Resistance was madness. From east, south, west, the French commanders—Bourlamaque, Bougainville, Roquemaure, Dumas, La Corne— had all fallen back, deserted by their militias. The provincial army had melted down to two hundred men; the troops of the line numbered scarce above two thousand. The city, crowded with non-combatant refugees, held a bare fortnight's provisions. Its walls, built for defence against Indians, could not stand against the guns which Amherst was already dragging up from the river; its streets of wooden houses awaited only the first shell to set them ablaze.
On the eastern side Murray was moving closer, to encamp for the siege. To the south the tents of Haviland's army dotted the river shore. Seventeen thousand British and British-Colonials ringed about all that remained of New France, ready to end her by stroke of sword if Vaudreuil would not by stroke of pen.
Next morning Bougainville sought Amherst's tent and presented a bulky paper containing fifty-five articles of capitulation. Amherst read them through, and came to the demand that the troops should march out with arms, cannon, flags, and all the honours of war. "Inform the Governor," he answered, "that the whole garrison of Montreal, and all other French troops in Canada, must lay down their arms, and undertake not to serve again in this war." Bougainville bore his message, and returned in a little while to remonstrate; but in vain. Then Lévis tried his hand, sending his quartermaster-general to plead against terms so humiliating—"terms," he wrote, "to which it will not be possible for us to subscribe." Amherst replied curtly that the terms were harsh, and he had made them so intentionally; they marked his sense of the conduct of the French throughout the war in exciting their Indian allies to atrocity and murder.
So Fort William Henry was avenged at length, in the humiliation of gallant men; and human vengeance proved itself, perhaps, neither more nor less clumsy than usual.
Vaudreuil tried to exact that the English should, on their side, pack off their Indians. He represented that the townsfolk of Montreal stood in terror of being massacred. Again Amherst refused. "No Frenchman," said he, "surrendering under treaty has ever suffered outrage from the Indians of our army." This was on the 7th of September.
Early on the 8th Vaudreuil yielded and signed the capitulation. Lévis, in the name of the army, protested bitterly. "If the Marquis de Vaudreuil, through political motives, believes himself obliged to surrender the colony at once, we beg his leave to withdraw with the troops of the line to Isle Sainte-Hélène, to maintain there, on our own behalf, the honour of the King's arms." To this, of course, the Governor could not listen. Before the hour of surrender the French regiments burnt their flags.
On the southern shore of the St. Lawrence, in the deepest recess of a small curving bay, the afternoon sun fell through a screen of bulrushes upon a birch canoe and a naked man seated in the shallows beside it. In one hand he held out, level with his head, a lock of hair, dark and long and matted, while the other sheared at it with a razor. The razor flashed as he turned it this way and that against the sun. On his shoulders and raised upper arm a few water-drops glistened, for he had been swimming.
The severed locks fell into the stream that rippled beside him through the bulrush stems. Some found a channel at once and were swept out of sight, others were caught against the stems and trailed out upon the current like queer water-flags. He laid the razor back in the canoe and, rising cautiously, looked about for a patch of clear, untroubled water to serve him for a mirror; but small eddies and cross-currents dimpled the surface everywhere, and his search was not a success. Next he fetched forth from the canoe an earthenware pan with lye and charcoal, mixed a paste, and began to lather his head briskly.
Twice he paused in his lathering. Before his shelter rolled the great river, almost two miles broad; and clear across that distance, from Montreal, came the sound of drums beating, bells ringing, men shouting and cheering. In the Place d'Armes, over yonder, Amherst was parading his troops to receive the formal surrender of the Marquis de Vaudreuil. Murray and Haviland were there, leading their brigades, with Gage and Fraser and Burton; Carleton and Haldfmand and Howe—Howe of the Heights of Abraham, brother of him who fell in the woods under Ticonderoga; the great Johnson of the Mohawk Valley, whom the Iroquois obeyed; Rogers of the backwoods and his brothers, bravest of the brave; Schuyler and Lyman: and over against them, drinking the bitterest cup of their lives, Lévis and Bourlamaque and Bougainville, Dumas, Pouchot, and de la Corne—victors and vanquished, all the surviving heroes of the five years' struggle face to face in the city square.
Hi motus animorum atque hæc certamina tanta—the half of North America was changing hands at this moment, and how a bare two miles' distance diminished it all! What child's play it made of the rattling drums! From his shelter John à Cleeve could see almost the whole of the city's river front—all of it, indeed, but a furlong or two at its western end; and the clean atmosphere showed up even the loopholes pierced in the outer walls of the great Seminary. Above the old-fashioned square bastions of the citadel a white flag floated; and that this flag bore a red cross instead of the golden lilies it had borne yesterday was the one and only sign, not easily discerned, of a reversal in the fates of two nations. The steeples and turrets of Montreal, the old windmill, the belfry and high-pitched roof of Notre Dame de Bonsecours, the massed buildings of the Seminary and the Hôtel Dieu, the spire of the Jesuits, rose against the green shaggy slopes of the mountain, and over the mountain the sky paled tranquilly toward evening. Sky, mountain, forests, mirrored belfry and broad rolling river—a permanent peace seemed to rest on them all.