The campaign closed in November with a partisan exploit on the Mohawk.  Here, at a place called German Flats, on the farthest frontier, there was a thriving settlement of German peasants from the Palatinate, who were so ill-disposed towards the English that Vaudreuil had had good hope of stirring them to revolt, while at the same time persuading their neighbors, the Oneida Indians, to take part with France.[535] As his measures to this end failed, he resolved to attack them.  Therefore, at three o’clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Beletre, wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small picket forts which they had built as places of refuge.  These were taken one by one and set on fire.  The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with their barns and outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie, the magistrate of the place.  Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Beletre, unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, and then made a hasty retreat.  Lord Howe, pushing up the river from Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned slaughter-field.  Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed up the results with pompous egotism:  “I have ruined the plans of the English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried consternation and terror into all those parts."[536]

[Footnote 535:  Depeches de Vaudreuil, 1757.]

[Footnote 536:  Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758.  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Fev. 1758.  Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758. Bougainville, Journal.  Summary of M. de Beletre’s Campaign, in N.Y.  Col.  Docs., X. 672.  Extravagant reports of the havoc made were sent to France.  It was pretended that three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000 livres.  These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from Quebec, Daine au Marechal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758.  Levis says that the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was not above three hundred.]

Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in September to Quebec, a place more to his liking.  “Come as soon as you can,” he wrote to Bourlamaque, “and I will tell a certain fair lady how eager you are.”  Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again to the same friend:  “My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the latter being the worse.”