1757] Activity of Montcalm. 129 ridiculed for occupying the troops at Halifax in planting vegetables for the use of the sick and wounded in the looked-for siege of Louisbourg, and in practising siege-operations a better and healthier alternative surely than the other one of drinking and idleness ! The dilatoriness lay with the English government in despatching an expedition to an open harbour on the 5th of May that should have sailed rather on the 5th of March. Loudon has perhaps a greater blunder to answer for, namely, that of entering on a campaign which, at a critical moment, removed him with the cream of his troops from operations of more vital import. He had not reached New York before the error was brought home to him by a despatch-boat laden with the disastrous news that Fort William Henry had fallen in lamentable fashion and that the waterway from the Hudson to Montreal was in the hands of the French. While Loudon, as the lampooners said, was " planting cabbages " in Nova Scotia, Montcalm had vigorously thrown himself on the weakened frontier of New York. Dazzled by his brilliant achievement at Oswego, hundreds of western savages had flocked to his standard at Montreal, while the so-called Christian Indians of Canada needed no such incentive to take up the hatchet. Ticonderoga or Carillon, at the head of Lake Champlain, was to be the rallying-place ; Fort William Henry, thirty miles off at the head of Lake George, the point of attack. The French commander, on his side, was not free from personal an- noyances. Vaudreuil, the governor, as a native-born Canadian, was jealous both of him and of his friends. The French troops on their part had no love for their Canadian brothers-in-arms. The civil admi- nistration from top to bottom battened on corruption. The Church claimed immense privileges, and was sometimes troublesome. But in the matter of making war these were trifles compared with the cumbrous and complex machinery that existed across the English frontier. There were no fanatical, jealous, parsimonious or ignorant legislators to be consulted, no supplies to be voted. The King found the money ; the colonists were at any rate anxious to fight, however they might differ on other matters ; and when the commander-in-chief gave the signal, every Canadian, without hope of pay, was ready to march with the French regiments, only anxious to prove his perennial though vain boast, that he was a better soldier than the regulars and equal to three Englishmen. 8000 men, including six royal regiments and a large body of the marine or colonial regulars, were at Ticonderoga in July. Montcalm was there himself, with the able de Levis as second in command. At the far end of the long, narrow, mountain-bordered lake in Fort William Henry, lay Colonel Munro with some 2000 men, nearly half of them raw militia recruits. Fourteen miles behind him, on the Hudson at Fort Edward, General Webb, commanding in Loudon's absence, had a still smaller number of still worse troops. In his rear lay Albany C. M. H. VII. CH. IV. 9
