The main army had assembled at Oswego during July, Amherst himself arriving on the 9th, but it was not until the first week of August that the last of the appointed regiments appeared at the rendezvous. The force consisted of eight weak battalions of British, numbering less than six thousand men, with four thousand five hundred Provincials and seven hundred Indians, or about eleven thousand in all. The flotilla for the transport of the army was made up of nearly eight hundred whale-boats and bateaux, and was escorted by gun-boats. On the 10th of August the entire force was embarked and by the 15th it had reached Oswegatchie or La Galette, on the site of the present Ogdensburg. Here a French brig of ten guns was attacked and captured by the gun-boats, and the flotilla pursued its way among the Thousand Islands. On an islet at the head of the rapids stood a French post named Fort Lévis, with a garrison of three hundred men, which Amherst forthwith invested, and after three days' cannonade reduced to surrender. Repair of the fort and of his boats detained him until the 30th, and on the 31st the expedition entered upon the most critical of its work, the descent of the rapids. On the 1st of September the flotilla was compelled to proceed in single file, but all went well until the 4th, when the most dangerous of the rapids was reached. On that day over sixty boats were wrecked or damaged and eighty-four men were drowned: but the passage was accomplished without molestation from the enemy, though large numbers of Canadians were on the watch on the banks. The next day was consumed in repairs, and on the 6th, the last rapid having been passed, the boats glided down to La Chine, nine miles from Montreal, on the left bank of the St. Lawrence. Here the army landed unopposed, marched straight upon Montreal and encamped beneath the walls on the eastern side: while Haviland on the 8th arrived on the southern shore against Amherst's camp. Amherst was a little late, having been delayed by the resistance of Fort Lévis. Had he been content to ignore it and simply to cut it off from Montreal, he, Murray and Haviland would have met, punctual to a day, on the 29th of August. As it was the junction was sufficiently complete, and the work of the campaign was practically done.

Sept. 8.

Bougainville, Bourlamaque, and Roquemaure had crossed over to Montreal with the few regular troops remaining with them, for the whole of their militia had melted away, and even the regulars had been greatly reduced by desertion. Thus the army assembled at Montreal, the sole force that remained for the defence of Canada, amounted to barely twenty-five hundred men, demoralised in order, in spirit, and in discipline. Around the city lay an hostile army of seventeen thousand men; the fortifications were contemptible except for defence against Indians, and Amherst's cannon were already moving up from La Chine. The French Governor called a council of war, which resolved that resistance was hopeless. Articles of capitulation were accordingly drawn up, and carried on the 7th by Bougainville to Amherst. The condition on which the French laid greatest stress was that they should march out with the honours of war; but this Amherst flatly refused. The troops, he said, must lay down their arms and serve no further during the present war: the French had played so inhuman a part in stirring up the Indians to treachery and barbarity of every kind, that he was determined to make an example of them. It is probable that the General referred only to the massacre of the wounded after the defeats at Fort William Henry, Ticonderoga, and the Monongahela; but the reckoning to be paid went back to earlier times. There were the wrongs, the encroachment and the double-dealing of a full century to be redressed; and the time for payment was come. In vain the French pleaded for easier terms: Amherst, a man not easily turned from his purpose, remained inflexible. Accordingly on the 8th of September, despite expostulation which rose almost to the point of mutiny on the part of Lévis, the capitulation was signed, and half a continent passed into the hands of Great Britain.

Meanwhile, as if to crown the whole work and to redeem all past failings and misfortunes, the expedition against the Cherokee Indians had been brilliantly successful. Trifling though the affair may seem in comparison with Amherst's momentous operations in the north, it marked the banishment of the panic fear of Indians which had followed on the defeat of Braddock. The command was entrusted to Colonel Montgomery, and the force committed to him was four hundred of the First Royals, seven hundred of his own Highlanders, and a strong body of Provincials. Starting from Charlestown, Carolina, Montgomery marched up one hundred and fifty miles to the township of Ninety-six, so called because it was supposed to be ninety-six miles from the township of Keowee, and pushed forward thence for four days through dense forest and mountainous country without finding any sign of Indians. Concluding therefore that the Cherokees were unaware of his advance, he left all tents and baggage behind and made a forced march to surprise the savages before they could escape. The main body of the Indians, however, retired before he could reach them; and he could accomplish no more than the destruction of crops and villages, after which he returned to a fort on the frontier, having traversed no less than sixty miles over a most difficult country without a halt. It was then resolved to begin the work anew and to make a fresh advance into the forest. On this occasion the Indians lay in wait for the British in a wooded valley and burst upon them suddenly, as they had upon Braddock, with hideous whooping and howling, and a scattered but deadly fire of rifles. The grenadiers and Light Infantry at once plunged into the forest to engage them, while the Highlanders hastened round their rear to cut off their retreat; and after a sharp action of an hour the Indians were put to flight with great slaughter. This engagement cost the British over eighty men killed and wounded, twice as many as Amherst had lost by lead and steel during the whole of his advance from Oswego to Montreal. But the mere comparison of casualties is of small moment. The really weighty matter is that British officers had learned to face the difficulties which had been fatal to Braddock, and to overcome them with a light heart.

It now remained for Amherst to enforce the capitulation on the French posts of the west. The occupation of Detroit, Miamis, and Michillimackinac was entrusted to Rogers, the partisan, with his rangers, who in the course of the winter hauled down the ensign of the Bourbons and hoisted the British flag in its place. There was still to be trouble with these remote stations, but it was not to come immediately, nor directly from the French. The rest of the General's work was principally administrative. Generous terms were granted to the inhabitants, and every precaution was taken to protect them against the Indian allies of the British. Amherst issued a general order appealing to his troops not to disgrace their victory by any unsoldierlike behaviour or appearance of inhumanity; and the army responded to the appeal with a heartiness which amazed the Canadians. A month after the capitulation the General could report that British soldiers and Canadian peasants were joining their provisions and messing together, and that when he had ordered soldiers to leave their scattered quarters so as to be closer to their companies, the people had begged that they might not be moved.[339] Such was not the fashion in which the French were wont to treat a captured territory.

Here then for the present we may take leave of Amherst. Pitt, as shall presently be seen, had further tasks for him, which were to be executed as usual quietly and thoroughly. The fame of the man is lost in that of Wolfe, and yet it was he, not Wolfe, that was the conqueror of Canada. The criticism usually passed upon him is that he was sure but slow, and to some extent it is justified by facts. Yet it should be remembered that, when he took over the command, affairs in North America were in extreme confusion and disorder, and that the work assigned to him was, on a far larger and more formidable scale, that which had fallen to Cumberland in 1745. Braddock had started everything in the wrong direction. Not only had he quarrelled with the Provincials and failed to instruct his troops aright, but he had deliberately forced them to follow wrong methods. Loudoun, again, had not improved relations with the provincial assemblies either by his correspondence with them or by his military operations. Finally Abercromby's imbecility at Ticonderoga had sacrificed hundreds of valuable lives, disgusted the colonists, and heightened the reputation gained by the French at the Monongahela. Then Amherst took the whole of the confused business in hand, and from that moment all went smoothly and well; so smoothly indeed that people quite forgot that it had ever gone otherwise. Yet his difficulties with the Provincials were not less than those of his predecessors nor less trying to his patience than to theirs; nay, even the good-will of the colonists was sometimes as embarrassing to him as their obstruction. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the atmosphere of young communities, such as were then the North American colonies, is most noxious to discipline. Americans, as their latest military effort has proved, do not yet understand the meaning of the term; the colonists of Australia and New Zealand, which have no such religious traditions as America, have but the vaguest conception of its significance. Thus when Amherst returned from the conquest of Louisburg to Boston, not all his efforts could prevent the inhabitants of that godly city from filling his men with rum; and the same spirit of indiscipline doubtless haunted the army through all the long and dreary months of winter-quarters. There was, again, the additional complication that in the matter of forest-fighting the British had much to learn from the Provincials; and it fell to Amherst to teach his troops greater freedom and independence in action without simultaneous relaxation of discipline. He overcame all these obstacles, however, in his quiet, methodical way. Discipline never failed; for Amherst, though no martinet, could be inexorably severe. Special corps of light troops and of marksmen were organised, and the drill of the whole army was modified to suit new conditions. It was in fact Amherst who showed the way to the reform afterwards carried out by Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe, of reducing the depth of the ranks to two men only. Such a formation would have diminished Wolfe's difficulties and materially have strengthened his dispositions on the plains of Abraham: but apparently so important an innovation never occurred to him. Amherst never fought a great action, so his improvements were never put to the test; but this does not impair his credit as a soldier of forethought and originality.

But the most remarkable quality in Amherst was his talent for organisation. The difficulties of transport in the Canada of his day were appalling. "Canada," says the American historian Parkman, "was fortified with vast outworks of defence in the savage forests, marshes, and mountains that encompassed her, where the thoroughfares were streams choked with fallen trees and obstructed by cataracts. Never was the problem of moving troops encumbered by artillery and baggage a more difficult one. The question was less how to fight an enemy than how to get at him." It was just this problem which Amherst's industry and perseverance had power to solve. We read of his launching forth on to Lake George with a flotilla of eight hundred boats and an army of eleven thousand men, and all sounds simple and straightforward enough. Yet these boats, setting aside the original task of building and collecting them, had to make several journeys to carry the necessary stores and provisions from Albany to the head of the lake, while every one of them, together with its load, required to be hauled overland from three to six miles through forest and swamp from the carrying-place on the Mohawk to Wood Creek. The same provision against the same difficulties were necessary on a smaller scale for Prideaux's attack on Niagara, and, under conditions of special embarrassment, for Stanwix's advance to the Ohio; while over and above this, there was marine transport and all necessaries for the expedition to Quebec to be provided, so as to enable Wolfe to proceed on his mission fully equipped and without delay. Add to this burden of work endless correspondence with the various provinces, as well as constant friction, obstruction, and general dilatoriness, and it becomes apparent that for all his slowness Amherst accomplished no small feat when he achieved the conquest of Canada in two campaigns.

The whole problem was in truth one of organisation, and Amherst was the man to solve it, for he was a great military administrator. Cautious undoubtedly he was in the field, but it would be absurd to contend that a man who took ten thousand men down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, with the dry comment that the said rapids were "more frightful than dangerous,"[340] was wanting in enterprise or audacity. His career as a general in the field was short, and his crowning campaign, having achieved its end without a general action, has little fame. Such is the penalty of bloodless operations, though they be the masterpiece of a mighty genius. Austerlitz is a name familiar to thousands who know nothing of the capitulation of Ulm. So Amherst to the majority of Englishmen is but a name: as though it were a small thing for a colonel taken straight from the classic fields of Flanders to cross the Atlantic to a savage wilderness, assume command of disheartened troops and the direction of discordant colonists, and quietly and deliberately to organise victory. He was the greatest military administrator produced by England since the death of Marlborough, and remained the greatest until the rise of Wellington.

Authorities.—The history of the French in Canada and of the long struggle between them and the English for the mastery of the continent has been admirably written in a series of volumes by Francis Parkman. Following in his footsteps through the original papers in the Record Office (C.O., America and West Indies, vols. lxiii., lxv., lxxiv.-lxxvi., lxxxi.-xciv., xcix.; W. O. Orig. Corres., vols. xiii.-xv.), through the Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, and through other English material, I have found little or nothing to glean, while the information which he has gathered from American sources is most valuable. The histories of Mante and Entick give a general account of the operations. Knox's Journal is one of the most valuable sources of information. Other authorities will be found given in detail by Parkman. Readers who are familiar with his works will have no difficulty in apprehending my obligations to him, which I wish to acknowledge to the full.