Crucible of War
Page 43
Although no independent evidence survives to corroborate Stobo’s own account, there is good reason to believe that it was he who told Wolfe of the footpath at L’Anse au Foulon (Fuller’s Cove)—a track that angled steeply up the bluff from the riverside to the Plains of Abraham, a couple of miles west of the city. On September 5, Wolfe ordered preparations for the move upriver, and on that or the following day met with Stobo. Then, evidently feeling that he had critical secret information to communicate to Amherst, he sent Stobo off with a packet of dispatches on the seventh. The next day he reconnoitered with his brigadiers above the city. He spent a good deal of time looking through a field telescope at L’Anse au Foulon but said nothing to Murray, Townshend, and Monckton about any plan to land there. They believed that the assault would be made higher up the river, at Cap Rouge, which they had recommended, or perhaps at Pointe aux Trembles. As the reconnaissance progressed, more than a score of transports and warships, bearing approximately 3,600 men, rode the flood tides upriver past Québec, anchored off Cap Rouge, and awaited Wolfe’s command.12
But his command did not come on the tenth—a heavy storm did, forestalling all amphibious operations. Nor did it come on the eleventh, when Wolfe ordered another thousand men upriver, stripping bare the defenses of his base camp on Île d’Orléans. At last on the twelfth he issued an order warning the army to make ready for an attack that would take place that night. Even then he did not inform his brigadiers of where he intended their forces to land; nor of when, exactly, they were to do so; nor of what objectives they were to seize. On the evening of the twelfth, nervously, they sent him a letter requesting further instructions. It was not until 8:30 that night—a half hour before the troops were to begin boarding their boats—that Wolfe wrote to inform them that the goal was “the Foulon distant upon 2 miles, or 2 ⁄2 from Quebec, where you remember [from the reconnaissance] an encampment of 12 or 13 Tents and an abbatis, below it.”13 They and their men would wait until the signal that had been announced was given—two lanterns hoisted on the main top-mast of Holmes’s flagship, H.M.S. Sutherland—and then would ride the ebbing tide downriver, under the direction of naval officers who knew the spot at which they were to disembark.
Wolfe’s partisans have interpreted his delay in informing his brigadiers of their objective as a sign of his genius. More likely than any concern for secrecy, however, it would seem that a combination of disdain for his subordinates and a highly precarious state of mind explain Wolfe’s silence. When the brigadiers’ letter arrived at his cabin on the Sutherland, he was busy making what can only be interpreted as careful preparations for his death. He had summoned a friend, Lieutenant John Jervis of the Royal Navy, in order to hand over a copy of his will, all his personal papers, and a miniature portrait of his fiancée, along with instructions on how to dispose of them. Jervis had found him dressed in a bright new uniform. The two men were talking over Wolfe’s presentiments of death when a messenger brought in the brigadiers’ letter, impelling him to pen his irritated reply. There is no evidence that he would otherwise have troubled to tell them where they and the army were bound. Wolfe would be in one of the first boats. Somehow, that was supposed to be enough.14
Although Wolfe was more eager to court his grim muse than to anticipate what might happen when the boats reached the cove, his troops embarked without a hitch. Quietly the river’s current and the ebbing tide began to carry the first wave of boats downriver, close to the north shore, at about 2:00 a.m. The night was calm. The moon, in its last quarter, gave little light. Sentries ashore could dimly make out the silent passing column, and they challenged it, but when French-speaking officers in the boats responded that they were convoying supplies down from Batiscan, the guards let them continue unimpeded. About a half hour before first light, the lead boats scraped ashore a little below the cove. Without waiting for further instructions, a detachment of light infantrymen scrambled up the 175-foot-tall bluff face, following the 58th Regiment’s big, nimble lieutenant colonel, William Howe. He had just turned thirty and had served in the siege of Louisbourg. Wolfe respected him for his physical courage no less than for his distinguished family connections—he was the youngest brother of Lord Howe, killed at Ticonderoga—and had given him command of a light-infantry battalion formed from the most agile men of several regiments. Now, as the boats carrying Wolfe and the rest of the advance party ground onto the shingle in the cove, Howe proved himself worthy of Wolfe’s confidence. In the last minutes of darkness he and his men mounted to the top of the cliff, fixed bayonets, and charged into the little French camp. When the brief flurry of musket fire was over, the British found among the wounded the detachment’s commander, Captain Louis Du Pont Du Chambon de Vergor—an officer whose only previous distinction was that in 1755 he had surrendered Fort Beauséjour to Robert Monckton. Vergor had barely had time to dispatch a runner to warn Montcalm that the British had begun to land at L’Anse au Foulon.15
It was about four o’clock when Wolfe struggled up the path from the cove to the top of the bluff. Together with Howe’s party, there were perhaps two hundred men with him. The remaining troops of the first wave were disembarking from their boats in the cove and starting to labor upward under the weight of their arms and packs; a French artillery battery several hundred yards upriver had just opened fire on the transports and armed sloops of the second wave, which were now approaching the cove. Things were not going as he had expected.
Wolfe had assumed that he would come ashore with the advance guard, that there would be resistance, and (if his meticulous preparations are evidence of his expectations) that he would be killed leading his men against the French outpost. If his wish were granted, he would have risked only the advance guard, the survivors of which would be free to reembark; Monckton, the second-in-command, would be free to call off an operation of which he clearly disapproved. In the event that he escaped death, Wolfe would at least have led one last heroic attempt to land troops before Québec and could order a withdrawal from the St. Lawrence with a certain degree of honor. His maladies were sure to kill him before he reached home—and disgrace; he would merely exchange a wretched lingering death for the quick glorious one he coveted.16
But now on the heights Vergor’s men had fled, there was no resistance except the ineffectual fire from the battery up the river, and Howe had already led his light infantry off to silence the guns. The three brigadiers were still below, and Wolfe, alone in the gray light before dawn, had no idea what to do next. In confusion he sent word down to the officer supervising operations at the cove, Major Isaac Barré, to halt the landings. Fortunately for Wolfe’s historical reputation, Barré ignored the order and rushed more men up the path. Howe’s light infantry meanwhile drove off the French gunners; the landings proceeded with dispatch; and Wolfe, at length collecting himself, went off to find a position for his men. Shortly after sunrise, in weather that had turned “showery,” Wolfe returned and gave the order to march for Québec.
By the full light of day, seven British battalions could be seen drawn up in battle order across the Plains of Abraham, blocking the Grande Allée—the main road into town—a little less than a mile from Québec’s western wall. Behind them, five more battalions were busy improving the path, guarding the landing, and harrying Canadian and Indian skirmishers out of the woods and cornfields. At the cove a detachment of sailors manhandled a pair of brass six-pounders up the trail. More than twenty sail of ships rode at anchor in the river. Wolfe’s luck, always uncommonly good, had held once more.
Indeed, it had outlasted his judgment. Wolfe might have ordered his men six hundred yards farther on, to entrench along the highest ground in front of Québec, the Buttes à Neveu, as a first step toward opening a siège en forme. To do so would have given them both protection from an enemy assault and a clear view of the walls of the city, which would have lain within the range of siege guns brought up from the ships. But he did not. Instead he continued to extend the line of battle across the thousand-yard br
eadth of the plains, and to wait. What happened next would rest entirely in the hands of the French.17
THE REDCOATS HAD already formed a preliminary line across the plains between 6:30 and 7:00 when the disbelieving marquis de Montcalm rode in from Beauport. He had been up all night, supervising defenses on the Beauport shore, where he had expected the British to make an assault landing. As part of an elaborate ruse, Admiral Saunders’s sailors had begun placing buoys off Beauport on the eleventh, as if to mark obstacles for assault craft to avoid. At eleven o’clock on the night of the twelfth Saunders had ordered sailors into the ships’ boats and instructed them to row noisily back and forth between Beauport and the mouth of the St. Charles, to convince the French that an attack was imminent. Montcalm had taken the bait and bent every effort to improving the defenses east of the city; he was convinced that the ships that had passed up the river were intended merely to distract him from fully manning the Beauport lines. He knew, of course, that the ships above the city represented a real threat, and as a result he had also detached enough men to bring Bougainville’s flying column up to a strength of about two thousand; but he himself remained in command of the eastern defenses, where he expected Wolfe to strike.
Montcalm and his officers at Beauport had spent so tense a night waiting for the attack that they had missed the first warning signal from the city, which indicated that something was amiss west of town. The general had sent his haggard men to their tents as soon as it was light enough to see that the British had withdrawn their boats and were not in fact preparing to land. Even the arrival at daybreak of a panting, panicked refugee from Vergor’s camp did not immediately set the army in motion. An aide, listening to the man, concluded that he was a lunatic; rather than further disturb his commander (or himself) the aide had gone off to bed. But not for long: a flurry of urgent messages suddenly arrived, verifying the initial report without clarifying the size of the threat. Only then had Montcalm been summoned from his bed and the general alarm sounded. Finally, after some hesitation—for he could not believe that any substantial number of men had been able to mount the cliffs above town—Montcalm had ordered his four regular battalions to post themselves before the walls of the city. Then, leaving fifteen hundred men behind to hold the Beauport lines in the event that the British landing was only an elaborate diversion, he had mounted his horse and ridden off to see what could be done.18
Nothing had prepared Montcalm for what he saw when he finally arrived on the Buttes à Neveu, overlooking the plains. To the aide who rode beside him, even the sight of the redcoats was less striking than their effect on Montcalm, who sat in the saddle as if thunderstruck, wordlessly surveying the long scarlet line: for a long moment, “it seemed as though he felt his fate upon him.” Then, somberly, he set about arranging his battalions in a line of battle facing the British. Elsewhere on the field, sporadic firing was already under way, as Canadian militiamen and Indians who had moved out from the city on Vaudreuil’s orders sniped from cover at the double rank of redcoats, who seemed unperturbed by the harassment. More than anything else it was the impassiveness of the British that unnerved Montcalm, for their very lack of response to the snipers bespoke a kind of discipline that he knew his own forces, so heavy with militia, lacked. With increasing anxiety he waited—for it was several miles from the east end of the Beauport defenses to the Plains of Abraham—while his men marched up and assumed the positions he indicated before the walls.19
As they arrived, and as he rode up and down the line positioning them for action, Montcalm’s thoughts surely eddied around the perils of his situation. Québec was almost out of provisions; Wolfe’s army was standing astride the road to Batiscan; and the British ships in the river were blocking access to the supply depot by water. The walls of the city offered little protection in comparison to the trench network at Beauport and Montmorency; indeed the section of wall behind his men, around the Bastion of St. Louis, was particularly weak. At most he could position about 4,500 men on the field, a number perhaps equivalent to the force of redcoats arrayed a half mile or so ahead of him. No more reinforcements were available unless Bougainville and his flying column should appear; but although a messenger had been dispatched to Bougainville’s camp at Cap Rouge at 6:45, Montcalm knew that to put two thousand men in motion and to march them in good order over the eight miles to Québec would take three hours. 20 But did he have that much time to spare?
It was about half-past nine when Montcalm concluded that he had no choice but to attack. To his chief of artillery he distractedly announced, “ ‘We cannot avoid action; the enemy is entrenching, he already has two pieces of cannon. If we give him time to establish himself, we shall never be able to attack him with the sort of troops we have.’ He added with a sort of shiver, ‘Is it possible that Bougainville doesn’t hear all that noise?’ ” Without waiting for a reply, he cantered off down the line to warn his officers to prepare their men to advance.21
In fact his enemy was not entrenching, even though from a distance of six hundred yards it looked to Montcalm like they were. What had actually happened was that, once the last units had joined his line at about eight o’clock, Wolfe had ordered his men to lie down, and so they remained until after nine. The Indian and Canadian snipers in the woods on the British left and in the cornfields that lay between the British right and the cliff edge had been gallingly effective since early in the day. By eight o’clock Howe’s light-infantrymen had done a fair job of clearing them out, but then Montcalm’s gunners had opened fire with four or five fieldpieces, and the cannonballs, bounding over the turf with enough force to cut a man in two, had begun to tell on the redcoat battalions. Notwithstanding the legend of a thin red line standing calmly under fire, to order one’s men to lie on their arms was far from unknown under such circumstances. Although Wolfe himself continued to walk the line and tempt the enemy gunners to try their skill on his brilliantly clad, scare-crow figure, he knew perfectly well that if he hoped to have an army fit to do battle he would have to preserve it until the moment came for his men to receive the French charge.22
While it is clear that by this point Wolfe had long since recovered from his cliff-top bout with indecision, it is by no means obvious that he had any plan other than to wait for Montcalm to make the next move. He knew that he had the better, more disciplined troops, and that in any open-field encounter they should be able to prevail against the imperfectly trained levies Montcalm had at his disposal. But he also knew, or should have known, that his chances of winning such a battle were diminishing by the minute. For not only were his men exposed to fire from the French cannon to their front; they were intensely vulnerable to attack from the west, their rear, and when Bougainville’s flying column came, it would approach from that direction. Because he had not formed a plan that went beyond taking a position in front of Québec, Wolfe had succeeded in placing his entire army between the hammer of Bougainville and the anvil of Montcalm. He had not given an order to entrench, as Montcalm feared: he had not even thought to order entrenching tools to be brought from the ships.23
The Battle of Québec, September 13, 1759. This shaded topographical rendering of the locale shows the city, within its six-bastioned wall; the rise, called the Buttes à Neveu, where Montcalm ordered his men into line; and the open, gradually sloping fields to the west, where Wolfe took his stand. The westward arm of the compass rose points almost directly to Wolfe’s landing place, L’Anse au Foulon. Note the steepness of the escarpment (indicated by darkness of shading) along the north side of the river, above the city. Downstream, north of the entry point of the St. Charles River, the flatness of the terrain presented a different kind of obstacle. As the sketched-in featureless expanse at the top of the map suggests, at low tide mud flats extended a half mile or more between high- and low-water marks. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
Indeed Wolfe had denied his men not only the protection of a ditch but even the chance for escape, since there
were now nearly 4,500 of them on the field and the only route of retreat lay back the way they had come, down a path so narrow that men could descend it only by twos. If he had hoped to sacrifice his own life heroically and then to leave the inglorious business of retreat to the brigadiers he despised, his hopes had been dashed. Instead—because he had enjoyed such extraordinary good fortune in landing his men, and because they had shown such professionalism in taking their position before Québec—James Wolfe now stood a fair chance of sacrificing twelve superb battalions to no larger purpose than gratifying his desire for a heroic death. We cannot know whether he worried, in the last moments of his life, over the consequences of his actions, or whether he even fully understood them. But his men, lying facedown in the mud while cannon shot ricocheted through their ranks and musket balls whistled overhead, could hardly have relished the position into which their commander, ardent for any desperate glory and maudlin in his attachment to Gray’s Elegy, had thrust them.24