nched to the skin: but the greater part got safe
ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of
Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the
surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top
they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet
the nearest French battery, a few rods distant. The division of
Lawrence soon came up; and as the attention of the enemy was now
distracted, they made their landing with little opposition at the
farther end of the beach whither they were followed by Amherst himself.
The French, attacked on right and left, and fearing, with good reason,
that they would be cut off from the town, abandoned all their cannon and
fled into the woods. About seventy of them were captured and fifty
killed. The rest, circling among the hills and around the marshes, made
their way to Louisbourg, and those at the intermediate posts joined
their flight. The English followed through a matted growth of firs till
they reached the cleared ground; when the cannon, opening on them from
the ramparts, stopped the pursuit. The first move of the great game was
played and won.[585]

[Footnote 584: Pichon, _Memoires du Cap-Breton_, 284.]

[Footnote 585: _Journal of Amherst_, in Mante, 117. _Amherst to Pitt, 11
June, 1758_. _Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a
Spectator_, 11. _General Orders of Amherst, 3-7 June, 1759. Letter from
an Officer_, in Knox, I. 191; Entick, III. 225. The French accounts
generally agree in essentials with the English. The English lost one
hundred and nine, killed, wounded, and drowned.]

Amherst made his camp just beyond range of the French cannon, and Flat
Point Cove was chosen as the landing-place of guns and stores. Clearing
the ground, making roads, and pitching tents filled the rest of the day.
At night there was a glare of flames from the direction of the town. The
French had abandoned the Grand Battery after setting fire to the
buildings in it and to the houses and fish-stages along the shore of the
harbor. During the following days stores were landed as fast as the surf
would permit: but the task was so difficult that from first to last more
than a hundred boats were stove in accomplishing it; and such was the
violence of the waves that none of the siege-guns could be got ashore
till the eighteenth. The camp extended two miles along a stream that
flowed down to the Cove among the low, wo