The French had shown no small skill in the building of this breastwork, which ran along a ridge of high ground behind the fort itself, and commanded the approach towards it from the land side.  The whole forest in the immediate vicinity had been felled.  It bore the appearance of a tract of ground through which a cyclone has whirled its way.  Great numbers of the trees had been dragged up to form the rampart, but there were hundreds of others, as well as innumerable roots and stumps, lugs and heads, lying in confusion all around; and Rogers, pointing towards the encumbered tract just beneath and around the rampart, looked at Pringle and said: 

“How do you think a bayonet charge is to be rushed over such ground as that?  And what good will our musketry fire be against those tough wooden walls, directed upon a foe we cannot see, but who can pick us off in security from behind their breastwork?  For let me tell you that there is great skill shown in its construction.  On the inside, I doubt not, they can approach close to their loopholes, which you can detect all along, and take easy aim at us; but on this side it is bristling with pointed stakes, twisted boughs, and treetops so arranged as to baffle and hinder any attempt at assault.  As I told your General, his cannon could shatter it in a few hours, if he would but bring them to bear.  But a rampart like that is practically bayonet and musket proof.  It will prove impregnable to assault.”

Pringle and Roche exchanged glances.  They had seen something of fighting before this, but never warfare so strange.

“Would that Lord Howe were living!” exclaimed the younger officer.  “He would have heard reason; he would have been advised.  But the General—­”

He paused, and a meaning gesture concluded the sentence.  It was not for them to speak against their commander; but he inspired no confidence in his men, and it was plainly seen that he was about to take a very ill-judged step.

It is the soldier’s fate that he must not rebel or remonstrate or argue; his duty is to obey orders and leave the rest.  But that night, as the army slept in the camp round the deserted sawmills, there were many whose eyes never closed in slumber.  Fritz saw the veteran Campbell sitting in the moonlight, looking straight before him with wide, unseeing eyes; and when the grey light of day broke over the forest, his face was shadowed, as it seemed, by the approach of death.

“I shall never see another sunrise,” he said to Fritz, as the latter walked up to him; “my span of life will be cut through here at Ticonderoga.”