Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Eventually more boats joined the Dublin’s and, according to Knox, ‘our gallant seamen, with their usual expertness, grappled them before they got down above a third part of the basin, towed them safe to shore and left them at anchor’.72 The basin was full of boats all towing a collection of rafts, in the words of one witness, ‘each separately representing a lofty pillar of solid fire’.73 Knox could hear the shouts of the sailors across the water. They continually reassured each other with calls of ‘All’s Well!’ He also heard one ‘remarkable expression from some of these intrepid souls to their comrades’ which he felt ‘I must not omit on account of their singular uncouthness.’ One voice yelled, ‘Damn me Jack, didst thee ever take hell in tow before?’74

  The rafts may have caused the odd, easily extinguishable fire, depending on which source is to be believed, but overall the damage to the British by the rafts was negligible. The French were satisfied with their performance, and the leadership of Courval, even if the ‘success did not correspond with his zeal’. He was ‘hotly pursued’ and had to be rescued by French gunboats. The general tone of the French sources was that he had been unlucky, on account of ‘progress [being] extremely slow and the night not being very dark’.75 The British were very pleased with the night’s work. The Stirling Castle ‘served the boatmen for the above service 1/2 a pint of brandy each’.76 They had earned it.

  Wolfe was furious. The next day a flag of truce was sent to the town and a stern message delivered to the French commanders. Wolfe was bored with repeated attempts to incinerate his ships, his men, and his lifeline. According to Knox the message said that ‘If the enemy presume to send down any more fire-rafts, they are to be made fast to two particular transports, in which are all the Canadian and other prisoners, in order that they may perish by their own base inventions.’ Knox reported that this threat was, however, ‘only looked upon as a menace’.77 Montcalm told de Lévis that Wolfe’s letter was ‘pretty stupid’ and did not ‘necessitate a response’.78

  NINE

  Defeat at Montmorency

  EARLY IN THE MORNING of 31 July 1759 Lieutenant Colonel Howe led the light infantry and another regiment north out of the British camp at Montmorency and followed the river inland. They made no secret of their march. They wanted to be seen. Above them the sky was clear and the men were hot well before the sun had even fully cleared the tops of the trees. Howe’s march was part of an intricate plan. The camp they left was bustling. Every cannon in the area was being hauled to the very edge of the steep cliffs, overlooking the roaring waterfall. Townshend wrote in his journal that this was done ‘in order to rake the French entrenchments’.1 Across the St Lawrence the camps at Point Lévis and on the tip of the Île d’Orléans were also buzzing. Flat-bottomed boats were drawn up on the shoreline; the grenadiers of the army were rechecking their equipment before boarding. Sharp new flints were carefully screwed into the jaws of the cock. To keep pebbles out of their shoes as they splashed through the shallows gaiters, white regulation ones or slightly more waterproof black linen ones if the soldier could afford it, were properly fastened. The company officers were busy. Before any attack it was the job of lieutenants and captains to ‘see that the balls fit in the men’s guns so that they may run down their barrels’ and ‘all their arms are clean and in good order’ as one British officer of the time recorded in his journal.2 Each soldier wore his light buff leather shoulder strap over his left shoulder supporting his cartridge box on his right hip. The box contained a wooden block with holes drilled for pre-prepared cartridges containing gunpowder and a musket ball. The black leather flap was supposed to keep the rain out. Cartridge boxes were not supplied by the government but by the regiment’s colonel, who was paid a lump sum to do so by the crown. Many colonels provided shoddy cartridge boxes and were slow to replace defective ones, choosing instead to pocket the leftover money. ‘Those that have not cartridge boxes’ were told by their officers to ‘break their cartridges and put their powder into horns’ while keeping the musket balls loose in a pocket or pouch.3 Bayonets were sharpened and then sheathed in a scabbard on a waistbelt that could also carry a sword, although on this campaign most grenadiers had dispensed with these cumbersome weapons. Since they were shock troops, the first wave was carrying the lightest possible load. Rations and blankets would be sent after them. Those in the second wave wore knapsacks on their backs with rolled-up blankets on top.

  The brick-red coats, waistcoats, and breeches were so bright when new that the tailors who made them often went blind. A new coat was supposed to be issued every year on the anniversary of King George II’s accession, 11 June, whether at home or on campaign. But the men about to climb into the flat-bottomed boats would not have been a mass of blinding colour. The new uniforms were often kept for formal occasions and if men could get away with it they patrolled, worked, and fought in their older, more comfortable coats. On their heads their tall mitre caps contributed to the sweat which poured off their brows. The grenadiers of Fraser’s 78th Highlanders had embellished their caps with bear fur which within a few years would be the regulation for all grenadiers.4

  Most officers, like Wolfe himself, wore their simple ‘red clothes’, an undecorated red frock coat without lace or even the distinctive colours of their regiments. On their feet were well-worn boots. These were not the dandies of fable. They were nearly all tough professionals who had grown up in the army. Most of them were country stock and they had been toughened by a childhood of tramping through the woods, moorland, and marshes of Britain and Ireland in pursuit of deer, grouse, and pheasant.

  At 0800 hours the grenadier companies filed onto the flat-bottomed boats. As they did so British ships pushed into the north channel between the éle d’Orléans and the Beauport shore. Extensive soundings had been carried out by James Cook and others to ascertain just how close the warships could get to the north bank. These had been performed at night and under the constant threat of being snatched by a group of Canadians or Native Americans in their canoes. The fifty-gun Centurion, nearly thirty years old, crept as close to land as she dared and began thundering away at the most easterly French positions on the north shore, the ones that sat alongside the Montmorency River and falls. Wolfe later reported to Pitt that ‘the ship was of great use, as her fire was very judiciously directed’.5 As it did so Townshend’s fifty cannon began blasting the same positions from across the river.

  Next, to the astonishment of the French defenders, two ‘Cats’, chunky coastal craft like the colliers on which Cook had learnt his trade, crowded as much sail on as possible and, at full speed, ran ashore. They grounded in the shallows about five hundred yards from the French shore defences. They were the Russell and the Three Sisters and Mackellar says that they were both ‘mounting 14 guns each’.6 These ships were ‘remarkably strong built’ according to the eighteenth-century Universal Dictionary of the Marine and with their broad beam and shallow draught they were designed to ‘take the ground’ rather than avoid it at all costs like most ships.7

  As their keels ran hard into the mud of the St Lawrence at 1000 hours it became immediately clear that the plan had gone wrong. Wolfe had been told by Cook and other naval officers that the Cats would be able to get much closer to the French positions. He had been hoping to use them as forts or bunkers from which his grenadiers would assault the shore while others remained on board to supply them with covering fire from the shelter of their heavy oak timbers. On board were four companies of grenadiers, under the command of Wolfe’s friend Lieutenant Colonel Murray of the 15th Regiment, some artillerymen, two light cannon designed to be dragged ashore to support the infantry, and 1,000 entrenching tools. Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ states that ‘the water being very shallow, they could not get so near the redoubts as the general had been informed was practicable. T’was said that at the top of the tide they could get within fifty yards, instead of which their distance was six hundred.’8 An added frustration was that as the tide had dropped, the Three Sisters, which was c
losest to the shore, had swung around and could not even bring her cannon to bear on the French positions. Instead, she was vulnerable to ‘raking’ fire from the French artillery which set about blasting her from stem to stern. Montresor reported to his father that the French floating batteries joined their colleagues on the shore in pouring a withering fire on the Cats with ‘almost every shot taking place’.9

  With typical bravery Wolfe immediately demanded to be rowed out to the Cats so he could make a decision on whether his attack was still realistic. He had originally intended to land troops and seize a redoubt on the shore. From his careful scrutiny from the Île d’Orléans he thought he had spotted, as he later told Pitt, one particular redoubt which was ‘detached’ and ‘appeared to be out of musket shot of the entrenchments upon the hill’.10 This would be his toehold on the heavily fortified Beauport shore. Montcalm would be forced to drive him out and this, Wolfe hoped, would bring on the general engagement that he wished so much to precipitate.

  On 28 July he had written to Monckton and outlined his intentions. He told his second in command that ‘The Master of the Pembroke [James Cook] assures the Admiral that a Cat can go within less than 1000 yards of the Redoubt—if so, it will be a short affair. The business will be to keep it.’ Wolfe made sure his most trusted subordinates held the key positions. Lieutenant Colonel Murray would command the grenadiers on the two Cats, while his favourite, Burton, ‘would have direction’ of the main body of the amphibious forces. Monckton was told to prepare the assault force with 10,000 musket cartridges, 200 shovels, fifty pick axes, and twenty ‘felling axes’.11 A couple of days before he had written again, on a scrap of paper for which he apologized, saying, ‘I have no better.’ In this letter he had emphasized that he wanted to stir Montcalm into action. It was infinitely possible that the French commander should attack a ‘corps of ours with superiority of numbers, than that we should attack his whole army entrenched, with what we can put on shore at one landing’. He was feeling very bullish. He promised Monckton that ‘If the Marquis gives Burton and I only two hours we shall knock his battalions about most furiously.’12

  An attack on the isolated redoubt on the very eastern extremity of the French line also gave Wolfe the chance to concentrate his forces. His ‘Family Journal’ explained his thinking:

  he could act with his whole army at once, for during the time that the troops from Levis and the Point of Orléans were passed over in boats, the troops from our camp to the east of the falls could march down and pass the Montmorency below the falls (which were fordable at low water); add to this that he hoped to shake the enemy’s line by the power of his artillery across the falls, and by that favour our attack.

  Townshend’s men could march across the bottom of the falls and support the amphibious landing. If Wolfe had aimed further towards the centre of Montcalm’s position where the beach was more favourable to an assault, all the troops would have to be landed by boat and ‘as the boats could not contain the half of the army the first debarkation would have been crushed before they could be sustained, particularly as the descent there must be in the presence of the main body of the French army’.13

  The decision to attack the very edge of Montcalm’s army surprised the French commander as much as anyone. Only six days before he had written to de Lévis, his second in command, and responsible for the left of the French line, saying that he ‘did not believe the English will attack the left’. In fact, he was beginning to believe they would not attack at all, ‘but will try to intercept French supplies and destroy the countryside’.14

  Four days later four companies of grenadiers had boarded the two Cats. The attack was planned for 30 July but there had not been a breath of wind. Wolfe’s Journal recorded that ‘calm made it impossible to attack the Redoubt’. Slightly later the journal gives us another indication of disagreements within the highest echelons of the British forces. There is an entry that says, ‘dislike of the General Officers and other to this business—but nothing better proposed by them’.15 On 31 July there was just enough breeze and Wolfe had ordered the attack to start.

  As Wolfe arrived at the Russell it was already coming under heavy fire from the shore. Two companies of the Louisbourg Grenadiers, just over one hundred and fifty men, were packed on board. All infantrymen hate being cooped up in an alien environment, passively enduring a heavy bombardment. The heat of the sun was being augmented by the ship’s gunners, who, Mackellar wrote, were ‘firing as fast as their guns would allow’; the infantrymen’s situation was close to being unbearable.16 They had begun taking casualties. Wolfe was risking his life by going aboard. He told Saunders later that ‘I was no less than three times struck with the splinters in that ship and had my stick knocked out of my hand with a cannonball while I was on board reconnoitring the position and movements of the enemy.’17

  Wolfe’s bravery was laudable and no doubt boosted his popularity with the huddled redcoats whose danger he shared, but his job was to make a decision. He was now close enough to the shore to realize that his assumptions about the French defences were wrong. The redoubt that he had hoped to capture was not isolated; it was not out of range from the French entrenchments. He reported to Pitt that ‘the redoubt was too much commanded to be kept without very great loss’, meaning that if he seized it the French would be able to fire down onto it from their entrenchments on the hills above. The central idea that had underpinned the operation had turned out to be false. The question was: should he call off the attack?

  Like all commanders in the thick of battle Wolfe found himself impelled towards action. Officers and men would have mentally prepared themselves to go into battle, their blood was up. From the shotblasted deck of a crowded ship, with wounded and dying men scattered around him, the idea of cancelling the operation must have seemed the cowardly rather than the wise option. The grenadiers had endured a summer of frustration, time and again being ordered into flat-bottomed boats for assaults that had been cancelled. Friends and comrades had been captured, tortured, and scalped while on patrol. Wolfe knew that these men were desperate for revenge, and desperate to get off this unfamiliar ship. Behind him on the St Lawrence more grenadiers were crammed onto flat-bottomed boats, bored and terrified at the same time, waiting for Wolfe’s decision.

  He later explained to Pitt that the ‘enemy seemed in some confusion’. Since ‘we were prepared for an action, I thought it a proper time to make an attempt upon their entrenchments’.18 It was a convenient excuse. Having told Monckton that he did not want to launch a direct assault on the enemy trenches he was now about to do just that. Orders were sent to the brigadiers, the grenadiers were to be taken off the Cats and ferried ashore in small boats. Wolfe was about to command his first battle.

  The tide was high when the Cats beached themselves, to allow them to get as close in as possible. Wolfe now realized, according to his ‘Family Journal’, that ’’twas necessary to let the ebb run e’re he attempted to land the troops, otherwise the landing would be under the musketry of the enemy’.19 Not only did he have to wait for the waters to recede and allow his men to deploy on the beach without being cut down by French musketry but he also had to wait for the ford below the Montmorency falls to become crossable by Townshend’s men waiting on the far side. This would not be possible for about four or five hours. The grenadiers were taken off the Cats, and they joined their fellows in the flat-bottomed boats bobbing in the middle of the St Lawrence. Malcolm Fraser was in one of the boats and wrote that ‘in this way we continued going sometimes up, sometimes down the river, the enemy throwing a shell at our boats almost every ten minutes, which luckily did no execution’.20 The occasional soaking in river water caused by the cannonballs must have almost been welcome on such a hot day.

  At around 1600 hours the tide was out. The retreating waters had uncovered a large strand on which Wolfe’s attack could form up. He gave the signal for the boats to head for the shore: a red flag from the main topgallant mast of the Russell. When this signal
had been noted he flew a blue-and-white striped flag from the same place to tell Townshend to start his march across the Montmorency. The sailors pulled hard on their oars. Suddenly the leading boats crunched onto a ledge that Wolfe described as being ‘a considerable distance’ from the shore. ‘This accident put us in some disorder,’ he reported. Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ says that he immediately ‘ordered the intermediate space twixt them and the enemies shore be sounded, to know if the troops could march it, without wetting their ammunition’, but ‘in many places the water was five feet deep’.21 While the grenadiers and sailors heaved the boats off the ledge, with cannonballs slapping into the water around them, Wolfe sent a message to Townshend to delay the crossing of the Montmorency and then took one flat-bottomed boat and tried to find a passage through the shallows. After an hour he had done so and ‘as soon as we had found a fit part of the shore’ he ordered the troops to disembark, ‘thinking it not yet too late for the attempt’.22 Mackellar says that the time was about 1715 hours. Forty-five minutes later the boats grounded and the grenadiers jumped into the water, hoisting muskets and cartridge cases high out of it. A witness wrote that ‘the grenadiers showed uncommon bravery in this affair; we got out of our boats and formed as well as we could in the water, which came up to our waistbelts’.23 Clouds had suddenly blackened the sky and Knox described the weather as ‘very gloomy’.24