PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA
QUEBEC, CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND THE CITADEL
Montcalm had arrived in May of 1756. By midsummer he was leading three thousand French artillerymen across Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac (Kingston), to attack the English post on the south side, Oswego. Inside the fort walls were seven hundred raw English provincials, ill of scurvy from lack of food. The result need scarcely be told. Seven hundred ill men behind wooden walls had no chance against three thousand soldiers in health with heavy artillery. To take the English by surprise, Montcalm had crossed the lake on August 4 by night. Two days later all the transport ships had landed the troops and the cannon had actually been mounted before the English knew of the enemy's presence. On the east side of the river was Fort Ontario, a barricade of logs built in the shape of a star, housing an outguard of three hundred and seventy men. On discovering the French, the sentry spiked their cannon, threw their powder in the river, and retired at midnight inside Oswego's walls. Working like beavers, Montcalm's men dragged twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as "Fort Rascal" because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble, fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers to avoid Indian massacre by surrender. A white flag was waved. Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered themselves prisoners to Montcalm. The Indians fell at once to mad plunder. Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were stripped of everything, and only Montcalm's promise of $10,000 worth of presents to the savages prevented butchery. The victors decamped to Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier during the entire year.
Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm. The English soldiers were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had left plow and carpenter's bench and fishing boat. While Montcalm was capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape, "making men out of mud" for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern sign,—always on horseback but never rode forward. Instead of striking at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors, Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg. July of 1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent scurvy,—"the cabbage campaign" it was derisively called,—and waiting for Gorham's rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg. Gorham's scouts brought back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four men-of-war and seven thousand men. To overpower such strength meant a prolonged siege. It was already August. Loudon sailed back to New York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.
THE EARL OF LOUDON
Montcalm was not the enemy to let the chance of Loudon's absence from the scene of action pass unimproved. While Loudon is pottering at Halifax, Montcalm marshals his troops to the number of eight thousand, including one thousand Indians at Carillon or Ticonderoga, where Lake George empties into Lake Champlain. Portaging two hundred and fifty flatboats with as many birch canoes up the river, the French invade the mountain wilderness of Lake George. Towards the end of July, Lévis leads part of the troops by land up the west shore towards the English post of Fort William Henry. Montcalm advances on the lake with the flatboats and canoes, and the rafts with the heavy artillery. Each night Lévis' troops kindle their signal fires on the mountain slope, and each night Montcalm from the lake signals back with torches. It needs artist's brush to paint the picture: the forested mountains green and lonely and silent in the shimmering sunlight of the summer sky; the lake gold as molten metal in the fire of the setting sun; the soldiers in their gay uniforms of white and blue, hoisting tent cloths on oar sweeps for sails as a breeze dimples the waters; the French voyageurs clad in beaded buckskin chanting some ditty of Old-World fame to the rhythmic dip of the Indian paddles; the Indians naked, painted for war, with a glitter in their eyes of a sinister intent which they have no mind to tell Montcalm; and then, at the south of Lake George, nestling between the hills and the water, the little palisaded fort,—Fort William Henry,—with gates fast shut and two thousand bushfighters behind the walls, weak from an epidemic of smallpox, and, as usual, so short of provisions that siege means starvation.