Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
two days later. A rout began, with Washington trying manfully to prevent a complete shambles, organizing the transport of the wounded, and trying to keep the retreat in some sequence. The French took 23 dead Indians, and about 16 wounded, compared with about 1,000 British dead and wounded, scores of whom were scalped by the Indians. Fortunately for the British, and as was their custom, the Indians had no interest in following up on their victory beyond taking the heads and picking the pockets of the enemy and whatever could be had from their wagons. The wreckage of Braddock’s flying column and the balance of his force arrived like a grim tornado in Philadelphia and, although they were in the searing heat of late July, demanded winter quarters.
The British did better in Acadia, and seized the French fort at the narrow isthmus connecting Cape Breton to Nova Scotia. There followed the expulsion ultimately of about 14,000 French and Franco-Indian civilians from Acadia (mainly Nova Scotia, and what are now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), an eerie foretaste of some greater deportations of helpless civilian populations in the centuries to come, an ethnic cleansing. The Acadians had generally refused an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, because of conflicting loyalties, a refusal to draw a hostile line with French and Indian relatives, and fear of being deprived of their right to practice as Roman Catholics and to retain their language. In about equal numbers, they were assimilated into New England, went to Louisiana and laid the base of the “Cajuns,” returned to France, or returned to the area of their expulsion when conditions had improved. It was a shabby affair, and there was no excuse for it, though it was conducted less brutally than more modern deportations, including by the United States of its southeastern Indians.2
The British also had a modest success on Lake George, south of Montreal, where both sides took several hundred casualties and continued into the winter more or less as they had entered the spring, though with the French toiling to build a larger fort. Admiral Boscawen had seized two ships and several hundred soldiers, but the main French reinforcements for Canada, under General Montcalm, had arrived successfully in Quebec. The attack on Niagara, which was the only one of the projected operations that made much sense, was not launched in 1755, as planned. Despite repeated acts of war and probably 2,000 casualties or prisoners taken, while Britain stood clearly in the eyes of the world and such international law as there was as an aggressor, France and Britain were still officially at peace. The rout and death of Braddock and the failure of the rest of the British plan had heavy repercussions in London, where Newcastle’s legendary talents at political survivorship would be put to a serious challenge. William Pitt’s hour had almost arrived.
Implausibly, Newcastle still thought he might be able to avoid war with France in Europe. He was trying to maintain his continental “system” of alliances with Austria, the Netherlands, and Georgian Hanover and some neighboring German states, against France and Prussia, steadily emerging as the chief acquirer of German states and a potential rival in central Europe to Austria, whose empire was largely in the polyglot and irredentist Slavic and Italian wards of eastern and southern Europe. Newcastle proposed to try to add Russia to this alliance, to put a rod on Prussia’s back, concerned always, Pitt and his faction claimed, more with the welfare of Hanover than of Britain.
The rise of Prussia under George II’s brother-in-law, Frederick the Great, caused George II to fear Prussian designs on Hanover, as Frederick had already seized Silesia from Maria Theresa. Acting on this concern, Britain proposed and negotiated renewal of its defensive treaty with Russia in 1755. Frederick feared Russia even more than George feared Prussia, and after first rejecting an overture from Britain on news of the renewal of the Anglo-Russian treaty, Frederick proposed, and in January 1756, concluded with Britain, a non-aggression pact, which became one of mutual assistance should any aggressor disturb “the tranquility of Germany”—i.e., attack either Hanover or Prussia.
This appeared to be a brilliant consolidation of Hanoverian security, but Newcastle had outsmarted himself. Maria Theresa was so outraged at Britain’s treaty with Prussia, from which she proposed to recover Silesia, that she terminated her alliance with Britain. Russia declined to ratify its treaty renewal with Britain; France renounced her treaty with Prussia and formed a new alliance with its rival of 250 years, Austria. This was the real beginning of the 200-year Franco-German conflict. Far from being secure, Hanover was now threatened by France and Austria.
In an attack that replicated his sudden seizure of Silesia, Frederick invaded the Austrian protectorate of Saxony in August 1756. Austria, France, and Russia declared war on Prussia. While it was reminiscent of the seizure of Silesia, the attack on Saxony, coming on the heels of the arrangements with Britain, also presaged the German attack on Poland immediately after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. And the cascade of treaty-triggered declarations of war would be somewhat replicated 158 years later at the outbreak of World War I (Chapters 8 and 10).
France would protect Austria, but Austria was not bound to assist France—it was sufficient incentive for the French to detach Austria from the British. These tergiversations became known as the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756.
In 1755, the Thirteen Colonies had about 1.5 million people, compared with a little more than four times that in Great Britain (excluding Ireland), around 15 million in France, 3.5 million in Prussia, and just under two million in the Netherlands. The American colonies had a faster rate of growth and higher standard of living than any of the major powers. They were politically primitive but, as events were to prove, had political leadership more talented than the governors the British haphazardly sent to rule over them, and even than the mature European powers themselves. The instances of statehood were already close to hand, though few thought in these terms, especially as the French menace loomed larger and more imminently than ever. The myth of the paltry obscurity of a handful of disparate and insignificant settlements, however, is much exaggerated, both by British snobbery and by the requirements of the mythos of America’s birth.
As Newcastle scattered subsidies across Europe from the Rhine to Russia, to try to raise an alliance that would deter France from going to war in reprisal against Britain’s acts of war in America, Pitt denounced the system of paying subsidies as cowardly and ineffectual with greater force and causticity than ever. His parliamentary remarks were especially vituperative given that he was a member of the government as paymaster of the armed forces, from which post he was finally dismissed in 1755. In 1756, Pitt claimed that Newcastle was deliberately leaving the British base in Minorca, in the Balearic Islands, under-defended, in order to represent the fall of it as evidence of the inadvisability of going to war with France. France had assembled a large naval force in Toulon, its main Mediterranean naval base, and attacked Minorca, which fell in the summer of 1756, despite an effort to protect the island by Admiral John Byng. Newcastle finally declared war on May 18, 1756, after hostilities had been in full swing in the Americas for two years. Partly in order to relieve himself of Pitt’s charges, Newcastle had Byng court-martialed and persecuted him relentlessly, until he was, very unjustly, executed by firing squad in March 1757.
It was of no interest to the other powers what happened between the British and French in North America, and the British and French had no interest in Central and Eastern Europe, except the nostalgic British defense of Hanover. This took the form, in practice, of the British arming and paying extensive Hanoverian and Hessian armies, which they could deploy to North America when conditions in Germany allowed their release. The Netherlands, traditionally one of Newcastle’s allies, was exhausted and had no interest in any of the contested areas and refused to be subsidized back into line as an ally. Sweden, however, was induced to join against Prussia. In its preliminaries this was the most American of all wars to date between the European powers.
Though their fleet was at Toulon, the French were preparing an army of up to 100,000 men in the Channel ports, for an invasion of Britain. Pitt, when he gained control of policy, wanted to mire France in Europe and deploy superior forces to America, India, and the Caribbean.
4. THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, AMERICA
The French commander in Quebec as of May 1756, Montcalm, was an accomplished soldier, though he, too, despised the Indians, and had little use for the Canadians either, but he was a military genius in comparison with Cumberland’s