and fifty vessels, including forty
men-of-war, frigates, and transports carrying twelve thousand men.
General Amherst is to command the land forces, and with Amherst is
Brigadier James Wolfe, age thirty-one, a tall, slim, fragile man, whose
delicate frame is tenanted by a lion spirit; or, to change the
comparison, by a motive power too strong for the weak body that held
it. By May the fleet is in Halifax. By June Amherst has joined
Boscawen, and the ships beat out for Louisburg through heavy fog, with
a sea that boils over the reefs in angry surf.

Louisburg was in worse condition than during the siege of 1745. The
broken walls have been repaired, but the filling is false,--sand grit.
Its population is some four thousand, of whom three thousand eight
hundred are the garrison. On the ships lying in the harbor are three
thousand marines, a defensive force, in all, {253} of six thousand
eight hundred. On walls and in bastions are some four hundred and
fifty heavy guns, cannon, and mortars. Imagine a triangle with the
base to the west, the two sides running out to sea on the east. The
fort is at the apex. The wall of the base line is protected by a
marsh. On the northeast side is the harbor protected by reefs and
three batteries. Along the south side, Drucourt, the French commander,
has stationed two thousand men at three different points where landing
is possible, to construct batteries behind barricades of logs.

[Illustration: BOSCAWEN]

Fog had concealed the approach of the English, but such a ground swell
was raging over the reefs as threatened any ship with instant
destruction. For a week Amherst and Wolfe and Lawrence row up and down
through the roiling mist and raging surf and singing winds to take
stock of the situation. With those batteries at the landing places
there is only one thing to do,--cannonade them, hold their attention in
a life-and-death fight while the English soldiers scramble through the
surf for the shore. From sunrise to sundown of the 8th furious
cannonading set the green seas churning and tore up the French
barricades as by hurricane. At sunset the firing ceased, and three
detachments of troops launched out in whaleboats at three in the
morning, two of the detachments to make a feint of landing, while Wolfe
with the other division was to run through the surf for the shore at
Freshwater Cove. The French were not deceived. They let Wolfe
approach within range, when the log barri