ke, the shattered regiments
were re-forming for a second charge. Gripping the colours he
staggered out to join them, and as he went a bullet sang past him and
his left wrist dropped nerveless at his side. He scarcely felt the
wound. The brutal jar of the repulse had stunned every sense in him
but that of thirst. The reek of gunpowder caked his throat, and his
tongue crackled in his mouth like a withered leaf.

Someone was pointing back over the tree-tops toward Rattlesnake
Mountain; and on the slopes there, as the smoke cleared, sure enough,
figures were moving. Guns? A couple of guns planted there could
have knocked this cursed rampart to flinders in twenty minutes, or
plumped round shot at leisure among the French huddled within.
Where was the General?

The General was down at the saw-mill in the valley, seated at his
table, penning a dispatch. The men on Rattlesnake Mountain were
Johnson's Indians--Mohawks, Oneidas, and others of the Six Nations--
who, arriving late, had swarmed up by instinct to the key of the
position and seated themselves there with impassive faces, asking
each other when the guns would arrive. They had seen artillery,
perhaps, once in their lives; and had learnt what it cost our
Generals some seventy more years to learn--imperfectly.

Oh, it was cruel! By this time there was not a man in the army but
could have taught the General the madness of it. But the General was
down at the sawmill, two miles away; and the broken regiments
reformed and faced the rampart again. The sun beat down on the
clearing, heating men to madness. The wounded went down through the
gloom of the woods and were carried past the saw-mill, by scores at
first, then by hundreds. Within the saw-mill, in his cool chamber,
the General sat and wrote. Someone (Gage it is likely) sent down,
beseeching him to bring the guns into play. He answered that the
guns were at the landing-stage, and could not be planted within six
hours. A second messenger suggested that the assault on the ridge
had already caused inordinate loss, and that by the simple process of
marching around Ticonderoga and occupying the narrows of Lake
Champlain Montcalm could be starved out in a week. The General
showed him the door. Upon the ridge the fight went on.

John a Cleeve had by this time lost count of the charges. Some had
been feeble; one or two superb; and once the Highlanders, with a
gallantry only possible to men past caring for l