sent. It was proposed to employ a large number of Colonial troops, the British Government to supply tents, provisions, arms and ammunition, and the colonists to clothe and pay the men, for which repayment was promised.

Louisburg was attacked by 157 sail under Boscawen, having 11,000 troops under Amherst on board. For five days fog and storm prohibited disembarkation. When it became possible, under cover of the fire of the ships on the French lines, troops with Wolfe in command were sent in boats to make a landing. The surf was so great that it was hard to find a place where a boat could land, and they were met by so hot a fire from French and Indians in concealed entrenchments that Wolfe came to the conclusion that no man could scramble through the surf and up the rocks with a chance of living. He gave the signal to stand away from the shore. But luckily two boats in charge of subalterns had already touched behind a rock, and the men were leaping into the surf. Wolfe with his Grenadiers followed, a lodgment was made, and the British carried the battery with the bayonet, the French leaving 33 guns behind them.

The loss of both life and boats by the British was very great. The French had sunk six large ships to close the narrow entrance into the harbour; the guns and stores had to be landed on the land side, an operation which was attended with great difficulty, over 100 boats being stove in in the surf and many drowned. The French ships floating in the harbour were destroyed by fire or captured by the sailors, and the land batteries having made a breach, Louisburg surrendered on July 27th, the whole of Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island with 3,000 soldiers, 3,000 seamen, and guns and stores going with it.

After the capture of Louisburg, it had been intended that Amherst and Boscawen should go on to invade Canada and take Quebec. But the delays and disasters of the other armies under Forbes and Abercrombie made this impossible. Forbes, to whom the capture of Fort Duquesne had been assigned, had to wait for three months for the raw and undisciplined men from the various Colonial states. He appears to have been himself a thoroughly efficient commander, he and his second in command Bouquet, a Swiss officer, being students of the new school of warfare, a style of fighting more suitable to operations in America than the formal Flanders fashions of campaign which

it was superseding. Forbes himself was so ill that he could not advance until September. But Bouquet made a great road over the Alleghanies. The description of the country which he wrote to Pitt is worth remembering in view of some of the operations in the American Revolutionary War later: "It is an immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees or brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards." The weather was desperately against the advance, the roads being mud, and then snow. When at the end of November they reached Fort Duquesne they found it destroyed and deserted. Forbes made a stockade in which he left 200 Colonials for its defence, and renamed it Pittsburg.

Abercrombie was to advance up the Hudson, to attack Crown Point, and then push on to Quebec. Immensely superior in force to the French, he had apparently an easy mission. He had with him as second in command Lord Howe, who had studied the Indian methods of fighting. His revolt against powder, pipe clay and pigtail went so far that he had the pigtails cut from the heads of the German soldiers under his command. Abercrombie's army went up to Lake George in boats, taking to the roads at the head of the Lake, where it connects with Lake Champlain. Here in a skirmish in the woods Lord Howe, who was the soul of the expedition, was killed. Montcalm had entrenched his force on a rocky height at Ticonderoga, a point commanding the junction of the two lakes, his defences being an abattis of huge logs, sharp stakes and brushwood, impossible for a frontal attack with the weapons of those days. Abercrombie's force was so immensely superior to that of Montcalm that he could have left part to watch the French while he went north with a force even then superior. But after Flanders fashion he ordered an attack on the log front. By those who are proud of the unique courage of the British soldier the attempt to carry this impregnable wall, four times repeated desperately at the orders of an incapable general, should be carefully read. It is an epitome of the best traditions of the fighting islander.

When the slaughter was stayed, when even Abercrombie recognized the impossible, he retreated to the head of Lake George, where he remained doing nothing, while his men died of dysentery. But at the end of August he consented that

Bradstreet, a New Englander who commanded the boatmen, should attack with a force mostly Colonials the fort of Frontenac which commanded the junction of Lake Ontario with the St. Lawrence river. The capture of this post with some boats easily effected, severed the French communications and gave the British the command of the lake.

An expedition to the West Indies attacked Martinique, dealing very skilfully with the conditions of winds and waves in the Tropics, and at the end of the year Goree in West Africa was taken by a force under Admiral Keppel.

The operations of 1759 were the climax of the war. John Barrington, Commodore Moore, Clavering and Crump conducted, under great difficulties, of which the wind was a potent factor, most brilliant operations in the West Indies, resulting in the reduction of Guadaloupe. Boscawen won a brilliant naval victory at Cape Lagos, off the Portuguese coast, while Hawke destroyed the ships and docks at Havre.

In Germany on August 1, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, who had been hardly holding his own against the French, won a great victory over them at Minden. A strong body of British had been sent out to his assistance in the previous year, commanded, in spite of their failure at St. Malo, by the Duke of Marlborough and Lord George Sackville. The victory was due to the courage and steadfastness of these British infantry, and the splendid service of the British artillery. But the effect of the victory was greatly lessened by the refusal of Lord George Sackville to bring up the cavalry for pursuit, a refusal which has never been explained. It was hardly likely to have been due to cowardice. He was courtmartialled and dismissed from the service, and passed out of sight until he was appointed to high office during the American Revolutionary War.

Towards the end of the year Hawke after much movement at sea, to which the politicians at home contributed, destroyed the French fleet by daring manoeuvres in the shoals and shallows of Quiberon Bay, among which Caesar had defeated the Veneti and Britons some 1,800 years previously, the most striking naval engagement of the war.

The triple attack on Canada was continued under Amherst. His army followed the route of Abercrombie, took Ticonderoga and Crown Point, but was checked by the French, who had

armed ships on the lake posted at the Isle aux Noix at the northern end of Lake Champlain. As Amherst had no ships, he had to stop and build them, which he was unable to do until too late for further operations in that year. Prideaux continued Forbes' advance, taking Niagara and driving the French to Detroit.

Wolfe was sent with ten battalions up the St. Lawrence for an attack on Quebec. His three Brigadiers reflect the character of military appointments in those days, Monckton, son of Viscount Galway, Murray, son of the Master of Elibank, and George Townshend, eldest son of Lord Townshend. It is very greatly to the credit of Pitt and a proof of his own power in office that he should have been able to advance Wolfe, a very young man of practically unknown family, of Catholic Irish origin, to so great a post of responsibility. He had not even physical beauty to recommend him. His force was less than 9,000 men, including, he writes, "six new-raised Companies of North American Rangers-not complete, and the worst soldiers in the universe,' "Engineers very indifferent and of little. experience." Certain of the American Militia wanted as pioneers refused an invitation to go. It seldom happens, says Wolfe, that a New England man prefers service to a lazy life. It was quite possibly an unjust estimate, but worth quoting in view of the opinions expressed by British officials of the Americans in the early years of the Revolutionary War.

Except for the actual last action on the plains of Abraham, the whole responsibility of this expedition rested on the fleet. It began with an error which had bad consequences. Admiral Durell had been sent up the Bay of St. Lawrence to go as high as the ice would permit him, and there wait to cut off any reinforcements by sea from France. His patience in the icecold estuary was not equal to the task. Several French ships, destined to give grievous trouble to the British army, carrying the much-needed men and provisions, evaded him and reached Quebec. They not only helped to provision the city, but they cut the communications between Wolfe and Amherst, who was now marching on Montreal.

The French colony was in a desperate plight in the spring of 1759. Great Britain had complete command of the sea, and could pour troops and war material into America, while all the

resources of France were strained without much success in her fight with Germany.

It had not been supposed to be possible for the British to take their ships up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. They could expect no assistance from the French pilots; no soundings had been taken for 25 years; and all the marks which were guides to navigation had been removed. Yet the extraordinary dangers of this uncharted river were surmounted by the skill and courage of the British sailors. Saunders sailed up and anchored below the town, enabling Wolfe to land his men at Point Levi on the south shore, at Montmorenci on the north shore, and on the Island of Orleans in the river.

The French from the town, which was defended by a long line of fortifications reaching to Montmorenci, tried to destroy the British fleet by fireships. The sentries bolted in panic, but the sailors in boats towed the blazing fireships to land and beached them. Then on the 18th of July Saunders achieved another supposed impossibility; he moved his ships above Quebec in the face of the French batteries, though he was unable to get at the French ships to destroy them.

The army was now in position to attack, but it was unable to do anything except to bombard the town. A frontal attack on the French defences was disastrously repulsed; Wolfe was reduced to laying waste the country round, burning the homesteads and destroying the crops in the hope of reducing the town by famine. So little could be done that at the end of August a council of Brigadiers was called. It was proposed by means of the fleet to bring the troops a great distance above the town, well beyond the defences, land them on the north bank and make an attack from thence. But Wolfe, himself in very ill health, was extremely despondent as to the result. "There is such a choice of difficulties," he wrote on September 2, "that I own myself at a loss how to determine." To the Earl of Holderness he wrote on September 9, my situation is certainly ruined, without the consolation of having done any considerable service to the State or without any prospect of it."

But the luck which seldom deserts brave men or brilliant generals such as Wolfe, came at the last moment to his assistance. The troops had, under cover of a feint, been transferred from the north bank to the south shore, and marched to the boats waiting