Old Quebec, the city of Champlain
TextIV. The Plains of Abraham
PHIPS’ siege of Quebec, with its awkward ship’s carpenter turned admiral, its Indian-mimicking French Governor, its noisy, ineffective bombardment, has more than a touch of comedy; but the drama in which Montcalm and Wolfe dispute the role of hero and contend for a prize of a value guessed at only by the statesmen seers of the time, never sinks beneath the dignity of tragedy.
Both the combatants were valiant, honorable, high-minded, and lovable. Both had already won laurels in battle. Each moved forward to the grand catastrophe by a path beset with difficulty and danger. Each gave his life for his cause and his country, and together they will live forever in the memory of the two peoples whom their great fight on the Plains of Abraham made one.
Montcalm, like Wolfe, had been a soldier from boyhood, gaining a varied experience in the European wars. Again in this resembling his rival, he was no mere soldier delighting in nothing but the clash of swords. He had some love of learning and taste for literature, and a heart that was very tender towards home and friends. Richer than Wolfe in one respect, he had a well-beloved wife and children, besides the mother to whom he wrote much the same kind of letters as the English hero sent to his mother at Greenwich.
Montcalm, nearly fifteen years older than his future antagonist, received his baptism of fire almost before Wolfe was out of his cradle. His experience of American warfare began two full years before his rival made his first painful passage of the Atlantic, and, on the July day when the young English brigadier was throwing up the redoubts which were to silence the batteries of Louisbourg, Montcalm, at Ticonderoga, hundreds of miles away, was flinging back from his bristling abatis of tree-tops a British force nearly four times the strength of his own.
Both men received their meed of honor and promotion. Whilst Montcalm was informed that “the king trusted everything to his zeal and generalship,” Wolfe was given a new opportunity to win distinction in the command of an expedition against Quebec.
In his brief winter’s sojourn in his native land, Wolfe had spent some weeks at Bath, trying to recuperate his shattered health, and in that fashionable resort of invalids and hypochondriacs had made the acquaintance of a beautiful girl, Katherine Lowther, who soon consented to betroth herself to the gaunt, odd-looking young hero of Louisbourg.
Montcalm, meanwhile, though a great man in the gay little society of Quebec, was passing his time unpleasantly enough. Far from home, tortured by anxiety, and hampered by the jealousy of the Governor de Vaudreuil and the shameless corruption of the Intendant Bigot and his accomplices, the general declared that only a miracle could save the colony. The people, who had been cheated, robbed, and oppressed for years, were at the point of starvation, and were losing heart. Yet, when news came in May that Wolfe had sailed to attack Quebec, seigneurs and habitants alike rallied bravely to the call of their leaders, and men and boys, red warriors and white, came pouring into the city.
Soon the army of defence numbered 16,000 men, most of whom Montcalm posted in a long-extended camp, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, touching the St. Charles on the right and the Montmorency on the left. Taking up his quarters at Beauport, he set his men to erect batteries and throw up earthworks on the steep ridge that runs for miles along the river.
As for the city itself—its fortifications were garrisoned by between one and two thousand men, guns were mounted on the walls, and the gates were shut and barricaded, except Palace Gate, from which a road led to the camp at Beauport across a bridge of boats girdling the St. Charles. That river was defended by a great boom of logs, whilst floating batteries, gunboats, and fire-ships were prepared for the protection of the harbor.
Then when all was done came a lull of horrible suspense, and the impatient “habitants” grew weary of waiting behind the entrenchments. But some, with hopeful memories of “Notre Dame des Victoires” and the miracles of their grandsires’ days, pleased themselves with the fancy that wind and wave must again be doing their grim work on the foe.
Not so. The English fleet, of twenty-two ships of the line and a great number of smaller vessels, was close at hand. It was under the command of the gallant Admiral Saunders, without whose cordial co-operation Wolfe could never have conquered Quebec, and it had on board nearly nine thousand seasoned troops, in addition to the seamen.
With the unwilling aid of French pilots, entrapped by stratagem, the vessels passed the perilous “traverse” at Cap Tourmente, and from that time the citizens of Quebec had no lack of excitement. The landing of the British on the Island of Orleans, the abortive attempt of the French to destroy the enemy’s fleet with their fire-ships, the erection of English batteries on Point Lévis and on the island, the encampment of the British below the Falls of Montmorency, the beginning of the bombardment, the passing of the invaders’ ships above the batteries of the city, all this kept the people of Quebec in a state of feverish expectancy. But Montcalm was not to be tempted nor provoked to descend for one moment from his inaccessible position.
At last Wolfe tried to force a battle. He landed a body of troops on a little beach about a mile above the Falls, and prepared to attack the French in their camp. But the men first on shore were too eager. Without waiting for orders or for their comrades, who were crossing to their assistance by a ford below the Falls, they tried to rush the heights where Montcalm’s army was gathered in force, and were beaten back with heavy loss.
For weeks after this battle there was a grim game of patience between the two skilled leaders. Unmoved by reverses on Lake Champlain which obliged him to send troops to Montreal, by the wasting of the parishes above and below Quebec, by threatened famine, present desolation, and the murmurs of his habitants, who were eager to escape from the army to gather in their harvests, Montcalm remained upon his heights, waiting for time and bad weather to rid the country of the foe.
But he had to do with a man whose stock of endurance matched his own. Disease weakened the English forces and came near robbing them of their head; but Wolfe’s work was not yet done, and on his bed of pain he still bent every power of mind and body to the accomplishment of his task.
If Montcalm could not be made to fight below the town, was it impossible to force a battle on the plains above Quebec? Impossible is not a word that heroes love; much is possible that at the first blush seems foolhardiness. Wolfe’s rugged pathway to battle and victory, death and immortal fame, was there, waiting his need, and in due time he discerned it.
Meanwhile there had begun mighty preparation in fleet and army for some last attempt on Quebec. There was movement of ships and bustle of men, re-disposition of forces, a noisy bombardment of the Beauport camp—the object of all concealed even from most of the British officers, lest some enlightening rumor should reach the ears of Montcalm.
On the night of September 12th, Wolfe made his last reconnaissance, and, haunted, it may be, by presentiments of his swiftly approaching death, repeated to his attendant officers some verses of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” an incident that has seemed the more worthy of note because the young general’s own path of glory led so speedily to the grave.
Wolfe well knew the desperate nature of his plan. From the opposite shore he had seen the white tents of the troops who were on guard above the Anse-au-Foulon, where he proposed to land; and he did not know that the post was commanded by the heedless coward Vergor, who had only escaped well-merited disgrace by the interposition of Bigot and Vaudreuil.
When, an hour before sunrise on the fateful morning of September 13th, Wolfe led his forlorn hope to the spot where the ascent was to be made, he did not guess that the guards above slept at their post; and his heart was heavy with misgivings.
The little path had been rendered impassable by obstructions, and the men had to clamber up the face of the rugged cliff, tree-covered then as it is to-day, whilst, below, the general waited in agonizing suspense till a ringing cheer told him that the guard was overpowered. Then the rough track was cleared, and, before day dawned grey and cloudy over the fortress, Wolfe’s little army of four thousand men (sadly small for the work in hand) had gained the top of the cliff, where now lies a sweet old-fashioned garden spread to the sun.
But Wolfe chose his battle-ground nearer the town, on the world-famous Plains of Abraham. There he drew up his men “in the first of all thin red lines”; there the French, forced to fight at last, made their gallant charge; there “fell Wolfe victorious”; there noble Montcalm received his mortal wound; and there was sounded the death-knell of the dominion of France in North America. But “the dramatic ending of the old order blessed the birth of the new.” It has been well said that “in a sense, which it is easier to feel than to express—two rival races, under two rival leaders, unconsciously joined hands on the Plains of Abraham.”
Not yet, however, would all the French admit that their cause was irretrievably lost. Though Montcalm lay under the Ursuline Chapel, in “his soldier’s grave dug for him, while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell”; though Governor de Vaudreuil had fled and Quebec had opened her gates to the foe, the gallant De Lévis had no thought of acquiescing in the passing of New France.
Gathering ten thousand men at Montreal, he marched in the spring upon Quebec. The English general, Murray, came out, with a far inferior force, to meet him, and again French and English locked in desperate strife on the plateau behind the city. A tall shaft, surmounted by a statue of Bellona, on the Ste. Foy road, marks the battlefield where the French won their last victory in a lost cause.