Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

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After landing, the infantrymen marched inland for about a mile and pitched their tents in a long line facing to the north, the direction from which trouble was likeliest. Knox had grabbed the opportunity of having a look around the church in the village of St Laurent, ‘a neat building with steeple and spire’. Inside, ‘all the ornaments of the altar were removed’ and there was a charming note from the local priest addressed to the ‘“Worthy Officers of the British Army”’, begging them ‘from their well known humanity and generosity they would protect his church and its sacred furniture, as also his house and other tenements adjoining to it’. In a very Christian gesture the priest concluded that ‘he wished we had arrived a little earlier, that we might have enjoyed the benefit of such vegetables, viz. asparagus, radishes, etc etc as his garden produced, and are now gone to seed’. Knox commented on the distinctive tone, ‘he concluded his epistle with many frothy compliments, and kind wishes etc consistent with that kind of politeness so peculiar to the French’.

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While his officers were sightseeing, pitching the camp, and bringing men and supplies ashore, Wolfe, as always, was pushing forward. Finally giving his curiosity free rein he and a small group of men crossed the island to catch a glimpse of the prize which he had travelled thousands of miles to claim. By his side was one of his most important colleagues: his Chief Engineer, Patrick Mackellar. The 42-year-old engineer was the perfect man for the job. Not only had he served more than twenty years in the Ordnance, the body responsible for the army’s engineering and artillery as well as its logistical and technical support, but he had also been stationed in North America from the beginning of the current war. He had accompanied the ill-starred General Braddock on his drive deep into the Pennsylvania backcountry in 1755, where he was badly wounded in the fiasco on the Monongahela. Mackellar’s war had not improved. He had been captured while attempting to defend the woefully inadequate fort at Oswego the following year. After languishing as a prisoner in Quebec itself for a few months he was exchanged for an officer of equal rank. He had then accompanied Amherst and Wolfe to Louisbourg where the Chief Engineer had been wounded and Mackellar inherited the role. The French fortress fell and Mackellar was now uniquely qualified for the Quebec job. Not only had he proved his ability to conduct a formal siege in North American conditions but he was one of the few living British men who had actually seen Quebec. He wrote a detailed report on the city, but his strict imprisonment had meant that he had been unable to see the landward walls. He had picked up hints from servants and had seen a copy of an old map. These combined with the ‘difficulty they made of our seeing it’ seemed to Mackellar to confirm ‘that the place must be weak towards the land’. An attack from this quarter ‘is the only method that promises success’. Wolfe had so far followed the recommendation in his engineer’s report to the letter. Mackellar had suggested seizing the Île d’Orléans and reorganizing there, threatening the whole north bank of the St Lawrence. This, he wrote, will ‘probably make the enemy more doubtful where the landing is intended, which may be a very considerable advantage’.

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Wolfe had met Mackellar the year before at the siege of Louisbourg and was, at first, unimpressed by what he saw. At the beginning of the Quebec campaign he had written to his uncle saying that ‘it is impossible to conceive how poorly the engineering business was carried on’ at Louisbourg. The French fortress ‘could not have held out ten days if it had been attacked with common sense’. He bemoaned that his engineers were ‘very indifferent, and of little experience; but we have none better’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not the first time Wolfe was unkind in his judgement, nor would it be the last time he would be forced to revise it.

Mackellar’s diary for June 1959 reports that ‘while the troops were disembarking, the General went to the point of Orleans with an escort’. Wolfe, Mackellar, and a company of rangers walked along the road that circles the island and after six miles arrived at the western tip. There Wolfe finally saw Quebec for the first time. From that vantage point Quebec looked spectacular, as it still does. The cliffs are clearly visible, about four miles away across the basin. To the south of the town the narrows can be distinctly seen, with steep wooded hills on either side, looking almost like a gorge. Mackellar would have pointed out the landmarks, identified the massed batteries, and also explained the difficulty of assaulting the Upper Town from the Lower. Quebec looked impregnable enough but Wolfe must have prepared himself for that. What he had not gambled on was the scale of the French defences that stretched along the north shore of the St Lawrence. Mackellar wrote that he and Wolfe ‘saw the enemy encamped along the North shore of the basin in eight different encampments, extending from the River St Charles to within a mile of the Falls of Montmorency, and the coast fortified all along’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The author of Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ writes that ‘from the falls of Montmorency to Beauport (which is four miles) the banks are very high and steep’. While ‘from Beauport to the river St Charles the banks are low and level the shore winds here in the form of an amphitheatre’. But this ideal landing place was ‘deeply entrenched, and batteries of cannon at small distances for the whole way’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Wolfe reported to London that ‘we found them encamped along the shore of Beauport…and entrenched in every accessible part’.

(#litres_trial_promo) His heart sank. He would later describe it as ‘the strongest country perhaps in the world to rest the defence of the town and colony upon’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Both he and Mackellar also noticed the small gunboats and floating batteries, providing more mobile firepower.

While crossing the Atlantic and sailing up the St Lawrence Wolfe had come up with a plan of operations. He had lightly assumed that ‘to invest the place and cut off all communication with the colony it will be necessary to encamp with our right to the river St Lawrence, and our left to the river St Charles’. This meant landing on the Beauport shore fighting ‘a smart action at the passage of the river St Charles’ and then surrounding the town on the landward side. This plan, like so many others, was predicated on the total inactivity of the enemy. Disobligingly the French commander had fortified the Beauport shore to such an extent that any landing would have to take place in the teeth of a terrible crossfire. Wolfe had written to his uncle that if he found the enemy was ‘timid, weak, and ignorant, we shall push them with more vivacity’. If, however, ‘I find that the enemy is strong, audacious, and well commanded, I shall proceed with the utmost caution and circumspection’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In that case the best he could hope for was to pin down as many defenders of Canada as possible and thereby limit the number of men that General Amherst would face on his push north towards Montreal. From his first view of the dispositions of the enemy it looked decidedly like the latter scenario was more likely.

Later in the summer Wolfe would write in his report to the Secretary of State, William Pitt, that ‘the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis de Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon’, had presented him with ‘obstacles’ which were ‘much greater than we had reason to expect, or could forsee’. It was abundantly obvious as he and Mackellar peered through their telescopes and beheld the sheer scale of the trenches, bastions, and batteries and also the numbers of defenders that the French were in a ‘very advantageous situation’. Stunningly, Wolfe, hitherto so eager to get to grips with the defenders of Quebec, even admitted in the report that ‘I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place.’

(#litres_trial_promo) His sudden pessimism demonstrated his inexperience as a commander. Word seems to have spread quickly throughout the army. Knox wrote in his journal that he had heard about the strength of the enemy position and that the French are employed ‘in adding every kind of work, that art can invent, to render it impenetrable’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is interesting that even the French journals seem to have got wind of the rumours in the British camp. One goes so far as reporting that ‘we have since learned that as soon as he [Wolfe] had taken an exact reconnaissance…he did not conceal from his principal officers of the army who accompanies him, that he did not flatter himself with success’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The only man on the French side who was not cheered by these rumours was Montcalm; ironically, he was equally disconsolate. ‘It seems like everything points to failure,’ he wrote in his journal as he wrestled with the lack of munitions and the slow pace of constructing his fortifications.

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‘After taking a full view of all that could be seen from this place,’ Mackellar reported that he and Wolfe ‘returned to St Laurent’

(#litres_trial_promo) where the army was disembarking and making camp. The hill above the village was seething with activity. Men cleared trees and stumps, others dug trenches for latrines and quartermasters marked out spaces on which their regiments would camp. Parties of men scoured the countryside for fresh hay; Knox reports that they returned with ‘excellent hay to lie upon’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That was not all, days later he comments on the ‘great quantities of plunder, that they found concealed in pits in the woods’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The arrival of thousands of men, with a sizeable hardened criminal minority, was like a plague of locusts. Not a cupboard, shed, or even suspiciously fresh piece of earth was left unsearched. Meanwhile, the hillside was alive with the noise of hundreds of mallets tapping away at pegs. Neat rows of tents were appearing on the southfacing slope. The British army always pitched them according to the same pattern. The comforting and familiar shape of the camp attempted to create some normality for soldiers who found themselves in utterly alien surroundings. The army would camp ‘in one line’, Knox tells us, ‘with our front to the north-ward’.

(#litres_trial_promo) On the northern edge of the camp were around five tents per regiment to house the quarter guard, a security force which men would rotate through to provide a twenty-four-hour watch. A wide avenue separated them from just over ten ‘Bells of Arms’, painted tents where the men’s muskets and bayonets were stored. Wolfe ordered his men not to leave any loaded muskets in these tents as it was known to cause ‘frequent mischiefs [sic]’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Behind these were neat double streets of tents for the men of the regiment. The dwellings of officers, non-commissioned officers, and the men were naturally strictly segregated. All the tents were dipped in salt water to stop them getting mildewed but when they eventually reached the end of their useful lives they would be turned into trousers and gaiters for the soldiers. Privates slept with comrades of their own rank, usually six to a tent, but Wolfe had ordered the day before landing that ‘as the months of July and August are generally very warm in Canada, there are to be no more than 5 men to a tent, or if the commanding officer likes it better and has camp equipage enough he may order only four’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Most of the officers slept alone but only because they were forced to buy their own tents. The most junior officers, struggling to survive on their tiny salaries, slept two to a tent.

Behind this mass of canvas were the tents of the majors and lieutenant colonels, closest to the river. Each regiment was easily identifiable, their uniforms and equipment bore their distinctive colour. The linings of the men’s jackets, the drums, the colours the regiment carried in battle would all be in this colour. White was the so-called ‘facing colour’ of Kennedy’s 43rd. Knox wore white cuffs and had white facings on his red jacket. The little camp colours that fluttered above their tents were white. These were little flags, eighteen inches square, on which was also emblazoned the number of the regiment. They were flown on poles that the regulations very precisely specified were to be seven feet six inches long except those by the quarter guard which were to be nine feet tall. They were erected by the Quartermaster to mark out where the tents should be pitched and from then on distinguished the regiment from the others in the encampment. The Bells of Arms were painted in the facing colour too and emblazoned with the royal cipher, the crown, and the number of the regiment.

Throughout his career Wolfe had been notably conscientious. His professionalism had won him many admirers in a peacetime army in which units were often left to go to seed. He had always insisted on strict discipline and sartorial correctness from his men. But he was just as hard on officers. He took the patriarchal duties of leadership very seriously indeed and expected his fellow officers to do likewise. In his writings on military life, gathered together and published years later, there are constant reminders to subalterns to pay attention to the welfare of their men. Much of it reads like a very modern manual with the emphasis on leading men into battle rather than driving them. When it came to setting up camp Wolfe insisted ‘that all colonels and commanding officers see their regiments encamped before they quit them: and all captains and subalterns to see their men be encamped before they pitch their own tents’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was an influential work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, read by young men desperate to learn their trade in the absence of any comprehensive training.

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From the road Wolfe and Mackellar would have been able to get a very good sense of the size of the army. The larger regiments like Fraser’s Highlanders or Webb’s 48th had many more tents than the understrength 15th or 28th. Wolfe wrote to his uncle just before entering the St Lawrence and said quite plainly that ‘the army under my command is rather too small for the undertaking’. However, he believed it was ‘well composed’. The troops were ‘firm’ having been ‘brought into fire’ at the siege of Louisbourg the year before.

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These regiments were the basic building blocks of the British army. Bigger units, such as brigades, existed only as ad hoc tactical formations. The regiment recruited the men, trained them, clothed, armed, and disciplined them and occasionally even paid them. Each one had a colonel at its head. Colonels had once literally owned the regiment, paying for its recruitment and weapons and hiring it out to the crown. By the eighteenth century a prolonged assault on this ramshackle late medieval system by Georges I and II had modernized the British army and the colonels’ role had been circumscribed. By 1759 they tended to be senior army officers, and occasionally important politicians, who kept an eye on the regiment on behalf of the crown. It was very rare for one of these colonels to command a regiment in the field. Instead lieutenant colonels or even majors would lead the unit on campaign, where they were known as battalions. A few regiments had second or even third battalions. Two of Wolfe’s battalions belonged to the same regiment, the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 60th Royal American Regiment. Traditionally regiments had simply been known by the names of their colonels. During the 1740s the regiments had been given numbers which, in theory, reflected their seniority. Numbers and colonels’ names were interchangeable throughout the 1750s, although technically the number had become the official method of labelling the regiment.

Nine battalions had disembarked and were putting up their tents; one, the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Royal American Regiment (the 3rd/60th), had stayed on board the ships to give Wolfe the option of striking a blow at another point on the St Lawrence. Wolfe also had a force of marines. Lieutenant Colonel Hector Boisrond commanded twenty-five officers and 577 of these sea soldiers. There could have been as many as a thousand others divided up between the naval ships. They hung their hammocks between the officers and the men, guarded the supplies of rum and the door to the captain’s cabin. Serving at sea prevented them from becoming fully effective soldiers. Crack infantrymen had to be able to run unthinkingly through a set of complicated drills for marching, loading and firing their muskets. Drill was practised again and again until it was second nature. At sea opportunities for this kind of training were limited. There was neither the space nor the numbers to replicate training on land. These marines did, however, represent a reservoir of semi-trained manpower which could free up army units for other duties. Wolfe feared that the shortage of regular troops meant that he could well be forced to stand them in the line of battle. To prepare for that eventuality orders in Wolfe’s army frequently included instructions to the marines to ‘be out at exercise as often as they conveniently can’.

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Alongside the regular infantry Wolfe had a force of rangers. These were Anglo-American colonial troops who had been recruited from frontiersmen, who, it was hoped, would have the necessary skills to challenge the Native Americans in irregular warfare. Unlike Canada the British colonies in America were not brimming with hardened backcountry men. Anglo-Americans were farmers and tradesmen, not hunters and trappers. Perhaps as a result, the rangers had rarely delivered on some of the more extravagant promises of their advocates. Wolfe was utterly dismissive of his rangers, full of a regular officer’s contempt for his more unorthodox colleagues. The year before he had watched them in action and wrote that ‘the Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending on them in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The following year had not given him cause to adjust his rather unambiguous position. He wrote from Louisbourg before departing for Quebec that he had ‘six new raised companies of North American Rangers—not complete, and the worst soldiers in the universe’. To Pitt he wrote that ‘they are in general recruits, and not to be depended upon’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Like so many other British officers sent to North America Wolfe underestimated both the threat posed by the Canadians and Native Americans and the potential utility of irregular troops to combat them. The siege of Louisbourg had largely been a conventional, European-style campaign with limited involvement by the Native troops. The forests, rivers, and hills around Quebec held very different challenges.

On leaving Louisbourg Wolfe had divided his army into three brigades each commanded by a brigadier general. He had written to his uncle describing them as being ‘all men of great spirit’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it had not been his choice of team. When he had been given command of the expedition Wolfe had rather petulantly demanded that he should appoint these three key officers. He had written to the commander in chief of the British army, Lord Ligonier, saying that unless, ‘he would give me the assistance of such officers as I should name to him he would do me a great kindness to appoint some other person to the chief direction’. He attempted to usurp London’s power of appointment because of his experience at Louisbourg the summer before. He blamed the lack of certain key people as the reason for the length of time it had taken to capture the French stronghold. He wrote that ‘so much depends upon the abilities of individuals in war, that there cannot be too great care taken in the choice of men, for the different offices of trust and impor-tance’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But as so often London was not prepared to surrender its vital powers of patronage to the commander in the field. It was one of the few ways in which the high command could influence the course of a campaign before the advent of telegraph, steamships, and railways. Wolfe moaned in a letter that his demand ‘was not understood as it deserved to be’.

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But he had little cause for complaint. Two of his three suggestions had been acceded to. One of them was his second in command, Robert Monckton, who was six months older than his commander. Monckton was the second son of the 1st Viscount Galway and had joined the prestigious aristocratic bevy of the 3rd Foot Guards as a boy of 15. Like Wolfe he had fought at Dettingen and he had seen action at Fontenoy as well. He had entered the House of Commons in 1752 and his strong political connections may have helped gain him a command in North America where it was clear that war could not be long avoided. When hostilities did break out he moved swiftly against two French forts on Chignecto Isthmus, Beauséjour and Gaspereau, which he captured in June 1755. It was the only real victory for British arms in three barren years of failure.

That summer Monckton carried out his orders to forcefully remove French-speaking Catholic Acadians from modern-day Nova Scotia after their refusal to take the oath of allegiance to King George II. France had ceded Acadia to Britain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 but the loyalties of the French settlers had remained understandably Francophile and their new British masters lacked the means or the desire to grasp the issue and coerce their allegiance. With the outbreak of war in 1755 and the arrival of troops from Britain the Governor of Nova Scotia finally had the military means to solve the problem by a wholesale removal of the settlers. Monckton’s men burnt villages, rounded the inhabitants up and herded them on board ships which transported them to the British colonies on the Atlantic coast or back to France. Some Acadians made their way to Canada where their harrowing tale of ethnic cleansing put iron into the souls of the Canadians, who now doubly feared the consequences of defeat. Some Acadians made their way to the French colony of Louisiana where their name would eventually be corrupted and become Cajun.

Monckton had gained the reputation as a serious, efficient professional. Wolfe seemed genuinely pleased to have him as second in command and wrote to him that ‘I couldn’t wish to be better supported, your spirit and zeal for the service will help me through all difficulties—I flatter myself that we set out with mutual good inclinations towards each other, and favourable opinions. I on my side shall endeavour to deserve your esteem and friendship.’

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The most junior brigadier was also the oldest. James Murray was 39 years old and had soldiered for well over half his life. He was short, his eyes burnt brightly as if with a constant grievance and he had a fiery temper. He and Wolfe had known each other for some time and that winter Wolfe requested that Murray command a brigade on the St Lawrence expedition. He was the fifth son of Lord Elibank but his aristocratic family had harmed rather than advanced his career thanks to some impolitic choices made by his brothers. Two of them had embraced the cause of the House of Stuart and ruined the family reputation. Murray’s family was one of many throughout Britain which had been split down the middle when in 1688 the Catholic Stuart King James II had been forced from the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland by his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange. Ever since then he and his male descendants had been barred from the throne and had launched a series of violent attempts to press their claim. Brothers had faced each other across the field of Culloden, the last stand by the Jacobite cause in Britain which saw hundreds of stunningly brave Highlanders slaughtered on a sleet-blasted moor outside Inverness in April 1746.

Wolfe had been at that battle and had stayed on afterwards as part of an army of occupation. Many of the men fighting under him at Quebec had served with the rebels or had family members who had. Murray’s brother was a close adviser to Charles Edward, the mercurial Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II. Murray believed that his brother’s treason had stalled his career. He had joined a Scottish regiment in the Dutch army at the age of 15 and regarded it with pride as the tough crucible of his professionalism. He liked to boast that there he had ‘served in all ranks except that as a drummer’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He had enrolled in the British army and had served on the ill-fated Cartagena expedition in 1740. The disease that tore through British ranks helped Murray by clearing the next few rungs on the ladder of advancement and he returned a captain and still only 20 years old. He campaigned in the West Indies, Flanders, and France and by the early 1750s was a lieutenant colonel in the 15th Regiment. The size of the British army meant that most officers knew or knew of each other. Wolfe referred to Murray when they served alongside each other on the Louisbourg campaign as ‘my old antagonist’, possibly because of a falling out in Scotland in the 1740s or an altercation after the failed amphibious operation against the French town of Rochefort, the post mortem of which had divided the officer corps. However, Wolfe praised Murray during the Louisbourg campaign, writing that he ‘acted with infinite spirit. The public is indebted to him for great services in advancing by every method in his power the affairs of the siege.’

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