Fort Amity
Page 3
CHAPTER II.
A BIVOUAC IN THE FOREST.
Through the night, meanwhile, Montcalm and his men had been workinglike demons.
The stone fort of Ticonderoga stood far out on a bluff at the head ofLake Champlain, its base descending on the one hand into the stilllake-water, on the other swept by the river which the British hadbeen trying to follow, and which here, its rapids passed, disemboguesin a smooth strong flood. It stood high, too, over these meetingwaters; but as a military position was next to worthless, beingdominated, across the river on the south, by a loftier hill calledRattlesnake Mountain.
Such was Ticonderoga; and hither Montcalm had hurried up theRichelieu River from the north to find Bourlamaque, that goodfighter, posted with the regiments of La Reine, Bearn, and Guienne,and a few Canadian regulars and militia. He himself had brought thebattalions of La Sarre and De Berry--a picked force, if ever therewas one, but scarcely above three thousand strong.
A couple of miles above the fort and just below the rapids, a bridgespanned the river. A saw-mill stood beside it: and here Montcalm hadcrossed and taken up his quarters, pushing forward Bourlamaque toguard the upper end of the rapids, and holding Langy ready with threehundred rangers to patrol the woods on the outer side of the river'sloop.
But when his scouts and Indians came in with the news of the Britishembarking on the upper shore, and with reports of their multitude,Montcalm perceived that the river could not be held; and, havingrecalled Bourlamaque and broken down the bridges above and below therapids, withdrew his force again to Ticonderoga, leaving only Langy'srangers in the farther woods to feel the enemy's approach.
Next he had to ask himself, Could the fort be defended? All agreedthat it could not, with Rattlesnake Mountain overtopping it: and themost were for evacuating it and retiring up Lake Champlain to thestronger French fort on Crown Point. But Montcalm was expectingLevis at any moment with reinforcements; and studying the ridge atthe extreme end of which the fort stood, he decided that the positionought not to be abandoned. This ridge ran inland, its slope narrowedon either side between the river and the lake by swamps, andapproachable only from landward over the _col_, where it broadenedand dipped to the foothills. Here, at the entrance to the ridge, andhalf a mile from his fort, he commanded his men to throw up anentrenchment and cut down trees; and while the sappers fell to workhe traced out the lines of a rude star-fort, with curtains andjutting angles from which the curtains could be enfiladed.Through the dawn, while the British slept in the woods, the Frenchmenlaboured, hacking and felling. Scores of trees they left to lie andencumber the ground: others they dragged, unlopped, to theentrenchment, and piled them before it, trunks inward and radiatingfrom its angles; lacing their boughs together or roughly pointingthem with a few strokes of the axe.
In the growing daylight the _chevaux-de-frise_ began to lookformidable; but Bourlamaque, watching it with Montcalm, shook hishead, hunched his shoulders, and jerked a thumb toward a spur ofRattlesnake Mountain, by which their defences were glaringlycommanded.
Montcalm said, "We will risk it. Those English Generals areinconceivable."
"But a cannon or two--"
"If he think of them! Believe me, who have tried: you never knowwhat 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 landwhere 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 surethat notion will exclude all others. We shall open the door andretreat 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, theEarl 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 ofthe brows and a bitter little sigh. The fighter judged war by itsvictories; the strategist by their effects. Montcalm could winvictories; even now, by putting himself into what might pass for hisadversary's mind, he hoped to snatch a success against odds.But what avails it to administer drubbings which but leave your foethe more stubbornly aggressive? British Generals blundered; butalways the British armies came on. War had been declared threeyears ago; actually it had lasted for four; and the sum of itsresults was that France, with her chain of forts planted foraggression from the St. Lawrence to the Ohio, had turned to defendingthem. His countrymen might throw up their caps over splendidrepulses of the foe, and hail such for triumphs; but Montcalm lookedbeneath the laurels.
The British, having slept the night in the woods, were mustered atdawn and marched back to the landing-place. Their General, fallingback upon common sense after the loss of a precious day, was nowresolved to try the short and beaten path by which Montcalm hadretreated. It formed a four-mile chord, with the loop of the riverfor 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; andAbercromby--in a sweating hurry now--determined to leave his gunsbehind. John a Cleeve, passing forward with his regiment, tooknote of them as they lay unlimbered amid the brushwood by thelanding-stage, and thought little of it. He had his drill-book byheart, relied for orders on his senior officers, and took pride inobeying them smartly. This seemed to him the way for a youngsoldier to learn his calling; for the rest, war was a game of valourand would give him his opportunity. Theoretically he knew the usesof artillery, but he was not an artilleryman; nor had he ever feltthe temptation to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. His cousinDick's free comments upon white-headed Generals of division andbrigade he let pass with a laugh. To Dick, the Earl of Loudon was"a mournful thickhead," Webb "a mighty handsome figure for apoltroon," Sackville "a discreet footman for a ladies' drum," and theancestors of Abercromby had all been hanged for fools. Dick, verymuch at his ease in Sion, would have court-martialled and cashieredthe lot out of hand. But John's priestly tutors had schooled him indiffidence, 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 thefamiliar words soothed him, and he wondered what had provoked thegrumbling. A minute later he had forgotten it. The column crawledforward sulkily. The shadow of Howe's loss lay heavy on it, and asense that his life had been flung away. They had been marched intoa jungle and marched back again, with nothing to show for it buttwenty-four wasted hours. On they crawled beneath the swelteringJuly heat; and coming to the bridge, found more delays.
Bradstreet and his men had worked like heroes, but the bridge wouldnot be ready to carry troops before the early morning. A woodensaw-mill stood beside it, melancholy and deserted; and here theGeneral took up his quarters, while the army cooked its supper anddisposed itself for the night in the trampled clearing around themill and in the forest beyond. The 46th lay close alongside theriver, and the noise of Bradstreet's hammers on the bridge keptJohn for a long while awake and staring up at the high easternridges, black as ink against the radiance of a climbing moon.In the intervals of hammering, the swirl of the river kept tune inhis ears with the whir-r-r of a saw in the rear of the mill, slicingup the last planks for the bridge. There was a mill in the valley athome, and he had heard it a hundred times making just such music withthe stream that ran down from Dartmoor and past Cleeve Court.His thoughts went back to Devonshire, but not to linger there; onlyto wonder how much love his mother would put into her prayers couldshe be reached by a vision of him stretched here with his firstbattle waiting for him on the morrow. He wondered, not bitterly, ifher chief reflection would be that he had brought the unplea
santexperience on himself when he might have been safe in a priest'scassock. He laughed. How little she understood him, or had everunderstood!
His heart went out to salute the morrow--and yet soberly. Outside ofhis simple duties of routine he was just an unshaped subaltern, witheyes sealed as yet to war's practical teachings. To him, albeit hewould have been puzzled had anyone told him so, war existed as yetonly as a spiritual conflict in which men proved themselves heroes orcowards: and he meant to be a hero. For him everything lay in thewill to dare or to endure. He recalled tales of old knights keepingvigil by their arms in solitary chapels, and he questioned the farhill-tops and the stars--What substitute for faith supported _him_?Did he believe in God? Yes, after a fashion--in some tremendous andoverruling Power, at any rate. A Power that had made the mountainsyonder? Yes, he supposed so. A loving Power--an intimatecounsellor--a Father attending all his steps? Well, perhaps; and ifso, a Father to be answered with all a man's love: but, beforeanswering, he honestly needed more assurance. As for another worldand a continuing life there, should he happen to fall to-morrow, Johnsearched his heart and decided that he asked for nothing of the sort.Such promises struck him as unworthy bribes, belittling the sacrificehe 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 tocarry the regimental colours, and had rather belong to the 46th thanto any other regiment. The honour of the 46th was dear to him now ashis own. But why, again? Pure accident had assigned him to the46th: as for love of his country, he could not remember that it hadplayed any conspicuous part in sending him to join the army.The hammering on the bridge had ceased without his noting it, andalso the whirr of the great hands-driven saw. Only the river sang tohim now: and to the swirl of it he dropped off into a dreamless,healthy sleep.