Death or Victory
Page 21
This was why Montcalm regarded these raids as militarily insignificant. His main concern was to avoid sending his regulars, needed for the defence of the city and the Beauport shore, to reinforce or rescue every Canadian group of adventurers who crawled off to have a dig at the British. If he sent regulars into these situations, they risked becoming entangled in a slogging match which he feared the more numerous British infantry would win.
However, he underestimated the utility of this kind of warfare in two ways. Since he believed hugely inflated accounts of British strength he did not give this irregular warfare enough credit for its attritional effect. The loss of every musket-carrying infantryman was very serious to Wolfe. Dank’s company of rangers had been virtually put out of action for the rest of the campaign by the briefest of fights. Mackellar was to write a little later in the summer that although on the occasion of each raid ‘we always repulsed the enemy’ it was ‘seldom without some little loss, which in the end amounted to a pretty considerable number’.35 Losses of key personnel like officers, engineers, and NCOs would seriously erode Wolfe’s ability to carry out complex operations. The death of a commander might prove decisive. History is littered with examples of campaigns that have been totally derailed following the death of a leader. Just the year before a confused skirmish in the woodlands outside Fort Carillon had led to the death of George Augustus, 3rd Viscount Howe, the young, dashing second in command of Abercrombie’s ill-fated army. His death was widely held, in Britain, France, and their respective colonies, to have been the cause of Aber-crombie’s subsequent dithering and defeat.
Second, Montcalm seems to have ignored the psychological impact of these raids. In the same entry Mackellar says that the British troops ‘soon began to despise’ the Canadians and Native Americans. It was a hatred born out of sheer terror. This was one of Montcalm’s most potent weapons and he did little to exploit it. A more adaptable, freethinking commander would have spent time considering how to use the techniques of ambush and raiding to inflict greater casualties on the British and grind down their morale.
Despite Montcalm’s hesitancy, throughout July the British troops were faced with brutal fighting that bordered on full-scale insurgency. On coming ashore Wolfe had taken steps to try to ensure the neutrality of the Canadian habitants in his confrontation with the forces of France. Orders were issued to the British troops forbidding the endemic looting that accompanied the passage of soldiers: ‘any soldier who is found with plunder in his tent, or returning with plunder to the army of any kind not taken by order, shall be sent directly to the provost in irons, in order to be tried for his life’. These failed to stem the habit, which soldiers seem to have regarded as one of their official perks. Knox reports that the light infantry returned from one patrol ‘well loaded with plunder of various kinds’.36 Wolfe issued constant threats throughout the summer to try to stop it. One of these stated that ’no churches, houses, or buildings of any kind are to be destroyed or burned without orders. The peasant that remains in their habitations, their women and children are to be treated with humanity; if any violence is offered to a woman, the offender shall be punished by death.’37
Wolfe had notices attached to church doors that informed Canadians that ’The King, my master, justly irritated against France and resolved to lower her insolence and revenge the insults offered to the English Colonies, has at length determined to send to Canada the formidable sea and land armament which the people of Canada now behold in the heart of their country.’ He assured them that ’the King of Great Britain wages no war against industrious Colonists and peasants, nor against women and children, nor the sacred ministers of religion; he foresees their distressful circumstances, pities their lot and extends to them offers of protection’. Provided that they ‘take no part directly or indirectly in the contest between the two crowns’, he assured them that they ‘can, without fearing the least molestation, there enjoy their property, attend to their religious worship; in a word, enjoy, in the midst of war, all the sweets of peace’.38
It was spectacularly naive to believe that the habitants would remain as disinterested observers watching the British, whose ‘object’ the proclamation admitted was to ‘totally deprive the French crown of its most valuable settlement in north America’. This was not Flanders where the people were happy to provide a picturesque backdrop to the formalized military posturing of ancien régime Europe, their rights as non-combatants protected carefully by each successive commander, the armies differing only in the colour of their coats. This was Canada, where generations of habitants had fought wars for its very existence, time and again, against enemies who had sought its, and their, total annihilation. Even today stories of shocking violence, of last ditch defences of stockades, of families butchered by the Mohawk are still part of the popular consciousness. In 1759 people only had to look to the miserable fate of the exiled Acadians, thrown off their burnt farms by the British, and now living among them, trying to rebuild shattered lives. The name, nationality, and religion of the resident of the Governor General’s palace mattered to the people of Canada.
Even if they had wanted to remain neutral, they had no choice. Every man who could bear arms was in the militia. His duty was to fight the invaders. If he proved hesitant his enthusiasm was boosted by Native American war parties that Vaudreuil sent out to remind Canadians where their loyalties lay. Colonel Williamson, Wolfe’s chief artillery officer, wrote to a colleague during the summer that ‘the sharp lookout of Vaudreuil’s Indians alone kept the peasant militiamen from stealing home to their farms, wives and children’.39 Williamson was unfair in suggesting that force alone kept the Canadians with Mont-calm’s army, many did not need the encouragement. As the accounts on both sides all attest, many Canadians were keen to kill redcoats. Any British soldier who left camp alone or found himself isolated while on patrol or with work parties risked a horrible death. Ramezay reports that ’every day, we saw them walking up and down around the dwellings at Point Levis with self-assurance, even though the inhabitants who retreated into the woods are harassing them constantly, and every day they kill some of them as soon as they wander away from their detachments’.40 Even the camp on the Île d’Orléans was not immune. One journal records that two of the Louisbourg Grenadiers ‘were scalped, and most cruelly mangled on the east end of the island of Orléans by three lurking Indians’.41 They had paddled over from the north shore and lain in ambush. Johnson records a typical incident, in which three men took themselves into the woods to have a poke around for any wild vegetables ‘to eat with their salt meat; and which are good for several disorders, and with which the woods abound in the summer season’. No sooner had they entered the wood but ’they were surprised by a party of these Canadian savages, and butchered in the most cruel and barbarous manner; being first killed and scalped, then ripped open and their heart taken out and themselves left on the spot where they had committed this horrid barbarity’.42 Such savage violence led to a steep spiralling in relations between the British troops and particularly their Canadian and Native American enemy. Atrocity sparked atrocity.
Wolfe issued order after order trying to keep wandering redcoats, accustomed to augment their diets when on campaign by purchasing victuals from the locals or roaming the forests, strictly in their camps or with their detachment at all times. ‘The first soldier who is taken beyond the out-guard, either in the front, rear, or flanks of the army, contrary to the most positive orders, shall be tried by a general court martial,’ he ordered. The camps would be made impregnable, fortified ‘in such a manner to put it entirely out of the enemy’s power to attempt any thing by surprise, and that the troops may rest in security after their fatigues’. Even with their stockades and breastworks, ‘the safety of an army depends in great measure upon the vigilance of the out-guards, any officer or non-commissioned officer who shall suffer himself to be surprised by the enemy, must not expect to be forgiven’.43
It was not just Britons who were suffering. Despite at
tempting to shelter the innocents of the St Lawrence, inevitably their blood was spilt. Malcolm Fraser was appalled by an incident involving a group of rangers operating on the south bank of the St Lawrence. Nearly every day the rangers would be out disputing control of wooded no-man’s-land and looking for prisoners to provide valuable intelligence. It was a parallel campaign to the more formal machinations of Wolfe and, sadly, is far less well chronicled. But for much of the summer it was the rangers and light infantry who were doing the bulk of the fighting. On one such raid Fraser heard that a group of rangers had captured a Canadian habitant. The prisoner had two young sons who followed the raiders crying out in distress. Fraser wrote that they were both ‘murdered by those worse than savage Rangers, for fear, as they pretend, they should be discovered by the noise of the children’. He knew the cause: ‘cowardice and barbarity…seems so natural to a native of America, whether of Indian or European extraction’. Knox relates the story only slightly changed. He said the ranger officer was mortified by what he had been forced to do; apparently, ‘the officer declared to me that it was with the greatest reluctance that can be conceived’.44
The rangers also provided protection to the infantrymen who were hard at work on defences for the camp on Point Lévis and new batteries with which to bombard the town. Every day, according to Knox, the sharp-eyed rangers ‘took post on all the adjoining hills, which command the road’ that ran along the coast and joined the batteries to the encampment. On each hilltop perched ‘small parties [of rangers] with breastworks about them’.45 Below them work on the batteries was proceeding apace.
Wolfe had written to Monckton, whose brigade was labouring on the construction on and around Point Lévis, saying that he intended the batteries to unleash ‘such a tremendous fire, that no human head can venture to peep up near it’. Wolfe had given Saunders and the navy long enough to deal with the enemy’s gunboats and floating batteries, now he intended to take matters into his own hands. ‘I think it the greatest misfortune, that so much water business interferes with us,’ he told his second in command before outlining his solution. He would blast them off the surface of the St Lawrence. The heavy but scarce thirty-two-pound cannonballs should not be fired at the town but at ‘the boats and every swimming thing’, all of which ‘must be shattered’.46
A mile down the coast, where the river was at its absolute narrowest, were the batteries at Pointe aux Pères. They were connected to the camp by a road with fortified strongpoints at regular intervals. The ever cheery and observant Knox enjoyed even this drudgery, ‘Being on a working party this morning at our batteries, I had a most agreeable prospect of the city of Quebec for the first time.’ But he looked on the town not as a tourist but as a demolition specialist. After his inspection he decided that ‘it is a very fair object for our artillery particularly the lower town whose buildings are closer and more compact than the upper’.47
Knox and his men worked hard on the necessary batteries. Vast amounts of hardware were disgorged by the naval ships and transports: ‘mortars, guns, shells, shot, and all manner of artillery stores, are landing at every tide’. Sailors rowed backwards and forwards with the cannon suspended underwater beneath the boats. Once ashore they were hauled into a ‘park of artillery and stores adjoining to our camp’. It was no mean task. Knox tells us that ‘the heaviest guns on shore are 32 pounders and largest mortars are 13 inches’.48 This was firepower on an industrial scale, an extraordinary contrast to the ancient warfare of war parties and knives that was being fought by Native Americans and rangers only yards away. Thirty-two-pound cannon were around three yards long and weighed three tons. Even the much smaller nine-pounder guns weighed more than a ton each. Only the Royal Navy could carry this weight of firepower into the heart of North America. The Neptune and the Princess Amelia alone had around the same number of cannon on board as the entire Anglo-German force fighting France in Europe at the time and far more than Wellington commanded at any time during the Peninsula War.49 The artilleryman, Colonel Williamson, made great use of this vast reservoir of firepower. He later wrote that in early July, ‘we marked out batteries for five 13 inch mortars and six 32 pounders borrowed from the navy to save our 24s’.50 The navy did not just lend the guns, it sent its sailors to manhandle them into position. A British officer, two years later, witnessed sailors doing exactly this kind of work on another expedition and he wrote that
you may fancy you know the spirit of these fellows, but to see them in action exceeds any idea that can be formed of them…a hundred or two of them, with ropes and pullies, will do more than all your dray horses in London. Let but their tackle hold and they will draw you a cannon or a mortar on its proper carriage up to any height, though the weight be never so great. It is droll enough to see them tugging along with a good 24 pounder at their heels; on they go huzzaing and hullooing, sometimes up hill, sometimes down hill; now sticking fast the brakes, presently floundering in the mud and mire; swearing, blasting, damning, sinking as if careless of everything but the matter committed to their charge as if death or danger had nothing to do with them.51
It was dangerous work. Not only did stragglers and strays risk death by tomahawk or knife, the French batteries across the river attempted to put a stop to the British building works by pounding them furiously with their own artillery. On 10 July Knox spent five hours under bombardment. He estimated that the French fired 122 shots and twenty-seven exploding shells, ‘yet we had not a man killed or wounded’. Montresor confirms that on 10 July for the ‘great part of the day the enemy kept a constant cannonading from the town on our works constructing under the command of Brigadier Monckton’. Panet also mentions this cannonade, which he watched from the walls of Quebec, although he laments that it ‘did not appear that this impeded their operations at all, even though we continued firing at night’.52 Siege warfare was the one area of eighteenth-century warfare which bore a strong resemblance to the massive industrial struggles of the twentieth. The men who built the batteries and the artillerymen who worked the guns lived in a world of trenches, sandbags, and sudden, arbitrary death from afar. Knox and his men avoided casualties in part because of the sensitivity shown by his superiors, particularly Wolfe who on one particular occasion won undying gratitude for showing ‘great attention to the preservation of the men’. He ordered them to ‘lie down or get under cover as soon as a flash was perceived’.53 Back in Britain Walpole heard a similar story about Wolfe in which the General came across a soldier who was shot through the lungs. Wolfe ‘stopped to press his hand…praised his services, encouraged him not to abandon the hopes of life—assured him of leave of absence and early promotion’. Walpole concluded that Wolfe ’gave the most minute attention to the welfare and comfort of his troops; and instead of maintaining the reserve and stateliness so common with other commanders of that day, his manner was frank and open, and he had a personal knowledge of perhaps every officer in his army’.54 Despite his abysmal relationships with his senior officers, it was these acts of thoughtfulness together with a genuine concern for the men’s welfare that seem to have earned Wolfe respect and even great affection from the lower ranks of his army.
The steady progress of the batteries was too much for the people of Quebec watching from across the St Lawrence. Through telescopes they could see exactly the quantity and type of artillery that the British were assembling opposite their beloved city and nobody doubted the terrible destruction that was about to be rained down on them. A French journal describes how ‘the enemy at the Point Levis was now seen to be busily employed in conveying in carts, with several yoke of oxen, mortars and cannon to the batteries opposite the town’. It reports that ‘the alarm became very great, and the expectation general of the town being reduced to ashes during the night, without any place of shelter to which the inhabitants could retire safely against the bombs’. Before the British had arrived the same journal had commented that ‘the strongest reliance’ was being placed on the sailors who manned the French batteries and who �
��were encamped under tents, pitched, each close to his battery’.55 Now, despite their heavy fire on the British, it was clear that this confidence had been misplaced. Counter-battery fire could slow the British down but it was a nuisance rather than a serious threat. The mood was grim. Knox talked to a French prisoner brought in by the rangers and asked what the general situation was in the French camp. The prisoner replied that ‘I cannot tell you any particulars being too young to judge of these matters: this I know, that we are all in great distress for bread, both army, garrison and country.’56 Every man, whether a private citizen or a combatant, was given a soldier’s ration while any woman who had insisted on staying could only buy bread from the bakery at exorbitant prices. Scarcity of food made Montcalm’s army even more ungovernable. A static army is an unruly one. Young, aggressive men become easily bored. Morale is almost always higher among troops on active operations even if they face greater dangers. By deciding that his men were no match for the British in open warfare and, as a result, adopting a totally defensive posture, rooted to the redoubts and trenches, Montcalm condemned thousands of his soldiers to months of dull monotony. Restive Native Americans and Canadians roamed around looking for food and trouble. At the beginning of July the French journal commented that ‘an evil was noticed today which had already existed a considerable time, this was, the desertion of the Canadians’. It blamed it on ‘either from their timidity, or from their not being accustomed to restraint and regular habits, or of remaining for a length of time inactive, encamped in a plain’. Their commanders took active measures to put a stop to it and apparently these ‘succeeded…in checking its daily recurrence’.57