The losses in this disastrous action were very heavy; the devotion of the officers, whose conduct was beyond all praise, leading them almost to annihilation. Among the wounded were two men who were to become conspicuous at a later day, Gage the leader of the advanced guard and Captain Horatio Gates of the garrison of New York. Of thirteen hundred and seventy-three non-commissioned officers and men, but four hundred and fifty-nine came off unharmed; and the wounded that were left on the field were tortured and murdered by the Indians after their barbarous manner. The loss of the French was trifling. Three officers were killed and four wounded, all of them at the critical moment while their men were wavering; nine white men also were killed and wounded, and a larger but inconsiderable number of Indians. It was in fact a total and crushing defeat. Yet Count Dieskau, an officer high in the French service in Canada, expressed no surprise when he heard of it, for it was the French rule, founded on bitter experience, never to expose regular troops in the forest without a sufficient force of Indians and irregulars to cover them. The Virginians, whose admirable behaviour had been the one creditable feature in the action, had shown that abundance of good irregular troops were to be found in America; and it was evident that the British needed only to learn from their enemies in order to defeat them. CHAPTER III [Sidenote: 1755.] [Sidenote: June 16.] The first blow against the French in America had failed; it must now be seen how it fared with the operations entrusted to Shirley, Johnson, and Monckton. Shirley, at Massachusetts, had been busy since the beginning of the year in calling the Northern provinces to arms, and they had responded nobly, Massachusetts alone raising forty-five hundred men, and the rest of New England and New York nearly three thousand more. The point first selected for attack was Fort Beauséjour on the Acadian isthmus, for which object two thousand volunteers of New England were sent up to Monckton. Adding to them a handful of regular troops from the garrison,[262] Monckton sailed away without delay to his work. On the 1st of June the expedition anchored in the bay before Fort Beauséjour, which after a fortnight's siege and the feeblest of defences fell, together with a smaller fort called Fort Gaspereau, into Monckton's hands. This success was followed by the expulsion of the greater part of the French population from Acadia, a harsh measure necessitated entirely by the duplicity of the Jesuit priests and of the Canadian Government, who had never ceased to stir up the unhappy peasants to revolt. From henceforth, therefore, Acadia may be dismissed from the sphere of active operations.