Fort Amity | Page 7

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