Montcalm and Wolfe — Chapter 27, Part 1

The Heights of Abraham Wolfe was deeply moved by the disaster at the heights of Montmorenci, and in a General Order on the next day he rebuked the grenadiers for their precipitation.

"Such impetuous, irregular, and unsoldierlike proceedings destroy all order, make it impossible for the commanders to form any disposition for an attack, and put it out of the general's power to execute his plans.

The grenadiers could not suppose that they could beat the French alone."

The French were elated by their success.

"Everybody," says the commissary Berniers, "thought that the campaign was as good as ended, gloriously for us."

They had been sufficiently confident even before their victory; and the bearer of a flag of truce told the English officers that he had never imagined they were such fools as to attack Quebec with so small a force.

Wolfe, on the other hand, had every reason to despond.

At the outset, before he had seen Quebec and learned the nature of the ground, he had meant to begin the campaign by taking post on the Plains of Abraham, and thence laying siege to the town; but he soon discovered that the Plains of Abraham were hardly more within his reach than was Quebec itself.

Such hope as was left him lay in the composition of Montcalm's army.

He respected the French commander, and thought his disciplined soldiers not unworthy of the British steel; but he held his militia in high scorn, and could he but face them in the open field, he never doubted the result.

But Montcalm also distrusted them, and persisted in refusing the coveted battle.

Wolfe, therefore, was forced to the conviction that his chances were of the smallest.

It is said that, despairing of any decisive stroke, he conceived the idea of fortifying Isle-aux-Coudres, and leaving a part of his troops there when he sailed for home, against another attempt in the spring.

The more to weaken the enemy and prepare his future conquest, he began at the same time a course of action which for his credit one would gladly wipe from the record; for, though far from inhuman, he threw himself with extraordinary intensity into whatever work he had in hand, and, to accomplish it, spared others scarcely more than he spared himself.

About the middle of August he issued a third proclamation to the Canadians, declaring that as they had refused his offers of protection and "had made such ungrateful returns in practising the most unchristian barbarities against his troops on all occasions, he could no longer refrain in justice to himself and his army from chastising them as they deserved."

The barbarities in question consisted in the frequent scalping and mutilating of sentinels and men on outpost duty, perpetrated no less by Canadians than by Indians.

Wolfe's object was twofold: first, to cause the militia to desert, and, secondly, to exhaust the colony.

Rangers, light infantry, and Highlanders were sent to waste the settlements far and wide.

Wherever resistance was offered, farmhouses and villages were laid in ashes, though churches were generally spared.

St. Paul, far below Quebec, was sacked and burned, and the settlements of the opposite shore were partially destroyed.

The parishes of L'Ange Gardien, Château Richer, and St. Joachim were wasted with fire and sword.

Night after night the garrison of Quebec could see the light of burning houses as far down as the mountain of Cape Tourmente.

Near St. Joachim there was a severe skirmish, followed by atrocious cruelties.

Captain Alexander Montgomery, of the forty-third regiment, who commanded the detachment, and who has been most unjustly confounded with the revolutionary general, Richard Montgomery, ordered the prisoners to be shot in cold blood, to the indignation of his own officers.

[753] Robineau de Portneuf, curé of St. Joachim, placed himself at the head of thirty parishioners and took possession of a large stone house in the adjacent parish of Château Richer, where for a time he held the English at bay.

At length he and his followers were drawn out into ambush, where they were surrounded and killed; and, being disguised as Indians, the rangers scalped them all.

[754] [Footnote 753: Fraser _Journal_.

Fraser was an officer under Montgomery, of whom he speaks with anger and disgust.

] [Footnote 754: Knox, II.

32. Most of the contemporary journals mention the incident.

] Most of the French writers of the time mention these barbarities without much comment, while Vaudreuil loudly denounces them.

Yet he himself was answerable for atrocities incomparably worse, and on a far larger scale.

He had turned loose his savages, red and white, along a frontier of six hundred miles, to waste, burn, and murder at will.

"Women and children," such were the orders of Wolfe, "are to be treated with humanity; if any violence is offered to a woman, the offender shall be punished with death."

These orders were generally obeyed.

The English, with the single exception of Montgomery, killed none but armed men in the act of resistance or attack; Vaudreuil's war-parties spared neither age nor sex.

Montcalm let the parishes burn, and still lay fast intrenched in his lines of Beauport.

He would not imperil all Canada to save a few hundred farmhouses; and Wolfe was as far as ever from the battle that he coveted.

Hitherto, his attacks had been made chiefly below the town;

but, these having failed, he now changed his plan and renewed on a larger scale the movements begun above it in July.

With every fair wind, ships and transports passed the batteries of Quebec, favored by a hot fire from Point Levi, and generally succeeded, with more or less damage, in gaining the upper river.

A fleet of flatboats was also sent thither, and twelve hundred troops marched overland to embark in them, under Brigadier Murray.

Admiral Holmes took command of the little fleet now gathered above the town, and operations in that quarter were systematically resumed.

To oppose them, Bougainville was sent from the camp at Beauport with fifteen hundred men.

His was a most arduous and exhausting duty.

He must watch the shores for fifteen or twenty miles, divide his force into detachments, and subject himself and his followers to the strain of incessant vigilance and incessant marching.

Murray made a descent at Pointe-aux-Trembles, and was repulsed with loss.

He tried a second time at another place, was met before landing by a body of ambushed Canadians, and was again driven back, his foremost boats full of dead and wounded.

A third time he succeeded, landed at Deschambault, and burned a large building filled with stores and all the spare baggage of the French regular officers.

The blow was so alarming that Montcalm hastened from Beauport to take command in person; but when he arrived the English were gone.

Vaudreuil now saw his mistake in sending the French frigates up the river out of harm's way, and withdrawing their crews to serve the batteries of Quebec.

Had these ships been there, they might have overpowered those of the English in detail as they passed the town.

An attempt was made to retrieve the blunder.

The sailors were sent to man the frigates anew and attack the squadron of Holmes.

It was too late.

Holmes was already too strong for them, and they were recalled.

Yet the difficulties of the English still seemed insurmountable.

Dysentery and fever broke out in their camps, the number of their effective men was greatly reduced, and the advancing season told them that their work must be done quickly, or not done at all.

On the other side, the distress of the French grew greater every day.

Their army was on short rations.

The operations of the English above the town filled the camp of Beauport with dismay, for troops and Canadians alike dreaded the cutting off of their supplies.

These were all drawn from the districts of Three Rivers and Montreal; and, at best, they were in great danger, since when brought down in boats at night they were apt to be intercepted, while the difficulty of bringing them by land was extreme, through scarcity of cattle and horses.

Discipline was relaxed, disorder and pillage were rife, and the Canadians deserted so fast, that towards the end of August two hundred of them, it is said, would sometimes go off in one night.

Early in the month the disheartening news came of the loss of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the retreat of Bourlamaque, the fall of Niagara, and the expected advance of Amherst on Montreal.

It was then that Levis was despatched to the scene of danger; and Quebec was deplorably weakened by his absence.

About this time the Lower Town was again set on fire by the English batteries, and a hundred and sixty-seven houses were burned in a night.

In the front of the Upper Town nearly every building was a ruin.

At the General Hospital, which was remote enough to be safe from the bombardment, every barn, shed, and garret, and even the chapel itself, were crowded with sick and wounded, with women and children from the town, and the nuns of the Ursulines and the Hôtel-Dieu, driven thither for refuge.

Bishop Pontbriand, though suffering from a mortal disease, came almost daily to visit and console them from his lodging in the house of the curé at Charlesbourg.

Towards the end of August the sky brightened again.

It became known that Amherst was not moving on Montreal, and Bourlamaque wrote that his position at Isle-aux-Noix was impregnable.

On the twenty-seventh a deserter from Wolfe's army brought the welcome assurance that the invaders despaired of success, and would soon sail for home; while there were movements in the English camps and fleet that seemed to confirm what he said.

Vaudreuil breathed more freely, and renewed hope and confidence visited the army of Beauport.

Meanwhile a deep cloud fell on the English.

Since the siege began, Wolfe had passed with ceaseless energy from camp to camp, animating the troops, observing everything, and directing everything; but now the pale face and tall lean form were seen no more, and the rumor spread that the General was dangerously ill.

He had in fact been seized by an access of the disease that had tortured him for some time past; and fever had followed.

His quarters were at a French farmhouse in the camp at Montmorenci; and here, as he lay in an upper chamber, helpless in bed, his singular and most unmilitary features haggard with disease and drawn with pain, no man could less have looked the hero.

But as the needle, though quivering, points always to the pole, so, through torment and languor and the heats of fever, the mind of Wolfe dwelt on the capture of Quebec.

His illness, which began before the twentieth of August, had so far subsided on the twenty-fifth that Knox wrote in his Diary of that day: "His Excellency General Wolfe is on the recovery, to the inconceivable joy of the whole army."

On the twenty-ninth he was able to write or dictate a letter to the three brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray: "That the public service may not suffer by the General's indisposition, he begs the brigadiers will meet and consult together for the public utility and advantage, and consider of the best method to attack the enemy."

The letter then proposes three plans, all bold to audacity.

The first was to send a part of the army to ford the Montmorenci eight or nine miles above its mouth, march through the forest, and fall on the rear of the French at Beauport, while the rest landed and attacked them in front.

The second was to cross the ford at the mouth of the Montmorenci and march along the strand, under the French intrenchments, till a place could be found where the troops might climb the heights.

The third was to make a general attack from boats at the Beauport flats.

Wolfe had before entertained two other plans, one of which was to scale the heights at St. Michel, about a league above Quebec; but this he had abandoned on learning that the French were there in force to receive him.

The other was to storm the Lower Town; but this also he had abandoned, because the Upper Town, which commanded it, would still remain inaccessible.

The brigadiers met in consultation, rejected the three plans proposed in the letter, and advised that an attempt should be made to gain a footing on the north shore above the town, place the army between Montcalm and his base of supply, and so force him to fight or surrender.

The scheme was similar to that of the heights of St. Michel.

It seemed desperate, but so did all the rest; and if by chance it should succeed, the gain was far greater than could follow any success below the town.

Wolfe embraced it at once.

Not that he saw much hope in it.

He knew that every chance was against him.

Disappointment in the past and doom in the future, the pain and exhaustion of disease, toils, and anxieties "too great," in the words of Burke, "to be supported by a delicate constitution, and a body unequal to the vigorous and enterprising soul that it lodged," threw him at times into deep dejection.

By those intimate with him he was heard to say that he would not go back defeated, "to be exposed to the censure and reproach of an ignorant populice."

In other moods he felt that he ought not to sacrifice what was left of his diminished army in vain conflict with hopeless obstacles.

But his final resolve once taken, he would not swerve from it.

His fear was that he might not be able to lead his troops in person.

"I know perfectly well you cannot cure me," he said to his physician; "but pray make me so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty: that is all I want."

In a despatch which Wolfe had written to Pitt, Admiral Saunders conceived that he had ascribed to the fleet more than its just share in the disaster at Montmorenci; and he sent him a letter on the subject.

Major Barré kept it from the invalid till the fever had abated.

Wolfe then wrote a long answer, which reveals his mixed dejection and resolve.

He owns the justice of what Saunders had said, but adds: "I cannot leave out that part of my letter to Mr. Pitt which you object to.

I am sensible of my own errors in the course of the campaign, see clearly wherein I have been deficient, and think a little more or less blame to a man that must necessarily be ruined, of little or no consequences.

I

take the blame of that unlucky day entirely upon my own shoulders, and I expect to suffer for it."

Then, speaking of the new project of an attack above Quebec, he says despondingly: "My ill state of health prevents me from executing my own plan; it is of too desperate a nature to order others to execute."

He proceeds, however, to give directions for it.

"It will be necessary to run as many small craft as possible above the town, with provisions for six weeks, for about five thousand, which is all I intend to take.

My letters, I hope, will be ready to-morrow, and I hope I shall have strength to lead these men to wherever we can find the enemy."

On the next day, the last of August, he was able for the first time to leave the house.

It was on this same day that he wrote his last letter to his mother: "My writing to you will convince you that no personal evils worse than defeats and disappointments have fallen upon me.

The enemy puts nothing to risk, and I can't in conscience put the whole army to risk.

My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible intrenchments, so that I can't get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little purpose.

The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing so much as to fight him; but the wary old fellow avoids an action, doubtful of the behavior of his army.

People must be of the profession to understand the disadvantages and difficulties we labor under, arising from the uncommon natural strength of the country."

On the second of September a vessel was sent to England with his last despatch to Pitt.

It begins thus: "The obstacles we have met with in the operations of the campaign are much greater than we had reason to expect or could foresee; not so much from the number of the enemy (though superior to us) as from the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis of Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon.

When I learned that succors of all kinds had been thrown into Quebec; that five battalions of regular troops, completed from the best inhabitants of the country, some of the troops of the colony, and every Canadian that was able to bear arms, besides several nations of savages, had taken the field in a very advantageous situation,--I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place.

I sought, however, an occasion to attack their army, knowing well that with these troops I was able to fight, and hoping that a victory might disperse them."

Then, after recounting the events of the campaign with admirable clearness, he continues: "I found myself so ill, and am still so weak, that I begged the general officers to consult together for the general utility.

They are all of opinion that, as more ships and provisions are now got above the town, they should try, by conveying up a corps of four or five thousand men (which is nearly the whole strength of the army after the Points of Levi and Orleans are left in a proper state of defence), to draw the enemy from their present situation and bring them to an action.

I have acquiesced in the proposal, and we are preparing to put it into execution."

The letter ends thus: "By the list of disabled officers, many of whom are of rank, you may perceive that the army is much weakened.

By the nature of the river, the most formidable part of this armament is deprived of the power of acting; yet we have almost the whole force of Canada to oppose.

In this situation there is such a choice of difficulties that I own myself at a loss how to determine.

The affairs of Great Britain, I know, require the most vigorous measures; but the courage of a handful of brave troops should be exerted only when there is some hope of a favorable event; however, you may be assured that the small part of the campaign which remains shall be employed, as far as I am able, for the honor of His Majesty and the interest of the nation, in which I am sure of being well seconded by the Admiral and by the generals; happy if our efforts here can contribute to the success of His Majesty's arms in any other parts of America."

Some days later, he wrote to the Earl of Holdernesse: "The Marquis of Montcalm has a numerous body of armed men (I cannot call it an army), and the strongest country perhaps in the world.

Our fleet blocks up the river above and below the town, but can give no manner of aid in an attack upon the Canadian army.

We are now here [_off Cap-Rouge_] with about thirty-six hundred men, waiting to attack them when and wherever they can best be got at.

I am so far recovered as to do business; but my constitution is entirely ruined, without the consolation of doing any considerable service to the state, and without any prospect of it."

He had just learned, through the letter brought from Amherst by Ensign Hutchins, that he could expect no help from that quarter.