The Glamour of Lost Causes

The first adult novel I can remember reading, as a young teenager, was Kenneth Roberts’s historical epic, Northwest Passage. The first half of the novel dealt with the 1759 expedition of Rogers’s Rangers to destroy an Abenaki mission on the St. Francis River, in what is now the Eastern Townships. Well I remember the gripping tale Roberts told—the stealthy march of the brave New Englanders through the forest, the surprise attack on the village just before dawn, and then the long, agonizing retreat to a fort on the Connecticut River, during which the Rangers were pursued by French and Indians and bedevilled by starvation (their provisions having long since given out).

Reading an account of this episode in William M. Fowler Jr.’s recently published history, Empires at War: The Seven Years’ War and the Struggle for North America 1754–1763, I was pleased to learn that Rogers lost more men on the way home—through starvation and enemy action—than he...