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 nine thousand and thirty-four.[606] To the New
England levies, or at least to their chaplains, the expedition seemed a
crusade against the abomination of Babylon; and they discoursed in their
sermons of Moses sending forth Joshua against Amalek. Abercromby, raised
to his place by political influence, was little but the nominal
commander. "A heavy man," said Wolfe in a letter to his father; "an aged
gentleman, infirm in body and mind," wrote William Parkman, a boy of
seventeen, who carried a musket in a Massachusetts regiment, and kept in
his knapsack a dingy little notebook, in which he jotted down what
passed each day.[607] The age of the aged gentlema