The Great Fortress | Page 6

than it was in Europe.
The harbour of Louisbourg ran about two miles north-east and south-west, with a clear average width of half a mile. The two little peninsulas on either side of the entrance were nearly a mile apart. But the actual fairway of the entrance was narrowed to little more than a clear quarter of a mile by the reefs and islands running out from the south-western peninsula, on which the fortress stood. This low, nubbly tongue of land was roughly triangular. It measured about three-quarters of a mile on its longest side, facing the harbour, over half a mile on the land side, facing the enemy's army, and a good deal under half a mile on the side facing the sea. It had little to fear from naval bombardment so long as the enemy's fleet remained outside, because fogs and storms made it a very dangerous lee shore, and because, then as now, ships would not pit themselves against forts unless there was no rival fleet to fight, and unless other circumstances were unusually propitious.
The entrance was defended by the Island Battery, which flanked the approach with thirty-nine guns, and the Royal Battery, which directly faced it with thirty guns. Some temporary lines with a few more guns were prepared in time of danger to prevent the enemy from landing in Gabarus Bay, which ran for miles south-west of Louisbourg. But the garrison, even with the militia, was never strong enough to keep the enemy at arm's length from any one of these positions. Moreover, the north-east peninsula, where the lighthouse stood, commanded the Island Battery; and the land side of Louisbourg itself was commanded by a range of low hillocks less than half a mile away.
It was this land side, containing the citadel and other works, which so impressed outsiders with the idea of impregnable strength. The glacis was perfect--not an inch of cover wherever you looked; and the approach was mostly across a slimy bog. The ditch was eighty feet wide. The walls rose over thirty feet above the ditch. There were embrasures for one hundred and forty-eight guns all round; though not more than ninety were ever actually mounted. On the seaward face Louisbourg was not so strongly fortified; but in the centre of this face there were a deep ditch and high wall, with bastions on each immediate flank, and lighter defences connecting these with the landward face. A dozen streets were laid out, so as to divide the whole town into conveniently square little blocks. The area of the town itself was not much more than a hundred acres altogether--rather close quarters for several thousand men, women, and children during a siege.
If reports and memoranda could defend a fortress, then Louisbourg ought indeed to have been impregnable. Of course every official trust entails endless correspondence. But, quite apart from the stated returns that go through 'the usual channel of communication,' reams and reams of paper were filled with special reports, inspections, complaints, and good advice. The governor wrote home, most elaborately, in 1724, about the progress of the works. Ten years later he announced the official inauguration of the lighthouse on the 1st of April. In 1736 the chief item was the engineer's report on the walls. Next year the great anxiety was about a dangerous famine, with all its attendant distress for the many and its shameless profits for the few. On November 23, 1744, reinforcements and provisions were asked for, because intelligence had been received that the New Englanders were going to blockade Louisbourg the following summer. At the same time, the discontent of the garrison had come to a head, and a mutiny had broken out because the extra working pay had not been forthcoming. After this the discipline became, not sterner, but slacker than ever, especially among the hireling Swiss. On February 8, 1745, within three months of the first siege, a memorandum was sent in to explain what was still required to finish the works begun twenty-five years before.
But, after all, it was not so much the defective works that really mattered as the defective garrison behind them. English-speaking civilians who have written about Louisbourg have sometimes taken partial account of the ordinary Frenchman's repugnance to oversea duty in time of peace and of the little worth of hireling foreigners in time of war. But they have always ignored that steady drip, drip, drip of deterioration which reduces the efficiency of every garrison condemned to service in remote and thoroughly uncongenial countries. Louisbourg was remote, weeks away from exchanges with Quebec, months from exchanges with any part of France or Switzerland. And what other foreign station could have been more thoroughly uncongenial, except, perhaps, a convict station in the tropics? Bad quarters were endurable in Paris or even