While Johnson lay at Lake George, Dieskau prepared a surprise for him.  The German Baron had reached Crown Point at the head of three thousand five hundred and seventy-three men, regulars, Canadians, and Indians.[303] He had no thought of waiting there to be attacked.  The troops were told to hold themselves ready to move at a moment’s notice.  Officers—­so ran the order—­will take nothing with them but one spare shirt, one spare pair of shoes, a blanket, a bearskin, and provisions for twelve days; Indians are not to amuse themselves by taking scalps till the enemy is entirely defeated, since they can kill ten men in the time required to scalp one.[304] Then Dieskau moved on, with nearly all his force, to Carillon, or Ticonderoga, a promontory commanding both the routes by which alone Johnson could advance, that of Wood Creek and that of Lake George.

[Footnote 303:  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 25 Sept. 1755.]

[Footnote 304:  Livre d’Ordres, Aout, Sept. 1755.]

The Indians allies were commanded by Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the officer who had received Washington on his embassy to Fort Le Boeuf.  These unmanageable warriors were a constant annoyance to Dieskau, being a species of humanity quite new to him.  “They drive us crazy,” he says, “from morning till night.  There is no end to their demands.  They have already eaten five oxen and as many hogs, without counting the kegs of brandy they have drunk.  In short, one needs the patience of an angel to get on with these devils; and yet one must always force himself to seem pleased with them."[305]

[Footnote 305:  Dieskau a Vaudreuil, 1 Sept. 1755.]

They would scarcely even go out as scouts.  At last, however, on the fourth of September, a reconnoitring party came in with a scalp and an English prisoner caught near Fort Lyman.  He was questioned under the threat of being given to the Indians for torture if he did not tell the truth; but, nothing daunted, he invented a patriotic falsehood; and thinking to lure his captors into a trap, told them that the English army had fallen back to Albany, leaving five hundred men at Fort Lyman, which he represented as indefensible.  Dieskau resolved on a rapid movement to seize the place.  At noon of the same day, leaving a part of his force at Ticonderoga, he embarked the rest in canoes and advanced along the narrow prolongation of Lake Champlain that stretched southward through the wilderness to where the town of Whitehall now stands.  He soon came to a point where the lake dwindled to a mere canal, while two mighty rocks, capped with stunted forests, faced each other from the opposing banks.  Here he left an officer named Roquemaure with a detachment of troops, and again advanced along a belt of quiet water traced through the midst of a deep marsh, green at that season with sedge and water-weeds, and known to the English as the Drowned Lands.  Beyond, on either hand, crags feathered with birch and fir, or hills mantled with woods, looked