Burgoyne had spent the winter in London and had arrived at Quebec about the same time as Germain’s dispatches.  He had loyally represented Carleton’s plans at headquarters.  But he did not know America and he was not great enough to see the weak points in the plan which Germain proposed to carry out with wholly inadequate means.

There was nothing wrong with the actual idea of this plan.  Washington, Carleton, and every other leading man on either side saw perfectly well that the British army ought to cut the rebels in two by holding the direct line from Montreal to New York throughout the coming campaign of 1777.  Given the irresistible British command of the sea, fifty thousand troops were enough.  The general idea was that half of these should hold the four-hundred-mile line of the Richelieu, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, while the other half seized strategic points elsewhere and still further divided the American forces.  But the troops employed were ten thousand short of the proper number.  Many of them were foreign mercenaries.  And the generals were not the men to smash the enemy at all costs.  They were ready to do their duty.  But their affinities were rather with the opposition, which was against the war, than with the government, which was for it.  Howe was a strong Whig.  Burgoyne became a follower of Fox.  Clinton had many Whig connections.  Cornwallis voted against colonial taxation.  To make matters worse, the government itself wavered between out-and-out war and some sort of compromise both with its political opponents at home and its armed opponents in America.

Under these circumstances Carleton was in favour of a modified plan.  Ticonderoga had been abandoned by the Americans and occupied by the British as Burgoyne marched south.  Carleton’s idea was to use it as a base of operations against New England, while Howe’s main body struck at the main body of the rebels and broke them up as much as possible.  Germain however, was all for the original plan.  So Burgoyne set off for the Hudson, expecting to get into touch with Howe at Albany.  But Germain, in his haste to leave town for a holiday, forgot to sign Howe’s orders at the proper time; and afterwards forgot them altogether.  So Howe, pro-American in politics and temporizer in the field, manoeuvred round his own headquarters at New York until October, when he sailed south to Philadelphia.  Receiving no orders from Germain, and having no initiative of his own, he had made no attempt to hold the line of the Hudson all the way north to Albany, where he could have met Burgoyne and completed the union of the forces which would have cut the Colonies in two.  Meanwhile Burgoyne, ignorant of Germain’s neglect and Howe’s futilities, was struggling to his fate at Saratoga, north of Albany.  He had been receiving constant aid from Carleton’s scanty resources, though Carleton knew full well that the sending of any aid beyond the limits of the province exposed him to personal