Montcalm lost no time.  As soon as darkness set in he began a battery at the brink of the height on which stood the captured fort.  His whole force toiled all night, digging, setting gabions, and dragging up cannon, some of which had been taken from Braddock.  Before daybreak twenty heavy pieces had been brought to the spot, and nine were already in position.  The work had been so rapid that the English imagined their enemies to number six thousand at least.  The battery soon opened fire.  Grape and round shot swept the intrenchment and crashed through the rotten masonry.  The English, says a French officer, “were exposed to their shoe-buckles.”  Their artillery was pointed the wrong way, in expectation of an attack, not from the east, but from the west.  They now made a shelter of pork-barrels, three high and three deep, planted cannon behind them, and returned the French fire with some effect.

Early in the morning Montcalm had ordered Rigaud to cross the river with the Canadians and Indians.  There was a ford three quarters of a league above the forts;[430] and here they passed over unopposed, the English not having discovered the movement.[431] The only danger was from the river.  Some of the men were forced to swim, others waded to the waist, others to the neck; but they all crossed safely, and presently showed themselves at the edge of the woods, yelling and firing their guns, too far for much execution, but not too far to discourage the garrison.

[Footnote 430:  Bougainville, Journal.]

[Footnote 431:  Pouchot, I. 76.]

The garrison were already disheartened.  Colonel Mercer, the soul of the defence, had just been cut in two by a cannon-shot while directing the gunners.  Up to this time the defenders had behaved with spirit; but despair now seized them, increased by the screams and entreaties of the women, of whom there were more than a hundred in the place.  There was a council of officers, and then the white flag was raised.  Bougainville went to propose terms of capitulation.  “The cries, threats, and hideous howling of our Canadians and Indians,” says Vaudreuil, “made them quickly decide.”  “This,” observes the Reverend Father Claude Godefroy Cocquard, “reminds me of the fall of Jericho before the shouts of the Israelites.”  The English surrendered prisoners of war, to the number, according to the Governor, of sixteen hundred,[432] which included the sailors, laborers, and women.  The Canadians and Indians broke through all restraint, and fell to plundering.  There was an opening of rum-barrels and a scene of drunkenness, in which some of the prisoners had their share; while others tried to escape in the confusion, and were tomahawked by the excited savages.  Many more would have been butchered, but for the efforts of Montcalm, who by unstinted promises succeeded in appeasing his ferocious allies, whom he dared not offend.  “It will cost the King,” he says, “eight or ten thousand livres in presents."[433]