Pitt had now a free hand for the execution of such enterprises as he might desire, a freer hand indeed than any of his predecessors for ten years past had enjoyed; for Cumberland, being ill-received by the King on his return from Hastenbeck, had resigned the Commandership-in-Chief and all his military appointments of whatever description. Pitt, conscious that the Duke had been hardly treated, made no secret of his sympathy with him; but there can be no doubt that Ligonier, who succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief, was infinitely more competent as a military adviser and more sympathetic as a military colleague. And there was need for sound military capacity to deal with all the projects that were ripening in the minister\'s teeming brain.
June 23.
December.

Parliament met on the 1st of December, and the King\'s speech, after announcing vigorous prosecution of the war in America and elsewhere, begged for support for the King of Prussia. Frederick fortunately stood just at that moment at his highest in the public view, for his two masterly victories at Rossbach and Leuthen; and Parliament did not hesitate to confirm a subsidy to him to enable him to carry on the struggle. But in other respects Pitt could find little to boast of in the past year, and he was obliged to confine his eulogy to Frederick and to Clive, whose victory at Plassey, now just become known in England, could not be ascribed to any extraordinary efforts on the part of a British Ministry. The word "elsewhere" in the King\'s speech[314] was understood to signify Hanover, though Pitt warmly disclaimed any such interpretation of the term; but the Commons did not quarrel with it nor with the estimates that were submitted in support of the policy. These were presented on the 7th of December and showed a force for the British Establishment of eighty-six thousand five hundred men, thirty thousand of them for Gibraltar and the colonies, and the remainder nominally for service at home. Four thousand of this number, however, were invalids, who were kept for duties in garrison only, a system wisely copied from earlier days and followed from the beginning to the end of the war. One new regiment only had been raised since the formation of Fraser\'s and Montgomery\'s Highlanders, namely Colonel Draper\'s, which had been created for service in India and which brought up the number of the regiments of the Line to seventy-nine. Adding the troops on the Irish to those on the British Establishment the full numbers of the Army may be set down roughly at one hundred thousand men. It was soon to be seen what Pitt could accomplish with them, when he had found officers who would fulfil his instructions.

America first occupied his attention and was dealt with summarily. The first thing to be done was to recall Lord Loudoun from the command, a resolution which was carried out before the year\'s end,[281] and to appoint a new General in his place. The choice fell upon General James Abercromby, who had been sent out by Newcastle\'s Administration; and the selection was not a fortunate one. The next step was to summon Colonel Jeffery Amherst from Germany, where he had been employed since 1756 as Commissary to the Hessian troops in the pay of England. Amherst, it will be remembered, was a Guardsman, and was last seen by us as Ligonier\'s aide-de-camp on the field of Fontenoy; so it is at least probable that his appointment was due to Ligonier\'s influence. Three new brigadiers were[315] nominated to serve under him, Lawrence, Whitmore, and James Wolfe. The operations to be undertaken in America were threefold. First and foremost Louisburg was to be besieged; and this duty was assigned to Amherst with fourteen thousand regular troops. Concurrently an advance was to be made upon Crown Point, and pushed forward if possible to Montreal and Quebec; which service was entrusted to Abercromby, aided by Brigadier Lord Howe, with about ten thousand regulars and twenty thousand Provincial troops. Lastly, nineteen hundred regular troops and five thousand Provincials under Brigadier-General Forbes were to repair Braddock\'s failure and capture Fort Duquêsne.[282] The number of Provincial troops to be employed was five times as great as that provided by the colonies in any previous year; but Pitt, while asking for so formidable a force, agreed to supply the troops with tents, provisions, arms, and ammunition, leaving to the provinces the expenses of raising, clothing, and paying them only. Moreover, he had readjusted the former regulations as to the seniority of Provincial and Imperial officers, which had given much offence, in a spirit somewhat less to the prejudice of the Provincials. True to his principle that British battles should be fought by British subjects he grudged no expense to gather recruits from the new British beyond sea.

The troops were to be escorted to America by a fleet under Admiral Boscawen, which was strong enough to overpower any French fleet in American waters. A squadron was also sent under Admiral Osborne to the Mediterranean to intercept any French reinforcements from Toulon, while yet another squadron under Sir Edward Hawke cruised with the like object before Rochefort. Osborne\'s name has been forgotten, and Hawke\'s lesser services have been swallowed up in the fame of his action before Quiberon; but it may be said here once for all that both officers performed their parts with admirable ability and signal success. The reader[316] may now begin to judge of Pitt\'s talent for organising victory.
1758.
Feb. 19.

Boscawen, with twenty-three ships of the line and several smaller vessels, sailed with his convoy of transports on the 19th of February. It had been Pitt\'s hope that the siege of Louisburg should have been begun by the 20th of April;[283] but fate was against him, and the Admiral did not reach Halifax until the 9th of May. Amherst, who had sailed with Captain George Rodney in H.M.S. Dublin on the 16th of March, was not less unlucky in his passage; and Boscawen, after waiting for his arrival at Halifax until the 28th of May, at last put to sea without him, but fortunately met the Dublin just outside the harbour. The huge fleet, one hundred and fifty-seven sail in all, with eleven thousand troops on board, then steered eastward, and on the 2nd of June sailed into Gabarus Bay, immediately to westward of the tongue of land whereon stood Louisburg. Here there were three possible landing-places: Freshwater Cove, four miles from the town; Flat Point, which was rather nearer; and White Point, which was within a mile of the ramparts. East of the fortress there was yet another landing-place named Lorambec. It was determined to threaten all these points simultaneously, Lawrence and Whitmore with their respective brigades moving towards White Point and Flat Point, with one regiment detached against Lorambec, while Wolfe\'s brigade should make a true attack upon Freshwater Cove.[284] Nothing very clear was known of the French defences erected to cover these landing-places, and it so happened that the point selected for attack was the most strongly defended of all.
June 8.

For five days all attempts at disembarkation were [317]frustrated by fog and storm; but at two o\'clock on the morning of the 8th the troops were got into the boats, and at daybreak the frigates of the fleet stood in and opened a fierce fire upon the French entrenchments at all of the threatened points. A quarter of an hour later the boats shoved off and pulled for the shore. Wolfe\'s party consisted of five companies of grenadiers, a body of five hundred and fifty marksmen drawn from the different regiments and known as the Light Infantry, and a body of American Rangers, with Fraser\'s Highlanders and eight more companies of grenadiers in support. The beach at Freshwater Cove, for which they were making, was a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end; and on the shore above it more than a thousand Frenchmen lay behind entrenchments, which were further covered by abatis. Eight cannon and swivels had been brought into position to sweep every portion of the beach and of its approaches, but were cunningly masked by young evergreen shrubs planted in the ground before them. The French had not been at fault when they selected the point remotest from the town as the most likely to be attacked by an enemy.

The boats were close in-shore before the French made any sign, when they suddenly opened a deadly fire of grape and musketry. Wolfe, seeing that a landing in face of such a tempest of shot would be hopeless, signalled to the boats to sheer off; but three of them, filled with Light Infantry on the extreme right, being little exposed to the fire, pulled on to a craggy point just to eastward of the beach, which was sheltered from the enemy\'s cannon by a small projecting spit. There the three officers in charge leaped ashore followed by their men, and Wolfe hastened the rest of his boats to the same spot. Major Scott, who commanded the Light Infantry, was the first to reach the land; and though his boat was stove in against the rocks he scrambled ashore, and with no more than ten men held his own against six times his numbers of French and Indians, till other troops came to his support. The rest of the boats followed[318] close in his wake. Many were stove in and not a few capsized; some of the men too were caught by the surf and drowned; but the greater part made their way ashore wet or dry, Wolfe, who was armed only with a cane, leaping into the surf and scrambling over the crags with the foremost. Arrived at the firm ground beyond, the men formed, attacked the nearest French battery in flank, and quickly carried it with the bayonet. Lawrence\'s brigade now rowed up, and finding the French fully occupied with Wolfe, landed at the western end of the beach with little difficulty or loss. Amherst followed him; and the French seeing themselves attacked on right and left, and fearing to be cut off from the town, abandoned all their guns, some three-and-thirty pieces great and small, and fled into the woods in the rear of their entrenchments. The British pursued, until on emerging from the forest they found themselves in a cleared space with the guns of Louisburg opening fire upon them. Then the pursuit was checked, for the first great object had been obtained. The total loss of the British little exceeded one hundred in killed, wounded, and drowned; that of the French was not much greater, but the British had gained a solid success.

Amherst pitched his camp just beyond range of the guns of the fortress, and selected Flat Point Cove as the place for landing his guns and stores. The disembarkation of material was a task of extreme difficulty and danger owing to the surf, so much so that over one hundred boats were stove in during the course of the siege. The General, therefore, had ample leisure to examine the ground before him. The harbour of Louisburg is a land-locked bay with an extreme width from north-east to south-west of about two and a half miles. The entrance is rather more than a mile wide, but is narrowed to less than half of that distance by a chain of rocky islets. The defences of the entrance were a battery on a small island on the west side of the channel and a fort on the eastern shore at the promontory of Lighthouse Point. Within the harbour[319] on the northern shore had stood a battery known as the Grand battery, but this was destroyed by the French on the night of Amherst\'s landing; and on the western shore on a triangular peninsula stood Louisburg itself, the Dunkirk of America, the apex of the triangle pointing towards the harbour, the base towards the land where Amherst\'s force now lay encamped. The full circuit of its fortifications was about a mile and a half, and the number of cannon and mortars mounted thereon and on the outworks exceeded two hundred. The garrison consisted of five battalions of regular troops, numbering about four thousand men, together with several companies of colonial troops from Canada; the whole being under command of a gallant officer named Drucour. Finally, at anchor in the harbour lay five ships of the line and seven frigates. The strongest front of the fortress was on the side of the land, running from the sea on the south to the harbour on the north: it was made up of four bastions called in succession, from north to south, the Dauphin\'s, King\'s, Queen\'s, and Princess\'s bastions. The King\'s bastion formed part of the citadel, and before it the glacis sloped down to a marsh which protected it completely; but at both extremities of the line there was high ground favourable for the works of a besieging force. It was towards the northern extremity, from a hillock at the edge of the marsh, that Amherst resolved to push his first attack.
June 25.
June 29.

Meanwhile the labour to be accomplished before the guns and stores could be brought to the spot was immense. The distance from the landing-place was a mile and a half, every yard of it consisting of deep mud covered with moss and water-weeds, through which it was necessary to make not only a road but an epaulement also, to protect the road; for a French frigate, the Aréthuse, lay in a lagoon called the Barachois at the extreme western corner of the harbour, and swept all the ground before the ramparts with a flanking fire. While, therefore, this work was going forward Wolfe was ordered with twelve hundred men and artillery to the[320] battery at Lighthouse Point, which had been abandoned by the French, in order to fire upon the Island battery and upon the ships in the harbour. After some days the Island battery was silenced with the help of the fleet, and the men of war were driven under the guns of the main fortress. The entrance to the harbour being thus laid open to the British fleet, the French commander under cover of a foggy night sank six large ships in the channel to bar the passage anew.
July 9.
July 14.
July 21.

On the very day when Wolfe succeeded in silencing the Island battery Amherst\'s preparations were at last completed; and the British began to break ground on the appointed hillock. From thence the trenches were carried, despite the fire of the Aréthuse, towards the Barachois; and it was soon evident that the frigate would be repaid for all the mischief that she had wrought. At the same time Wolfe broke ground to the south opposite to the Princess\'s bastion, and despite a fierce sortie made by a drunken party of the garrison, pushed his works steadily forward against it. Another three weeks saw the net closing tighter and the fire raining fiercer about the doomed fortress. The Aréthuse, after sticking to her moorings right gallantly under an ever increasing fire, was compelled at last to shift her position. Two days later Wolfe, as busy at the left as at the right attack, made a dash at nightfall upon some rising ground only three hundred yards before the Dauphin\'s bastion, drove out the French that occupied it, and would not be forced back by the fiercest fire from the ramparts. On the 21st a lucky shell fell on one of the French line-of-battle ships and set her on fire. The scanty crew left on board of her could not check the flames. She drifted from her moorings upon two of her consorts and kindled them also; and all three were burned to the water\'s edge. The two remaining line-of-battle ships survived them but a little time, for a few nights later six hundred sailors rowed silently into the harbour and surprised and captured both of them. One, being aground, was burned, and the other was[321] towed off, in contempt of the fire from the fortress, to a safe anchorage.
July 27.

By this time Amherst\'s batteries had reduced Louisburg almost to defencelessness. The masonry of the fortress had crumbled under the concussion of its own guns and was little able to stand the shot of the British. A new battery erected on the hill to the north of the Barachois raked the western front of the French works from end to end, and there was no standing against its fire. On the 26th of July the last gun on that front was silenced and a practicable breach had been made. Drucour then made overtures for a capitulation. Amherst\'s reply was short and stern: the garrison must surrender as prisoners of war, and a definite answer must be returned within one hour. Drucour replied at first with defiance, but, before his messenger could reach Amherst he sent a second emissary to accept the terms; and on the following day the British occupied the fortress. The casualties of the besiegers were not heavy, little exceeding five hundred killed and wounded of all ranks. The loss of the French is unknown, but must have been very great, from sickness not less than from shot and shell. The number of soldiers and sailors made prisoners amounted to fifty-six hundred, while over two hundred cannon and a large quantity of munitions and stores were surrendered with the fortress. So Cape Breton, and Prince Edward\'s Island with it, passed under the dominion of the British for ever.

The siege over, Amherst proposed to Boscawen to proceed to Quebec, but the Admiral did not consider the enterprise to be feasible. Drucour\'s gallant defence, indeed, had accomplished one object, in preventing Amherst from co-operating with Abercromby in the attack on Canada; though, could the siege have been begun at the date fixed by Pitt, his efforts would have been of little avail. Amherst therefore left four battalions to garrison Louisburg,[285] and sent Colonel Monckton, Colonel Lord Rollo, and Wolfe, each with a[322] sufficient force, to complete the work of subjugation on Prince Edward\'s Island, the Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wolfe having accomplished his part of the task went home on sick leave, and Amherst sailed with five battalions[286] for Boston, where he arrived on the 14th of September and was received with immense though rather inconvenient enthusiasm by the inhabitants.[287] His presence was but too sorely needed to repair the mischief wrought by Abercromby\'s incapacity.

The prospects of Abercromby at the opening of the campaign were such as might have encouraged any General. Vaudreuil, the Governor of Canada, a corrupt and incapable man, knowing of the intended advance of the British by Lakes George and Champlain upon Ticonderoga and Crown Point, had proposed to avert it by a counter-raid along the Mohawk upon the Hudson. This plan, being vague, and indeed impracticable, was abandoned; and the defence of the approaches to Montreal was committed to Montcalm, who was stationed at Ticonderoga with an insufficient force of about four thousand men, and without support from the posts higher up the lake. To Abercromby, with seven thousand regular troops and nine thousand Provincials, the exposure of this weak and isolated force should have been welcome as the solution of all his difficulties. It must now be seen to what end he turned so excellent an opportunity.

The early months of the summer were occupied with the task, always vexatious and troublesome, of collecting the Provincial troops, and of sending supplies up the Mohawk and the Hudson to Fort Edward. The latter work was tedious and harassing, despite the facilities of carriage by water, for there were three portages between Albany and Fort Edward, at each of which all boats had to be unladen, and dragged, together [323]with their stores, for three or even more miles overland before they could be launched again for easier progress. None the less the business went forward with great energy; and notwithstanding the danger of convoys from the attack of Indians when passing through the forest, the work of escorting was so perfectly managed that not one was molested. These admirable arrangements were due to Brigadier Lord Howe, the eldest of three brothers, all of whom were destined to leave a mark for good or evil on English history.

Howe had been appointed by Pitt to make good the failings which were suspected in Abercromby. He was now thirty-four years of age, and having arrived in America with his regiment, the Fifty-fifth, in the previous year, had been at pains to learn the art of forest-warfare from the most famous leader of the Provincial irregulars. He threw off all training and prejudices of the barrack-yard, joined the irregulars in their scouting-parties, shared the hardships and adopted the dress of his rough companions and became one of themselves. Having thus schooled himself he began to impart the lessons that he had learned to his men. He made officers and men, alike of regular and of Provincial troops, throw off all useless encumbrances; he cut the skirts off their coats and the hair off their heads, browned the barrels of their muskets, clad their lower limbs in leggings to protect them from briars, and filled the empty space in their knapsacks with thirty pounds of meal, so as to make them independent for weeks together of convoys of supplies. In a word, he headed a reaction against the stiff unpractical school of Germany so much favoured by Cumberland, and tried to equip men reasonably for the rough work that lay before them. Such ideas had occurred to other men besides him. Colonel Bouquet of the Sixtieth wished to dress his men like Indians, and Brigadier Forbes went cordially with him, for, as he wrote emphatically, "We must learn the art of war from the Indians." Washington, again, said that if the matter were left to his inclination[324] he would put both men and officers into Indian dress and set the example himself.[288] There was in fact a general revolt of all practical men against powder and pipeclay for bush-fighting, and Howe was fortunately in a position to turn it to account. Possibly it is to his influence that may be traced the formation in the same year of a regiment which, being designed for purposes of scouting and skirmishing only, was clothed in dark brown skirtless coats without lace of any description. This corps ranked for a time as the eightieth of the Line, and was known as Gage\'s Light Infantry.[289] It must not be supposed that these reforms were accepted without demur. Officers were dismayed to find that they were expected to wash their own clothes without the help of the regimental women, and to carry their own knives and forks with them according to Howe\'s example; and the German soldiers, of whom there were many in the Sixtieth, sorely resented the cropping of their heads. But Howe was a strict disciplinarian, and not the less, but rather the more, on this account was adored by the men.[290]
July 5.

By the end of June the whole of Abercromby\'s force, with all its supplies, was assembled at the head of Lake George. On the 4th of July the stores were shipped, and on the following day the men were embarked. The arrangements were perfect: each corps marched to its appointed place on the beach without the least confusion, and before the sun was well arisen the whole army was afloat. The scene was indescribably beautiful. Overhead the sky was blue and cloudless; the sun had just climbed above the mountain tops, and his rays slanted down over the vast rolling slope of forest to the lake. Not a breath of air was [325]moving to ruffle the still blue water or stir the banks of green leaves around it, as the twelve hundred boats swept over the glassy surface. Robert Rogers, most famous of American partisans and instructor of Howe, with his rangers, and Gage with part of his new Light Infantry led the way. John Bradstreet of New England followed next with the boatmen, himself the best boatman among them; and then in three long parallel columns came the main body of the army. To right and left blue coats showed the presence of the Provincial troops of New England and New York, and in the centre flared the well-known English scarlet. Howe led this centre column with the Fifty-fifth, his own regiment; and after him followed the first and fourth battalions of the Sixtieth, the Twenty-seventh, Forty-fourth, Forty-sixth, and last of all the Forty-second with their sombre tartan, each regiment marked by its flying colours of green or buff or yellow or crimson. Then, unmarked by any flag, for colours they had none, came more of Gage\'s brown coats. Two "floating castles" armed with artillery also accompanied this column, towering high above the slender canoes and whale-boats; and in the rear came the bateaux laden with stores and baggage, with a rear-guard made up of red coats and of blue. So the great armament, stretching almost from shore to shore, crept on over the bosom of the lake, the strains of fife and drum mingling with the plashing of ten thousand oars, till the narrows were reached and the broad front dwindled into a slender procession six miles in length, still creeping on like some huge sinuous serpent on its errand of destruction and death.
July 6.

By five in the afternoon the flotilla had travelled five-and-twenty miles, and a halt was made for the baggage and artillery, which had lagged behind. At eleven o\'clock it started again, and at daybreak reached the narrow channel that leads into Lake Champlain by the headland of Ticonderoga. A small advanced post of the French on the shore was driven back, and the[326] work of disembarkation was begun. By noon the whole army had been............