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 gentleman was fifty-two.
[Footnote 606: _Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July, 1758._]
[Footnote 607: Great-uncle of the writer, and son of the Rev. Ebenezer
Parkman, a graduate of Harvard, and minister of Westborough, Mass.]
Pitt meant that the actual command of the army should be in the hands of
Brigadier Lord Howe,[608] and he was in fact its real chief; "the
noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in
the British army," says Wolfe.[609] And he elsewhere speaks of him as
"that great man." Abercromby testifies to the universal respect and love
with which officers and men regarded him, and Pitt calls him "a
character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue.
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