His efforts to stop the
bloody work--and they were successful efforts involving
danger to himself--clear him of all blame as a man.
The number of persons massacred has been given by some
few British and American writers as amounting to 1,500.
Most people know now that this is nonsense. All but about
a hundred of the losses on the British side are accounted
for otherwise, under the heading of those who were either
killed in battle, or died of sickness, or were given up
at Fort Edward, or were sent back by way of Halifax. It
is simply impossible that more than a hundred were
massacred.
Still, a massacre is a massacre; all sorts of evil are
sure to come of it; and this one was no exception to the
rule. It blackened unjustly the good name of Montcalm.
It led to an intensely bitter hate of the British against
the Canadians, many of whom were given no quarter
afterwards. It caused the British to break the terms of
surrender, which required the prisoners not to fight
again for the next eighteen months. Most of all, the
massacre hurt the Indians, guilty and innocent alike.
Many of them took scalps from men who had smallpox; and
so they carried this dread disease throughout the
wilderness, where it killed fifty times as many of their
own people as they had killed on the British side.
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