Fort Amity

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Malbrouck s'en-va-t'en guerre:
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!
Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre:
--Ne sais quand reviendra!

CHAPTER II.

A BIVOUAC IN THE FOREST.

Through the night, meanwhile, Montcalm and his men had been working
like demons.

The stone fort of Ticonderoga stood far out on a bluff at the head of
Lake Champlain, its base descending on the one hand into the still
lake-water, on the other swept by the river which the British had
been trying to follow, and which here, its rapids passed, disembogues
in a smooth strong flood. It stood high, too, over these meeting
waters; but as a military position was next to worthless, being
dominated, across the river on the south, by a loftier hill called
Rattlesnake Mountain.

Such was Ticonderoga; and hither Montcalm had hurried up the
Richelieu River from the north to find Bourlamaque, that good
fighter, posted with the regiments of La Reine, Bearn, and Guienne,
and a few Canadian regulars and militia. He himself had brought the
battalions of La Sarre and De Berry--a picked force, if ever there
was one, but scarcely above three thousand strong.

A couple of miles above the fort and just below the rapids, a bridge
spanned the river. A saw-mill stood beside it: and here Montcalm had
crossed and taken up his quarters, pushing forward Bourlamaque to
guard the upper end of the rapids, and holding Langy ready with three
hundred rangers to patrol the woods on the outer side of the river's
loop.

But when his scouts and Indians came in with the news of the British
embarking on the upper shore, and with reports of their multitude,
Montcalm perceived that the river could not be held; and, having
recalled Bourlamaque and broken down the bridges above and below the
rapids, withdrew his force again to Ticonderoga, leaving only Langy's
rangers in the farther woods to feel the enemy's approach.

Next he had to ask himself, Could the fort be defended? All agreed
that it could not, with Rattlesnake Mountain overtopping it: and the
most were for evacuating it and retiring up Lake Champlain to the
stronger French fort on Crown Point. But Montcalm was expecting
Levis at any moment with reinforcements; and studying the ridge at
the extreme end of which the fort stood, he decided that the position
ought not to be abandoned. This ridge ran inland, its slope narrowed
on either side between the river and the lake by swamps, and
approachable only from landward over the _col_, where it broadened
and dipped to the foothills. Here, at the entrance to the ridge, and
half a mile from his fort, he commanded his men to throw up an
entrenchment and cut down trees; and while the sappers fell to work
he traced out the lines of a rude star-fort, with curtains and
jutting angles from which the curtains could be enfiladed.
Through the dawn, while the British slept in the woods, the Frenchmen
laboured, hacking and felling. Scores of trees they left to lie and
encumber the ground: others they dragged, unlopped, to the
entrenchment, and piled them before it, trunks inward and radiating
from its angles; lacing their boughs together or roughly pointing
them with a few strokes of the axe.

In the growing daylight the _chevaux-de-frise_ began to look
formidable; but Bourlamaque, watching it with Montcalm, shook his
head, hunched his shoulders, and jerked a thumb toward a spur of
Rattlesnake Mountain, by which their defences were glaringly
commanded.

Montcalm said, "We will risk it. Those English Generals are
inconceivable."

"But a cannon or two--"

"If he think of them! Believe me, who have tried: you never know
what an English General will do--or what his soldiers won't.
Pile the trees higher, my braves--more than breast-high--
mountain-high if time serves! But this Abercromby comes from a land
where the bees fly tail-foremost by rule."

"With all submission, I would still recommend Crown Point."

"Should he, by chance, think of planting a gun yonder, I feel sure
that notion will exclude all others. We shall open the door and
retreat on Crown Point unmolested."

Bourlamaque drew in a long breath and emitted it in a mighty _pouf_!

"I am not conducting his campaign for him," said his superior calmly.
"God forbid! I once imagined myself in his predecessor's place, the
Earl of Loudon's, and within twenty minutes France had lost Canada.
I shudder at it still!"

Bourlamaque laughed. Montcalm had said it with a whimsical smile,
and it passed him unheeded that the smile ended in a contracting of
the brows and a bitter little sigh. The fighter judged war by its
victories; the strategist by their effects. Montcalm could win
victories; even now, by putting himself into what might pass for his
adversary's mind, he hoped to snatch a success against odds.
But what avails it to administer drubbings which but leave your foe
the more stubbornly aggressive? British Generals blundered; but
always the British armies came on. War had been declared three
years ago; actually it had lasted for four; and the sum of its
results was that France, with her chain of forts planted for
aggression from the St. Lawrence to the Ohio, had turned to defending
them. His countrymen might throw up their caps over splendid
repulses of the foe, and hail such for triumphs; but Montcalm looked
beneath the laurels.

The British, having slept the night in the woods, were mustered at
dawn and marched back to the landing-place. Their General, falling
back upon common sense after the loss of a precious day, was now
resolved to try the short and beaten path by which Montcalm had
retreated. It formed a four-mile chord, with the loop of the river
for arc, and presented no real difficulty except the broken bridge,
which Bradstreet was sent forward to repair.

But though beaten and easy to follow, the road was rough; and
Abercromby--in a sweating hurry now--determined to leave his guns
behind. John a Cleeve, passing forward with his regiment, took
note of them as they lay unlimbered amid the brushwood by the
landing-stage, and thought little of it. He had his drill-book by
heart, relied for orders on his senior officers, and took pride in
obeying them smartly. This seemed to him the way for a young
soldier to learn his calling; for the rest, war was a game of valour
and would give him his opportunity. Theoretically he knew the uses
of artillery, but he was not an artilleryman; nor had he ever felt
the temptation to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. His cousin
Dick's free comments upon white-headed Generals of division and
brigade he let pass with a laugh. To Dick, the Earl of Loudon was
"a mournful thickhead," Webb "a mighty handsome figure for a
poltroon," Sackville "a discreet footman for a ladies' drum," and the
ancestors of Abercromby had all been hanged for fools. Dick, very
much at his ease in Sion, would have court-martialled and cashiered
the lot out of hand. But John's priestly tutors had schooled him in
diffidence, if in nothing else.

His men to-day were in no pleasant humour, and a few of them--
veterans too--grumbled viciously as they passed the guns.
"Silence in the ranks!" shouted the captain of his company; and the
familiar words soothed him, and he wondered what had provoked the
grumbling. A minute later he had forgotten it. The column crawled
forward sulkily. The shadow of Howe's loss lay heavy on it, and a
sense that his life had been flung away. They had been marched into
a jungle and marched back again, with nothing to show for it but
twenty-four wasted hours. On they crawled beneath the sweltering
July heat; and coming to the bridge, found more delays.

Bradstreet and his men had worked like heroes, but the bridge would
not be ready to carry troops before the early morning. A wooden
saw-mill stood beside it, melancholy and deserted; and here the
General took up his quarters, while the army cooked its supper and
disposed itself for the night in the trampled clearing around the
mill and in the forest beyond. The 46th lay close alongside the
river, and the noise of Bradstreet's hammers on the bridge kept
John for a long while awake and staring up at the high eastern
ridges, black as ink against the radiance of a climbing moon.
In the intervals of hammering, the swirl of the river kept tune in
his ears with the whir-r-r of a saw in the rear of the mill, slicing
up the last planks for the bridge. There was a mill in the valley at
home, and he had heard it a hundred times making just such music with
the stream that ran down from Dartmoor and past Cleeve Court.
His thoughts went back to Devonshire, but not to linger there; only
to wonder how much love his mother would put into her prayers could
she be reached by a vision of him stretched here with his first
battle waiting for him on the morrow. He wondered, not bitterly, if
her chief reflection would be that he had brought the unpleasant
experience on himself when he might have been safe in a priest's
cassock. He laughed. How little she understood him, or had ever
understood!

His heart went out to salute the morrow--and yet soberly. Outside of
his simple duties of routine he was just an unshaped subaltern, with
eyes sealed as yet to war's practical teachings. To him, albeit he
would have been puzzled had anyone told him so, war existed as yet
only as a spiritual conflict in which men proved themselves heroes or
cowards: and he meant to be a hero. For him everything lay in the
will to dare or to endure. He recalled tales of old knights keeping
vigil by their arms in solitary chapels, and he questioned the far
hill-tops and the stars--What substitute for faith supported _him_?
Did he believe in God? Yes, after a fashion--in some tremendous and
overruling Power, at any rate. A Power that had made the mountains
yonder? Yes, he supposed so. A loving Power--an intimate
counsellor--a Father attending all his steps? Well, perhaps; and if
so, a Father to be answered with all a man's love: but, before
answering, he honestly needed more assurance. As for another world
and a continuing life there, should he happen to fall to-morrow, John
searched his heart and decided that he asked for nothing of the sort.
Such promises struck him as unworthy bribes, belittling the sacrifice
he came prepared to make. He despised men who bargained with them.
Here was he, young, abounding in life, ready to risk extinction.
Why? For a cause (some might say), and that cause his country's.
Maybe: he had never thought this out. To be sure he was proud to
carry the regimental colours, and had rather belong to the 46th than
to any other regiment. The honour of the 46th was dear to him now as
his own. But why, again? Pure accident had assigned him to the
46th: as for love of his country, he could not remember that it had
played any conspicuous part in sending him to join the army.
The hammering on the bridge had ceased without his noting it, and
also the whirr of the great hands-driven saw. Only the river sang to
him now: and to the swirl of it he dropped off into a dreamless,
healthy sleep.

CHAPTER III.

TICONDEROGA.

At the alarm-post next morning the men were in high spirits again.
Everyone seemed to be posted in the day's work ahead. The French
had thrown up an outwork on the landward end of the ridge; an
engineer had climbed Rattlesnake Mountain at daybreak and conned it
through his glass, and had brought down his report two hours ago.
The white-coats had been working like niggers, helped by some
reinforcements which had come in overnight--Levis with the Royal
Roussillon, the scouts said: but the thing was a rough-and-ready
affair of logs and the troops were to carry it with the bayonet.
John asked in what direction it lay, and thumbs were jerked towards
the screening forest across the river. The distance (some said) was
not two miles. Colonel Beaver, returning from a visit to the
saw-mill, confirmed the rumour. The 46th would march in a couple of
hours or less.

At breakfast Howe's death seemed to be forgotten, and John found no
time for solemn thoughts. Bets were laid that the French would not
wait for the assault, but slip away to their boats; even with Levis
they could scarcely be four thousand strong. Bradstreet, having
finished his bridge, had started back for the landing-stage to haul a
dozen of the lighter bateaux across the portage and float them down
to Lake Champlain filled with riflemen. Bradstreet was a glutton for
work--but would he be in time? That old fox Montcalm would never let
his earths be stopped so easily, and to pile defences on the ridge
was simply to build himself into a trap. A good half of the officers
maintained that there would be no fighting.

Well, fighting or no, some business was in hand. Here was the
battalion in motion; and, to leave the enemy in no doubt of our
martial ardour, here were the drums playing away like mad. The echo
of John's feet on the wooden bridge awoke him from these vain shows
and rattlings of war to its real meaning, and his thoughts again kept
him solemn company as he breasted the slope beyond and began the
tedious climb to the right through the woods.

The scouts, coming in one by one, reported them undefended: and
the battalion, though perforce moving slowly, kept good order.
Towards the summit, indeed, the front ranks appeared to straggle and
extend themselves confusedly: but the disorder, no more than
apparent, came from the skirmishers returning and falling back upon
either flank as the column scrambled up the last five hundred yards
and halted on the fringe of the clearing. Of the enemy John could
see nothing: only a broad belt of sunlight beyond the last few
tree-trunks and their green eaves. The advance had been well timed,
the separate columns arriving and coming to the halt almost at
clockwork intervals; nor did the halt give him much leisure to look
about him. To the right were drawn up the Highlanders, their dark
plaids blending with the forest glooms. In the space between, Beaver
had stepped forward and was chatting with their colonel. By and by
the dandified Gage joined them, and after a few minutes' talk Beaver
came striding back, with his scabbard tucked under his armpit, to be
clear of the undergrowth. At once the order was given to fix
bayonets, and at a signal the columns were put in motion and marched
out upon the edge of the clearing.

There, as he stepped forth, the flash of the noonday sun upon lines
of steel held John's eyes dazzled. He heard the word given again to
halt, and the command "Left, wheel into line!" He heard the calls
that followed--"Eyes front!" "Steady," "Quick march," "Halt, dress
"--and felt, rather than saw, the whole elaborate manoeuvre; the rear
ranks locking up, the covering sergeants jigging about like dancers
in a minuet--pace to the rear, side step to the right--the pivot men
with stiff arms extended, the companies wheeling up and dressing; all
happening precisely as on parade.

What, after all, was the difference? Well, to begin with, the
clearing ahead in no way resembled a parade-ground, being strewn and
criss-crossed with fallen trees and interset with stumps, some
cleanly cut, others with jagged splinters from three to ten feet
high. And beyond, with the fierce sunlight quivering above it, rose
a mass of prostrate trees piled as if for the base of a tremendous
bonfire. Not a Frenchman showed behind it. Was _that_ what they had
to carry?

"The battalion will advance!"

Yes, there lay the barrier; and their business was simply to rush it;
to advance at the charge, holding their fire until within the
breastwork.

The French, too, held their fire. The distance from the edge of the
clearing to the abattis was, at the most, a long musket-shot, and for
two-thirds of it the crescent-shaped line of British ran as in a
paper-chase, John a Cleeve vaulting across tree-trunks, leaping over
stumps, and hurrahing with the rest.

Then with a flame the breastwork opened before him, and with a shock
as though the whole ridge lifted itself against the sky--a shock
which hurled him backward, whirling away his shako. He saw the line
to right and left wither under it and shrink like parchment held to a
candle flame. For a moment the ensign-staff shook in his hands, as
if whipped by a gale. He steadied it, and stood dazed, hearkening to
the scream of the bullets, gulping at a lump in his throat. Then he
knew himself unhurt, and, seeing that men on either hand were picking
themselves up and running forward, he ducked his head and ran forward
too.

He had gained the abattis. He went into it with a leap, a dozen men
at his heels. A pointed bough met him in the ribs, piercing his
tunic and forcing him to cry out with pain. He fell back from it and
tugged at the interlacing boughs between him and the log-wall,
fighting them with his left, pressing them aside, now attempting to
leap them, now to burst through them with his weight. The wall
jetted flame through its crevices, and the boughs held him fast
within twenty yards of it. He could reach it easily (he told
himself) but for the staff he carried, against which each separate
twig hitched itself as though animated by special malice.

He swung himself round and forced his body backwards against the
tangle; and a score of men, rallying to the colours, leapt in after
him. As their weight pressed him down supine and the flag sank in
his grasp, he saw their faces--Highlanders and redcoats mixed.
They had long since disregarded the order to hold their fire; and
were blazing away idly and reloading, cursing the boughs that impeded
their ramrods. A corporal of the 46th had managed to reload and was
lifting his piece when--a bramble catching in the lock--the charge
exploded in his face, and he fell, a bloody weight, across John's
legs. Half a dozen men, leaping over him, hurled themselves into the
lane which John had opened.

Ten seconds later--but in such a struggle who can count seconds?--
John had flung off the dead man and was on his feet again with his
face to the rampart. The men who had hurried past him were there,
all six of them; but stuck in strange attitudes and hung across the
withering boughs like vermin on a gamekeeper's tree--corpses every
one. The rest had vanished, and, turning, he found himself alone.
Out in the clearing, under the drifted smoke, the shattered regiments
were re-forming for a second charge. Gripping the colours he
staggered out to join them, and as he went a bullet sang past him and
his left wrist dropped nerveless at his side. He scarcely felt the
wound. The brutal jar of the repulse had stunned every sense in him
but that of thirst. The reek of gunpowder caked his throat, and his
tongue crackled in his mouth like a withered leaf.

Someone was pointing back over the tree-tops toward Rattlesnake
Mountain; and on the slopes there, as the smoke cleared, sure enough,
figures were moving. Guns? A couple of guns planted there could
have knocked this cursed rampart to flinders in twenty minutes, or
plumped round shot at leisure among the French huddled within.
Where was the General?

The General was down at the saw-mill in the valley, seated at his
table, penning a dispatch. The men on Rattlesnake Mountain were
Johnson's Indians--Mohawks, Oneidas, and others of the Six Nations--
who, arriving late, had swarmed up by instinct to the key of the
position and seated themselves there with impassive faces, asking
each other when the guns would arrive. They had seen artillery,
perhaps, once in their lives; and had learnt what it cost our
Generals some seventy more years to learn--imperfectly.

Oh, it was cruel! By this time there was not a man in the army but
could have taught the General the madness of it. But the General was
down at the sawmill, two miles away; and the broken regiments
reformed and faced the rampart again. The sun beat down on the
clearing, heating men to madness. The wounded went down through the
gloom of the woods and were carried past the saw-mill, by scores at
first, then by hundreds. Within the saw-mill, in his cool chamber,
the General sat and wrote. Someone (Gage it is likely) sent down,
beseeching him to bring the guns into play. He answered that the
guns were at the landing-stage, and could not be planted within six
hours. A second messenger suggested that the assault on the ridge
had already caused inordinate loss, and that by the simple process of
marching around Ticonderoga and occupying the narrows of Lake
Champlain Montcalm could be starved out in a week. The General
showed him the door. Upon the ridge the fight went on.

John a Cleeve had by this time lost count of the charges. Some had
been feeble; one or two superb; and once the Highlanders, with a
gallantry only possible to men past caring for life, had actually
heaved themselves over the parapets on the French right. They had
gone into action a thousand strong; they were now six hundred.
Charge after charge had flung forward a few to leap the rampart and
fall on the French bayonets; but now the best part of a company
poured over. For a moment sheer desperation carried the day; but the
white-coats, springing back off their platforms, poured in a volley
and settled the question. That night the Black Watch called its
roll: there answered five hundred men less one.

It was in the next charge after this--half-heartedly taken up by the
exhausted troops on the right--that John a Cleeve found himself
actually climbing the log-wall toward which he had been straining all
the afternoon. What carried him there--he afterwards affirmed--was
the horrid vision of young Sagramore of the 27th impaled on a pointed
branch and left to struggle in death-agony while the regiments
rallied. The body was quivering yet as they came on again; and John,
as he ran by, shouted to a sergeant to drag it off: for his own left
hand hung powerless, and the colours encumbered his right. In front
of him repeated charges had broken a sort of pathway through the
abattis, swept indeed by an enfilading fire from two angles of the
breastwork, slippery with blood and hampered with corpses; but the
grape-shot which had accounted for most of these no longer whistled
along it, the French having run off their guns to the right to meet
the capital attack of the Highlanders. Through it he forced his way,
the pressure of the men behind lifting and bearing him forward
whenever the ensign-staff for a moment impeded him. He noted that
the leaves, which at noon had been green and sappy, with only a
slight crumpling of their edges, were now grey and curled into tight
scrolls, crackling as he brushed them aside. How long had the day
lasted, then? And would it ever end? The vision of young
Sagramore followed him. He had known Sagramore at Halifax and
invited him to mess one night with the 46th--as brainless and
sweet-tempered a boy as ever muddled his drill.

John was at the foot of the rampart. While with his injured hand he
fumbled vainly to climb it, someone stooped a shoulder and hoisted
him. He flung a leg over the parapet and glanced down? moment at the
man's face. It was the sergeant to whom he had shouted just now.

"Right, sir," the sergeant grunted; "we're after you!"

John hoisted the colours high and hurrahed.

"Forward! Forward, Forty-sixth!"

Then, as a dozen men heaved themselves on to the parapet, a fiery
pang gripped him by the chest, and the night--so long held back--came
suddenly, swooping on him from all corners of the sky at once.
The grip of his knees relaxed. The sergeant, leaping, caught the
standard in the nick of time, as the limp body slid and dropped
within the rampart.

CHAPTER IV.

THE VOYAGEURS.

Fringue, fringue sur la riviere;
Fringue, fringue sur l'aviron!

The man at the bow paddle set the chorus, which was taken up by boat
after boat. John, stretched at the bottom of a canoe with two
wounded Highlanders, wondered where he had heard the voice before.
His wits were not very clear yet. The canoe's gunwale hid all the
landscape but a mountain-ridge high over his right, feathered with
forest and so far away that, swiftly as the strokes carried him
forward, its serrated pines and notches of naked rock crept by him
inch by inch. He stared at these and prayed for the moment when the
sun should drop behind them. For hours it had been beating down on
him. An Indian sat high in the stern, steering; paddling
rhythmically and with no sign of effort except that his face ran with
sweat beneath its grease and vermilion. But not a feature of it
twitched in the glare across which, hour after hour, John had been
watching him through scorched eyelashes.

Athwart the stern, and almost at the Indian's feet, reclined a brawn
of a man with his knees drawn high--a French sergeant in a
spick-and-span white tunic with the badge of the Bearnais regiment.
A musket lay across his thighs, so pointed that John looked straight
down its barrel. Doubtless it was loaded: but John had plenty to
distract his thoughts from such a trifle--in the heat, the glare, the
torment of his wounds, and, worst of all, the incessant coughing of
the young Highlander beside him. The lad had been shot through the
lungs, and the wound imperfectly bandaged. A horrible wind issued
from it with every cough.

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