From Cawdor Johnson and Boswell drove to Fort George, “the most regular fortification in the island,” according to Johnson; “where,” he continues, “they were entertained by Sir Eyre Coote, the Governor, with such elegance of conversation, as left us no attention to the delicacies of his table.” Wolfe, who saw it in 1751, when it was partly made, writes: “I believe there is still work for six or seven years to do. When it is finished one may venture to say (without saying much) that it will be the most considerable fortress, and the best situated in Great Britain.”[562] In the evening our travellers continued their journey to Inverness—a distance of twelve miles. [Sidenote: CULLODEN.] The reviewer of Johnson’s narrative in the _Scots Magazine_ expresses his wonder that as “he must have passed near the Field of Culloden he studiously avoided to mention that battle.”[563] Boswell is equally reticent. The explanation is perhaps merely due to the dusk of evening, in which they passed by the spot. It is not unlikely, on the other hand, that the silence was intentional. Johnson shows a curious reticence in a passage in which he refers to the Rebellion of 1745. In his description of Rasay he writes: “Not many years ago the late laird led out one hundred men upon a military expedition.” [Sidenote: THE BUTCHER DUKE.] Had he visited Culloden or described the campaign, his indignation must have flamed forth at the cruelties of the butcher duke. Boswell, Lowlander though he was, said “that they would never be forgotten.” With Smollett, in his _Tears of Scotland_, they might well have exclaimed:—
“Yet when the rage of battle ceased, The victor’s soul was not appeased: The naked and forlorn must feel Devouring flames and murd’ring steel.”
Johnson does indeed speak of “the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror.”[564] It was about this time, or only a little later, that Scott was learning “to detest the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred.”[565] That an Englishman could travel in safety, unarmed and unguarded, through a country which only seven and twenty years before had been so mercilessly treated seems not a little surprising. For the next day or two he was to follow a course where fire and sword had swept along. Wolfe, whose “great name,” we boast, was “compatriot with our own,” who had so little of the savage spirit of war that he would rather have written Gray’s _Elegy_ than take Quebec, even he exulted that “as few prisoners were taken of the Highlanders as possible. We had an opportunity of avenging ourselves. The rebels left near 1,500 dead.” Yet he did not think that enough had been done. The carnage-pile was not lofty enough. Surveying the battle-field five years later, he writes in a letter to his father, a general in the army, “I find room for a military criticism. You would not have left those ruffians the only possible means of conquest, nor suffered multitudes to go off unhurt with the power to destroy.”[566] Ruffians indeed they had shown themselves in their raid into England, but enough surely had been done in the way of slaughter to satisfy the most exacting military critic. How merciless our soldiers had been is proved by the letters that were written from the camp. A despatch sent off from Inverness on April 25, nine days after the battle, says that “the misery and distress of the fugitive rebels was inexpressible, hundreds being found dead of their wounds and through hunger at the distance of twelve, fourteen, and even twenty miles from the field.”[567] On June 5 an officer wrote from Fort Augustus: “His Royal Highness has carried fire and sword through their country, and driven off their cattle, which we bring to our camp in great quantities, sometimes 2,000 in a drove. The people are deservedly in a most deplorable way, and must perish either by sword or famine, a just reward for traitors.”[568]