The garrison marched out with the honors of war, to be
transported to France, together with such of the civilian
population as wished to go.
The British squadron then sailed into the harbor. Pepperrell's
strange army, ragged and war-worn after the long siege, entered
the town by the south gate. They had fought as crusaders, for to
many of them Catholic Louisbourg was a stronghold of Satan.
Whitfield, the great English evangelist, then in New England, had
given them a motto--Nil desperandum Christo duce. There is a
story that one of the English chaplains, old Parson Moody, a man
of about seventy, had brought with him from Boston an axe and was
soon found using it to hew down the altar and images in the
church at Louisbourg. If the story is true, it does something to
explain the belief of the French in the savagery of their
opponents who would so treat things which their enemies held to
be most sacred. The French had met this fanaticism with a
savagery equally intense and directed not against things but
against the flesh of men. An inhabitant of Louisbourg during the
siege describes the dauntless bravery of the Indian allies of the
French during the siege: "Full of hatred for the English whose
ferocity they abhor, they destroy all upon whom they can lay
hands.
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