s "Fort Rascal"
because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before
Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble,
fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then
hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but
Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon
shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers
to avoid Indian massacre by surrender. {248} A white flag was waved.
Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered
themselves prisoners to Montcalm. The Indians fell at once to mad
plunder. Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were
stripped of everything, and only Montcalm's promise of $10,000 worth of
presents to the savages prevented butchery. The victors decamped to
Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told
that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier
during the entire year.

Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on
in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the
trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm. The English soldiers
were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for
the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had
left plow and carpenter's bench and fishing boat. While Montcalm was
capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape,
"making men out of mud" for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said
of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his
campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern
sign,--always on horseback but never rode forward. Instead of striking
at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors,
Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg. July of
1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent
scurvy,--"the cabbage campaign" it was derisively called,--and waiting
for Gorham's rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg. Gorham's scouts brought
back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four
men-of-war and seven thousand men. To overpower such strength meant a
prolonged siege. It was already August. Loudon sailed back to New
York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to
reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.

[Illustration: THE EARL OF LOUDON]

Montc