Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  The wounded staggered or were carried down the track to the Anse au Foulon for transfer to the hospital on Île d’Orléans. They were forced to make way for bands of sailors dragging cannon up towards the Plains of Abraham. The Hunter alone sent ‘an officer and 30 men’, or just under a third of the ship’s company to help with this task.10 One witness watched this ‘laborious employment which the honest tars set about with the greatest alacrity’. He reports that ‘it was really diverting to hear the midshipmen cry out ‘“Starboard, starboard, my brave boys.”’11

  On the Plains soldiers were setting to work fortifying their position. One British source describes how as soon as the fighting was over ‘we received part of our entrenching tools, and began to make redoubts, not knowing but next morning we would have another [enemy force] to cut’.12 At least one senior British officer regarded his army’s position as very fragile. Murray, now second in command, wrote a year later that they had been ‘surprised into a victory’. As he came to terms with the unexpected success he looked about him and realized that it had ‘cost the conquered very little indeed’.13 The French still had a considerable force on the other side of the St Charles River and Bougainville lurked to the rear.

  With some alacrity, therefore, the ground was cleared, houses on the periphery of the battlefield were fortified, and, in the words of Chief Engineer Patrick Mackellar, ‘we began to raise redoubts on the front and upon the flanks of our camp’.14 Like the rest of the army young Malcolm Fraser and his men ‘lay on our arms all the night of the 13th September’.15 They slept rough, at the barricades, muskets in hand. If any one challenged a stranger the password was ‘Victory’. Around them was the wreckage of battle. Dead bodies awaited burial and discarded kit lay in heaps. The battlefield smelt of burnt grass, gunpowder, and blood. Survivors were less moved than might be expected. They were all veterans and as an Austrian commander once wrote after a battle in Europe, ‘it is not a question of being hardhearted, unless you are an authentic villain. But you are so glad to have survived the day that you become a little insensitive.’16

  The wary British troops would have been cheered if they had known what was afoot in the French camp across the St Charles. The confidence of the French regular troops, in particular, had been crushed by the day’s fighting. One journal reports that ‘after the battle…diverse officers of the regular troops did not hesitate to say openly, in the presence of the soldier, that no other course remained for us than to capitulate promptly for the entire colony’.17 Vaudreuil sent to a dying Montcalm for advice. The General wrote back that he had three options: surrender the colony, retire to the Jacques Cartier River, or attack. Montcalm’s pessimism, now strengthened by his impending death, got the better of him and during the night he wrote to the British commander. The note is, as always, impeccably phrased: ‘Sir, Obliged to cede Quebec to your arms I have the honour to beg your Excellency’s kindness for our sick and wounded.’ It ended: ‘I have the honour to be, sir, your very humble and very obedient servant. Mont-calm.’18 After his somewhat premature surrender of Quebec Montcalm dictated a letter to his beloved family, praised his successor, de Lévis, and received the last rites from Bishop Pontbriand. Montcalm died as he watched his last dawn at 0500 hours. His corpse was lowered into a shell hole in the floor of the Ursulines’ chapel where it remained until it was reburied with great pomp in 2001 in the cemetery of the General Hospital.19

  But the town was not Montcalm’s to surrender. There was still a garrison and an army licking its wounds on the Beauport shore. The previous evening Vaudreuil had called a council of war. It had been a bad-tempered affair. Vaudreuil and Bigot had urged an attack. A regular officer who watched the meeting wrote that the Governor General urged his subordinates to ‘take their revenge the next morning and endeavour to wipe off the stains they had contracted the foregoing fatal day’. The witness believed that ‘this proposal which seemed to carry a true sense of honour with it, ought never to have been rejected by those gentlemen who receive their sovereign’s pay, in order to maintain his spirit of honour’.20 However, reject it they did. The regular officers refused to follow Vaudreuil. Another witness was exasperated. ‘All these gentlemen,’ he wrote, were ‘exaggerating somewhat the loss we had suffered, all voted unanimously that the army should retreat to Jacques Cartier.’ This was madness according to the source, ‘by concentrating M de Bougainville’s corps, the Montréal Battalions and the garrison of the town we should still have remaining about nearly five thousand fresh troops, whom we might regard as the elite of the army’. In the end Vaudreuil was unable to convince the officers, reeling from their shocking defeat. He was simply outvoted.21 At 2100, three hours after the meeting broke up, the French army fled north up the St Charles ‘abandoning provisions, ammunition, baggage, and artillery and marched all night to gain the Point aux Trembles’.22 One officer wrote that ‘the disorder started when we left’. It was soon a ‘melee’. Had the British intervened, ‘50 men could have destroyed the rest of our army’. The disconsolate author concluded that ‘the French soldier does not know discipline any more, instead of training the Canadian he has taken all his bad faults’.23 Johnstone, Montcalm’s aide-de-camp, wrote that ‘it was not a retreat but an abominable flight’.24

  In the morning Mackellar inspected the abandoned Beauport shore. ‘They left most of their tents standing,’ he wrote, as well as ‘all their artillery along that coast, and a considerable quantity of provisions which was plundered and carried off by the habitants’.25 Vaudreuil had also left behind instructions to the commander of French forces in the city itself, Ramezay. He said that the British entrenchments made them ‘every moment still more inaccessible’ to French attack and as a result he was going to retreat upcountry. Ramezay was to defend the city until ‘he shall fall short of provisions’ at which point he was to send ‘the most capable and intelligent officer of his garrison to propose its capitulation agreeably to the subjoined articles’. Vaudreuil enclosed these articles of capitulation in rough form.26 On 14 September Ramezay reviewed his men. Three hundred and thirty French and colonial regulars formed a nucleus of professionals. They were joined by twenty artillerymen, 500 sailors, and around thirteen hundred militiamen, something like 2,200 in all. There were eight days’ worth of rations to feed these men and the 4,000 civilian inhabitants of Quebec.

  On 14 September Townshend ordered that the parole or challenge was ‘Wolfe’ and the countersign ‘England’.27 The imperial canonization of Wolfe had begun. His loss does seem to have profoundly affected his men. Knox reaches new heights of hyperbole and melodrama to describe his former commander in chief. ‘Our joy at this success,’ Knox insisted, ‘is inexpressibly damped by the loss we sustained of one of the greatest heroes which this or any other age can boast of,—General James Wolfe, who received his mortal wound, as he was exerting himself at the head of the grenadiers of Louisbourg.’ ‘My pen is too feeble,’ he continued, ‘to draw the character of this British Achilles…yet I may, with strict truth, advance that Major General James Wolfe, by his talents…no means inferior to a Frederick [the Great], a Henry [le grand of France], or a Ferdinand [the successful commander of British and allied forces in Europe at the time].’28 A volunteer with one of the regiments wrote that Wolfe had been a ‘noble, a much loved, a much lamented officer’.29 Malcolm Fraser wrote that ‘we suffered an irreplaceable loss in the death of our commander the brave Major General James Wolfe, who was killed in the beginning of the general action; we had the good fortune not to hear of it till all was over’.30

  It was not only the officers who grieved for their commander; the less audible voice of the men in the ranks was also in mourning. Iain Campbell composed a verse, in Gaelic, of his epic ballad which recorded the campaign in the memory of the clan Fraser:

  the flowing blood of our renowned general was soaking into the grass and it was a terrible loss though it is a great tale to tell…He asked to be lifted, so that he could see the battle, while he was in that terrible pl
ight he could not see the heroes as death took away his sight! they said to him in high spirits ‘we have suddenly won the battlefield and the Gaels are among them wounding them as they run downhill’.31

  One officer wrote that ‘the soldiers were inconsolable for the loss of their brave general as they loved him beyond measure; and well they might, for he was extremely tender to, and careful of, them, and was called, the Officer’s Friend, and Soldier’s Father’.32 Lieutenant Browne who had shared Wolfe’s final moments wrote to his father saying,

  You can’t imagine…the sorrow of every individual in the army for so great a loss. Even the soldiers dropped tears, who were but the minute before driving their bayonets through the French. I can’t compare it to anything better than to a family in tears and sorrow which had just lost their father, their friend and their whole dependence.33

  Saunders and Townshend, who both had good cause to dislike Wolfe, behaved very correctly in their correspondence. Saunders wrote to Townshend saying that the ‘loss of our friend General Wolfe gives me the greatest concern which in some measure is taken off by the great victory of today…he was himself sensible of the weakness of his constitution, and determined to crowd into a few years actions that would have adorned length of life’.34 Perhaps oddly the two men were the major beneficiaries of Wolfe’s will. He had written it during the early summer during his long journey aboard the Neptune and left ‘my light service of plate’ to Saunders, ‘in remembrance of his guest’. As for his ‘camp equipage, kitchen furniture, table linen, wine and provisions’, these were left to ‘the officer who succeeds me in the command’. ‘All my books and papers, both here and in England’ were left to his keen fellow student of military history, Colonel Carleton. His linen and clothes were left to his servant François and his three footmen, and all the servants were paid up to the end of the year and their board looked after until they arrived in Britain or ‘engage with other masters, or enter into some other profession’. On top of this he left ‘50 guineas to François, 20 to Ambrose and ten to each of the others’. Anything left ‘I leave to my good mother, entirely at her disposal’.35

  On 14 September Townshend issued a stirring General Order. It informed the men that ‘the general officers remaining fit to act take the earliest opportunity to express the praise which is due to the conduct and bravery of the troops’. The nature of the victory ‘sufficiently proves the superiority which this army has over any number of such troops as they engaged yesterday’. The men were told to bear the fatigues of the next few days with good cheer because ‘this seems to be the period which will determine in all probability our American labours’. Tents were to be brought up to save the men from another night in the open while the army’s pioneers were to start burying the heaps of dead.36 Townshend instructed the engineers to widen the track from Anse au Foulon, to make it easier to bring tents and other supplies up. Once the tents were on the Plains, a heavy siege artillery train began the long, painful ascent to the higher ground where men were digging batteries to house it. Over the next few days, one journal reports, ‘twelve heavy 24 pounders, six heavy 12 pounders, some large mortars and 4 inch howitzers’ were brought up ‘to play upon the town’.37 Rear Admiral Holmes reported that ‘the army and the fleet were incessantly employed in getting every thing ready for opening batteries against the town’. There was a good deal of hurry because ‘it is now very late in the season and the utmost diligence was used and the greatest fatigue undergone, with spirit and cheerfulness by every body, to bring the campaign soon to an end’.38 Townshend also appointed new brigadiers; Burton now finally won his promotion and Fraser, also recovering from a wound, was also elevated. The new commander was also careful to keep Monckton closely informed. Townshend wrote to his colleague upon hearing that the wound was not mortal, congratulating him on the fact and telling him that he was investing the town as closely as possible to complete the long siege. He finished the letter, ‘Adieu, Dear Bob, no man wishes your health more than your obedient servant.’39

  Inside Quebec the spirit of the townspeople was cracking. Militiamen slipped out of the town to avoid capture. Ramezay was astonished to receive a remonstrance on 15 September from the wealthiest citizens to capitulate on honourable terms rather than prolong the resistance and risk a violent assault on the city. The prospect of the British army sacking Quebec was far more terrible than even the bombardment that they had all endured for nearly two months. It was a fact of military life that when an eighteenth-century army had battered its way through ditches, breaches in the city wall, across barricades, and into the narrow streets of a town they could not nor would not be restrained. It was one of the few times that the mask of discipline was allowed to slip or, indeed, was discarded entirely. Captured cities were often subjected to obscene ravages, reminiscent of Attila’s attacks on Roman cities at the end of the Western Empire. Not only did the chaotic, bloody, and ferocious nature of an assault make reimposing discipline a practical impossibility but also it was felt by many that the horrors visited on the townspeople punished them for their resistance and was the most effective encouragement for other towns to surrender quickly. This was certainly the case with Quebec. Men like Jean-Claude Panet, Jean Taché, a wealthy 61-year-old merchant and trader, and François Daine, de facto mayor of Quebec, had put up stoically with the destruction of their houses during the summer but to have their cellars plundered of all their worldly goods, their daughters raped, and their families murdered was too high a price to pay for patriotism.

  Ramezay summoned his senior officers to a council of war. He later reported that ‘we had lost all hope of being rescued’.40 It was agreed that ‘this place, little capable of defense, being enclosed partly by a mere palisade, might with its artillery and warlike stores, hold out, some time, against the efforts of the enemy, if provisions were in sufficient abundance’. However, those supplies were lacking. One option would have been to send out all the women and children, to ensure that only men who could bear arms were fed, and thus prolong the defence of the town. Townshend recorded in his journal that a messenger was sent to ask him to give safe passage to the women and children through British lines. He refused to give the French this assurance because it would clearly allow the men to hold out a good deal longer. 41 Knowing that he was unable to jettison ‘useless’ mouths, Ramezay went around the table and asked every officer for his view. All but one of the fourteen men present advised surrender. Bigot said that ‘the extremity to which the place is reduced for provisions being considered, my opinion is, to demand a capitulation’. Another officer referred to the ‘very bad, dilapidated fortifications’. One voice alone spoke up for heroic resistance. Louis-Thomas Jacau de Fiedmont was an artillery officer who had risen from the ranks. According to some he was the inventor of the floating batteries which were nicknamed ‘Jacobites’ after him. He had been captured twice during the war already and obviously did not relish another spell of British hospitality. He urged the council to ‘reduce the ration and persevere in defending the place to the last extremity’. He failed to convince anyone else around the table but was made a Knight of the Order of Saint-Louis the following winter for his loyalty. Ramezay summarized the meeting: ‘considering the instructions I have received from the Marquis de Vaudreuil and the scarcity of provisions, proved by the returns to me furnished and the searches I have had made, I conclude to endeavor to obtain from the enemy the most honorable capitulation’.42

  Two days later Ramezay wrote to Vaudreuil excusing the step that he now felt forced to take. He explained that ‘the precipitation of the retreat and the abandonment of the town has taken place without provision having been made for its sustenance’. The people were terrified of the ‘dangers impending of its being taken by assault’, while many of the sailors and militiamen were not interested in fighting. As he looked across the Plains of Abraham he could see two enemy batteries ready to ‘fire at this moment’. He was not hopeful of help from Vaudreuil: ‘your army all divided and separated offers
me no prospect of prompt succour’ while ‘the arrival of the flour you promise is as difficult by land as by sea’. Above all Ramezay insisted that ‘I must save my garrison and the people.’43

  Vice Admiral Saunders struck fear into the hearts of the Quebecers by a well-timed demonstration with his mightiest warships. The very largest ships had waited throughout the summer further downstream and had played no part in the fighting. Now he moved seven of them into position off the Lower Town, their towering hulls bristling with cannon. These ships carried twice as many guns as the frigates that had been doing much of the fighting in the basin. Holmes reports that this highly aggressive move ‘put the enemy in the utmost consternation’. The garrison now feared their ‘coming up alongside of the lower town with the night tide, and that they would be stormed by sea and land’.44

  It was too much for the French defenders. Ramezay was determined to surrender the town. As he made arrangements to do so, the return of de Lévis from Montreal to take control of the French army at Jacques Cartier had brought with it a new sense of purpose. He immediately insisted that the army march on Quebec and dislodge the British besiegers. Vaudreuil sent food on horseback to Ramezay and a messenger with instructions to ‘encourage him by all means to hold out to the last extremity’.45 The cavalryman, de la Rochebeaucourt led his men in a wild gallop around the British army and into Quebec with bags of biscuit lashed to their saddles. They arrived just after the departure of Armand de Joannès, an aide to Ramezay, to the British camp with a document of capitulation signed by his commander. It was not irreversible but the Quebec garrison had clearly lost their appetite for any further resistance. Daine wrote a letter to Versailles attempting to defend Ramezay’s decision. He had surrendered, he insisted, ‘in order not to expose the garrison and the people to a general assault, and thereby to the fury of the avenger, according to the laws of war’. Time had run out, ‘the commandant judged that hesitation was no longer excusable’. Daine reported that he and his family were ‘on the brink of dying of hunger’.46