ad
been working at court but he did not suspect that the Governor himself,
all blandness and compliments to his face, was writing to Paris
voluminous attacks on his character and conduct.

In the next summer (1758) Montcalm won another great success. He lay
with his forces at Ticonderoga. The English were determined to press
into the heart of Canada by way of Lake Champlain. All through the
winter, after the fall of Fort William Henry, they had been making
preparations on a great scale at Albany. By this time Amherst and Wolfe
were on the scene in America, and they spent this summer in an attack
on Louisbourg which resulted in the fall of the fortress. On the old
fighting ground of Lake Champlain and Lake George, the English were this
year making military efforts such as the Canadian frontier had never
before seen. William Pitt, who now directed the war from London, had
demanded that the colonies should raise twenty thousand men, a
number well fitted to dismay the timid legislators of New York and
Pennsylvania. At Albany fifteen thousand men came marching in by
detachments--a few of them regulars, but most of them colonial militia
who, as soon as winter came on, would scatter to their homes. The leader
was General Abercromby--a leader, needless to say, with good connections
in England, but with no other qualification for high command.

On July 5, 1758, there was a sight on Lake George likely to cause a
flutter of anxiety in the heart of Montcalm at Ticonderoga. In a line
of boats, six miles long, the great English host came down the lake and,
early on the morning of the sixth, landed before the fort which Montcalm
was to defend. The soul of the army had been a brilliant young officer,
Lord Howe, who shared the hardships of the men, washed his own linen at
the brook, and was the real leader trusted by the inept Abercromby. It
was a tragic disaster for the British that at the outset of the fight
Howe was killed in a chance skirmish. Montcalm's chief defense of
Ticonderoga consisted in a felled forest. He had cut down hundreds
of trees and, on high ground in front of the fort, made a formidable
abbatis across which the English must advance. Abercromby had four men
to one of Montcalm. Artillery would have knocked a passage through the
trunks of the trees which formed the abbatis. Abercromby, however, did
not wait to bring up artillery. He was confident that his huge force
could beat down opposition by a rapid attack, and h