[Footnote 603:  Correspondance de Vaudreuil, 1758.  Livre d’Ordres, Juin, 1758.]

The proposed movement promised, no doubt, great advantages; but it was not destined to take effect.  Some rangers taken on Lake George by a partisan officer named Langy declared with pardonable exaggeration that twenty-five or thirty thousand men would attack Ticonderoga in less than a fortnight.  Vaudreuil saw himself forced to abandon his Mohawk expedition, and to order Levis and his followers, who had not yet left Montreal, to reinforce Montcalm.[604] Why they did not go at once is not clear.  The Governor declares that there were not boats enough.  From whatever cause, there was a long delay, and Montcalm was left to defend himself as he could.

[Footnote 604:  Bigot au Ministre, 21 Juillet, 1758.]

He hesitated whether he should not fall back to Crown Point.  The engineer, Lotbiniere, opposed the plan, as did also Le Mercier.[605] It was but a choice of difficulties, and he stayed at Ticonderoga.  His troops were disposed as they had been in the summer before; one battalion, that of Berry, being left near the fort, while the main body, under Montcalm himself, was encamped by the saw-mill at the Falls, and the rest, under Bourlamaque, occupied the head of the portage, with a small advanced force at the landing-place on Lake George.  It remained to determine at which of these points he should concentrate them and make his stand against the English.  Ruin threatened him in any case; each position had its fatal weakness or its peculiar danger, and his best hope was in the ignorance or blundering of his enemy.  He seems to have been several days in a state of indecision.

[Footnote 605:  N.Y.  Col.  Docs., X 893.  Lotbiniere’s relative, Vaudreuil, confirms the statement.  Montcalm had not, as has been said, begun already to fall back.]

In the afternoon of the fifth of July the partisan Langy, who had again gone out to reconnoitre towards the head of Lake George, came back in haste with the report that the English were embarked in great force.  Montcalm sent a canoe down Lake Champlain to hasten Levis to his aid, and ordered the battalion of Berry to begin a breastwork and abattis on the high ground in front of the fort.  That they were not begun before shows that he was in doubt as to his plan of defence; and that his whole army was not now set to work at them shows that his doubt was still unsolved.

It was nearly a month since Abercromby had begun his camp at the head of Lake George.  Here, on the ground where Johnson had beaten Dieskau, where Montcalm had planted his batteries, and Monro vainly defended the wooden ramparts of Fort William Henry, were now assembled more than fifteen thousand men; and the shores, the foot of the mountains, and the broken plains between them were studded thick with tents.  Of regulars there were six thousand three hundred and sixty-seven, officers and soldiers, and of provincials