Meanwhile the bulk of the New Englanders were establishing their camp along the brook which fell into Gabarus Bay beside Flat Point and within two miles of Louisbourg. Equipment of all kinds was very scarce. Tents were so few and bad that old sails stretched over ridge-poles had to be used instead. When sails ran short, brushwood shelters roofed in with overlapping spruce boughs were used as substitutes.

Landing the four thousand men had been comparatively easy work. But landing the stores was very hard indeed; while landing the guns was not only much harder still, but full of danger as well. Many a flat-boat was pounded into pulpwood while unloading the stores, though the men waded in waist-deep and carried all the heavy bundles on their heads and shoulders. When it came to the artillery, it meant a boat lost for every single piece of ordnance landed. Nor was even this the worst; for, strange as it may seem, there was, at first, more risk of foundering ashore than afloat. There were neither roads nor yet the means to make them. There were no horses, oxen, mules, or any other means of transport, except the brawny men themselves, who literally buckled to with anchor-cable drag-ropes--a hundred pair of straining men for each great, lumbering gun. Over the sand they went at a romp. Over the rocks they had to take care; and in the dense, obstructing scrub they had to haul through by main force. But this was child's play to what awaited them in the slimy, shifting, and boulder-strewn bog they had to pass before reaching the hillocks which commanded Louisbourg.

The first attempts here were disastrous. The guns sank out of sight in the engulfing bog; while the toiling men became regular human targets for shot and shell from Louisbourg. It was quite plain that the British batteries could never be built on the hillocks if the guns had nothing to keep them from a boggy grave, and if the men had no protection from the French artillery. But a ship-builder colonel, Meserve of New Hampshire, came to the rescue by designing a gun-sleigh, sixteen feet in length and five in the beam. Then the crews were told off again, two hundred men for each sleigh, and orders were given that the work should not be done except at night or under cover of the frequent fogs. After this, things went much better than before. But the labour was tremendous still; while the danger from random shells bursting among the boulders was not to be despised. Four hundred struggling feet, four hundred straining arms--each team hove on its long, taut cable through fog, rain, and the blackness of the night, till every gun had been towed into one of the batteries before the walls. The triumph was all the greater because the work grew, not easier, but harder as it progressed. The same route used twice became an impassable quagmire. So, when the last two hundred men had wallowed through, the whole ensnaring bog was seamed with a perfect maze of decoying death-trails snaking in and out of the forbidding scrub and boulders.

Pepperrell's dispatches could not exaggerate these 'almost incredible hardships.' Afloat and ashore, awake and asleep, the men were soaking wet for days together. At the end of the longest haul they had nothing but a choice of evils. They could either lie down where they were, on hard rock or oozing bog, exposed to the enemy's fire the moment it was light enough to see the British batteries, or they could plough their way back to camp. Here they were safe enough from shot and shell; but, in other respects, no better off than in the batteries. Most men's kits were of the very scantiest. Very few had even a single change of clothing. A good many went bare-foot. Nearly all were in rags before the siege was over.

When twenty-five pieces had been dragged up to Green Hill and its adjoining hillocks, the bombardment at last began. The opening salvo seemed to give the besiegers new life. No sooner was their first rough line of investment formed than they commenced gaining ground, with a disregard for cover which would have cost them dear if the French practice had not been quite as bad as their own. A really wonderful amount of ammunition was fired off on both sides without hitting anything in particular. Louisbourg itself was, of course, too big a target to be missed, as a rule; and the besiegers soon got so close that they simply had to be hit themselves now and then. But, generally speaking, it may be truthfully said that while, in an ordinary battle, it takes a man's own weight in cartridges to kill him, in this most extraordinary siege it took at least a horse's weight as well.

The approach to the walls defied all the usual precautions of regular war. But the circumstances justified its boldness. With only four thousand men at the start, with nearly half of this total on the sick list at one rather critical juncture, with very few trained gunners, and without any corps of engineers at all, the Provincials adapted themselves to the situation so defiantly that they puzzled, shook, and overawed the French, who thought them two or three times stronger than they really were. Recklessly defiant though they were, however, they did provide the breaching batteries with enough cover for the purpose in hand. This is amply proved both by the fewness of their casualties and by the evidence of Bastide, the British engineer at Annapolis, who inspected the lines of investment on his arrival, twelve days before the surrender, and reported them sufficiently protected.

Where the Provincials showed their 'prentice hands to genuine disadvantage was in their absurdly solemn and utterly futile councils of war. No schoolboys' debating club could well have done worse than the council held to consider du Chambon's stereotyped answer to the usual summons sent in at the beginning of a siege. The formula that 'his cannon would answer for him' provoked a tremendous storm in the council's teacup and immediately resulted in the following resolution: 'Advised, Unanimously, that the Towne of Louisbourg be Attacked this Night.' But, confronted with 'a great Dissatysfaction in many of the officers and Souldiers at the designed attack of the towne this Night,' it was 'Advised, Unanimously,' by a second council, called in great haste, 'that the Said Attack be deferred for the Present.' This 'Present' lasted during the rest of the siege.

Once the New Englanders had settled down, however, they wisely began to increase their weight of metal, as well as to decrease the range at which they used it. They set to work with a will to make a breach at the North-West Gate of Louisbourg, near where the inner angle of the walls abutted on the harbour; and they certainly needed all their indomitable perseverance when it came to arming their new 'North-Western' or 'Titcomb's Battery.' The twenty-two pounders had required two hundred men apiece. The forty-two pounders took three hundred. Two of these unwieldy guns were hauled a couple of miles round the harbour, in the dark, from that 'Royal Battery' which Vaughan had taken 'by the Grace of God and the courage of 13 Men,' and then successfully mounted at 'Titcomb's,' just where they could do the greatest damage to their former owners, the French.

Well-trained gunners were exceedingly scarce. Pepperrell could find only six among his four thousand men. But Warren lent him three more, whom he could ill spare, as no one knew when a fleet might come out from France. With these nine instructors to direct them Pepperrell's men closed in their line of fire till besieged and besiegers came within such easy musket-shot of one another that taunting challenges and invitations could be flung across the intervening space.

Each side claimed advantages and explained shortcomings to its own satisfaction. A New England diarist says: 'We began our fire with as much fury as possible, and the French returned it as warmly with Cannon, Mortars, and continual showers of musket balls; but by 11 o'clock we had beat them all from their guns.' A French diarist of the same day says that the fire from the walls was stopped on purpose, chiefly to save powder; while the same reason is assigned for the British order to cease fire exactly one hour later.

The practice continued to be exceedingly bad on both sides; so bad, indeed, that the New Englanders suffered more from the bursting of their own guns than from the enemy's fire. The nine instructors could not be everywhere; and all their good advice could not prevent the eager amateurs from grossly overloading the double-shotted pieces. 'Another 42-pound gun burst at the Grand Battery.' 'Captain Hale is dangerously hurt by the bursting of another gun. He was the mainstay of our gunnery since Captain Rhodes's misfortune'--a misfortune due to the same cause. But, in spite of all such drawbacks on the British side, Louisbourg got much the worst of it. The French had to fire from the centre outwards, at a semicircle of batteries that fired back convergingly at them. Besides, it was almost as hard to hit the thin, irregular line of British batteries as it was to miss the deep, wide target of overcrowded Louisbourg. The walls were continually being smashed from without and patched up from within. The streets were ploughed from end to end. Many houses were laid in ruins: only one remained intact when the siege was over. The non-combatants, who now exceeded the garrison effectives, were half buried in the smothering casemates underground; and though the fighting men had light, air, and food enough, and though they were losing very few in killed and wounded, they too began to feel that Louisbourg must fall if it was not soon relieved from outside.

The British, on the contrary, grew more and more confident, both afloat and ashore, though they had one quite alarming scare ashore. They knew their navy outmatched the French; and they saw that, while Warren was being strengthened, du Chambon was being left as devoid of naval force as ever. But their still greater confidence ashore was, for the time being, very rudely shaken when they heard that Marin, the same French guerilla leader who had been sent down from Quebec against Annapolis with six or seven hundred whites and Indians, had been joined by the promised