Besides these, the battalions of Artois and Bourgogne, to the number of eleven hundred men, were in garrison at Louisbourg.  All these troops wore a white uniform, faced with blue, red, yellow, or violet,[372] a black three-cornered hat, and gaiters, generally black, from the foot to the knee.  The subaltern officers in the French service were very numerous, and were drawn chiefly from the class of lesser nobles.  A well-informed French writer calls them “a generation of petits-maitres, dissolute, frivolous, heedless, light-witted; but brave always, and ready to die with their soldiers, though not to suffer with them."[373] In fact the course of the war was to show plainly that in Europe the regiments of France were no longer what they had once been.  It was not so with those who fought in America.  Here, for enduring gallantry, officers and men alike deserve nothing but praise.

[Footnote 371:  Of about twelve hundred who came with Montcalm, nearly three hundred were now in hospital.  The four battalions that came with Dieskau are reported at the end of May to have sixteen hundred and fifty-three effective men. Etat de la Situation actuelle des Bataillons, appended to Montcalm’s despatch of 12 June.  Another document, Detail de ce qui s’est passe en Canada, Juin, 1755, jusqu’a Juin, 1756, sets the united effective strength of the battalions in Canada at twenty-six hundred and seventy-seven, which was increased by recruits which arrived from France about midsummer.]

[Footnote 372:  Except perhaps, the battalion of Bearn, which formerly wore, and possibly wore still, a uniform of light blue.]

[Footnote 373:  Susane, Ancienne Infanterie Francaise.  In the atlas of this work are colored plates of the uniforms of all the regiments of foot.]

The troupes de la marine had for a long time formed the permanent military establishment of Canada.  Though attached to the naval department, they served on land, and were employed as a police within the limits of the colony, or as garrisons of the outlying forts, where their officers busied themselves more with fur-trading than with their military duties.  Thus they had become ill-disciplined and inefficient, till the hard hand of Duquesne restored them to order.  They originally consisted of twenty-eight independent companies, increased in 1750 to thirty companies, at first of fifty, and afterwards of sixty-five men each, forming a total of nineteen hundred and fifty rank and file.  In March, 1757, ten more companies were added.  Their uniform was not unlike that of the troops attached to the War Department, being white, with black facings.  They were enlisted for the most part in France; but when their term of service expired, and even before, in time of peace, they were encouraged to become settlers in the colony, as was also the case with their officers, of whom a great part were of European birth.  Thus the relations of the troupes de la marine with the colony were close; and formed a sort of connecting link between the troops of the line and the native militia.[374] Besides these colony regulars, there was a company of colonial artillery, consisting this year of seventy men, and replaced in 1757 by two companies of fifty men each.