“See, this is the problem with our colonies. We brought these disagreements from our old land to our new one. Faith, my daughters have more courtesy with one another,” he told me, “and they’ve but barely left the cradle.”

The Connecticut troops did not like our New York ones. The feeling was mutual. Nor did the Dutch volunteers care to serve under any authority but that of Albany’s mayor or his brother. The major general disdained the entire arrangement—our lack of supplies and our sickness were only the start of his list of complaints.

But we gathered our forces and marched, notwithstanding, a hundred miles up through the wilderness, to the place called Wood Creek near the lake that the French called Champlain.

Here the major general called a war council together with the mayor of Albany and the leaders of those men of the Five Nations who had come to join us—Mohawks and Oneidas—who advised us to continue on our way toward Quebec, where even now our fleet from Boston might be starting their assault.

But one week passed, and we were still encamped at Wood Creek while the major general sent out scouts, awaited word from Albany, held more councils, and weighed his options.

Wilde and I sat one night with our backs against the trunks of tall white pine trees, watching yet another war council.

“You see now,” Wilde said, “here you have two very different men, and it’s a lesson for you. On the one hand, you have Captain Schuyler, there”—he nodded to the younger brother of the mayor of Albany—“who clearly thinks we’re wasting time with all this talk, and should move on and fight. And on the other, you’ve our major general, who wants nothing more than to break camp and leave.”

I studied both men, trying to be generous to the major general. “It might just be caution. After all, not much has gone to plan.”

“You cannot take the measure of a man when things are working well,” said Wilde, as though it were a truth I ought to know. “It’s only when the plan goes badly wrong and everything is broken that you’ll see what he is made of—if he breaks, too, or builds something from the pieces that remain.”

Of the things I learned that summer, those few words perhaps have stayed with me the longest. I did take them to my heart, there on that evening underneath the pines, and they proved to be true.

The major general did break camp, with his excuses that it was now too late in the season, and too many of our men had fallen ill, and there were too few of us, and the men of the Seneca nation had not come to join us as promised, and all was poorly planned from the beginning, and, at any rate, this was the will of God, and not his fault.

But before heading back to Albany, he granted Captain Schuyler leave to lead a force of volunteers in an assault against the French of La Prairie.