One more success was scored by the French before the winter came on. In October, Vaudreuil sent out from Montreal a raiding party of the old type, consisting of about 300 Canadians and Indians under an officer named Belêtre. They went up the St. Lawrence into Lake Ontario, landed on its southern shore, at some distance east of the ruins of Oswego, crossed to the portage between the Mohawk and Wood Creek, where the forts were no longer standing, and moved down the Mohawk to raid the outlying settlements. Between the head waters of the Mohawk and Schenectady, on the northern side of the river, was the district known as the German Flats, where German colonists had been planted about the year 1720. They came from the Palatinate, and their group of houses bore the name of the settlement or village {268} of the Palatines. In the second week of November, Belêtre's party broke in among them, burnt houses and barns, killed cattle, horses, and some of the inhabitants, carried off over a hundred prisoners, and retired in safety in face of a weak detachment from a little English fort on the other side of the river, and of a stronger body of troops whom Lord Howe brought up from Schenectady too late to retrieve the disaster. [Sidenote: _The French triumphant in North America._] [Sidenote: _William Pitt._] This was the end of the campaign, the high-water mark of French successes in North America. At the end of 1757, the English had been beaten at all points. They had failed to attack Louisbourg, they had been driven from Lake George, the country of the Five Nation Indians was nearly cut off, all hold on the rivers and the lakes was gone. The outlook was dark in the extreme: it is always darkest before dawn, and as a matter of fact dawn had already begun; for William Pitt, who had been dismissed from office in April, was recalled by the unanimous voice of the people of England before the end of June, and, leaving to the incompetent Duke of Newcastle the name of Prime Minister, controlled, as Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons, the soldiers, the sailors, the subsidies and the foreign policy of his country.[16] [Footnote 16: Lord Chesterfield in a letter to his son dated May 18, 1758 (1775 ed., vol. iv, p. 137, Letter 298), wrote as follows of the Newcastle-Pitt combination: 'The Duke of Newcastle and Mr. Pitt jog on like man and wife, that is, seldom agreeing, often quarrelling, but by mutual interest upon the whole not parting.'] [Sidenote: _Want of a leader on the English side._]