To besiege Fort Edward was impossible, as Montcalm had no
means of transporting cannon thither; and to attack Webb without them
was a risk which he had not the rashness to incur.
It was Bougainville who first brought Vaudreuil the news of the success
on Lake George. A day or two after his arrival, the Indians, who had
left the army after the massacre, appeared at Montreal, bringing about
two hundred English prisoners. The Governor rebuked them for breaking
the capitulation, on which the heathen savages of the West declared that
it was not their fault, but that of the converted Indians, who, in
fact, had first raised the war-whoop. Some of the prisoners were
presently bought from them at the price of two kegs of brandy each; and
the inevitable consequences followed.
"I thought," writes Bougainville, "that the Governor would have told
them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the
English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and
taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be
forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them
brandy. I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes
beheld. On the fifteenth, at two o'clock, in the presence of the whole
town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and
forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him." The Intendant Bigot, the
friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and another French writer
says that they "compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their
children.
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