Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Quebec was the nucleus of Canadian life. It had been the very first seed of settlement planted in the barren turf of Canada and it had flourished. It was Canada’s political, religious, educational, and social centre, its link to the outside world, the depository for the wealth of an empire. It occupied the best natural defensive position in North America and it was the continent’s most powerful fortress. One of Canada’s greatest governors, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, wrote to Colbert in France in 1672 that ‘nothing has seemed to me so beautiful and magnificent as the site of the city of Quebec, it cannot be better situated, and is destined to one day become the capital of a great empire’.2 That prophecy had certainly come true.

  Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon, Seigneur of Saint-Véran, Candiac, Tournemine, Vestric and Saint-Julien-d’Arpaon, Baron de Gabriac, Lieutenant General in the army of Louis XV, and commander in chief of French forces in Canada, had arrived in Quebec. He was short, stocky, and energetic. Within minutes of the group installing themselves in Montcalm’s accommodation on the north of Upper Town overlooking the St Charles River, messages, requests, and orders started pouring out. An already febrile city was stirred up to new heights. Since 10 May the ships that had evaded Durell had been arriving from France. They represented salvation. The vast cereal producing areas of modern Canada were not settled in the eighteenth century. The land of the populated valley of the St Lawrence was far from ideal for growing wheat, and while enough was grown to feed the civilian population, the addition of several thousand hungry and unproductive soldiers brought the colony to the edge of starvation. New France had a slim industrial base, there was only one iron forge and the dawning of total war overwhelmed indigenous capabilities. The ships’ holds were packed with food, alcohol, and the stuff of war, including barrels of gunpowder and cannonballs that acted as ballast. Not least, the convoy had also brought news of Wolfe’s expedition, gleaned from intelligence sources in Europe and papers found aboard a captured British ship. Montcalm had spent the winter in Montreal, where he was better placed to strike out in the direction of the first attack that the British would launch on the colony. It was now clear that, despite threats on other fronts, he would be needed in Quebec.

  Montcalm was 47 years old. His dark brown eyes were full of life and he had a passionate drive that could occasionally tip into a fiery temper. Contemporaries called him a typical southerner. He was born in the ancestral chateau of Candiac near Nîmes in southern France and his was an impeccably aristocratic, if not a wealthy line. His ancestors had been raised, lived and killed on the battlefield. Few of the Montcalms had died in their beds. He had been commissioned an officer at the age of 9 and by 17 was a captain. He saw active campaigning in the 1730s under the great Marshal de Saxe and was left in no doubt as to the dangers of high command when he was close to the Duke of Berwick as he was blown to pieces by a cannonball at Philippsburg in Germany in 1734. He had made the all-important advantageous marriage to Angelique Louise Talon de Boulay, daughter of the Marquis de Boulay, a well-connected colonel. Their marriage was a love match and of ten children six had survived, two boys and four girls. His poignant letters to his wife, enquiring after his children and full of longing for his native Provence, have made him an attractive figure to later biographers.

  He had bled for France. Montcalm had been wounded during the defence of Prague in his late twenties and then almost starved to death on the infamous retreat from Bohemia during the War of Austrian Succession. As a colonel he had led his men from the front and twice rallied his fleeing regiment during the crushing French defeat at Piacenza. He ended the battle a pathetic prisoner in Austrian hands, his unit annihilated and his body savaged with no less than five sabre cuts. He was exchanged for an Austrian prisoner of equal rank only to be wounded in another French defeat in a ravine in the Alps. Just after the inconclusive peace that ended the War of Austrian Succession he petitioned the Minister of War for a pension, citing his thirty-one years, eleven campaigns, and five wounds. He was given an annual stipend of 2,000 livres in 1753.3 He could have easily seen out his days as a stout provincial nobleman, a pillar of Montpellier society, finding good matches for his daughters and regiments for his boys, but that was never the fate of the Montcalms.

  Given the jingoistic enthusiasm for empire that swept across the world in the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that the idea of trans-oceanic empire was unfashionable and unpopular for much of the time since its inception in the sixteenth century. Colonies were often seen as expensive millstones around the neck of the mother country, enriching bourgeois merchants or propping up royal egos. Colonies were lethal to the health of Europeans, peopled by new men on the make who sought opportunities denied them in the stratified societies of Europe. They were crucibles of immorality. Colonists often proved willing to adopt the habits and the women of the Natives. ‘Civilized’ values were eroded and social barriers scaled as turbulent young societies coalesced and fragmented. Above all, for military men, there was nothing glorious about a war of ambush, stockades, river crossings, and forests. The eighteenth-century officer regarded the plains of northern Europe as the natural theatre for war. Here honour was to be won, in battles of foot, cavalry, and artillery which were fought as their fathers, and grandfathers, had done, under the eyes of royal dukes or perhaps even the sovereign himself. Even Wolfe dreamt about commanding a cavalry regiment on the Continent, in the Anglo-Pruss-ian force that was defending George II’s small German Electorate of Hanover from the armies of Louis XV. French policymakers and military men also regarded this as the primary theatre. Traditionally British gains in West Africa, India, the Caribbean, or North America were wiped out at the peace table as long as French armies occupied strategically important Channel ports or German cities.

  The capture of the Baron Dieskau, commander of French forces in Canada, in a skirmish on the banks of Lake George at the very fringe of empire was a case in point. Few senior officers were willing to replace him and serve in the New World. It was a forgotten theatre of war, and one in which the imbalance was slowly increasing as every spring more reinforcements were sent from Britain than from France. Montcalm’s name was chosen from the list of junior field officers. It was ‘a commission that I had neither desired nor asked for’, he recorded in his journal. But ‘I felt I had to accept this honourable and delicate commission’, because it ‘ensured my son’s fortunes’. Like many a proud, noble but impecunious family, the Montcalms depended solely on the crown for patronage. Part of the package was a promise that ‘the King would give my regiment to my son’. He was also promoted to Maréchal de camp, a Major General in British parlance, with a 25,000 livres salary, resettlement money, and living expenses. He would receive a pension of 6,000 livres a year, and half for his wife if he failed to return. This last provision was ‘dear to my heart’, he wrote and ‘touched me because I owe Madame de Montcalm so much’. On 11 March 1756 he had gone to Versailles, to collect his commission and present his son to the King, who duly made the teenager a colonel. Having guaranteed the social, military, and financial stability of his line, he had ridden for Brest on the fifteenth where he met his staff and boarded ship for Canada.4

  The crossing had taken five weeks. Like Wolfe, he tired of being cooped up aboard ship and he disembarked as soon as he could, below Quebec, travelling up the last thirty miles of the St Lawrence to the town on horseback. As he rode he no doubt cast his practised eye over the shoreline, placing artillery batteries and forts in his mind’s eye to impede the progress of the British fleet that he knew one day would try to penetrate up the river. He had arrived in Quebec in May 1756 and stayed a week. Long enough to realize that this was ‘a country and a war where everything is so different from European practice’.5 It was not a compliment.

  Three years later he had not changed his mind. He never came to love Canada nor its rugged inhabitants. The deeply conservative aristocrat could not bring himself to embrace the mobility of Canadian culture. Skilled labou
rers or fur traders could amass fortunes, buy enough land to become seigneurs, obtain military commissions for their sons, who could then build the family’s reputation on the battlefield and eventually acquire noble rank. Soldiers could make fortunes from the massive funds that were earmarked for the colony. Montcalm complained that Le Mercier, the commandant of the artillery for Quebec, ‘came out twenty years ago a simple soldier, [but] will soon be worth about six or seven hundred thousand livres, perhaps a million if these things continue’.6 ‘He does not care for much,’ Montcalm confided to his journal, ‘other than his own interest.’7 One of his aides wrote that ‘one must agree that this spirit of greed, of gain, of commerce, will always destroy the spirit of honor, of glory, and military spirit’. He worried about the effect of this brave new world on the men under their command. ‘Soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘corrupted by the great amount of money, [and] by the example of the Indians and Canadians, breathing an air permeated with independence, work indolently.’ He concluded that ‘this country is dangerous for discipline’.8

  The art of war was another area in which Montcalm found himself deeply at odds with Canadian thinking. He saw warfare only through the lens of a regular officer, unable to escape the mindset in which he had been immersed all his life. He regarded war in America as barbaric. For generations Canada had defended herself from the Native Americans and British settlers alike by adopting the tactics of the former. Raids, ambushes, massacres, and farm burning were the norm for Canadians, much to the horror of regular officers sent out from France. In Europe the behaviour of armies was tightly circumscribed. Rules and conventions protected women, civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. Enemy commanders wrote shocked letters to each other, always in impeccable French, if any of their subordinates broke this code. No commander could ever ask a junior officer to obey an order that conflicted with his duty as a gentleman. Indeed, the officers of all the ancien régime armies counted themselves as members of a supranational group espousing the principles of honour and gentility. They would even socialize freely during the regular truces or breaks in fighting. The prospect of total war was anathema; it was believed that it would destroy religion and property, and invert the social order. Anarchy of this sort threatened to be catastrophic for the combatant powers and would certainly outweigh any short-term military advantage gained.

  In North America war had none of this refined veneer. War was total, and cold-blooded slaughter was common. Communities, French or British, white or Native, faced utter annihilation at the hands of the enemy. Native Americans routinely enslaved prisoners or tortured them to death with excruciating exactness. Settlers on both sides faced an existence of scarcity and brutality with no reward for civility. Faced with the bloody realities of life on the frontier Montcalm was appalled. Yet Canadians were certain that their strongest weapon against the encroachments of the far more populous British settlers from the south had always been their Native American allies. Native raids could throw back British colonists almost to the coastal cities, as time and again they were hopelessly outmatched by tribes bred to fight among the rivers, lakes, and forests of the backcountries of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Armed with French muskets, powder, and knives, fed when necessary with French provisions and paid in brandy and gold, the Native war parties terrorized vast swathes of frontier. Among them were handfuls of Canadian colonial soldiers, fluent in their language, dressed and painted like Natives so that it was hard to tell the difference. These men attempted to channel Native American aggression along avenues that would serve the cause of New France. Montcalm and many French officers regarded the Native Americans with at best suspicion, but usually utter disdain. As for the Canadians who served alongside them, men who chose to live like the ‘savages’ even when presented with the opportunities of Christian civilization, they were worse than the ‘savages’ themselves. Traders, the voyageurs, travelled to the far west adopting the attitudes, dress, language, and women of the Natives. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, wrote of these men, that ‘one recognizes them easily by their looks, by their size and because all of them are tattooed on their bodies with figures of plants or animals’. Tattooing in New France was a ‘long and painful’ process with burning gunpowder poured into holes pricked in the skin. Bougainville observed that ‘one would not pass for a man among the Indians of the Far West if he had not had himself tattooed’.9

  Montcalm argued strongly that a new era of warfare had dawned in North America. No longer would small numbers of tough, tattooed fighters and their Native American allies protect New France. Since the outbreak of this round of fighting, the scale of the resources sent by the French and the British had brought modern warfare to the continent. ‘The war had changed character in Canada,’ he wrote to France in the spring of 1759, ‘the vast forces of the English’ meant that the Canadian way of making war was obsolete. Previously, ‘the Canadians thought they were making war, and were making, so as to speak, hunting excursions’. Once, ‘Indians formed the basis; now, the accessory.’ He made little attempt to disguise his disdain; apparently he had tried to tell the Canadians, ‘but old prejudices continue’.10 In 1758, he asserted that ‘it is no longer the time when a few scalps, or the burning [of] a few houses is any advantage or even an object. Petty means, petty ideas, petty councils about details are now dangerous and waste material and time.’11 Bougainville loyally agreed with his commander. ‘Now war is established here on the European basis,’ he wrote. ‘It no longer is a matter of making a raid but of conquering or being conquered. What a revolution! What a change!’ The effect of Montcalm’s dismissal of the traditional tactics of Native Americans and Canadians was malignant. As the war progressed rifts between French regulars sent out from Europe and the home-grown defenders of New France grew ever wider. Regular troops robbed the habitants and their officers snubbed their opposite numbers in the militia. Both Montcalm and Bougainville were withering in their criticism of Canadians. New France ‘will perish’ predicted Bougainville, ‘victim of its prejudices, of its blind confidence, of the stupidity or of the roguery of its chiefs’.12 To Montcalm, one man personified Canadian attitudes, and, in his view, failings. He sat at the pinnacle of New French society: the Canadian-born Governor and Lieutenant General, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Marquis de Vaudreuil.

  Vaudreuil’s father had been sent out from France at the end of the seventeenth century to command the royal troops in the colony, and had then been appointed Governor General of New France. Vaudreuil had been enrolled as an ensign at the grand old age of 6, was a captain at 13, and a major at 27. He had campaigned in the west against the Fox Indians during the 1720s and from 1743 to 1753 he was Governor of the portion of New France called Louisiana: the lands from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi up the river to the Great Lakes. He was appointed Governor General in 1755, the first to have been born in Canada. In 1759 he was 60.

  Vaudreuil was proud, indecisive and deeply defensive about the abilities of Canadians. Like many colonial soldiers, he was extremely keen not to be seen as inferior to French-born officers. Vaudreuil had tried to convince the Minister of Marine in France that he did not need to send out a commander for the regular troops. Vaudreuil himself knew how to save Canada; he just needed an infusion of regular troops. But the army were having none of it. French regulars would fight under their own officers, not Canadians.

  Vaudreuil was disliked by the influx of French officers. Montcalm regarded him as a meddling amateur. Bougainville described him as a ‘timid man and who neither knows how to make a resolution nor to keep one once made’.13 For three years Montcalm and Vaudreuil had clashed over strategy. In 1758 Bougainville noted in his journal: ‘I see with grief the growing misunderstanding between our leaders.’14 Vaudreuil lacked the stomach for direct confrontation but his letters to his masters at the French court in Versailles are full of complaints about Montcalm and reveal a great sensitivity over his position within the colony. At th
e end of the campaigning season of 1758 he informed Versailles of the ‘indecent observations made by the officers of the regular troops of which I had the largest share’. He feared they had ‘even become so public that they form the conversation of the soldiers and the Canadians’. He knew full well who was to blame: Montcalm, who had given ‘too great liberty’ to his officers who were ‘giving an unrestrained course to their expressions’. The situation was clearly grave, but ‘I pass the matter by in silence, I even affect to ignore it, in the sole view of the good of the king’s service, already aware of the consequences which might attend an open rupture with the Marquis’.15 In this Vaudreuil was right, Montcalm made no secret of his dislike of the Governor General. He talked openly of it with his junior officers and his official journal is littered with snide comments. It was unprofessional and deeply harmful to relations between the French and the Canadians.

  Vaudreuil’s policy of raids deep into British-held territories had proved remarkably successful in the first few years of the war. A smattering of French officers brought gold, trade goods, and brandy to the Native Americans along the British frontier from the Great Lakes down to Georgia, to encourage them to hurl back vulnerable British settlements. The British sphere of influence had been shrunk by a hundred miles as Native raids had burnt homes and scalped farmers deep into Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Fort Granville, in modern Lewistown, Pennsylvania, just over one hundred miles from Philadelphia, was captured and burnt by Native Americans and Canadians. All the resources, manpower, and treasure of the wealthy and populous central colonies, in particular of Virginia and Pennsylvania, were poured into protecting their own frontiers, largely without success.