Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Vergor, the French commander, later exaggerated the intensity of his defence. He wrote that the enemy was ‘held back until daylight arrived’ and only then were his men ‘finally overpowered’. He reported that ‘the greater part of his force was killed or wounded and this moreover was not until after having himself been twice wounded, once by a ball which broke his leg, and other in his hand’. The defence may have been less impressive, but he was wounded and captured. He was taken out to a British sloop ‘where’, he claimed, ‘he found himself with 14 English officers who had been wounded in this action’.29 This account was, to be sure, composed to justify the grant of a pension, and in that respect, at least, it was successful.

  As the French defenders scattered into the woods or fled up the track towards the Heights, Knox and the other redcoats on the beach followed them up. ‘We lost no time,’ he wrote, and then, with no little exaggeration, ‘scrambled up one of the steepest precipices that can be conceived, being almost perpendicular, and of an incredible height’.30 One of Howe’s volunteers was running down the track when he saw a shadowy force advancing up it, ‘who we did not know (it being only daybreak),’ he recounted. He and his comrades feared the worst; ‘we put ourselves in the best posture of making a defence: two of us advanced, when they came close, and challenged them, when we found it was Captain Fraser with his company, who we joined’.31 The two British thrusts had met halfway up the path. The Foulon road was theirs.

  Minutes later, Knox reached the summit where ‘all was quiet, and not a shot was heard, owing to the excellent conduct of the light infantry under Colonel Howe’. It was now daylight and the men halted, formed their ranks with their backs to the river and ‘for a few minutes’ they waited, looked around them and prepared themselves for the next phase.32

  Below them more troops were streaming onto the beach. Knox had been very impressed with the efficiency of the amphibious side of the operation. ‘As fast as we landed,’ he wrote, ‘the boats put off for rein-forcements.’33 These troops were on board the ships of Holmes’ fleet which was now close at hand. They had swept down the river with the tide and the 1,700 soldiers on board were now clambering into the flat-bottomed boats as they returned from transporting the first wave. Some bore the scars of the skirmishing at the shore with splintered gunwales and blood slippery on the benches. Holmes had carefully prearranged the formation of his ships for when they arrived: ‘the boats were to go close in shore and land the troops; the sloops were to lie next to them’; the frigates were to lie outside the sloops and on the outside the transports were to anchor, ‘ready to disembark the troops when ordered’.34

  The ships had all arrived at daybreak. This ensured that by the time the frigates added the fire support of their cannon to help the men ashore they could actually see what they were aiming at. Wolfe, suspicious of all things naval, ordered that ‘officers of artillery and detachments of gunners are put on board the armed sloops to regulate their fire, that in the hurry our troops may not be hurt by our artillery…the officers will be particularly careful to distinguish the enemy and to point their fire against them…Frigates will not fire till broad daylight, so no mistake can be made.’35 The French battery at Samos, a few hundred yards upstream, blasted away at this wealth of new targets. The log of the Squirrel records that they had ‘several shot fired at us which cut away part of our running rigging, two went through our flying jibb and one through our hull abaft the forechains’.36 Most of the cannonballs screamed overhead as the flat-bottomed boats rowed into shore with the second wave.

  Wolfe was ashore and pleased with his light infantry. His ‘Family Journal’ reported that

  Colonel Howe with the light infantry gained the heights with little loss, the enemy had a hundred men to guard the Foulon which were soon dispersed: Mr Wolfe was highly pleased with the measure Col Howe had taken to gain the heights, wished that Mr Howe might outlive the day that he might have an opportunity of stamping his merit to the government.37

  There is some evidence, however, that Wolfe had an attack of nerves. Perhaps thinking it was all too easy, he sent his Adjutant General Isaac Barré down to the boats to ‘stop them a little until he had an opportunity of knowing the enemy’s strength…and whether they might not be in numbers sufficient to prevent his establishing himself’.38 Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ agrees saying that the young general ‘stopped a further debarkation of the troops until the first were well established above, saying if the post was to be carried there was enough ashore for that purpose, if they were repulsed a greater number would breed more confusion’.39 Barré carried this message down from the Heights but on arriving at the beach he made an important decision. He saw the boats full of troops about to head for the shore. He later explained that ‘thinking from the knowledge he had of Mr Wolfe’s intentions’ and knowing ‘that the orders he had received were in consequence of [Wolfe’s] not expecting the troops could be got landed so soon’, he ‘took the liberty seeing things thus situated, not to deliver the orders he had received, but suffered the Troops to land as fast as possible and went and reported it to General Wolfe, who was much pleased to find himself established on shore with his army sooner than he expected’.40

  Barré’s disobedience thus prevented a serious mistake by Wolfe. The General had made a terrible gamble landing his forces where he had and security lay in getting as many of them ashore as he could before the French arrived to drive him back. Barré ensured that this process continued. As more troops landed Wolfe’s confidence grew. He dispatched Howe’s light infantry to silence the Samos battery, which Mackellar reported ‘annoyed both boats and shipping a good deal’.41 One of these men wrote that ‘this was effected without the loss of a man; the enemy placed one of the cannon to flank us crossing a bridge, which they fired, drew off, and got into the woods which was within forty yards of the battery. We demolished the powder and came away.’42

  By now the second wave was ashore and drawn up at the top of the cliff. The sailors at the oars of the flat-bottomed boats struck out again, this time to collect the third wave. It consisted of the two regiments which had been concealed on the other bank of the St Lawrence. They were lying ‘in the woods on the south shore opposite to the Foulon, and were soon brought over to join the army’, reports the ‘Family Journal’. When they finally joined the army it put the number of men at Wolfe’s disposal at 4,400.43

  By 0800 hours this small force was in neat ranks on the southern edge of the Heights of Abraham, with its back to the river, all eyes scanning the scrub and distant trees for any sign of the French. The amphibious landing had been a triumph because of the masterly coordination of the navy and the quick-witted initiative of the soldiers, who had attacked straight uphill, even though some of them found themselves further downstream than they were expecting. Behind the infantry heavier equipment was being manhandled up the narrow path. The sailors of the fleet were dragging two six-pound brass cannon up to give the British real firepower in the coming battle.

  On the Heights all Wolfe cared about was the whereabouts of the French. Amphibious attacks are always terribly vulnerable to counter-attacks and never more so than this one on the banks of the St Lawrence in the early hours of 13 September 1759. Retreat was not an option. Wolfe had brought his army up a tiny, winding track, down which it would be impossible to conduct a fighting retreat. At the bottom lay the narrowest of beaches, too small to hold the thousands of men in his army. If disaster overtook them, a panicked mass of men would charge down the ravine, surge onto the beach, and many of them would be jostled into the St Lawrence and drowned. The boats could carry less than half the force so a quick evacuation was not possible. Wolfe had led his men into a situation from which there were two outcomes: victory or annihilation.

  The first sign of the French was a light company from the Guyenne Regiment, the unit that was in limbo between Bougainville’s force and Montcalm’s. Mackellar reported that ‘very soon’ after Wolfe reached the summit, this company had appeared on
some rising ground towards the town. ‘Finding they were too late, they retired without making any attempt to molest us,’ the engineer reported. Mackellar afterwards learnt that ‘this battalion was to have come upon this ground the night before; but by some lucky accident their arrival was deferred; some say they were detained by the French General himself upon receiving intelligence by a deserter that there was a descent to be made that night upon the coast of Beauport’.44

  The Guyenne had been encamped on the Heights for a few days in the first week of September. Its subsequent movements have kept historians arguing for centuries. Vaudreuil later tried to blame its absence from the Heights of Abraham squarely on Montcalm. He reported to the French government that ‘I was counting much on the good [position] of the Guyenne Regiment, I thought it was still on the heights of Quebec, but Monsieur de Montcalm had recalled it, the same day at nightfall without warning me.’45 This is not exactly the truth as letters written in those tense early September days show. On 6 September Vaudreuil had written to Bougainville saying ‘after having conferred with M le Marquis de Montcalm…we will hold back the Guyenne Regiment and have it return to its camp’. Based by the St Charles River it would then be ‘in a position to give assistance at the Anse de Māres, to the town, and the Canardiāre [section of the Beauport shore immediately east of the St Charles River] alike’.46 Montcalm’s journal notes on 4 September that ‘the Guyenne regiment is camped on the extreme right so that it can go wherever it is needed and even above Quebec if it is necessary.’47

  The French leadership had remained sceptical about the likelihood of an attack in this sector. This had influenced their deployment of the troops and it also acted as a brake on their activity even when rumours of a landing started coming in at dawn on 13 September. Firing was heard, but this was hardly unusual after such a violent summer. The bells of Quebec rang but were ignored by the army at Beauport which had just spent the night in a state of high anxiety thanks to Saunders’ complicated and realistic feints. Montcalm and the other senior officers were blinded by their preconceptions and what they could see in front of them. The British fleet in the basin looked threatening, and boats full of men swarmed to and fro. This perfectly matched Mont-calm’s expectations about where the British would attack and as a result he was convinced.

  The French army at Beauport had been waiting in their trenches all night. Before dawn, Montcalm’s journal written by one of his aides states that ‘the town used the agreed signal to indicate that something had happened’. There was also the sound of firing: ‘a little before daybreak we heard gunshots above Quebec. We did not doubt that a convoy of food that we had been expecting had been discovered and possibly taken.’ As the first confused and inaccurate reports came in, Montcalm, who had been listening to false intelligence from enthusiastic but inexperienced Canadians all summer, was sceptical. Six weeks before he had tried to calm an edgy Vaudreuil who was nervous about an attack above the town. Montcalm had written, ‘only God, sir, can do the impossible…and we cannot believe that the enemy have wings that would allow them in one night to cross water, land, climb rugged slopes and scale walls’.48

  It is unclear how and when Montcalm and Vaudreuil heard about the landings and, more importantly, when they realized that it was no false alarm. Montcalm’s journal reports that a Canadian from Vergor’s post arrived at daybreak, ‘with all the marks of terror’. He claimed that ‘he was the only one who had escaped and that the enemy was on the ground above’. Montcalm’s aides were dismissive: ‘we knew so well how difficult it was to penetrate by that route, if it was defended that we did not believe a word of what he was telling us and we thought that fear had made him mad’. The author ‘went to have a rest’.49

  Montcalm was quickly forced to revise this judgement, although Vaudreuil later claimed that Montcalm never informed him. Instead, he received a note written at 0545 hours from the commander of the forces in the Lower Town, Chevalier de Bernetz, which notified Vaudreuil of a landing at Foulon and one against the Lower Town which never, in fact, materialized. Bernetz could no longer hear musketry and assumed that the British had been beaten off. Even so he recommended that the Guyenne ‘cannot make too much haste’.50 The catastrophic dissonance at the top of the French forces was brought into stark relief in this great moment of crisis. Montcalm and Vaudreuil do not seem to have corresponded. It was unclear who was issuing orders or where final authority lay. An hour after Vaudreuil received Bernetz’s note, he wrote to Bougainville: ‘It seems fairly certain that the enemy has made a landing at the Anse au Foulon.’ On the Beauport shore ‘we have set a good number of troops in motion. We hear a certain amount of small arms fire…I have the honour to wish you good day.’51 He did not order Bougainville, posted with his men upriver, beyond the British landings, to march at full speed to the sounds of the fighting; instead, there were appeals for information and encouragement for the young man to stay ‘attentive’ to British movements. The great commanders have the ability to issue short, simple, and clear orders to their subordinates. This note might have been brief but it was neither of the other two. It left Bougainville none the wiser as to the unfolding crisis or what he could do, with his considerable force of crack troops, to assist his senior officers.

  One French officer later wrote that

  so badly established was the communication between each of M de Bougainville’s posts and between the latter and M de Montcalm’s camp that the English…were already in order of battle on the heights of Quebec where they even had some field pieces of small calibre, before anyone in our camps was as yet aware that the enemy wished to attack us in that quarter.

  The army, he reported, had just gone to their tents to grab some much needed sleep, after spending the night awake and waiting for an attack on their sector. Now ‘the generale was beat; all the troops resumed their arms’ and followed Montcalm to the west.52

  Montcalm’s aide-de-camp, the Chevalier Johnstone, had spent the morning chivvying the troops into action. He claimed later that Vaudreuil had ordered them all to stay put and he had to order them in the name of Montcalm to ignore their Governor General. He begged a senior French officer to march with all speed to the Plains of Abraham because ‘it was evident that the English army—already landed near Quebec—could never think of making a second descent at Beauport’. Johnstone insisted that ‘there would be in a few hours an engagement upon the heights which would immediately decide the fate of the colony’. He eventually won his argument.53

  Another French officer wrote that initial reports suggested that the British had withdrawn after feigning a landing. But just after 0600 hours ‘an express arrived with an account that the whole of the English army had landed and were advancing in good order’. ‘Immediately our troops quitted their camp,’ he continued, ‘and filed off, leaving a guard of 1500 men only to defend it, and took post upon the heights of Abraham, waiting for the arrival of the enemy.’54 The men trudged up the steep incline from the St Charles to the Plains. The certainties of defending their positions along the Beauport shore had been shattered, no one now knew what to expect.

  By 0700 hours Montcalm was certain enough to send his forces streaming across the bridges over the St Charles River. They were finally leaving their Beauport positions which they had clung to so obstinately. Like the British troops taking their first tentative steps onto the Plains of Abraham above them, they had not slept that night. A summer of tension, of manoeuvre, of skirmishing and of waiting was over. The pitched battle which Montcalm had tried so hard to avoid, and Wolfe had been desperate to provoke, was now inevitable. Wolfe’s men were threatening the poorly constructed western defences of Quebec, which would not stand a serious siege. Montcalm could no longer rely on a passive defence. Now the British would have to be removed. He was going to have to fight a battle to save Quebec and New France.

  FOURTEEN

  The Battle of the Plains of Abraham

  THE RED-COATED INFANTRY stood in neat ranks, properly dressed, gap
s between each regiment, the unfurled colours flapping lazily above their heads. Grenadiers guarded the flank of each regiment. After the chaos and physical exertion of the landings and the climb there was a stillness, a chance to catch their breath and look about them. None of them had ever laid eyes on the Plains of Abraham before. It had always been out of sight at the top of the barricade of cliffs. Now this undulating stretch of open ground lay to their right, with some crops planted but used mainly for grazing. It is likely that it had once belonged to Abraham Martin who had arrived in New France as a 30-year-old in around 1620. He may have been of Scottish descent or, like so many other chancers who headed for the New World, he may have taken on a false identity to escape a dark past. He was known as ‘the King’s Pilot’ and could have been an official pilot in addition to being a fisherman. He and his wife Marguerite had produced a brood of children, one of whom was the first French child ever born in Canada, and another the godchild of Samuel de Champlain himself. This did not stop Martin from behaving inappropriately with a young woman in Quebec, a crime for which he was imprisoned. His family no longer owned the land; it had been in the possession of the Ursuline nuns a century before it felt the tread of rough British boots.1