The numbers came out as lopsided as the day had felt. The British official return counted around 547 killed, some 1,356 wounded, and about 77 missing, close to two thousand men, and some accounts round the total up past that and push the dead far higher, toward eight hundred or a thousand. Either way it was one of the bloodiest defeats the British suffered in the whole war: somewhere between nineteen hundred and two thousand casualties, most of them spent in a few hours in front of a wall of logs. The French, fighting from behind that wall, lost only around three hundred fifty to three hundred eighty men on July 8 itself, perhaps five hundred or so counting the skirmish two days before. A small army had destroyed a large one and barely been scratched.

For Montcalm it was the victory of his life, an improbable, against-all-odds triumph that ranks as his defensive masterpiece. He had held the gateway to Canada with a force a quarter the size of the one that came for it. When it was over he raised a great cross on the field where his men had stood, giving the credit, as he saw it, to divine intervention. The cross became part of the legend of the day.

For James Abercromby it was the end. The defeat was so total and so clearly self-inflicted, an army wrecked against a wall its own guns could have broken, that there was no defending it. The historian Lawrence Gipson wrote that no American campaign of the war “ever launched ... involved a greater number of errors of judgment.” Pitt recalled him by letter that September. He never commanded an army again. In his place Pitt sent Major General Jeffery Amherst, the officer who had just taken Louisbourg, to finish the job in the north.

The grief for Lord Howe outlasted the shame of the battle. The young general who had been the heart of the army was buried at Albany, and the loss of him was felt far beyond the camp. The Province of Massachusetts Bay paid for a monument to him in Westminster Abbey in London, an unusual honor for a colony to bestow, a measure of how much the man had been loved by the colonials who served under him. The army that lost the battle had, in a real sense, already lost it the moment he was killed.

And yet the fort fell anyway, the very next year, and almost without a fight. In 1759 Amherst came up the same corridor with another army, and this time the French did not try to hold the Heights. They evacuated Carillon, blew up and partly wrecked the fort behind them in late July, and the British walked into the ruins on July 27, 1759, and gave the place the name it has carried ever since: Fort Ticonderoga. The wall of logs that had killed two thousand men in 1758 changed hands in 1759 with hardly a shot.

The battle did not change the war. Pitt had aimed three blows at New France in 1758, and the other two landed. Louisbourg fell that summer, opening the sea road to Quebec. Fort Duquesne in the west was taken late in the year. Even with the disaster at Carillon in the middle, 1758 was the year the war turned in Britain’s favor, and the men who died in front of Montcalm’s wall did so in a campaign season their side, on the whole, won. Their commander had handed the French their greatest victory of the war, and it had not been enough to save New France.

One cost did not show up in the casualty returns. The whole thing had been watched. Native observers saw the largest army on the continent throw itself to pieces against a French wall, and a British defeat on that scale, witnessed by the very nations both empires were courting, did the British no favors when they next went looking for allies. The corridor between the lakes was never only an imperial prize. The Haudenosaunee and other nations had lived in this country, claimed it, and fought over it for generations before either crown drew a line on it, and it was their allegiance, more than any fort, that would help decide who finally held the north.