Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ recorded that ‘the regular troops made but one effort and afterwards dispersed. The troupes de Colonie and Militia disputed the copse for some time afterwards.’109 Vaudreuil attempted to take the credit for this fierce rearguard action. He wrote to the Minister of Marine in Paris saying that by the time he arrived on the battlefield, ‘I could not stop a soldier. I rallied about 1000 Canadians, who by their bold front, arrested the enemy in his pursuit.’110 To de Lévis he reported that twice he ‘rallied the army’ and only ceded the battlefield when he saw ‘the discouragement of the army would lead perhaps to an even worse outcome’.111 In fact, the sharp fight bears all the hallmarks of a spontaneous stand by proud, gritty Canadians rather than a carefully orchestrated plan by Vaudreuil, but the reinforcements he brought across the St Charles may certainly have swelled the numbers of those who fought on.

  Malcolm Fraser wrote that the Highlanders bore the brunt of this unexpected flaring up of fighting. With Brigadier Murray leading them on, they tried to drive the Canadians back. They found themselves plunged into bush fighting, similar to the skirmishing throughout July and August. Fraser recorded that casualties came from ‘skulking fellows, with small arms, from the bushes and behind the houses in the suburbs of St Louis and St John’s’. He claimed that ‘they greatly exceeded us in numbers, they killed and wounded a great many of our men, and killed two Officers, which obliged us to retire a little, and form again’. To add to the British discomfort, the British ships’ logs mention that the French hulks, anchored in the St Charles, ‘fired several shots at our people’.112 The Highlanders needed help; it appeared in the form of the ‘58th Regiment with the 2nd battalion of Royal Americans’. ‘Having come up to our assistance,’ reports Fraser, ‘all three making about five hundred men, advanced against the enemy and drove them first down to the great meadow between the hospital and the town and afterwards over the river St Charles.’ The fighting died down by midday. The fierce skirmishing had been an unwelcome sting in the tail of the battle for the British who had thought the fighting over when they saw the French regulars retreating. Fraser noted that ‘it was at this time that our regiment suffered most’. The Highlanders had paid a high price for their aggression. Around a hundred and seventy of their 500 officers and men were casualties, eighteen of them killed outright. The officers suffered particularly badly as the sharpshooters singled them out. These included Thomas Ross of Calrossie, who was ‘mortally wounded in the body, by a cannon ball from the hulks, in the mouth of the River St Charles, of which he died in great torment, but with great resolution, in about two hours thereafter’.113 Simon Fraser of Inverallochy had been narrowly saved from facing the massed musketry of the British army at Culloden in 1746 by virtue of his youth. He had been 13 at the time of the battle but his older brother Charles had led the Frasers of Lovat as they fought for the Stuart Prince Charles and was killed by the British as he lay injured on the battlefield. Simon, now wearing both the red coat of King George and the kilt of his clan, was terribly wounded on the Plains of Abraham, but clung on to life for just over a month before joining his brother in the roll-call of Fraser heroes.

  The French army fled into the city or across the bridges over the St Charles and back to the Beauport shore. The gates into the town were packed with a mass of panicking men and horses. Montcalm had watched his attack disintegrate. His beloved regular battalions had proved no match for the British and now his retreat was being covered by the Canadians who fought tenaciously along the wooded northern edge of the battlefield. Montcalm had no choice but to follow his broken men back to the city. As he waited in the crowd to get through the Saint-Louis gate he was wounded in the thigh and the stomach. He slumped in his saddle and had to be held upright in it by three soldiers. They threaded his horse through the town’s streets. Onlookers screamed when they saw their general’s shirt soaked in blood and he called out to these ‘good friends’ and told them ‘it is nothing’. But on arriving at the Ursuline Convent it became clear that his wounds were, in fact, mortal. The battlefield had claimed another Montcalm.114

  The Plains of Abraham had, in the space of no more than fifteen minutes, gone from being the scene of a tightly controlled manoeuvring by thousands of men to utter chaos. The most senior officers on either side had been killed or had left the field with mortal wounds. Whole units had disintegrated in flight or pursuit. Murray was leading the Highlanders against the Canadians and had lost all overview of the battle. In the midst of this mayhem Townshend’s aide-de-camp, who had gone to Wolfe with a message from Townshend warning about his lack of troops, returned to tell his brigadier that Wolfe was dead, Monckton off the field, and that he was now in command of the army.

  Townshend had spent the battle on the northern flank of the British position. Here the French had made a less spirited attack than in the centre and ‘were soon repulsed’ according to Townshend’s report. To his wife he admitted that ‘though I was not in the warmest part of the action; yet I had more shots near me than in any other action I’ve seen’. ‘It has pleased god,’ he continued, ‘to preserve me for my Charlotte and my George and the rest and to restore me to you whom alone I have found good and grateful to me.’115 The crisis was far from over, however. When Murray’s brigade had all charged wildly after the retreating French, Townshend had been forced to move the 2nd/60th Royal Americans into the gap they had left. He worried that he was being spread too thin, especially because there was still ‘a body of savages, which waited…for an opportunity to fall upon our rear’.116 Eighteenth-century battles were frequently lost when generals thought them won and vice versa. The Austrians won Kolin in 1757 despite being sure they had lost and were defeated at Torgau when they were certain of victory. Communication was haphazard, smoke obscured everything, noise was universal, and cheering could come from anyone.

  Townshend had to be very careful that the British did not squander the winning position that musketry had brought them. He raced to the centre where he found that ‘the pursuit had put part of the troops in great disorder’. While he struggled to impose some control and get the scattered men back into their ranks, a messenger brought him the news he had been dreading to hear: ‘Monsieur de Bougainville with about 2000 men, the corps from Cap Rouge and that neighbourhood, appeared in our rear.’117

  Forty-five minutes earlier and the history of North America may have been rather different. Bougainville later claimed that he had not been told about the landing until sometime after it had occurred. ‘I was not informed of it until nine in the morning’ he wrote in his journal. But, he claimed, he had begun marching ‘at once’.118 Given the impossibility of coordinating any joint attack before telegraph or radio, turning up ready to fight forty-five minutes apart was quite remarkable; however, in that brief flash of time the hopes of New France had been extinguished. Bougainville’s 2,000 men were some of the finest in North America and would have acted as a hammer to Montcalm’s anvil but alone they were not enough to defeat Townshend’s army. He scrambled to redeploy his men. The reliable Burton and his 48th Regiment who had stood in reserve all day were swung round to meet the threat as was the 3rd/60th who had been sent back to guard the landing zone. Williamson rushed his field pieces across to face the new threat.

  The two British regiments, again outnumbered, called Bougainville’s bluff. The young Frenchman, brilliantly gifted but experiencing independent command for the first time, looked desperately for any sign of Montcalm’s forces. He also tried to gauge the strength of the troops blocking his way. He could see men swelling the British ranks with every minute that passed, running over from other parts of the battlefield. Williamson’s guns fired a couple of shots at maximum elevation towards his position. Perhaps this decided him. Preferring caution to reckless abandon, he withdrew. In his journal he made his excuse: ‘when I came within range of the battle, our army was beaten and in retreat. The entire English army advanced to attack me. I retreated before them and posted myself so as to cover the
retreat of our army.’119 If Montcalm and Bougainville had both made the other’s decision the day might have ended with different results.

  Townshend did not have the stomach to follow him. The army of New France had been soundly beaten. Hundreds of its men lay heaped on the field of battle. Townshend told Pitt that he did not want to ‘risk the fruit of so decisive a day’. If he caught up with Bougainville he feared that he would have to fight ‘upon his own terms and in the midst of woods and swamps’.120 Failing to annihilate a broken and defeated enemy was common in this period. The process of battle seriously weakened the ties that bound the army. Mackellar wrote that ‘our loss, though not great in numbers, was nevertheless severe’.121 By this he meant that important men had been put out of action. Canadian sharpshooters had taken a toll on the British officers. Wolfe and Monckton were joined on the casualty list by Carleton, Barré, Spital (a ‘Brigade Major’ under Monckton), and Harvey Smythe, Wolfe’s aide-de-camp. Units became lost and dispersed, totally out of touch. Officers could go for hours without knowing if the day was won or lost. Re-establishing some kind of centrifugal authority was almost more important than thrashing a beaten enemy. The men needed time to recover from huge emotional and physical strain. No one had slept for more than a few minutes in the previous thirty-six hours. Friends had been killed and horribly wounded beside them. Some men threw themselves to the ground and fell into a deep sleep straight after battle; others looted the corpses of the fallen. The Russian success at Gross-Jägersdorf in 1757 was not followed up because the Russian soldiers could not be stopped from killing the Prussian wounded, stripping their corpses, and downing any captured liquor. The men had survived; they were not overly enthusiastic about throwing themselves back into the fray. Commanders were just as exhausted. The intellectual effort required left nerves at breaking point. Townshend had a wood full of expert enemy bush fighters to his north, a city wall mounted with cannon to his front, and his two superior officers had been carried off the battlefield, one killed the other seriously wounded. Reassembling his army, clearing the battlefield, gauging French strength, and bringing up supplies would be more than enough work for the rest of the day. Townshend elected to stay put.

  A summer of skirmishing and guerrilla warfare so typical of war in North America had culminated in a notably European battle. A thin red British line had trounced massed French columns in a tantalizing preview of the clashes that would become the symbol of a later and greater war between these two nations, when Napoleon Bonaparte would grasp at global hegemony. Monckton wrote to Pitt as he was convalescing from his wound trying to explain the causes of victory. Above all, he insisted that ‘His Majesty’s troops behaved with the greatest steadiness and bravery’.122 Townshend wrote to Amherst echoing his colleague’s sentiments: ‘was I really to point out the most striking cause of this successful stroke I must attribute it to the admirable and determined firmness of every British soldier in the field’. ‘Victory or no quarter,’ he continued, ‘was I may affirm in every man’s face that day.’123

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Our rejoicings are not yet over’

  QUEBEC’S WESTERN WALLS had been lined with onlookers during the battle. The townspeople watched helplessly as the future of their homeland was decided. They could see wounded men writhing on the ground and many other bodies who would move no more. Among them were friends, husbands, and relatives. As the French forces retreated the citizens knew that now the terrible trauma of a close siege beckoned, coming on top of a summer of shortages, fire, and bombardment. Others had an even closer view. The General Hospital was on the edge of the battlefield itself. It was packed with nuns from three different convents as well as many sheltering civilians. One of the nuns recorded that the atmosphere was one of ‘terror and confusion’. The sisters peered out of the windows and ‘witnessed the carnage’.

  This seems to have had a bracing effect, one of them reports that ‘it was in such a scene that charity triumphed, and caused us to forget self-preservation and the danger we were exposed to, in the immediate presence of the enemy’. There was a wave of casualties, brought to the hospital ‘by hundreds, many of them our close connexions’. ‘It was necessary,’ she writes, ‘to smother our grief and exert ourselves to relieve them.’1

  The wounded and dead were collected during the truce that always followed pitched battles. Some of the British soldiers dragged or carried casualties to the rear. Sergeant Thompson wrote that ‘our men had nothing better to carry them on, than a kind of hand barrow with canvas laid across it’. It was slow going and the strong Scotsman lost his patience and threw one wounded Frenchman across his shoulder like a sack of coal and ‘landed him safe at the temporary hospital’. With this kind of gentle treatment it is not surprising that ‘the poor devils would cry out lustily when they were in an uneasy position, but one could not understand a word of what they said’. He reports one vivid memory of a man with ‘one of his cheeks lying flat on his shoulder, which he got by attempting to run away though he had a highlander on his heels’.2

  Slowly a picture emerged of the scale of the dead and wounded. The official British casualty return emphasizes that the regiments paid very different prices for the victory.3 Fraser’s 78th was cruelly battered with 170 reported casualties, just under one third of those who had taken part in the battle. Fifty-four Louisbourg Grenadiers, nearly a quarter of the unit, were killed or injured. One hundred men, about one in three, of Anstruther’s 58th Regiment were also casualties. These three units had anchored both flanks and had borne the brunt of the sniping by the Canadians, and Fraser’s had suffered for their enthusiastic pursuit of the broken French army. More than a third of the 2nd/60th were casualties, yet more evidence that Canadian fire from the woods had been effective. Other units that were not exposed to the full fury of Canadian skirmishing fared much better. Webb’s 48th Regiment, held in reserve, had only three men wounded. Kennedy’s 43rd and Lascelles’ 47th which had faced the full force of the French column and blasted it with their muskets returned only twenty-six and thirty-eight casualties respectively. There is no doubting that in this battle it was the colonial sharpshooters who did the real damage to the British. The overall number of killed was very small. Just sixty-one officers and men died on the field whereas 592 were wounded. This is unusually disproportionate, the ratio of killed to wounded would normally be something in the order of 1:3 rather than the almost 1:10 that occurred on the Plains of Abraham. One explanation is that the French and Canadians were firing accurately but at too great a range to kill British soldiers. Many, like Malcolm Fraser, were hit, but not terminally. The casualty figures provide an indication of the danger associated with different jobs. Officers were almost twice as likely to be killed or injured as the men. If the two unengaged units are discounted, the 48th and the 3rd/60th, then two out of every seven officers who fought on the front line ended up as casualties. The figure for the men is one in six. Chaplain Robert MacPherson wrote grimly home that ‘the volunteers of the army will be provided for’.4 These eager young men who dreamt of being officers now found that French musket balls had created plenty of vacancies. Perhaps the most dangerous job of all was to be a general officer or on his staff. The British army on the Plains of Abraham had been virtually decapitated.

  The French army had suffered even worse. ‘We have just had an awful encounter,’ Vaudreuil scribbled in a note to Lévis.5 Montcalm, the French commander, his second in command, and a number of other senior figures such as the commander of the militia on the right wing, François-Xavier de Saint-Ours, had all been killed or mortally wounded. One French officer estimates that they lost ‘between seven or eight hundred men killed and wounded’.6 Mackellar writes that 200 ‘officers and men lay dead upon the field’. The British also took ‘13 officers and 350 men prisoners’. He noted that ‘we could not exactly find out’ the number of wounded ‘but from what we could learn they must have been above 1000 or 1200 men’.7 Townshend wrote in his official report that ‘their loss is
computed to have been about 1500 men, which fell chiefly upon their regulars’.8

  Surgeons on both sides were busy. Unfortunately for the wounded the professional bar to becoming a surgeon could not have been lower. Few had degrees and there was certainly no requirement to have a medical qualification. The Royal College of Surgeons was only founded in 1800. There was no centralized army medical board, nor would there be until the end of the century, so each regimental commander made his own arrangements. Pay was poor, conditions usually awful and tools and medicines were basic and in short supply. Anyone with any skill was bound to regard a comfortable and well-paid practice in London, Bath, or Edinburgh as infinitely preferable to slogging around the mosquito-infested combat zones on the periphery of empire.9

  Men undergoing surgery had around a 50 per cent chance of survival. The most common operation was an amputation. Strong liquor was poured down the throat of the patient, a blindfold put on, and a leather strap inserted between the upper and lower jaw to bite on. Then a screw tourniquet was applied above the wound and tightened to prevent haemorrhaging. The surgeon used a scalpel to slice the flesh away from his chosen point on the limb. Then he placed a blade up against the bone and started sawing. After a few amputations the saw grew dull and the cutting took longer and longer. Through the afternoon growing piles of severed limbs piled up behind the surgeon and his mates.