Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...decade French-led Indians had whooped down on outlying New England farms, and the colonial defenders had done little to stop the raids. In the summer of '55 Rogers' New Hampshire unit was attached to an offensive aimed at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The British colonials had struck no effective blow, had no notion of enemy strength. Rogers volunteered for missions into the wilderness, returned with the required intelligence-and news that his party had shot up a French canoe. It was the first offensive action of a sorry campaign...
Bush Fighters. As the woodsman became bolder, his sorties changed from mere reconnaissance missions to raids in force. The commando warfare was brand-new to the British and confounding to the French. A Rogers raid against Ticonderoga in December 1757 was typical of his methods. In weather that would have clogged ordinary troop movements, Rogers led 150 men through the untracked forest, ranged them about the fort, and, when the French refused to stir outside, slaughtered their cattle and burned their wood supplies, leaving a receipt for what he had destroyed...
Such shenanigans delighted the troops, but they did not always please British commanders-notably General Thomas Gage, whose light infantry showed up poorly in comparison with the bush fighters, who had become known as "Rogers' Rangers." Gage became Rogers' lifelong enemy, and years later, when the New Hampshire man commanded the outpost at Michilimackinac on Lake Michigan, Gage was to bring a wholly unfounded charge of treason against...
Most of the rest of his life ran downhill. His accounts were snarled, and the British refused to honor bills he had run up for provisions. Soldiers rescued him from debtors' prison in New York, but in London, on one of the trips he made to raise money, he was jailed for 22 months. His most ambitious moneymaking venture, which gave Novelist Kenneth Roberts the title for his book about Rogers, was to find a northwest passage to the Pacific. But debt, circumstance and such enemies as Gage kept him from searching for the ' overland route that...
Room at the Top. A tragicomedy of Angry Young Manners about a Julien Sorel of the welfare state. Sometimes embarrassingly close to caricature, it remains one of the best British pictures in years...