundred rangers lay dead and wounded in the snow.   Evening was near and the forest was darkening fast, when the few survivors broke and fled.   Rogers with about twenty followers escaped up the mountain; and gathering others about him, made a running fight against the Indian pursuers, reached Lake George, not without fresh losses, and after two days of misery regained Fort Edward with the remnant of his band.   The enemy on their part suffered heavily, the chief loss falling on the Indians; who, to revenge themselves, murdered all the wounded and nearly all the prisoners, and tying Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces.  

Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche had become separated from the other fugitives; and, ignorant of woodcraft, they wandered by moonlight amid the desolation of rocks and snow, till early in the night they met a man whom they knew as a servant of Rogers, and who said that he could guide them to Fort Edward.   One of them had lost his snow-shoes in the fight; and, crouching over a miserable fire of broken sticks, they worked till morning to make a kind of substitute with forked branches, twigs, and a few leather strings.   They had no hatchet to cut firewood, no blankets, no overcoats, and no food except part of a Bologna sausage and a little ginger which Pringle had brought with him.   There was no game; not even a squirrel was astir; and their chief sustenance was juniper-berries and the inner bark of trees.   But their worst calamity was the helplessness of their guide.   His brain wandered; and while always insisting that he knew the country well, he led them during four days hither and thither among a labyrinth of nameless mountains, clambering over rocks, wading through snowdrifts, struggling among fallen trees, till on the fifth day they saw with despair that they had circled back to their own starting-point.   On the next morning, when they were on the ice of Lake George, not far from Rogers Rock, a blinding storm of sleet and snow drove in their faces.   Spent as they were, it was death to stop; and bending their heads against the blast, they fought their way forward, now on the ice, and now in the adjacent forest, till in the afternoon the storm ceased, and they found themselves on the bank of an unknown stream.   It was the outlet of the lake; for they had wandered into the valley of Ticonderoga, and were not three miles from the French fort.   In crossing the torrent Pringle lost his gun, and was near losing his life.   All three of the party were drenched to the skin; and, becoming now for the first time aware of where they were, they resolved on yielding themselves prisoners to save their lives.   Night, however, again found them in the forest.   Their guide became delirious, saw visions of Indians all around, and, murmuring incoherently, straggled off a little way, seated himself in the snow, and was soon dead.   The two officers, themselves but half alive, walked all night round a tree to keep the blood in motion.   In the morning, again toiling on, they presently saw the fort across the intervening snowfields, and approached it, waving a white handkerchief.   Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand.   They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged.   Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of the British army.