Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1756 to 1763, part 4

{268} Why did Amherst not come to Wolfe's aid?

His enemies say because the commanding general was so sure the siege of Quebec would fail that he did not want any share of the blame.

That may be unjust.

Amherst was of the slow, cautious kind, who marched doggedly to victory.

He may not have wished to risk a second Ticonderoga.

Wolfe's position was now desperate.

His only alternatives were success or ruin.

"You can't cure me," he told his surgeon, "but mend me up so I can go on for a few days."

What he did in those few days left his name immortal.

Robert Stobo, who had been captured from Washington's battalions on the Ohio, and who knew every foot of Quebec from five years of captivity, had escaped, joined Wolfe, and drawn plans of all surroundings.

From his ship above Quebec Wolfe could see there was one path just behind the city where men might ascend to the Plains of Abraham outside the rear wall, but the path was guarded, and Bougainville's troops patrolled westward as far as Cape Rouge.

[Illustration: LOUIS JOSEPH, MARQUIS DE MONTCALM] It was now September.

From their trenches above the river the French could see the English evacuating camp at Montmorency.

They were jubilant.

Surely the English were giving up the siege.

Night after night English transports loaded with soldiers ascended the St. Lawrence above Quebec.

What did it mean?

Was it a feint to draw Montcalm's men away from the east side?

{269} The French general was sleeplessly anxious.

He had not passed a night in bed since the end of June.

The fall rains were beginning, and another month of work in the trenches meant half the army invalided.

The most of the English fleet was working up and down with the tide between the western limits of Quebec and Cape Rouge, nine miles away.

Bougainville's force was increased to three thousand men, and he was ordered to keep especial watch westward.

The steepness of the precipice was guard enough near the town.

Wednesday, the 12th of September, the English troops were ordered to hold themselves in readiness.

They passed the day cleaning their arms, and were ordered not to speak after nightfall or permit a sound to be heard from the ranks.

Admiral Saunders with the main fleet was to feign attack on the east side of the city.

Admiral Holmes with Wolfe's army, now numbering not four thousand men, was to glide down with the tide from Cape Rouge above Quebec.

Because the main fleet lay on the east side Montcalm felt sure the attack would come from that quarter.

Deserters had brought word to Wolfe that some flatboats with provisions were coming down the river to Quebec that night.

Here, then, the position!

Saunders on the east side, opposite Beauport, feigning attack; Montcalm watching him from the Beauport cliffs; Wolfe nine miles up the river west of the city; Bougainville watching him, watching too for those provisions, for Quebec was down to empty larder.

It is said that as Wolfe rested in his ship, the _Sutherland_, off Cape Rouge, he felt strange premonition of approaching death, and repeated the words of Gray's "Elegy,"--"The paths of glory lead but to the grave,"--but this has been denied.

Certainly he had such strange consciousness of impending death that, taking a miniature of his fiancée from his breast, he asked a fellow-officer to return it to her.

About midnight the tide began to ebb, and two lanterns were hung as a sign from the masthead of the _Sutherland_.

Instantly all the ships glided silent as the great river down with the tide.

The night was moonless.

Near the little bridle path now known as Wolfe's Cove the ships draw {270} ashore.

Sharp as iron on stone a sentry's voice rings out, "Who goes?"

"The French," answers an officer, who speaks perfect French.

"What regiment?"

"The Queen's," replies the officer, who chances to know that Bougainville has a regiment of that name.

Thinking they were the provision transports, this sentry was satisfied.

Not so another.

He ran down to the water's edge, and peering through the darkness called, "Why can't you speak louder?"

"Hush you!

We 'll be overheard," answers the English officer in French.

Thus the English boats glided towards the little bridle path that led up to the rear of the city.

Wolfe's Cove is not a path steep as a stair up the face of a rock, as the most of the schoolbooks teach; it is a little weed-grown, stony gully, easy to climb, but slant and narrow, where I have walked many a night to drink from the spring near the foot of the cliff.

Twenty-four volunteers lead the way up the stony path, silent and agile as cats.

At the top are the tents of the sentries, who rush from their couches to be overpowered by the English.

Before daybreak the whole army has ascended to the plateau behind the city, known as the Plains of Abraham.

No use entering here into the dispute whether Wolfe took his place where the goal now stands, or farther back from the city wall.

Roughly speaking, the main line of Wolfe's forces, three deep, with himself, Monckton, and Murray in command, faced the rear of Quebec about three quarters of a mile from what was then the wall.

To his left was the wooded road now known as St. Louis.

He posts Townshend facing this, at right angles to his front line.

Another battalion lay in the woods to the rear.

There were, besides, a reserve regiment, and a battalion to guard the landing.

What was Wolfe's position?

Behind him lay Bougainville with three thousand French soldiers, fresh and in perfect condition.

In front lay Quebec with three thousand more.

To his right was the river; to his left, across the St. Charles, Montcalm's main army of five thousand men.

"When your enemies blunder, {271} don't interrupt them," Napoleon is reported to have advised.

If some one had not blundered badly now, it might have been a second Ticonderoga with Wolfe; but some one did blunder most tragically.

Montcalm had come from the trenches above Beauport, where he had been guarding against Saunders' landing, and he had ordered hot tea and beer served to the troops, when he happened to look across the St. Charles River towards Quebec.

It had been cloudy, but the sun had just burst out; and there, standing in the morning light, were the English in battle array, red coat and tartan kilt, grenadier and Highlander, in the distance a confused mass of color, which was not the white uniform of the French.

"This is a serious business," said Montcalm hurriedly to his aide.

Then, spurs to his big black horse, he was galloping furiously along the Beauport road, over the resounding bridge across the St. Charles, up the steep cobblestone streets that lead from Lower to Upper Town, and out by the St. Louis road to the Plains of Abraham.

In Quebec all was confusion.

_Who_ had given the order for the troops to move out against the English without waiting for Bougainville to come from Cape Rouge?

But there they were, huddling, disorderly columns that crowded on each other, filing out of the St. Louis and St. John Gates, with a long string of battalions following Montcalm up from the St. Charles.

And Ramezay, who was commandant of the city, refused to send out part of his troops; and Vaudreuil, who was at Beauport, delayed to come; and though Montcalm waited till ten o'clock, Bougainville did not come up from Cape Rouge with his three thousand men.

Easy to criticise and say Montcalm should have waited till Bougainville and Vaudreuil came.

He could _not_ wait, for Wolfe's position cut his forces in two, and the army was without supplies.

With his four thousand five hundred men he accepted fate's challenge.

Bagpipes shrilling, English flags waving to the wind, the French soldiers shouting riotously, the two armies moved towards each other.

Then the English halted, silent, motionless {272} statues.

The men were refreshed, for during the four hours' wait from daylight, Wolfe had permitted them to rest on the grassed plain.

The French came bounding forward, firing as they ran, and bending down to reload.

The English waited till the French were but forty yards away.

"They were not to throw away their fire," Wolfe had ordered.

Now forty yards, if you measure it off in your mind's eye, is short space between hostile armies.

It is not as wide as the average garden front in a suburban city.

Then suddenly the thin red line of the English spoke in a crash of fire.

The shots were so simultaneous that they sounded like one terrific crash of ear-splitting thunder.

The French had no time to halt before a second volley rent the air.

Then a clattering fire rocketed from the British like echoes from a precipice.

With wild halloo the British were charging, .

.

.

charging, .

.

.

charging, the Highlanders leading with their broadswords flashing overhead and their mountain blood on fire, Wolfe to the fore of the grenadiers till a shot broke his wrist!

Wrapping his handkerchief about the wound as he ran, the victorious young general was dashing forward when a second shot hit him and a third pierced his breast.

He staggered a step, reeled, fell to the ground.

Three soldiers and an officer ran to his aid and carried him in their arms to the rear.

He would have no surgeon.

It was useless, he said.

"But the day is ours, and see that you keep it," he muttered, sinking back unconscious.

A moment later he was roused by wild, hilarious, jubilant, heart-shattering shouts.

"Gad!

they run!

See how they run!"

said an English voice.

"_Who_--run?"

demanded Wolfe, roused as if from the sleep of death.

"The enemy, sir.

They give way .

.

.

everywhere."

"Go, one of you," commanded the dying general; "tell Colonel Burton to march Webb's regiment down Charles River to cut off retreat by the bridge.

Now God be praised!"

he added, sinking back; "I die in peace!"

And the spirit of Wolfe had departed, leaving as a heritage a New Empire of the North, and an immortal fame.

[Illustration: DEATH OF WOLFE (From the painting by Benjamin West)] {273} Fate had gone hard against the gallant Montcalm.

The first volley from the English line had mowed his soldiers down like ripe wheat.

At the second volley the ranks broke and the ground was thick strewn with the dead.

When the English charged, the French fled in wildest panic downhill for the St. Charles.

Wounded and faint, Montcalm on his black charger was swept swiftly along St. Louis road in the blind stampede of retreat.

Near the walls a ball passed through his groins.

Two soldiers caught him from falling, and steadied him on either side of his horse through St. Louis gate, where women, waiting in mad anxiety, saw the blood dripping over his horse.

"My God!

My God!

Our marquis is slain!"

they screamed.

"It is nothing,--nothing,--good friends; don't trouble about me," answered the wounded general as he passed for the last time under the arched gateway of St. Louis road.

"How long have I to live?"

he asked the surgeon into whose house he had been carried.

"Few hours, my lord."

"So much the better," answered Montcalm.

"I shall not live to see Quebec surrendered."

Before daylight, he was dead.

Wrapped in his soldier's cloak, laid in a rough box, the body was carried that night to the Ursuline Convent, where a bursting bomb had scooped a great hole in the floor.

Sad-eyed nuns and priests crowded the chapel.

By torchlight, amid tears and sobs, the body was laid to rest.

Both generals had died as they had lived,--gallantly.

To-day both are regarded as heroes and commemorated by monuments; but how did their governments treat them?

Of course there were wild huzzas in London and solemn memorial services over Wolfe; but when his aged mother petitioned the government that her dead son's salary might be computed at 10 pounds a day,--the salary of a commander in chief,--instead of 2 pounds a day, she was refused in as curtly uncivil a note as was ever penned.

Montcalm had died in debt, and when his family petitioned the French government to pay these debts, the King thought it should be done, but he did not take the trouble to see that his {274} good intention was carried out.

It was easy and cheaper for orators to talk of heroes giving their lives for their country.

There are no better examples in history of the truth that glory and honor and true service must be their own reward, independent of any compensation, any suffering, any sacrifice.

Though the panic retreat continued for hours and Quebec was not surrendered for some days, the battle was practically decided in ten minutes.

The campaign of the next year was gallant but fruitless.

In April, before the fleet has come back to the English, De Lévis throws himself with the remnants of the French army against the rear wall of Quebec; and as Montcalm had come out to fight Wolfe, so Murray marches out to fight De Lévis.

Both sides claimed the battle of Ste.

Foye as victory, but another such victory would have exterminated the English.

Lévis outside the walls, Murray glad to be inside the walls, each side waited for the spring fleet.

If France had come to Canada's aid, even yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray's army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May was British.

That decided Canada's fate.

De Lévis retreated swiftly for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the east proceeds General Murray.

De Lévis and Vaudreuil had less than two thousand fighting men at Montreal.

September 8th they capitulated, and three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada passed under the dominion of England.

Officers, many of the nobility, Bigot and his crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant's ring were put on trial and punished for their corruption and misrule.

Bigot suffered banishment and the confiscation of property.

The other members of his clique received like sentences.

Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders,--like Champlain and Maisonneuve,--spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her {275} explorers, spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights,--like Frontenac and Iberville and Montcalm,--New France had fallen.

Why?

For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan.

But be this remembered,--and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,--the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation.

Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation.

It is Canada,--a New Dominion.

To-day wander round Quebec.

Tablets and monuments consecrate many of the old hero days.

Though the British government rebuilt a line of walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace even a vestige of the old French walls.

Mounds tell you where there were bastions.

A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old ramparts.

An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned over the St. Lawrence.

Of the palace where the Intendant held his revels there are not even ruins.

If you drive out past Beauport, you will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick walls of Château Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild.

That is all you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom;

but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,--chapel spire and cross and domed cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold.

The church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient régime.

Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of power they hold in the government of the Dominion?

{276} CHAPTER XIII FROM 1763 TO 1812

English law and Quebec--French rights guarded--Pontiac's war--Siege of Detroit--Fight at Bloody Run--Michilimackinac falls--How Bouquet wins victory--Return of captives--The peddlers--Methods of Nor'westers--Traders invade the Up Country--Disaffection in Canada--Canada invaded--Quebec invested--Montgomery's fight--"Rats in a trap"--Relief at last--Tricks of ringsters--Coming of Loyalists--Life in the backwoods