Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  On 19 August Wolfe himself was struck down. He had always suffered from intestinal and other complaints and the microbes found a willing host in his weak body. His ‘Family Journal’ says simply that ‘Mr Wolfe was taken ill of a fever’ and ‘was incapable of business’.83 Wolfe wrote to a government minister in London and blamed ‘the extreme heat of August and a good deal of fatigue’.84 Rumours swept around the army for days until news of their commander’s illness was confirmed on 22 August. It came as no surprise to Knox whose suspicions had been aroused by Wolfe’s failure to visit the camp at Point Lévis for three or four days. Clearly until then he had visited every encampment of his far-flung army almost daily. This was only a small part of his gruelling routine. He inspected fortifications, batteries, and latrines. He led counter-attacks against Canadian and Native American raids. He interrogated deserters. Perhaps most stressful of all was the terrible responsibility for the success or failure of the mission. He had found the French much stronger than he had hoped. He had not heard a single thing from Amherst, supposedly the other half of a giant pincer attack. All his assaults had come to naught while his army was being whittled away by ambush and disease. Although only a sergeant, John Johnson showed great empathy for his commander, putting his illness down to stress. Wolfe was worried, Johnson explained, that ‘he should be exposed to the contumelies [insults] of a harsh and unthinking populace, and that his military talents should be exposed to ridicule, after exerting every faculty of both body and mind, for the service of his country’. ‘These perturbations of his mind,’ he continued, ‘affected his body to that degree, that he was for some days entirely unfit for public business.’85

  His men took the news of their general’s illness very badly. Knox reported that ‘it is with the greatest concern to the whole army, that we are now informed of our amiable General’s being very ill of a slow fever: the soldiers lament him exceedingly, and seemed apprehensive of this event’.86 Whatever disagreements Wolfe may have had with his senior officers his popularity among the men had remained high. His attention to their well-being, his energy and presence in every corner of every British camp, and, perhaps above all, his determination to share the dangers of battle with his men had made him a popular commander. In the forests along the Montmorency or in the leading flat-bottomed boat feeling its way into the shore through the shoals during the attack on 31 July, Wolfe had been in the middle of some of the thickest fighting. His calm refusal to be intimidated by Native American tactics and his constant assurances that if the men trusted their comrades, their officers, and their muskets they would overcome, seem to have won their respect.

  Wolfe was bedridden for at least a week. Knox crossed the river on 24 August to receive orders for Monckton’s brigade at Point Lévis but Wolfe ‘was so ill above stairs as not to be able to come to dinner’.87 His headquarters were in ‘a tolerable house’, according to Knox, which survives until today although it is boarded up, surrounded by weeds, and in need of paint. It is little bigger than a cottage but considerably more comfortable than the tents of the men he led. Something of his lifestyle during his time there can be deduced from a will he wrote in June while aboard the Neptune sailing towards Quebec. He left his ‘camp equipage, kitchen furniture, table linen, wine and provisions’ to his successor in command of his army. He had a servant, François, who was to take half of his ‘clothes and linen’ while ‘three footmen’ would share the other half.88 Wolfe would have been kept in clean, comfortable conditions with a regular supply of fresh food. These, rather than the close attention of the army’s surgeons, with their belief in draining blood from the patient, gave him a decent chance of recovering. More so than the hundreds of men who lay crammed and filthy in the overflowing hospital on the Ìle d’Orléans.

  Unable to leave his bed, his army depleted, and the nights gradually closing in, Wolfe was forced to break with habit and consult. The man who had taken no advice now sent from his sickbed instructions that, in the words of his ‘Family Journal’, his brigadiers should ‘take what measures they thought most salutary’.89

  In a letter to his three subordinates Wolfe wrote that he hoped that ‘the public service may not suffer by the General’s indisposition’. He begged that the ’Brigadiers will be so good to meet and consult together for the public utility and advantage, and to consider of the best method of attacking the Enemy, if the French army is attacked and defeated, the General concludes the town would immediately surrender, because he does not find they have any provisions in the place’.90 He outlined three ways of attacking the enemy. The first suggestion involved ‘fording the Montmorency 8 or 9 miles up’ and attacking the French Beauport positions from the rear. Wolfe admitted that it would be hard to complete this march in secret, writing that ‘it is likely they would be discovered upon their march on both sides of the river’. The second and third plans involved a force marching across the ford at the bottom of the falls and making an attack on a weak point in the Beauport defences while Monckton brought his men across in the flat-bottomed boats. This was, in effect, the same plan that had led to such a sharp defeat on the last day of July. It was not fresh thinking and neither was his final comment that ‘the general thinks that the country should be ruined and destroyed as much as can be done consistent with a more capital operation’.91

  Obviously Wolfe could not tear his gaze from the sprawling enemy camp along the Beauport shore. Despite his defeat at Montmorency he clearly still believed that the basic plan and objectives had been sound. His brigadiers disagreed. Townshend wrote to his wife during these days saying that ‘General Wolfe’s health is but very bad. His generalship in my poor opinion is not a bit better, this only between us.’ Townshend appears to have given up hope. He concluded that ‘the success of this campaign, which from the disposition the French have made of their force must chiefly fall to General Amherst and General Johnson’.92 Despite this pessimism on 28 August the brigadiers met in the morning at Point Lévis to consider their commander’s recommendations. Then they went on board the Stirling Castle to confer with Saunders, who had been overseeing the slow battle to drive the French gunboats from the St Lawrence basin as well as keeping the army fed and supplied with convoys of small boats passing to and fro between the British camps. Monckton returned to Point Lévis in the evening but Murray and Townshend stayed aboard overnight.93 The next day they sent Wolfe their reply. It was not what he was expecting.

  ‘Having met this day, in consequence of General Wolfe’s desire to consult together for the public utility, and advantage, and to consider of the best method of attacking the enemy,’ the brigadiers began, ‘we…considered some propositions of his with respect to our future operations, and think it is our duty to offer our opinion as follows.’94 They dismissed Wolfe’s obsession with the Beauport shore as politely as they could. ‘The natural strength of the enemy’s situation between the river St Charles, and the Montmorency, now improved by all the art of their engineers makes the defeat of their army if attacked there very doubtful,’ they wrote. ‘From late experience’, they reminded Wolfe, the British boats would be unprotected by the fire of the ships. Nor were they impressed with Wolfe’s other idea: the long flanking march which would cross the Montmorency miles inland and then attack the French from behind. ‘It appears to us,’ they told him, ‘that, that part of the army which is proposed to march through the woods…to surprise their camp is exposed to certain discovery, and to the disadvantage of a continual wood fight.’ The long summer of fighting had convinced the brigadiers, and Saunders, that victory lay neither in frontal amphibious assaults nor in prolonged marches through woodlands teeming with Native American and Canadian skirmishers. Even if Wolfe’s attacks on the Beauport defences did result in victory, the French would simply withdraw across the St Charles and ‘dispute the passage’ of that river, supplied, as he was, from his magazines further west.95

  They begged Wolfe to banish thoughts of a battle for Beauport altogether. They were unanimously ‘of the op
inion that the most probable method of striking an effectual blow is by bringing up the troops to the south shore, and directing our operations above the town’. There was ‘very little doubt’ that the British could establish themselves on the north shore above the town as Murray had shown with his raid on Deschambault. In this event ‘the Marquis de Montcalm must fight us on our own terms [because] we are betwixt him and his provisions, and betwixt him and their Army opposing General Amherst’. ‘If he gives us battle,’ they asserted, ‘and we defeat him, Quebec and probably all Canada will be ours, which is an advantage far beyond any we can expect by an attack on the Beauport side.’ Having totally rejected his plans and suggested a radically different strategy his brigadiers attempted to comfort him with declarations of their loyalty: ’we cannot conclude without assuring the General, that whatever he determines to do, he will find us most hearty, and zealous in the execution of his orders’.96

  The brigadiers even went as far as to prepare a plan of operations which suggested the immediate abandonment of the Montmorency camp. A minimum of troops would be left at Point Lévis and the tip of Ìle d’Orléans and the rest of the army concentrated at the mouth of the Etchemin River around six miles above Quebec where it entered the St Lawrence. Troops would then be packed into as many transports as could get past the guns of the town and landed on the north shore. The best place, they thought, was ‘half a league’ above the Cap Rouge River, which was about ten miles upriver of Quebec. As soon as the first wave was landed, every boat available would ferry the remaining troops from the south shore across to join the first wave on the north. This plan would menace Quebec’s least fortified side, it would threaten Montcalm’s all-important communications and supply routes, and it would concentrate the diminished manpower of the British expeditionary force in one single thrust. Above all it would circumvent the two greatest obstacles to British arms encountered thus far: the irregular forces of Canada and the bristling shore defences of the St Lawrence.97

  Saunders and the brigadiers spoke with huge confidence about operating above the town because, as they met to consider how to break the deadlock on the St Lawrence, the navy, after weeks of trying, had finally managed to get more ships past the town. Wolfe had made his usual insinuations that the navy were cowards as August had progressed and Saunders’ ships had failed to get above Quebec. On 13 August Wolfe had written to Monckton demanding to know the reason for the ‘delay of the ships and for their not attempting it yesterday when the weather was so favourable’.98

  Time and again ships had tried to get through the narrows but the wind had failed them at the key moment and the town’s cannon forced the almost stationary ships to return. It was not until 27 August, as Saunders reported to the Admiralty, that ‘they got up, which was the fourth attempt they had made to gain their passage’. On the night of 27/28 August he continued, ‘the Lowestoft and Hunter sloop with two armed sloops and two catts with provisions [are] to pass Quebec and join the Sutherland’.99

  One British officer watching from Point Lévis said that the French fired 200 shots at the ships.100 A sergeant in the Louisbourg Grenadiers thought that the French batteries ‘fired so hot at them with shot and bombs, that one would have thought it impossible for any vessel to pass; but they received little or no damage’.101 A few of them did, in fact, find their target. The Hunter’s log reported that ‘when abreast of the town, the French being at their quarters fired very hard for a space of time; we passed with the loss of two men and one wounded’. The day after the carpenters were ‘repairing what was damaged by the shot’ and the following day the ‘sailmakers [were] mending the shot holes in the fore and mizzen topsails’. The Lowestoft’s log said that at 2045 hours she was ‘abreast of the town of Quebec, from which we received a smart fire of shot and shells, at which we fired seven 9-pounders…In passing the town received many holes through our sails and a deal of our running rigging shot away.’ 102

  The upriver fleet was now turning into a powerful body capable of carrying and landing a large number of troops in one wave. Saunders made sure that more and more ships were sent to reinforce this growing force commanded by his subordinate, Rear Admiral Holmes. A sergeant in the Louisbourg Grenadiers recorded that on 29 August ‘five sail went to pass the town’; the batteries ‘fired very warm all the time of their passing, and I was very well informed that only 15 of their shot took place out of all their firing’. On the thirtieth ‘four of our ships passed the town, where they kept a continual firing; but did us very little damage’.103 Ramezay reports that ‘we fired upon them, without being able to see the harm we caused’. ‘But,’ he continued, rather desperately, ‘we have found some effects on the beach that led us to believe that we had sunk a few of them.’104

  A few pieces of driftwood did not signify a sinking. The French batteries were simply unable to discourage the British ships from passing if they had a fair easterly breeze and a flood tide to get them past the town. By the end of August the shore batteries of the Lower Town had been thoroughly blasted by the British. A French journal records that ‘it was no longer possible for anyone to remain’ on the ramparts because ‘the fire from the batteries on the Pointe Lévis was vigorously sustained by day and night’. They spent truces desperately building cannon-proof ‘épaulements’ or breastworks to try to protect their artillerymen but they still took terrible casualties. Over a single four-or five-day period the French journal recounts that thirteen men were ‘killed or wounded passed recovery’.105

  Typically when taking on batteries, ships would use a mixture of round shot to damage the fabric of the battery itself and grape to kill the artillerymen or at least scare them into abandoning their posts. Despite the seeming mismatch between lighter guns on an unstable ship firing at heavy, well-mounted cannon ensconced behind stone defences, ships often silenced shore batteries. Back on the coast of France Captain Hervey of the Monmouth embarrassed the French defenders of Brest by sailing in and capturing prizes under the mouths of the cannon of the shore batteries. A hail of grape shot sent the French gunners scurrying away from their guns. In January 1762 it took HMS Dragon only an hour to silence a shore battery in Martinique. Faced with aggressive British fire the guns of Quebec were not enough to block the narrows and as the wind blew fresh from the east Saunders crowded the upper river with British ships.

  On the night of 31 August/1 September five more vessels, led by the frigate Seahorse, passed the town. A French journal bemoaned that ‘the English had now 17 vessels above the town, of which, one of them was a two decker, two frigates, and the rest small vessels and transports—of these however several were mounted with cannon’.106 Montcalm described their manoeuvres to Bougainville as being ‘of the most alarming kind’.107 It was the one threatening development in an otherwise better than expected month for the French. Great swathes of Canada had been burnt and its principal town had also been reduced to ashes but the British were no closer to taking possession of it. By the end of August the French even felt bullish enough to take some aggressive action against the fleet in the river above the town.

  As soon as British ships had passed the town in July, Vaquelin, a naval officer who had won the respect of his peers fighting the British at Louisbourg the year before, had been sent up to look after the French frigates that had been moored for safety a long way beyond Quebec, near Trois Rivières. Early in the summer he had sent a message to Quebec saying that if they sent him the ships’ crews, who were manning the artillery batteries in the Lower Town, he would capture or destroy the British ships operating above the town. His suggestions were ignored. A French journal did not know ‘whether it was that they did not like at that moment to unman the batteries, or that they would not render themselves responsible for the two frigates, in case of their failing in the attack’. Either way, ‘a deaf ear was turned to his solicitations’.108 In late August, however, his suggestion was finally taken up. One French journal records that ‘a levy was made of 1,100 men, officers and sailors’ in order to
‘arm Le Machau, Le Senectaire, and some other ships to attack the enemy ship of 50 guns’.109 Panet reports that two battery commanders from Quebec ‘with the elite men’ were to rearm the frigates.110

  ‘When everything was in readiness for putting in execution the plan,’ records one journal, ‘they were preparing to sail…with a favourable wind; and in the opinion of all the seamen, success was infallible.’ At that very moment a courier reached the crews. He had been sent from Quebec with an urgent summons for the sailors to return. It was 28 August and the night before more British ships had passed the town. Vaudreuil wanted the sailors back. Not only did he now fear an assault on the Lower Town, but the replacement artillerymen had proved woefully inadequate. They had failed to do much damage to the British ships; indeed, they were dangerous to themselves. ‘Above 20 of our men were wounded,’ records the journal, ‘and not any from the fire of the enemy, but solely from their own unskilfulness in serving our guns at the batteries.’ The sailors were deeply upset. ‘Nothing could exceed their discontent, at being frustrated in their wish of prosecuting an enterprise, which they were assured would have afforded them the opportunity of signalizing, and perhaps enriching themselves.’111 It was a cruel blow to another French plan that had great potential. Vaudreuil displayed poor leadership in not seeing the opportunity earlier. The small squadron of British ships above Quebec was isolated and vulnerable. An attempt should have been made against them before the end of August. By the time the French made their move the British had advanced enough ships into the upper river to decisively fix the balance of power in their favour.