Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  While King George’s American and British subjects imagined a new empire in the hinterland of the continent, replete with fertile river valleys, furs, and other raw materials, Murray’s little army was on short rations, huddled among the wreckage of Quebec, trying to build shelters to protect themselves from the imminent winter freeze. Their writ did not extend beyond the range of the cannon on the battlements. The enemy army lay between them and the rest of the colony and foraging parties still needed close protection from the Canadians who lurked in the shadows. Murray issued order after order in an attempt to maintain discipline. ‘No person whatsoever,’ he announced on 30 September, ‘is to molest or interrupt the French Inhabitants or people of the Country by taking their things or any other property of theirs, they be now subjects of his Majesty and under protection of the government.’99

  The army had suffered badly over the summer. Only 250 men and twenty officers had been killed, but 1,200 were sick or wounded. Wolfe’s army had lost around 15 per cent of its men.100 Montresor spoke for those that were left: ‘I think the desolation of this place exceeded Louisbourg,’ he told his father, ‘I’m quartered in a house that has no roof, not a single board.’ He was jealous of the 48th Regiment which was billeted in the Intendant’s Palace, which had survived the bombardment almost intact.101 Sergeant Thompson ‘made choice of a little house on the esplanade although it was scarcely inhabitable from the number of our shells that had fallen through it’. He ‘contrived to get a number of little jobs done towards making it passably comfortable for the men, and for my own part I got Hector Munro, who was a joiner by trade to knock up a kind of cabinet (as the Canadians call it) in one corner of the house for myself’.102 Like Wolfe before him, Murray had to deal with the scourge of women. He was forced to issue one order in which he ‘desires the commanding officers of regiments will not suffer their men to marry with the French’.103

  The men struggled to erect some form of shelter as well as working on the defences of the town and gathering enough firewood to last the winter. On top of this there was the threat of French attack. John Johnson wrote that ‘from our first entrance in the town of Quebec, our orders were every night repeated, to lie on our arms: no officer, no soldier unless he was sick, was allowed to undress, or go to bed; nor were we on any pretence, allowed to put off our accoutrements during the night’.104 No soldier was allowed to leave the town without specific permission from Murray himself.

  As the weather got colder, survival became an ever greater challenge. It became harder to keep discipline among the half-starved and freezing men. An unnamed inhabitant wrote that ‘Quebec is nothing but a shapeless mass of ruins. Confusion, disorder, pillage reign even among the inhabitants, although the English make examples of severity every day…English and French, all is chaos alike. The inhabitants, famished and destitute, escape to the country. Never was seen such a sight.’105 Pontbriand, the Bishop of Quebec, wrote just before he died in 1760 that ‘Blessed are those who, without attributing it wrongly and rashly to secondary causes, recognize in it the avenging arm of the Lord and submit to it.’ The Bishop blamed ‘insulting talk’, the ‘continual grumbling’, the ‘little fidelity in the observance of feast-days and the Sabbath’, and the ‘ignominious passion of drunkenness’ for the loss of Quebec.106 The British were God’s chosen instrument of punishment.

  By mid-November Murray certainly did not feel that he was God’s tool. He was growing desperate. On 13 November he wrote in his journal that ‘a very unusual desertion at this time prevailed among the troops’. He blamed the ‘plundering kind of war which had been carried on this last campaign had so debauched the soldier, that there was no putting a stop to these without very severe punishment; to avoid which, most probably, they deserted’. The next day he wrote that ‘as drunkenness and theft continued to reign predominant vices in the garrison, highly prejudicial to the service, I recalled all licences, and ordered for the future every man who was found drunk to receive twenty lashes every morning till he acknowledged where he got it, and forfeit his proper allowance of rum for six weeks’.107 Jean-Félix Récher was a victim of this growing anarchy. On 7 November he simply notes in his journal: ‘I am burgled and wounded.’108 After this brush with a British soldier he took shelter in the Ursuline Convent.

  By December sentries were freezing to death on duty, parties of men who donned snow shoes to try to collect firewood were ambushed, and the first signs of scurvy were appearing among the soldiers. Fraser wrote in his journal on 1 December that ‘it is thought we shall have a great deal of difficulty in supplying ourselves with fuel this winter. The winter is now very severe.’ It was ‘insupportably cold’; some of the sentries ‘have been deprived of speech and sensation in a few minutes’. Frostbite was already taking men’s toes and fingers and yet Fraser was alarmed that ‘the country people tell us it is not yet the worst’. The garrison were ‘but indifferently clothed’ but the Highlander ‘in particular is in a pitiful situation having no breeches, and the Philibeg is not at all calculated for this terrible climate’. The weather forced the proud Highlanders to part with their traditional dress. Malcolm Fraser noted that ‘Colonel Fraser is doing all in his power to provide trousers for them, and we hope soon to be on a footing with other regiments in that respect.’ The once neatly turned out redcoats now looked more like a band of marauding Siberians. Fraser wrote that ‘the weather is such that they are obliged to have all covered but their eyes, and nothing but the last necessity obliged any men to go out of doors’.109 The St Lawrence froze and the men had to stumble across the jagged ice to drag firewood and skirmish with enemy troops on Point Lévis.

  A soldier in the 15th Regiment commented that ‘we were totally unprepared for such a climate, neither fuel, forage, or indeed anything to make life tolerable. The troops were crowded into the vacant houses as well as possible. Numbers fell sick and the scurvy made a dreadful havoc among us.’ Hauntingly, he wrote that the ‘fatigues of winter was so great that the living almost envied the dead’.110 There was an ever increasing number of the latter. By the end of the winter around a thousand British corpses were neatly stacked outside the walls. The ground was frozen solid and it was impossible to bury them.

  As the snow eventually began to melt Murray could rely on only around 3,000 men to defend Quebec. Scurvy had, according to Fraser, made ‘fierce havoc in the garrison’. He estimated that two and a half thousand men were sick with ‘scarce a man of the army entirely free from it’. His own regiment, the 78th, had lost 106 men dead since the fall of Quebec and 580 of the survivors were in the sickbay.111 It was deeply unfortunate that Murray now faced a daring enemy commander determined to make a bold strike to reverse the positions in Canada before the spring thaw brought the inevitable flow of British men and supplies up the St Lawrence.

  De Lévis and Vaudreuil had scraped together a force of 7,000 men. As soon as the ice on the upper river started to crack de Lévis embarked this army. On 26 April the flotilla landed at St Augustin but one of his men fell overboard and was spotted by the British garrison at Quebec who rescued him and learnt about the movements of the French force. Murray quickly withdrew his men from Lorette and Ste Foy just before de Lévis could attack. Murray now faced exactly the same dilemma as that Montcalm had wrestled with in September. He believed, as he later wrote, that ‘I could not hesitate a moment about giving the enemy battle. As everyone knows the place is not tenable against an army in possession of the heights.’112 He had hoped to entrench his force on the Plains of Abraham but the ground was still too hard to dig trenches. Even so, like Montcalm, he believed that he had, at all costs, to deny the enemy the high ground outside the city walls, and he marched his shrivelled force out at 0700 hours on 28 April.

  The force was composed, according to John Johnson, of ‘a poor pitiful handful of half starved, scorbutic skeletons; many of whom had laid by their crutches on the occasion, and would not be prevailed on to stay behind’.113 Around half of Fraser’s Regiment had discharged th
emselves voluntarily from their hospital beds to join their comrades for the coming battle. Murray formed his men up on the same ground that Montcalm had chosen for his army in September. From there he could see the French force spilling out onto the Plains. After some skirmishing between his light troops and the French advance party, the latter seemed to give way hastily. Murray made a snap decision. Abandoning his defensive plan he ordered the army to attack the French. Like Montcalm, he gambled on an aggressive stroke to send the enemy reeling backwards before they could get their men, guns, and supplies onto the Plains of Abraham. Fraser wrote that ‘the bait was too tempting, and his passion for glory [got] the better of his reason’.114 Unfortunately Lévis’ men, like Wolfe’s, were ready to repel the attacks. The British retreated and the French formed their own columns and drove into Murray’s line. Weak, sickly, and heavily outnumbered, the British line collapsed. Muskets were cast aside, artillery abandoned, and a mass of fugitives fled into the town. The defending general had fought on the same ground and used the same strategy as Montcalm had done the year before and the results had been virtually identical. The butcher’s bill was even higher. Murray recorded just over a thousand casualties of whom 259 were killed. The long-suffering Highlanders of the 78th lost 100 men killed and wounded and twenty-seven of their thirty-nine officers. Colonel Fraser himself was wounded again and Malcolm Fraser was shot in the groin.115 De Lévis lost over eight hundred men with 193 of them killed. Native Americans butchered and scalped many of the wounded.

  The second siege of Quebec now commenced. Everything would depend on whether de Lévis could take the city before the British reinforcements arrived from the Atlantic. In the city the British force teetered on the brink of total anarchy. Murray hanged a man on the spot to try to discourage the endemic drunkenness and destroyed private alcohol stores. The siege works edged closer although the British artillery on the walls made them pay terribly for every yard gained, gunpowder being the one substance in the ruined town of which there was an abundance. Such was the shortage of men that British officers strapped themselves into harnesses to help haul cannon up from the Lower Town. Murray sent desperate appeals to Amherst for help. He began to load his sloops with equipment and stores in case he had to retreat.

  On 9 May a ship appeared in the St Lawrence. Civilians and soldiers on both sides strained to decipher the colours at her masthead. As she neared Quebec a long pendant could be seen at the main truck, a sure sign that the ship bore the King’s commission. The King of Britain’s commission. Soon the ensign at the mizzen peak and the Union Flag on the jack staff confirmed her allegiance. Knox had stood on the shore as men around him argued as to whether she was French or British. As she dropped anchor the more perceptive among the soldiers would have recognized that she was the Lowestoft, which had been present at the landings at the Anse au Foulon the previous September. Knox watched as she blasted a twenty gun salute and her captain wasted no time in climbing down into his barge to give Murray his first report from the outside world since October. ‘The gladness of the troops is not to be expressed,’ Knox reports. ‘Both officers and soldiers mounted the parapets in the face of the enemy, and huzzaed, with their hats in the air for almost an hour.’ The countryside reverberated with musket and cannon fire as infantrymen and artillerymen alike blazed away in euphoria. ‘The gunners were so elated, that they did nothing but fire and load for a considerable time.’ Knox was certain that the ‘garrison of Vienna, when closely besieged, and hard pressed…by the Turks, were not more rejoiced on sight of the Christian army…marching to their relief’.116

  The French were disappointed but not dismayed. One ship did not mean the end. If a French fleet was in the St Lawrence it could swat the plucky Lowestoft aside, deliver troops and men to de Lévis, and force the town to surrender. Undaunted, the French commander commenced his bombardment on 11 May. He was short of powder and had to limit each cannon to only twenty rounds a day. Even so French cannon came close to opening a breach in the walls. In the end it was the sailors, not the engineers, that decided it. On 15 May two more British ships arrived, the Vanguard with seventy guns and the Diana with thirty-two. All the British ships had spent the previous summer in the St Lawrence and now they wasted no time in passing the narrows and scattering de Lévis’ Canadian support vessels. One of his frigates hit a rock and sank as she fled; the other was driven ashore where her crew set her on fire. With no naval support, and his flank now threatened, de Lévis had to call off the siege. He sent a note to Murray requesting sympathy for the French wounded and then abandoned them and his heavy artillery as he retreated. On 17 May Murray led the garrison out hoping to pay his enemy back for his defeat at Ste Foy, but de Lévis was too quick and had already crossed the Cap Rouge River. There was nothing to be gained from further pursuit. Murray’s exhausted men needed to recuperate.

  British seapower had strangled New France; after Quiberon Bay the French navy effectively ceased to function. Money was so scarce that there was nothing to feed the dockyard cats. Versailles did send a token force, late in the season, to Canada of six ships and only 400 men. They never got near de Lévis. In July they anchored in the mouth of the Restigouche River, where despite batteries on either shore and a boom across the entrance British ships broke into the anchorage forcing the French sailors to burn their own ships. It now fell to the army to administer the final cut. During the summer three pincers advanced on Montreal. Murray led his army along the St Lawrence from Quebec. Brigadier William Haviland advanced up that ancient corridor of violence beside the Adirondacks: the Lake Champlain-Richelieu valley. Amherst approached Montreal along the St Lawrence from Lake Ontario. Remarkably all three armies reached Montreal from their three totally different directions within a day and a half of each other. De Lévis’ force had almost disintegrated. The militia had gone home to protect their farms and families and try to salvage what they could of their lives under new masters. By 5 September even his regulars were deserting in droves. Montreal was indefensible and Lévis was outnumbered ten to one.

  On 7 September Vaudreuil sent out his terms. Amherst accepted all of them but one. The French troops would not be allowed the honours of war. There would be no proud march past of French regulars, their colours unfurled, armed with a cannon and slow match burning. The British commander would not forgive French atrocities. De Lévis was appalled. He begged to be given permission to take his regulars and fight to the last on Île Ste Hélène ‘in order to sustain there, in our own name, the honour of the King’s arms, resolved to expose ourselves to every extremity rather than submit to conditions which appear to us so contrary thereto’.117 Vaudreuil would not countenance this and ordered his general to surrender. De Lévis heaped up the colours of the army and set them ablaze; he would not have them thrown at the feet of George II. Finally he broke his own sword rather than surrender it. On 9 September a mere 2,100 men, the remnant of the army of Canada, laid down their arms in the Place d’Armes. Canada was under British occupation.

  EPILOGUE

  FOUR YEARS LATER, in 1763, that occupation was made annexation in the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years War. Curiously it had actually been nine years after the first bloody encounter between Washington and Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. France’s fortunes had not improved much after her crushing defeats in 1759. In January 1760 Colonel Eyre Coote crushed a French force at Wandiwash in south-east India. Following a close blockade by the Royal Navy; Pondicherry, the last major French possession in the Indian subcontinent, surrendered in 1761. Wolfe’s army was sent from Canada to attack Martinique in the Caribbean, which fell in January 1762. Spain realized, far too late, that British global hegemony was not a welcome prospect and joined France in 1761. Her army and navy, which would have been so useful to France as allies a few years before, were now rounded on by the veteran British services. Her colonies in the Caribbean were stripped from her. Dominica, St Lucia, and St Vincent all fell. In the summer of 1762 a daring piece of navigation brought a British fl
eet through the Old Bahama Passage to stun the Spanish garrison of Havana, the cornerstone of Spanish power in the region. As on the St Lawrence a British fleet, with no previous knowledge of the navigation, felt its way through a treacherous channel, through waters which the Spanish assumed were impracticable for big ships. The disbelieving Spaniards defended the city with desperate bravery but it surrendered in August 1762. The British had been decimated by illness. Of 14,000 men who served in Cuba only 3,000 were fit for service when the surrender came; only 1,000 of these casualties were caused by enemy action. Wolfe’s veterans died in Cuba. The army that had been blooded at Louisbourg, had poured musket volleys into the French on the Plains of Abraham, survived frostbite and scurvy to capture Montreal the following year were annihilated by disease before the walls of Havana. Captain Henry Moore commanded a company of the 48th Regiment. In December it consisted of one sergeant, one drummer, and four privates who were fit.1 Men like Knox, Johnson, and Thompson did survive the war, due in large part to their staying in North America while their comrades headed south.

  The shame of losing their Caribbean capital was compounded for the Spanish by the capture of Manila in October 1762, the heart of their Oriental empire, by a dashing operation launched by British forces in India. Unbeknownst to any of the belligerents in the Philippines, peace was being made in Europe at the time and so the Philippines were handed straight back. Despite this it had been the most successful war in British history. But this one-sided ascendancy brought with it grave difficulties in both the short and long term. Any peace that conceded anything to the defeated powers was bound to be unpopular with the more belligerent British politicians such as William Pitt. He had left the cabinet in disgust at his colleagues’ refusal to declare war on Spain until it was absolutely certain that her king, Charles III, intended to fight. Men like the Duke of Bedford, who negotiated the eventual treaty, did not want Britain to so dominate the world that it would only drive her adversaries into a grand coalition to attempt to clip her wings. Louis XIV had brought just such an alliance together against him and France was still living with the consequences. Besides, the lawful acquisition of some colonies at the peace table was a good deal more satisfactory than temporary possession of all of them in times of war.