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. [535] 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." [536]
[535] Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1757.
[536] Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Fév. 1758. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758. Bougainville, Journal. Summary of M. de Belêtre's Campaign, in N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 672. Extravagant reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000 livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from Quebec, Daine au Maréchal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758. Lévis says that the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was not above three hundred.
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." [537]
[537] Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 22 Mai, 1758.
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 Œdipus 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