to attack them. Therefore, at
three o'clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred
colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Beletre,
wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small
picket forts which they had built as places of refuge. These were taken
one by one and set on fire. The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with
their barns and outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the
inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly
women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie,
the magistrate of the place. Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a
garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first
alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Beletre,
unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of
destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses,
and then made a hasty retreat. Lord Howe, pushing up the river from
Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned
slaughter-field. Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed
up the results with pompous egotism: "I have ruined the plans of the
English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried
consternation and terror into all those parts."[536]

[Footnote 535: _Depeches de Vaudreuil, 1757._]

[Footnote 536: _Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12
Fev. 1758. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758._ Bougainville, _Journal. Summary of M.
de Beletre's Campaign_, in _N.Y. Col. Docs._, X. 672. Extravagant
reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that
three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four
thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were
destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000
livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from
Quebec, _Daine au Marechal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758_. Levis says that
the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was
not above three hundred.]

Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in
September to Quebec, a place more to his liking. "Come as soon as you
can," he wrote to Bourlamaque, "and I will tell a certain fair lady how
eager you are." Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again
to the same friend: "My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the
latter