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."[610] High as this praise is, it seems to have been deserved.  The young nobleman, who was then in his thirty-fourth year, had the qualities of a leader of men.  The army felt him, from general to drummer-boy.  He was its soul; and while breathing into it his own energy and ardor, and bracing it by stringent discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service and gave it new shapes to suit the time and place.  During the past year he had studied the art of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in their scouting-parties, sharing all their hardships and making himself one of them.  Perhaps the reforms that he introduced were fruits of this rough self-imposed schooling.  He made officers and men throw off all useless incumbrances, cut their hair close, wear leggings to protect them from briers, brown the barrels of their muskets, and carry in their knapsacks thirty pounds of meal, which they cooked for themselves; so that, according to an admiring Frenchman, they could live a month without their supply-trains.[611] “You would laugh to see the droll figure we all make,” writes an officer.  “Regulars as well as provincials have cut their coats so as scarcely to reach their waists.  No officer or private is allowed to carry more than one blanket and a bearskin.  A small portmanteau is allowed each officer.  No women follow the camp to wash our linen.  Lord Howe has already shown an example by going to the brook and washing his own."[612]

[Footnote 608:  Chesterfield, Letters, IV. 260 (ed.  Mahon).]

[Footnote 609:  Wolfe to his Father, 7 Aug. 1758, in Wright, 450.]