Towards the end of June he reached that valley by the head of Lake George which for five years past had been the annual mustering-place of armies.  Here were now gathered about eleven thousand men, half regulars and half provincials,[724] drilling every day, firing by platoons, firing at marks, practising manoeuvres in the woods; going out on scouting parties, bathing parties, fishing parties; gathering wild herbs to serve for greens, cutting brushwood and meadow hay to make hospital beds.  The sick were ordered on certain mornings to repair to the surgeon’s tent, there, in prompt succession, to swallow such doses as he thought appropriate to their several ailments; and it was further ordered that “every fair day they that can walk be paraded together and marched down to the lake to wash their hands and faces.”  Courts-martial were numerous; culprits were flogged at the head of each regiment in turn, and occasionally one was shot.  A frequent employment was the cutting of spruce tops to make spruce beer.  This innocent beverage was reputed sovereign against scurvy; and such was the fame of its virtues that a copious supply of the West Indian molasses used in concocting it was thought indispensable to every army or garrison in the wilderness.  Throughout this campaign it is repeatedly mentioned in general orders, and the soldiers are promised that they shall have as much of it as they want at a halfpenny a quart.[725]

[Footnote 724:  Mante, 210.]

[Footnote 725:  Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson in the Expedition against Ticonderoga, 1759.  Journal of Samuel Warner, a Massachusetts Soldier, 1759.  General and Regimental Orders, Army of Major-General Amherst, 1759.  Diary of Sergeant Merriman, of Ruggles’s Regiment, 1759. I owe to William L. Stone, Esq., the use of the last two curious documents.]

The rear of the-army was well protected from insult.  Fortified posts were built at intervals of three or four miles along the road to Fort Edward, and especially at the station called Half-way Brook; while, for the whole distance, a broad belt of wood on both sides was cut down and burned, to deprive a skulking enemy of cover.  Amherst was never long in one place without building a fort there.  He now began one, which proved wholly needless, on that flat rocky hill where the English made their intrenched camp during the siege of Fort William Henry.  Only one bastion of it was ever finished, and this is still shown to tourists under the name of Fort George.

The army embarked on Saturday, the twenty-first of July.  The Reverend Benjamin Pomeroy watched their departure in some concern, and wrote on Monday to Abigail, his wife:  “I could wish for more appearance of dependence on God than was observable among them; yet I hope God will grant deliverance unto Israel by them.”  There was another military pageant, another long procession of boats and banners, among the mountains and islands of Lake George.  Night found them near the outlet; and