A History of Britain, Volume 2 (63 page)

The French, it was confidently felt, must be shaking in their shoes. One British force was to retake Louisbourg, denying reinforcements; a second was to capture the forts at Niagara, travelling up the rivers from the Hudson; while Braddock himself would march on Fort Duquesne, where Washington had come to grief. Once that had been dealt with Braddock would advance north, rolling up resistance, and join the Niagara battalions at the lake: simple, decisive, swift. Washington and Franklin met the general at Frederickstown in Maryland just before the march of his two regiments. Washington went as aide-de-camp on the strength of his knowledge of the country, and Franklin had provided a spectacular token of Pennsylvania's appreciation of British protection by supplying each officer with the equivalent of the imperial pantry: 6 pounds of rice, raisins, chocolate, coffee and sugar; a pound each of green and Bohea black tea; half a pound of pepper; a whole Gloucester cheese; 20 pounds of best butter; two hams; 2 gallons of Jamaica rum and two dozen bottles of Madeira. This was what made it worth being British.

Unfortunately it was also what doomed Braddock to bloody fiasco on 9 July 1755. It was not just the 150 wagons and 500 packhorses bearing all these supplies that slowed him to a plod en route to the Monongahela forks. It was the necessity of cutting a laborious way through deep forest, widening tracks to make a road wide enough and level enough to get his supply train through without getting into potentially dangerous difficulties. His Mingo Native American guides had doubtless alerted Braddock to these obvious logistical realities, but as a Mingo chief, Scarouady, noted, he treated them barely better than ‘dogs'. The dogs could bite. The ‘contemptible savages' fighting for the French did not form up in the open like sporting Jacobites to take on Braddock's light infantry, but raked them with fire from invisible positions deep inside the forest. Weakened by dysentery and suffering acutely from haemorrhoids, Braddock let his training as an officer and a gentleman take over. As his boxed-in infantry attempted to return fire into the piny nowhere he remained imperturbable in the saddle, riding the line, encouraging the soldiers even as they fell in hundreds: a deliberately perfect target for the inevitable musket ball in the chest. Down went the redcoats like lead soldiers in text-book platoon formation, their fellows taking their place in the firing line, staying put as they dropped. By the time a modicum of self-preservation took over, and men actually began running for their lives, two-thirds of Braddock's force was dead or critically wounded. The French and their Native American allies had lost just twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded. Braddock died on the retreat and was buried along the road his sappers had cut. George Washington, who took the general's blood-soaked cloak back to Mount Vernon, did not in fact conclude that Braddock had been woefully mistaken in his tactics, only that his men had been inadequate to the task.

If one kind of Cumberland war guaranteed defeat, another, just as depressing, guaranteed a kind of ‘success'. In Nova Scotia the Governor, Charles Lawrence, was engaged not just in pacification but in something more ominously modern: mass deportation. By the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the French-Catholic Acadians had been allowed to live peacefully in southern Nova Scotia, on the wrong side of the Anglo-French divide, provided they refrained from actively assisting the enemy. But as the Franco-British conflict in America heated up, their refusal to take a formal oath of loyalty to King George made them seem like a permanent fifth column, egging on the Native Americans to attack the outnumbered British. Lawrence was determined to get to them before they got to him, and set in motion the appalling policy known to the Acadians euphemistically as ‘
le grand dérangement
'. At least 6000 of them
who had been living on the shores of the Bay of Fundy were forcibly uprooted from farms, homes and land, and assembled for trans-shipment to Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia. The move was so sudden and so brutal that, even as the boats were being prepared to take them away, they could not quite believe they were ‘actually to be removed'. On 8 October the first group was loaded. The British officer in charge wrote: ‘Began to embarke the Inhabitants who went of very Solentarily and unwillingly, the women in Great Distress Carrying Off their Children in their Arms, Others Carrying their Decrepit Parents in their carts and all their Goods moving in Great Confusion and appeared a scene of Woe and Distress.' Colonists from New York and Massachusetts took their place in northern Maine and Nova Scotia. Half of the passengers on the first ship to the Carolinas died on board in conditions of extreme filth and hardship. Some thousands managed to escape to Canada, only to find the country changing hands with the imminent Seven Years' War. Another group made a great odyssey down Duquesne's strategic trail on the Mississippi all the way to Louisiana where they finally resettled, exchanging a diet of lobster and cod for crayfish and catfish as Acadian culture metamorphosed into Cajun.

The dogs of war had been unloosed (even if the American tails had wagged them). And from the beginning it was thought of as a world war, even by the habitually cost-conscious Duke of Newcastle. The strategy, though, was not in fact any different from the way in which the war of the 1740s had been fought. There would be a heavily subsidized European ally, Prussia, whose armies would pin the French down in Europe and divert both men and resources away from the imperial theatres in India, West Africa, the Caribbean and America. The bulk of the Royal Navy would, as always, be assigned to guard the home waters and raid and blockade French ports from the Mediterranean up the Atlantic coast, stopping reinforcements from reaching Canada. In America itself, ‘long-injured, long-neglected, long-forgotten,' as Pitt said (exaggerating as usual), the old Braddock plan of simultaneously attacking Canada, the upper New York lake fort at Ticonderoga and Fort Duquesne in the heart of the Ohio Country was revived. But along with it came many of the old mistakes. Braddock's replacement as coordinator of these campaigns was yet another Cumberland stop-gap, the Ayrshire aristocrat John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, whose enthusiasm for the military life had led him to plant a wood resembling a regiment of the line and who came with a retinue of seventeen servants, travelling mistress and mistress's maid. If anything, Loudoun's contempt for the colonials and their savage allies was even more patrician than Braddock's. Convinced that the whole
bloody shower needed smartening up, he courted the hatred of American officers by insisting on the War Office policy of ranking Americans far below their counterparts in the regular British regiments and alienated the men by demanding that the British whip-happy code of military discipline (500 lashes for insubordination, 1000 for stealing a shirt) be imposed on the colonial troops who had never seen it, much less endured it. Exasperated by contraband trade between the French-Caribbean and British colonies, Loudoun's answer was to shut down trade altogether.

Loudoun's way of running the war represented a clear choice and the Americans knew it. An alternative would have been to co-opt the colonial troops and the Native Americans in a genuinely imperial coalition. This would mean entrusting the colonial assemblies and their governors with the power to raise men and money in the ways they best saw fit, and the ways best suited to part-time bachelor soldiers who would want to feel assured that when the worst was over they could get back to their farms and forges. Raising funds for these troops, as the governors knew, was better done through consent than by imperious demand. But men like Braddock and Loudoun saw the assemblies and even the governors as mere subalterns to be told what was needed and when and where to deliver it. To allow them any sort of latitude in military affairs, they believed, was to indulge their natural tendency to insubordination, to compromise discipline and to court defeat. Loudoun continually expressed his horrified astonishment that the colonials, especially the ‘leading people', presumed to venture criticism or even opinion on imperial strategy. And the raw material of American troops he believed to be unfit for serious combat. Only integrating them into regular regiments and teaching them, fiercely if need be, how real soldiers conducted themselves would create a viable army.

Even though Loudoun had much of his way, defeat came all the same. In India the irrepressible and brutally efficient Robert Clive destroyed Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, handing (whether it wanted them or not) the revenues of the richest province in Mughal India to the East India Company so that it could balance its books. But elsewhere the first two years of the war against France were a procession of disasters. In the Mediterranean Admiral Byng lost the island of Minorca, thought strategically vital for controlling the routes east to Italy and the Levant. Amid an ugly eruption of patriotic fury, Byng was sacrificed by court-martial to spare the government the odium. Worse, Admiral Boscawen's fleet failed to blockade the mouth of the St Lawrence effectively, so that reinforcements and supplies managed to get through to the armies of New France at Quebec and Montreal. On the New York lakes,
it was the French and not the British who were on the offensive, capturing Fort William Henry in 1757.

It was the end of Newcastle. Pitt, who had raised a hue and cry for massive mobilization, had been brought into the administration, but kept (not least by the king's mistrust) from real power. At the end of 1757, though, with the prospects looking grim, Pitt was finally given his moment, and he leapt at it with the full conviction of someone who never for a second doubted that God had personally appointed him for the job. Among his first priorities was to make it clear that he would fight an American war the American way and to repair some of the damage done by the likes of Braddock and Loudoun. The latter was ignominiously recalled, and Pitt won friends in the American assemblies by committing the British government to reimburse the colonials for any expenses laid out for equipment and pay. Over £1million would be earmarked for this. Whole-hearted collaboration instantly replaced surly assent: Massachusetts, for instance, voted for the supply of 7000 volunteer troops. Likewise Pitt repealed Loudoun's invidious weighting of ranks between the regulars and the colonials. Then he threw good men and pots of money at the job in hand. Generals – some of them, like James Wolfe and William Howe, in their thirties – were suddenly promoted, leapfrogging over their seniors. Others, like Jeffrey Amherst in command of the frontal attack on Canada, were given unprecedented troop strength: some 14,000 alone for the attack on Louisbourg. The French in America could probably put together no more than some 16,000 of their own soldiers together with whatever Native Americans they could mobilize, but those would now be counterbalanced by Mohawks and other tribes among the Iroquois nation who, seeing the writing on the wall, had gravitated towards the British. By the end of 1757 there were nearly 50,000 British imperial troops committed to the war in Canada, almost two-thirds of the entire population of New France. Almost £5.5 million was spent on the American sector of the war alone, £1 million for the navy and another £1million on fulfilling the promise to pay for colonial troops. Pitt had succeeded in persuading the country that this time the war had to be all or nothing.

And it was to be a British, not an English, war. The first Highland regiment in the British army to serve abroad had been raised and deployed in Europe in 1745 – the year of the Jacobite rising. But those soldiers were predominantly drawn from loyal clans like the Campbells. By the time that additional regiments were formed for the American campaign their recruiting zone was much broader. There were Munroes from Galloway and Murrays from Inverness. It has been estimated that by
the time the American war began one in four officers in the imperial army were Scots. They were to undergo a murderous baptism of fire.

In early July 1758 the portly General Abercromby (known unpromisingly to his own soldiers as ‘granny'), in command of the expedition to take Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, decided, while a mile distant from the battle site, to send his troops on a suicidal frontal assault without first setting his artillery up on a hill where it might at least have given them covering fire. The result was predictable. The Black Watch and the Inniskillings quick-marched to the sound of bagpipes right into the tangle of sharpened tree-stumps set in front of the breastworks and never exited. A terrified officer in a battalion of Massachusetts volunteers, Archelaus Fuller, flat on the ground behind a log while French musket shot whistled past his ears, described ‘a sorful s[ight] to behold, the ded men and wounded lay on the ground having som of them Legs, their arms and other [sic] lims broken, others shot threw the body and very mortly wounded; to hear thar cris and se their bodis lay in blod and the earth trembel with the fier of smal arms was a mournfull [h]our ever I saw'. This carnage continued for eight hours. Nearly 2000 dead and grievously wounded lay around the timber palisades. At sunset, not having heard anything from their officers, the survivors who had had the sense to lie motionless between logs tentatively rose from their brushy cover and disappeared into the woods like raccoons on the run.

Ticonderoga was, though, the first and last real catastrophe of Pitt's war. Only glories followed: first, the fall of great Louisbourg to Amherst and his brigadier James Wolfe in a conventional siege that unloaded such devastating ordnance on the town that it capitulated before it melted. Among those who witnessed the triumph was the thirteen-year-old Olaudah Equiano, who some years before had been bought by a sea captain, Michael Henry Pascal, as his page and servant. When Pascal went to serve in the Royal Navy in 1756, Olaudah went with him and found himself aboard the same ship as Wolfe en route to Cape Breton. At the end of the siege he was flooded with a kind of terrible wonder at the strange terrors of war: ‘A lieutenant of the
Princess Amelia
[one of the ships] was giving the word of command and while his mouth was open a musket ball went through it and passed out his cheek. I had that day in my hand the scalp of an Indian king, killed in the engagement: the scalp was taken off by a Highlander.' Holding the scalp of an Indian king who had been killed by a Highlander, Equiano was getting an accelerated education in the multi-national empire.