Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  They may have been frustrated and hungry, but according to the official account, they were still ‘full of ardor’. Canadians were worried by ‘the progress of the enemy’s works’ and were desperate to strike a blow. Many of them ‘renewed their representations to the Marquis de Vaudreuil for permission to form a strong detachment, with which they proposed to cross to Point Lévis and destroy the enemy’s works’.58 Another journal says that it was particularly ‘the principal merchants and tradesmen of Quebec (the persons who were the most interested in the preservation of the houses and other buildings)’ who met and decided to take a petition to Vaudreuil.59 This time permission was given for the operation to go ahead. As usual every source assigns credit and blame differently to every conceivable actor in the drama but is hard to believe, though, that Vaudreuil was not an enthusiastic advocate of offensive action by his beloved Canadians and Native Americans. Meanwhile the journals of the regular officers such as de Lévis and Montcalm have the unmistakable tone of cynical disengagement with the whole project. A source close to Vaudreuil records that ‘the General [Vaudreuil], who was acquainted with the intrepidity of the farmers, consented, notwithstanding the remonstrances which reached him from other quarters, and promised to send that detach-ment’.60 Ramezay reports that ‘this manoeuvre was not approved of by M. le Marquis de Montcalm’.61 The latter’s journal laments that ‘there is fermentation in the heads of the citizens of Quebec, they want to govern themselves and make their own decisions about military operations’.62 One source, which has the ring of truth to it, suggests that Montcalm eventually gave his grudging acquiescence, ‘to avoid discouraging the town’s people’.63 The expedition would be led by Jean-Daniel Dumas, who immediately volunteered his services. His name must have inspired confidence. Dumas had fought in Germany and Italy in the French army before transferring to the colonial service and arriving in Acadia in 1750. He immediately took to North American warfare, and proved adept at securing the services of Native American allies. He was transferred to the Ohio valley in time to march out to stop Braddock’s column reaching Monongahela. During the first volleys of that battle, the French commander had been killed and Dumas had seized control, directing the rest of the fighting which resulted in a stunning victory. He was showered with praise and honours and distinguished himself on his next post as Adjutant for all the militia units on the expedition to take Fort William Henry. Vaudreuil, always relentlessly positive about the militia, claimed that ‘because of his diligence, our troops, and even our Canadians, yielded nothing to the troupes de terre in the most precise execution of military duties’. Now he was Adjutant General for all the colonial forces in Canada, responsible for their drill, discipline, and administration. He combined bravery under fire with a personal probity almost unique in the rotten administration of New France. A later report into corruption in the colony commented that ‘everywhere the Sieur Dumas was in command, expenses diminished by half on the day of his arrival, and upon his departure rose again to their normal level’.64

  The chance to drive the British from Point Lévis under one of Canada’s most dashing officers led to a surge of willing recruits. One French officer noted that ‘men of all ranks, even to the mere schoolboy, volunteered in crowds for the detachment’. As a regular officer he was concerned that this ‘mob of militia, without discipline’ would have no chance against ‘regular troops in their entrenchments’. But he was ambivalent. Although it appeared ‘imprudent’, it would ‘cease to be so considered when it is known that those entrenchments were commanded by woods whence they could be fired on’. This was an important consideration because, as he was generous enough to admit, the militia were expert marksmen. It was a skill at which they ‘excel incomparably’ to the regular troops.65

  Montcalm remained unconvinced. He was a regular officer and believed that the outcome of the campaign would be decided by regular troops. Since he had fewer than Wolfe he assumed that he would lose a straight fight. His only chance of success, he believed, lay in using his fortifications as a force multiplier. The strength of his positions would cancel out Wolfe’s greater numbers. Operations like Dumas’ raid were, to Montcalm, a waste of precious professional soldiers. He sent a token number of men. Only one company of troupes de terre, at most one hundred and fifty men, was earmarked. The rest was to be made up of a similar number of troupes de la marine, Canadian militiamen, and Native Americans. Around a thousand men and boys were taken on, including a gaggle of students from the Jesuit college who were given the nickname the ‘Royal Syntax’. Ramezay reports that Dumas ‘would have had an even larger number if we had permitted all of those to go with him who had earnestly entreated to do so. There were even some Magistrates who volunteered themselves eagerly.’66

  Just before the departure of the motley force a deserter from the British arrived to tell them that the magazine was in an entrenchment by the church on Point Lévis. Armed with this useful intelligence they left Quebec on the evening of 12 July. They marched upstream half a mile to the Anse des Mères. A crowd of townspeople apparently ‘flocked to the heights to see the embarkation’. The men of the expedition were in fine fettle, ‘all manifesting the greatest ardour and full of confidence, and impatient to surprise and attack an enemy much inferior to them in number’.67 They crossed the St Lawrence, and now in total darkness, assembled on the south bank. Dumas divided his men into three columns to advance in tandem, ‘so that they might cover a larger area in their effort to find out whether the English have an outpost’.68 Dumas was using a well-tried technique for fighting in the woods. If one force came up against a British strongpoint, the other two could outflank it and attack from behind. Any force that attempted to stop the French attack could find itself encircled and trapped.

  Unfortunately, Dumas was not with a war party of Abenaki, or other hardened veterans of countless raids along the frontier. He was with a scratch rabble of amateurs who staggered and crashed through the woods, their veins fizzing with adrenalin. Perhaps inevitably elements of the various columns stumbled upon each other, saw silhouettes of men with muskets and fired blindly at them. Panet blames ‘schoolboys’ and ‘scatterbrains’ who ‘fired upon their friends’.69 As musket balls whined overhead and thumped into tree trunks the pulse of every novice raced and suddenly every shadow became a British grenadier. Muskets rang out through the woods. A couple of men were hit and like wildfire the Canadians panicked. ‘They imagined themselves surrounded by the enemy,’ wrote a French officer, ‘fired at their own men and went tumbling over one another down the hill to get back to the canoes.’70 Men threw away their weapons and ammunition pouches as they sprinted back to the water’s edge. The accounts are as confused as the men were that night. Dumas may have managed to rally his men once or even twice only for the same thing to happen. Tantalizingly the Native Americans who had gone on ahead reported ‘that the enemy were not making any movement’.71 Panet says that Dumas joined these Native Americans and they came ‘within a rifle’s range and a half’ of the ‘English entrenchments’.72 If Dumas could have launched an attack he would have done so with complete surprise. In fact, the British had no idea that there had been a hostile force on the south side of the St Lawrence until days later. But Dumas was unable to rally more than a couple of hundred of his terrified flock. Trying to re-establish command and control in the dark, among a crowd of petrified, inexperienced volunteers, was an impossible job. A journal relates that ‘neither the entreaties, the prayers, nor the threats of the officers had the slightest effect in reanimating their courage’.73 At least two men were dead, others were wounded, many had discarded their weapons, and the vast majority were worthless with fright. As Dumas walked from group to group he was left in no doubt that his only option was to get back to the north side of the river. It had been an utter failure. A French officer wrote simply that the mission demonstrated ‘all the extravagances a panic is capable of producing’.74

  It was more than an embarrassing failure, it was a missed opportu
nity. One diarist wrote that ’this misadventure caused us the loss of one of the most favorable opportunities to strike a blow on the enemy, which the singular uneasiness we have since learned they were continually in, might have rendered of so much the greater advantage…they had as yet only some imperfect entrenchments’.75 A journal called it a ‘disgraceful, and voluntary overthrow’, and stated that it ‘flung all who remained in the Town into the greatest consternation and almost into despair’.76 Montcalm and his fellow French regulars must have had their worst snobberies confirmed about the uselessness of Canadian troops and irregular forays in general. Yet much of the blame for the failure of the expedition lies with him. Night attacks through woodland towards unreconnoitred enemy positions are one of the hardest operations to accomplish even today. Dumas’ force should never have been allowed to go. The fact that it was suggests that Montcalm regarded a large proportion of his force as quite superfluous and cared not how they passed the time. Despite Montcalm’s dismissal of the entire venture, it had represented a significant opportunity. By splitting the British force into three different camps Wolfe had opened himself to the possibility of one portion of it being defeated in detail. A well-led, experienced force could have administered a nasty shock to Monckton’s men on Point Lévis. As well as taking a heavy toll in British men and supplies this might have retarded the construction of the batteries, thus stealing still more of Wolfe’s most scarce resource: time.

  There was yet more woe for the French that night. As Dumas’ force blundered around in the woods the cannon in Wolfe’s batteries on Point Lévis finally roared out. Shot and shell hurtled across the St Lawrence. Dumas’ farce would have tragic consequences for the town and people of Quebec.

  SEVEN

  ‘Trust me, they shall feel us’

  THE TRENCHES WERE ALIVE with activity. Blue-coated artillerymen mixed with infantrymen in red and pioneers in an array of ragged smocks. In front of them sat the squat outlines of cannon in a regular line, each behind a neat embrasure of packed earth or bulging, earth-filled baskets known as ‘gabions’. The north-west corner of the sky was still bright. The sun had set twenty minutes before but the outline of Quebec was perfectly silhouetted. If the gunners looked to their right they would have seen British ships manoeuvring in the basin, ‘bomb ketches’ each carrying a giant mortar, which could fire an exploding bomb in a high, looping trajectory. To have any hope of hitting anything the ship had to be stable, and for some time the ketches had been trying to set their anchors at their bows and stern to keep themselves steady. They had spent the afternoon getting into position and had been attacked by French gunboats. Royal Navy frigates had sailed to support them and Knox watched as for an hour there was a ‘smart cannonading’ but without ‘any damage being sustained on either side, the enemy scarce venturing to come near enough for execution’. Eventually he judged that ‘the ketches got into a good situation, and kept it’.1

  At a command from the artillery officer in charge of each group of guns, the crews stepped forward. Five men surrounded each gun, two on either side and a sergeant to the rear. Four more stood further back ready to feed the iron cannon with more gunpowder from a store a safe distance away. The sergeant commanded; his rank obvious by the sash tied around his waist, his long blue jacket with broad red lapels. Each gun had been ‘searched’ for any cracks in the barrel that would weaken the cannon and risk it exploding, and also carefully ‘wormed’ to remove any impurities. After the gunpowder had been pushed down the barrel as far as it would go, a wad of hay or rag was placed between it and the cannonball, which was rolled in last. A quadrant was inserted into the mouth of the cannon which enabled the aiming officer to calculate the correct elevation. Since these cannon would be firing at near their ‘utmost’ range the mouths were raised to about forty-five degrees above the horizontal, by adjusting the ‘elevating screw’ beneath the belly of the gun, an invention less than ten years old which replaced crude wedges shoved underneath the breech. With the cannon aimed and loaded the team waited for the order to fire. Between two cannon, with its sharp point buried in the mud, was a long pole which held slow match, a ‘linstock’. The match was three loosely woven hemp strands prepared with old wine and saltpetre which burnt very slowly.

  At 2100 hours on 12 July, as Dumas’ unlucky force was muddling through the woods towards the batteries, a rocket flew up vertically; it exploded like a firework and cast an unnatural light on the waiting men and their cannon. It was the signal to open fire. At each of the six cannon, the sergeant barked an order and the ‘ventsman’ stepped forward and stabbed a sharp tool down into the vent on top of the barrel, which pricked the fabric enclosing the main charge of powder in the breech below and made ignition more certain. Then he filled up the vent with a fine gunpowder. Next he stepped well back and the sergeant turned to his left and said ‘fire’. The ventsman had already used the linstock to light a stiff tube of layered paper around half a yard long, which burnt at an inch a minute. He plunged this ‘portfire’ into the powder in the vent. There was a bright flash, and milliseconds later an almighty crash as the main charge ignited. The cannon and its carriage sprang back as if it weighed only a few pounds. Thick smoke totally engulfed the gun crew as they automatically began the reloading drill as if it was second nature. The ventsman rushed to cover the vent to stop any air getting in and igniting any residual powder. If he failed to do this properly the spongeman could lose his arms in the resulting explosion. Traditionally the spongeman had the right to hit the ventsman over the head with his staff if he thought the latter was not doing his job. When he was satisfied with his colleague’s effort, the spongeman plunged a fleece attached to the end of a wooden rod into a bucket or cask of water and then rammed it dripping into the muzzle to douse any red-hot traces of powder or wadding. To the left of the barrel a gunner had a charge of powder ready, and as soon as the spongeman was finished he pushed it into the barrel. The spongeman twirled his rod around and inserted the other end into the barrel where he rammed the powder home. Next the ball was rolled down and the gun was ready to fire again. The whole team heaved at the wheels of the carriage and moved it back into position.

  On board the stoutly built bomb ketches the four-ton mortars roared as they sent their gunpowder-filled bombs, thirteen inches in diameter, into a high arc above the city. Each ship was built around the mortar, it took up the entire mid-section and there were no continuous decks. The officers slept huddled at the stern, the crew at the bows while the artillerymen who fired the mortar often slept on shore or even in the ship’s open boats along with their supplies. That night the decks had been soaked with river water, through a little valve in the bottom of the ship, and drenched curtains screened off the captain’s cabin where artillerymen prepared fuses. The bombs were lowered in on a pulley, the fuse lit and then fired as quickly as possible. The recoil was enormous, it was absorbed by the network of massive wooden beams that cradled the mortar, but it shook every man on board to the bone.

  The bombardment of Quebec had begun. Initially as Wolfe’s chief artilleryman, Colonel Williamson, reported, it was carried on by the mortars on board the ships in the basin, joined by ‘five 13 inch mortars and six 32 pound’ cannon on Point Lévis. Interestingly Williamson says that the cannon in question were ‘borrowed from the navy to save our 24 [pounder]s’. He wanted to avoid too much wear and tear on the barrels of his twenty-four pounders which were the most efficient weapons for battering down the walls of Quebec whenever the British army could get itself across to the north shore and start the close siege. The guns were operating at long ranges, firing at targets ‘from 1100 to 2000 yards’ away. 2

  With cold barrels and a new target Knox reports that the first and second volleys ‘fell rather short’ much to the rejoicing of the enemy, ‘who put forth many triumphant shouts on the occasion’. Their laughter was soon stilled as ‘we immediately got to the proper distance and changed their mirth’.3 It was terribly cruel on the Quebecers who saw the first ball
s splash harmlessly in the river only to see the range creep forward with every subsequent discharge. Soon solid round cannonballs were smashing into the stone houses of the Lower Town. Perhaps even worse were the ‘carcasses’, iron baskets reminiscent of skeletons, hence the name, packed with a potent mix of whatever flammable materials were at hand such as pitch and mealed gunpowder. They were primitive incendiary bombs; rather than exploding on detonation they would burn intensely. As they arched across the sky they left a flowing tail of fire like a shooting star.

  Jean-Felix Récher, the 35-year-old parish priest of Quebec, left a detailed journal of the siege. In the previous few days, he wrote, the noise of the French cannon blasting the British batteries ‘caused me to become partially deaf’. On the night the British opened fire the congregation met in the cathedral at 2100 hours for a ‘last meeting’ and ‘then the cannon started’.4

  Panet reports that the cannon and mortars fired a volley every half an hour. Other French sources estimate that around two or three hundred projectiles of different kinds landed in Quebec that night and ‘inflicted considerable damage’.5 Ramezay claims that the town for which he was responsible ‘received more than 200 bombs, which caused considerable damage’.6 Another eyewitness records that ‘the bombs were directed against the upper town and towards those parts of it where there were the largest buildings and the greatest assemblage of Houses; changing their aim at every volley’. It became clear to the people of Quebec that Wolfe’s aim was not to ‘dismount the batteries’ that protected the narrows and the town but to ‘frighten the people and make them abandon the town’. This was not a bombardment with a specific, clinical military objective; the total destruction of Quebec could have only very marginal military usefulness. Instead, it was an attack on the psychology of everybody in and around the town; an application of raw terror. On that basic level it certainly succeeded. The same source describes the explosions and the collapsing buildings and says that ‘not any quarter of Quebec afforded shelter against so tremendous a fire—the people all fled from their homes and sought for refuge upon the ramparts, on the side next to the country’.7 Récher wrote that his residence was hit by two cannonballs. ‘The whole town was terrified,’ he recorded, ‘in particular the women and children who were gathered in a big group by the citadel, crying, lamenting and praying continually, huddled in small cliques to recite prayers using their beads.’8 As the sun rose, the town gates were thrown open and ‘women and children were seen flying in crowds along the fields’.9 Pontleroy, the engineer, was ‘concerned about the unfortunate people and opened up all the water tanks to women and children’. Both Montcalm and he deeply regretted that they had no bread to give these miserable fugitives.10