Upstate NY fort to commemorate anniversary of 1758 battle

A 15,000-strong British army sailed up Lake George 250 years ago this summer, intent on taking Fort Ticonderoga, France's southernmost outpost in the region. The French, outnumbered nearly five to one but well fortified, hastily built 8-foot-high log barriers as the enemy approached.

The name Ticonderoga still resonates among veterans of Scotland's most revered military regiment, the Black Watch, but not because the fight went well for their predecessors.

Hacking through brush, felled trees and sharpened tree limbs that slowed their advance to a desperate crawl, the 42nd Highland Regiment and other redcoats were easy targets for French gunners firing from behind the barriers.

"They go in 1,000 strong and lose 500," British author Stephen Brumwell said of the Black Watch casualties as he stood on the fort's wind-swept ramparts, not far from where hundreds of his countrymen are buried.

Almost 2,000 British troops in all were killed, wounded or captured at Ticonderoga, along with some 440 Frenchmen.

Veterans of the Black Watch, which has been merged with other British military units after nearly three centuries as an independent regiment, will join British, Canadian and American active military personnel here in July for a memorial service marking the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carillon, also known as the Battle of Ticonderoga.

The name Ticonderoga lives on at a desert base camp in Iraq named by a British unit.

"They still haven't forgotten," Brumwell, author of several books on the 18th-century British military in North America, said during a recent history conference.

"For them it's a very poignant moment, this massive shedding of blood. The British are great fans of these glorious defeats."