The position of the enemy was full in sight before them. At the head of
the lake, towards the right, stood the fort, close to the edge of the
water. On its left was a marsh; then the rough piece of ground where
Johnson had encamped two years before; then a low, flat, rocky hill,
crowned with an entrenched camp; and, lastly, on the extreme left,
another marsh. Far around the fort and up the slopes of the western
mountain the forest had been cut down and burned, and the ground was
cumbered with blackened stumps and charred carcasses and limbs of fallen
trees, strewn in savage disorder one upon another.[509] This was the
work of Winslow in the autumn before. Distant shouts and war-cries, the
clatter of musketry, white puffs of smoke in the dismal clearing and
along the scorched edge of the bordering forest, told that Levis'
Indians were skirmishing with parties of the English, who had gone out
to save the cattle roaming in the neighborhood, and burn some
out-buildings that would have favored the besiegers. Others were taking
down the tents that stood on a plateau near the foot of the mountain on
the right, and moving them to the entrenchment on the hill. The garrison
sallied from the fort to support their comrades, and for a time the
firing was hot.
[Footnote 509: _Precis des Evenements de la Campagne de 1757 en la
Nouvelle France._]
Fort William Henry was an irregular bastioned square, formed by
embankments of gravel surmounted by a rampart of heavy logs, laid in
tiers crossed one upon another, the interstices filled with earth.
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