once on the way drives with such fury that the route is marked by
"yelping dogs, broken-backed pigs and dismembered geese."

It was under this playwright and satirist, who had some skill as
a soldier, that the British cause now received a blow from which
it never recovered. Burgoyne had taken part in driving the
Americans from Canada in 1776 and had spent the following winter
in England using his influence to secure an independent command.
To his later undoing he succeeded. It was he, and not, as had
been expected, General Carleton, who was appointed to lead the
expedition of 1777 from Canada to the Hudson. Burgoyne was given
instructions so rigid as to be an insult to his intelligence. He
was to do one thing and only one thing, to press forward to the
Hudson and meet Howe. At the same time Lord George Germain, the
minister responsible, failed to instruct Howe to advance up the
Hudson to meet Burgoyne. Burgoyne had a genuine belief in the
wisdom of this strategy but he had no power to vary it, to meet
changing circumstances, and this was one chief factor in his
failure.

Behold Burgoyne then, on the 17th of June, embarking on Lake
Champlain the army which, ever since his arrival in Canada on the
6th of May, he had been preparing for this advance. He had rather
more than seven thousand men, of whom nearly one-half were
Germans under the competent General Riedesel. In the force of
Burgoyne we find the ominous presence of some hundreds of Indian
allies. They had been attached to one side or the other in every
war fought in those regions during the previous one hundred and
fifty years. In the war which ended in 1763 Montcalm had used
them and so had his opponent Amherst. The regiments from the New