Montcalm assured them that if they had been neglected, it was only through the hurry and confusion of the time; expressed high appreciation of their talents for bush-fighting, promised them ample satisfaction, and ended by telling them that in the morning they should hear the big guns.  This greatly pleased them, for they were extremely impatient for the artillery to begin.  About sunrise the battery of the left opened with eight heavy cannon and a mortar, joined, on the next morning, by the battery of the right, with eleven pieces more.  The fort replied with spirit.  The cannon thundered all day, and from a hundred peaks and crags the astonished wilderness roared back the sound.  The Indians were delighted.  They wanted to point the guns; and to humor them, they were now and then allowed to do so.  Others lay behind logs and fallen trees, and yelled their satisfaction when they saw the splinters fly from the wooden rampart.

Day after day the weary roar of the distant cannonade fell on the ears of Webb in his camp at Fort Edward.  “I have not yet received the least reinforcement,” he writes to Loudon; “this is the disagreeable situation we are at present in.  The fort, by the heavy firing we hear from the lake, is still in our possession; but I fear it cannot long hold out against so warm a cannonading if I am not reinforced by a sufficient number of militia to march to their relief.”  The militia were coming; but it was impossible that many could reach him in less than a week.  Those from New York alone were within call, and two thousand of them arrived soon after he sent Loudon the above letter.  Then, by stripping all the forts below, he could bring together forty-five hundred men; while several French deserters assured him that Montcalm had nearly twelve thousand.  To advance to the relief of Monro with a force so inferior, through a defile of rocks, forests, and mountains, made by nature for ambuscades,—­and this too with troops who had neither the steadiness of regulars nor the bush-fighting skill of Indians,—­was an enterprise for firmer nerve than his.

He had already warned Monro to expect no help from him.  At midnight of the fourth, Captain Bartman, his aide-de-camp, wrote:  “The General has ordered me to acquaint you he does not think it prudent to attempt a junction or to assist you till reinforced by the militia of the colonies, for the immediate march of which repeated expresses have been sent.”  The letter then declared that the French were in complete possession of the road between the two forts, that a prisoner just brought in reported their force in men and cannon to be very great, and that, unless the militia came soon, Monro had better make what terms he could with the enemy.[515]

[Footnote 515:  Frye, in his Journal, gives the letter in full.  A spurious translation of it is appended to a piece called Jugement impartial sur les Operations militaires en Canada.]