by Dan Snow
Exhausted, surrounded by young, gallant, foolish officers who hid their terror behind aggression, taking the offensive was the easiest decision to make. All summer Montcalm had tried to ignore the inexorable gravitational pull of the enemy force, sought to hold back the weight of French martial tradition, and stifle the clamour for a decision. Now he gave in to it. A word to his aides sent them galloping away to notify the men: the French army would prepare to attack.
Many have sought to explain Montcalm’s decision. A British officer speculated that Montcalm knew Wolfe was waiting for more artillery and chose to attack ‘either willing to deprive us of this advantage or fearing that we might be reinforced; or perhaps from contempt of our numbers’.50 Across the battlefield a French officer noted that ‘our troops showed great eagerness to engage, and intrepidity, but kept it up a very little time only’. Montcalm, he supposed, wanted to harness this enthusiasm, and ‘it was judged proper to take immediate advantage of this spirit; however it would have been more prudent to have waited the arrival of Monsieur de Bougainville, who was advancing with the flower of the army; but our generals thought they could do the business without him’.51
Perhaps there is yet another reason why Montcalm was keen to fight as soon as possible. One French officer wrote that such was his hatred of Vaudreuil that he wanted to win a victory before the latter had appeared on the field of battle. ‘The rash haste with which M. de Montcalm had made his attack originated in jealousy,’ wrote this officer. ‘M. de Vaudreuil had in a note requested him to postpone the attack until he had reunited all his forces.’ The officer concluded that Montcalm’s ‘ambition was that no person but himself should ever be named’.52 Ramezay agreed. ‘M. le Marquis de Montcalm allowed himself to be taken over by fervour, believing that he could overcome the enemy single-handedly,’ wrote the Vaudreuil ally.53 The Governor General himself later reported to the Minister for the Colonies that ‘the Marquis de Montcalm, who was the first informed of the circumstance, supposed no doubt, that it was only a detachment. That general, carried away by his zeal and great vivacity, despatched the pickets of the different regiments, a part of the battalions and Canadians, and advanced himself without communicating his arrangements to me.’ Vaudreuil then says that ‘I ordered the remainder of our forces, with the exception of the posts of the line of Beauport and set out immediately to place myself at the head of the army.’54 If Vaudreuil really did plan to ‘place himself at the head of the army’ then it is very possible that Montcalm was desperate to attack before the man he regarded as an amateur buffoon came to usurp his position.
Ultimately Montcalm was deeply pessimistic about the chance of the colony surviving whatever the outcome of this campaign. If he fought and lost a battle, Quebec would fall; but he clearly believed that if the British stayed where they were Quebec would certainly fall as well. At least this way King Louis’ honour would be intact, the town’s fate would be decided on the field of battle.
Like Wolfe, Montcalm moved along the battle line. He greeted officers and shouted words of encouragement. According to legend he wore a cuirass, or metal breast plate, which was a touch anachronistic even in the eighteenth century. Beneath it he wore the uniform of a general officer which was a single breasted blue coat, a red waistcoat beneath and a black cocked hat richly decorated with white trim and gold lace. Rather than walking like his British counterpart he rode on a powerful black charger with his sword drawn. Montcalm eventually took position in the centre at the head of the Béarn and Guyenne Regiments. These regular troops wore standard grey-white coats, their tails hitched up to secure them during the march, but underneath were distinctive red waistcoats. Mud covered their gaiters which attempted to protect the grey-white breeches beneath. Tricorne hats laced with metallic thread sat on the men’s heads; the sergeants sported gold lace in theirs while some of the officers wore plumes. French troops were always shaved clean but wore their hair long, tied back in a tight plait with a black bow. Some had adopted the Canadian tradition of scarring their faces with tattoos, made by burning gunpowder into a pattern of small lacerations.
Montcalm formed the two battalions in his centre into a column. Colours fluttered above the regular companies. One was a plain white ‘Colonel’s Colour’ and the other was a regimental colour, usually a white cross with colourful quarters. The Guyenne’s colour had its first and third quarters green and the second and fourth quarters were buff.55 This regiment now joined the Béarn in a narrow-fronted but deep battering ram, often favoured by attacking sides. Not all the men in the column could bring their muskets to bear on the enemy because they were packed in the middle of a dense mass of men, but the feeling of being surrounded by their comrades was comforting and bolstered the men’s courage. Columns sought to punch through thin enemy lines by sheer weight of numbers and momentum. Montcalm aimed this column of his beloved regulars towards the very heart of Wolfe’s position. He hoped to achieve an overwhelming superiority at just one point of the British line. Break it and rout would follow.
At 1000 hours the French drummers beat the signal to advance. They were dressed in their ‘King’s Livery’, a blue coat with a red and white thread in a chain motif along the seams. Their drums were the same colours as their coats and richly decorated with fleurs-de-lis. Montcalm walked his horse at the head of the centre column. As the soldiers of France stepped off they held their muskets with the index finger of the right hand on the trigger guard and the thumb on top of the cock. Their left hands gripped the stock of their muskets at chin height, their thumb pointing upwards along the barrel. Knox remembers hearing their ‘loud shouts’.56 The unmistakable roar of Vive le Roi! reverberated across the battlefield. There was no doubt in any of the participants’ minds that this would be a decisive clash for control of North America.
Mackellar watched the French attack and wrote that they came on ‘briskly’.57 Montcalm’s journal reports that they ‘ran, shouting loudly’.58 They were perhaps a bit too keen. The pace of the advance quickly caused gaps between the men. Anne-Joseph-Hippolyte de Maurās de Malartic, the Comte de Malartic, a major in the Béarn, rode into battle just like his general. He later wrote to a fellow officer that the French set off ‘much too fast’. ‘We had not gone twenty paces,’ he continued, ‘when the left was too far in the rear and the centre was too far in front.’59 De Lévis heard that ‘our army started to move with plenty of ardour but little organization’. He also reported that the ground was rough and obstacles such as bushes and patches of wheat widened the gaps between the men as they got caught up in undergrowth or slowed down to clamber across an obstruction.60
British cannonballs tore through the centre column. The densely packed mass of men was a plum target and the British artillerymen were masters of their trade. Malcolm Fraser watched the effects of the British fire; the French seemed ‘very much galled by our artillery’, which was ‘very well served’. As he watched the French advance it fell into ‘some confusion’.61
At 600 yards a well-laid cannon had just under a 90 per cent chance of hitting a body of infantrymen. After a couple of minutes, at 300 yards range, the British artillerymen changed to firing canister shot. A tin container with around forty lead balls disintegrated as it left the muzzle. Its deadly payload sprayed in all directions, some balls hitting the ground and others going high and losing their speed, but around 30 per cent found the French column. As the attackers moved to within 150 yards that figure increased to around 50 per cent.62 Charles-Joseph, the Prince of Ligne, a successful Austrian commander in Europe at the time, noticed a herding instinct among men when they became terrified as the projectiles tore through their ranks. ‘I cannot recall an action,’ he wrote after a lifetime on the battlefield, ‘when I did not have to try to break up a multitude of such columns with blows with the flat of my sword, while my corporals were wading in with their sticks.’63 Montcalm had filled the vacancies in his regular battalions with Canadian recruits when the army had gathered in the spring. But four months was no
t enough to make a hardened soldier. It took six months at the very least, if training time and ammunition were in plentiful supply which they had not been in the camp on the Beauport shore. Often a full year was required to turn a farm hand into a soldier.64 These new recruits among the French regulars could not resist the urge to fire at the British line at extreme range and then, compounding their error, throw themselves on the ground to reload in the Canadian way. This might have made sense for the individuals but it was a death blow to the cohesion of the whole. Malartic wrote that these men ‘fired without orders, and according to their custom threw themselves on the ground to reload. This false movement broke all the battalions.’65
Mackellar watched with glee. ‘Their front began to fire before they got within range,’ he wrote, ‘and the firing immediately extended throughout the whole body; but in a very wild and scattered manner. They then began to waver, but still kept advancing with the same disorderly fire.’66 Now was the moment that Montcalm needed the steadying presence of his elite grenadier units, tough veterans who could maintain the impetus of the attack. But they were all attached to Bougainville and to the west; where his considerable force should have been appearing at any moment, there was neither musket smoke nor sound of battle. They had not yet arrived.
Knox wrote that the French fired something approximating a full volley at about one hundred and thirty yards distance. Fraser wrote that it did ‘very little execution’.67 Many of the musket balls whistled over the heads of the British. Others found their targets but as one eyewitness reported, the French were ‘firing at too great a distance’ and as a result ‘their balls were almost spent before they reached our men’. He wrote that ‘several of our people having received contusions on parts where the blow must have been mortal, had they reserved their fire a little longer’.68 Fraser was one of these lucky ones. ‘I received a slight contusion,’ he wrote, ‘in the right shoulder or rather breast, before the action became general, which pained me a good deal, but it did not disable me from my duty then, or afterwards.’69
As the French advanced the British remained silent and still. ‘General Wolfe had given positive orders,’ wrote Sergeant Johnson, ‘not to fire a shot until the enemy should be within forty yards.’70 This was ‘punctually obeyed’ and there was hardly any movement, only the lazy flapping of the colours and a rare man tumbling to the ground killed or wounded. As the enemy neared every battalion commander gave one last look at his men and took up his position behind the colours in the very centre of his unit. Every word of command was given in a steady, calm voice, to project a confidence that the speaker may not have felt in the pit of his stomach. Frederick the Great was clear on the subject: ‘the courage of the troops consists entirely in that of the officers: a brave colonel means a brave battalion’.71 Some of the officers may have been a little amateur by modern standards but every one of them was scrupulously reckless in battle. They were under no account to duck or flinch. Besides, they knew that if they could hear the whoosh of a cannonball or the whine of a musket round then it was already past them anyway. They would never hear the ball that hit them.
The red-coated soldiers stood, immobile, impassive, as musket balls twitched at their clothes and knocked men to the floor next to them. After a long summer campaign in which skill at skirmishing was highly prized, and troops were rewarded for showing initiative, suddenly warfare had reverted to the type that they recognized. Here was war as they had trained for it. Years of drill on commons and heaths across Britain and Ireland and more recently in Halifax and Louisbourg had taught them to ignore death. A manual decreed that in the last few moments before battle the men must ‘pay the greatest attention to the words of command, remaining perfectly silent and steady, not making the least motion with head, body, feet, or hands, but such as shall be ordered…shoulders square to the front, and kept back; the body upright, the breast pressed forward’. Heads were erect and eyes forward, the men were ‘not to be suffered to cast down their eyes, nor look on the ground’.72
Some armies needed infamous blocking detachments to shoot those who fled from the line of battle but Wolfe’s men needed no such coercion. Unlike the scratch, demoralized battalions that Braddock had led into slaughter, Wolfe’s regiments were communities bound by years of active campaigning. Every man stood between other men he knew, whose wives had cooked for him, whose children played together on the Île d’Orléans. To run in front of these comrades was unthinkable. Many wanted revenge; every man had lost a friend or mess mate to Native American ambush or French musket balls. They had grown to trust their officers who had kept them fed and watered and turned a blind eye to the looting of habitants’ houses and never shied away from a fire fight. They seem to have had a genuine belief in the superiority of a Briton to Frenchman, Canadian or a despised Native American. But not all Wolfe’s men were superhuman. Many of them smothered their terror in drink. Water bottles hung at the men’s sides filled with carefully hoarded portions of powerful New England rum.73
Drunk or not, Knox remembered the ‘uncommon steadiness’ of the army. The French fire was tolerated with ‘the greatest intrepidity and firmness’ and the soldiers paid ‘the strictest obedience to their officers’.74 There was a perverse pleasure in receiving an enemy volley before firing one of your own. Lieutenant Colonel Murray wrote that his men were ‘determined to conquer or die in their ranks rather than be scalped and hacked’.75
When the French got to forty yards a clear shout went up from each regimental commander: ‘Make Ready!’ The men of the rear rank smartly stepped right, into the gap between the men in front. At ‘Present!’ a thousand muskets whipped sharply through ninety degrees. Left hands slid about a third of the way down the long, forty-six-inch barrel, butts were forced, as the drill book said, into ‘the hollow between your right breast and shoulder, pressing it close to you’. Callused right thumbs pulled back the cock and then slid off to rest on the smooth walnut top of the grip while the right index finger curled around the trigger. The men were told in training to keep ‘both arms close to your body’ and take ‘good aim by leaning the head to the right and looking along the barrel’.76 Time and again the men had been told to aim low; new recruits were made to aim at the ground just in front of them, to compensate for the tendency to fire high. Wolfe’s more experienced infantrymen now pointed their weapons at the ankles of the advancing French infantry.77
The next command still echoes to this day. With all the clarity and volume they could muster the regimental commanders roared, ‘Fire!’ Nearly as one, a thousand fingers pulled their triggers. Like a serpent strike the cock sprang forward and the new, sharp flint scraped down the steel frizzen. Sparks flew as the frizzen tipped back to reveal the pan, with its mound of gunpowder. The sparks ignited the powder with a puff of smoke and a shower of burning powder singed side whiskers and stung cheeks. The small explosion sent flames through the touch-hole in the side of the barrel where the main charge was ignited with a loud bang, sending the musket ball blasting out of the muzzle. The British line disappeared as an eruption of white smoke swallowed the men.
Knox wrote that the men fired with ‘great calmness’ and the resultant volley was ‘as remarkable a close and heavy discharge, as I ever saw performed at a private field of exercise’. Talking to French officers after the battle he heard from them that ‘they never opposed such a shock as they received from the centre of our line, for they believed every ball took place, and such regularity and discipline they had not experienced before; our troops in general and particularly the central corps, having levelled and fired,—comme un coup de canon [like the blast of a cannon]’.78 The men had been ordered to load not one but two musket balls to achieve the maximum effect on the first massive volley. Thousands of lead balls, weighing 3.5 grams and a shade under two centimetres in diameter flew across the thirty- or forty-metre gap at around five hundred metres per second and slammed into the French infantrymen.
The Land Pattern Musket, better known by its later
nickname, the ‘Brown Bess’, was one of the best infantry muskets in the world. The basic design survived from the 1730s to the 1850s. It was still, however, a deeply inaccurate weapon. In fact, some commanders like Frederick the Great trained their men to sacrifice any hope of accuracy for sheer volume of fire.79 It also had a low muzzle velocity so even if the round was on target there was a good chance that it would not punch through the skin. To have any chance of hitting and killing somebody the target could not be more than eighty or possibly a hundred yards away. Most commanders tried to make their men wait, as Wolfe had done, until the enemy was very close indeed. The immortal, ‘whites of their eyes’ expression, attributed to William Prescott, a rebel American officer, was coined during one of the first engagements of the American Revolution at Bunker Hill, nearly sixteen years after Quebec, but could just as well have applied to the British policy on the Plains of Abraham. A letter from an eyewitness appeared in the British media saying that the French were so close that the British made ‘them feel our bullets and bayonets almost at the same time’.80 A conservative estimate is that perhaps 40 per cent of that first mighty discharge was on target. Some musket balls thudded into cartridge pouches and ricocheted off tomahawks and sword hilts but the rest hit French flesh.81
After just one crashing volley the front few ranks of the attacking column must have been utterly destroyed. Dead and wounded men lay in heaps on the ground. Any soldier whose enthusiasm to get to grips with the British was still intact after that pounding would have had to clamber over the shattered corpses of his comrades and find his feet on ground slick with blood. Worse still, he would have known that there was only the briefest of respites before the musketry resumed. Through the smoke he would have been able to hear the British officers shouting for the men to reload.