ng-place of
armies. Here were now gathered about eleven thousand men, half regulars
and half provincials,[724] drilling every day, firing by platoons,
firing at marks, practising manoeuvres in the woods; going out on
scouting parties, bathing parties, fishing parties; gathering wild herbs
to serve for greens, cutting brushwood and meadow hay to make hospital
beds. The sick were ordered on certain mornings to repair to the
surgeon's tent, there, in prompt succession, to swallow such doses as he
thought appropriate to their several ailments; and it was further
ordered that "every fair day they that can walk be paraded together and
marched down to the lake to wash their hands and faces." Courts-martial
were numerous; culprits were flogged at the head of each regiment in
turn, and occasionally one was shot. A frequent employment was the
cutting of spruce tops to make spruce beer. This innocent beverage was
reputed sovereign against scurvy; and such was the fame of its virtues
that a copious supply of the West Indian molasses used in concocting it
was thought indispensable to every army or garrison in the wilderness.
Throughout this campaign it is repeatedly mentioned in general orders,
and the soldiers are promised that they shall have as much of it as they
want at a halfpenny a quart.[725]

[Footnote 724: Mante, 210.]

[Footnote 725: _Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson in the Expedition
against Ticonderoga, 1759. Journal of Samuel Warner, a Massachusetts
Soldier, 1759. General and Regimental Orders, Army of Major-General
Amherst, 1759. Diary of Sergeant Merriman, of Ruggles's Regiment, 1759._
I owe to William L. Stone, Esq., the use of the last two curious
documents.]

The rear of the-army was well protected from insult. Fortified posts
were built at intervals of three or four miles along the road to Fort
Edward, and especially at the station called Half-way Brook; while, for
the whole distance, a broad belt of wood on both sides was cut down and
burned, to deprive a skulking enemy of cover. Amherst was never long in
one place without building a fort there. He now began one, which proved
wholly needless, on that flat rocky hill where the English made their
intrenched camp during the siege of Fort William Henry. Only one bastion
of it was ever finished, and this is still shown to tourists under the
name of Fort George.

The army embarked on Saturday, the twenty-first of July. The Reverend
Benjamin Pomeroy watched their