The Great Fortress | Page 5

the greatest Frenchman the New World ever saw, came out to Canada, there was eager competition among the troops at home to join his army in the field. Officers paid large sums for the honour of exchanging into any one of the battalions ordered to the front; and when volunteers were called for from the ranks every single man stepped forward. But no Montcalm came out to Louisbourg, and nothing but bounties could get a volunteer. There were only between five and six hundred regulars in the whole garrison during the first siege, twenty-five years after the foundation, and nearly half of these were foreigners, mostly 'pay-fighting Swiss.'
The third factor was the militia. Every able-bodied man, not specially exempt for other duties, was liable for service in time of war; and the whole island could be drawn upon for any great emergency at Louisbourg. Between thirteen and fourteen hundred men were got under arms for the siege of 1745. Those who lived in Louisbourg had the advantage of a little slack discipline and a little slack drill. Those in the country had some practice in the handling of firearms. But, taken all round, it would be an exaggeration to call them even quarter-trained soldiers.
The fourth factor was the Indians. They belonged to the Micmac tribe of the great Algonquin family, and probably numbered no more than about four thousand throughout the whole French sphere of influence in what are now the Maritime Provinces. A few hundred braves might have been ready to take the war-path in the wilds of Cape Breton; but sieges were not at all in their line, except when they could hang round the besiegers' inland flanks, on the chance of lifting scalps from careless stragglers or ambushing an occasional small party gone astray. As in Canada, so in Cape Breton, the Indians naturally sided with the French, who disturbed them less and treated them better than the British did. The British, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of superior sea-power, had more goods to exchange. But in every other respect the French were very much preferred. The handful of French sent out an astonishingly great number of heroic and sympathetic missionaries to the natives. The many British sent out astonishingly few. The Puritan clergy did shamefully little compared with the wonderful Jesuits. Moreover, while the French in general made the Indian feel he was at all events a fellow human being, the average British colonist simply looked on him as so much vermin, to be destroyed together with the obstructive wilds that harboured him.
The fifth factor, the navy, brings us into contact with world-wide problems of sea-power which are too far-reaching for discussion here [Footnote: See in this Series The Winning of Canada and The Passing of New France, where they are discussed.] Suffice it to say that, while Louisbourg was an occasional convenience, it had also peculiar dangers for a squadron from the weaker of two hostile navies, as squadrons from France were likely to be. The British could make for a dozen different harbours on the coast. The French could make for only this one. Therefore the British had only to guard against this one stronghold if the French were in superior force; they could the more easily blockade it if the French were in equal force; and they could the more easily annihilate it if it was defended by an inferior force.
The last factor was the fortress itself. This so-called 'Gibraltar of the West,' this 'Quebec by the sea,' this 'Dunkirk of New France,' was certainly first of its kind. But it was first only in a class of one; while the class itself was far from being a first among classes. The natural position was vastly inferior to that of Quebec or Gibraltar; while the fortifications were not to be compared with those of Dunkirk, which, in one sense, they were meant to replace. Dunkirk had been sold by Charles II to Louis XIV, who made it a formidable naval base commanding the straits of Dover. When the Treaty of Utrecht compelled its demolition, the French tried to redress the balance a little by building similar works in America on a very much smaller scale, with a much more purely defensive purpose, and as an altogether subsidiary undertaking. Dunkirk was 'a pistol held at England's head' because it was an integral part of France, which was the greatest military country in the world and second to England alone on the sea. Louisbourg was no American Dunkirk because it was much weaker in itself, because it was more purely defensive, because the odds of population and general resources as between the two colonies were fifteen to one in favour of the British, and because the preponderance of British sea-power was even greater in America