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Title: The Winning of Canada:
   A Chronicle of Wolfe
   [Vol. 11 of "The Chronicles of Canada"]
Author: Wood, William Charles Henry (1864-1947)
Illustrator [William Pitt]: Brompton, Richard (1734-1783)
Illustrator [Lord Amherst]: Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Illustrator [The Death of Wolfe]: West, Benjamin (1738-1820)
Illustrator [James Wolfe]: Anonymous, fl. ca. 1770
Date of first publication: 1914
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1920
Date first posted: 6 July 2010
Date last updated: 6 July 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #566

This ebook was produced by:
Marcia Brooks, David T. Jones, David Edwards
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available
by the Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries




_CHRONICLES OF CANADA_

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton

In thirty-two volumes



11

THE WINNING OF CANADA

BY WILLIAM WOOD



_Part III_

_The English Invasion_


[Illustration: JAMES WOLFE
From the National Portrait Gallery]


THE WINNING
OF CANADA

A Chronicle of Wolfe

BY

WILLIAM WOOD

[Illustration]

TORONTO

GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

1920

_Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention_

Press of The Hunter-Ross Co., Limited, Toronto


TO
MY MOTHER




AUTHOR'S NOTE


Any life of Wolfe can be artificially simplified by treating his
purely military work as something complete in itself and not as a part
of a greater whole. But, since such treatment gives a totally false
idea of his achievement, this little sketch, drawn straight from
original sources, tries to show him as he really was, a co-worker with
the British fleet in a war based entirely on naval strategy and
inseparably connected with international affairs of world-wide
significance. The only simplification attempted here is that of
arrangement and expression.

W. W.

Quebec, April 1914.


CONTENTS

                                     Page

   I. THE BOY                           1

  II. THE YOUNG SOLDIER                10

 III. THE SEVEN YEARS' PEACE           28

  IV. THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR             43

   V. LOUISBOURG                       52

  VI. QUEBEC                           67

 VII. THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM            99

VIII. EPILOGUE--THE LAST STAND        140

      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE            147

      INDEX                           149


ILLUSTRATIONS


JAMES WOLFE                              _Frontispiece_
  From the National Portrait Gallery.

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM           _Facing page_ 52

VIEW OF LOUISBOURG IN 1758                         "  58

THE SIEGE OF LOUISBOURG, 1758                      "  64
  Map by Bartholomew.

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC                                "  90
  Map by Bartholomew.

THE DEATH OF WOLFE                                 " 140
  After the painting by Benjamin West.

LORD AMHERST                                       " 144
  From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.



CHAPTER I

THE BOY

1727-1741


Wolfe was a soldier born. Many of his ancestors had stood ready to
fight for king and country at a moment's notice. His father fought
under the great Duke of Marlborough in the war against France at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. His grandfather, his
great-grandfather, his only uncle, and his only brother were soldiers
too. Nor has the martial spirit deserted the descendants of the Wolfes
in the generation now alive. They are soldiers still. The present head
of the family, who represented it at the celebration of the
tercentenary of the founding of Quebec, fought in Egypt for Queen
Victoria; and the member of it who represented Wolfe on that occasion,
in the pageant of the Quebec campaign, is an officer in the Canadian
army under George V.

The Wolfes are of an old and honourable line. Many hundreds of years
ago their forefathers lived in England and later on in Wales. Later
still, in the fifteenth century, before America was discovered, they
were living in Ireland. Wolfe's father, however, was born in England;
and, as there is no evidence that any of his ancestors in Ireland had
married other than English Protestants, and as Wolfe's mother was also
English, we may say that the victor of Quebec was a pure-bred
Englishman. Among his Anglo-Irish kinsmen were the Goldsmiths and the
Seymours. Oliver Goldsmith himself was always very proud of being a
cousin of the man who took Quebec.

Wolfe's mother, to whom he owed a great deal of his genius, was a
descendant of two good families in Yorkshire. She was eighteen years
younger than his father, and was very tall and handsome. Wolfe thought
there was no one like her. When he was a colonel, and had been through
the wars and at court, he still believed she was 'a match for all the
beauties.' He was not lucky enough to take after her in looks, except
in her one weak feature, a cutaway chin. His body, indeed, seems to
have been made up of the bad points of both parents: he had his
rheumatism from his father. But his spirit was made up of all their
good points; and no braver ever lived in any healthy body than in his
own sickly, lanky six foot three.

Wolfe's parents went to live at Westerham in Kent shortly after they
were married; and there, on January 2, 1727, in the vicarage--where
Mrs Wolfe was staying while her husband was away on duty with his
regiment--the victor of Quebec was born. Two other houses in the
little country town of Westerham are full of memories of Wolfe. One of
these was his father's, a house more than two hundred years old when
he was born. It was built in the reign of Henry VII, and the loyal
subject who built it had the king's coat of arms carved over the big
stone fireplace. Here Wolfe and his younger brother Edward used to sit
in the winter evenings with their mother, while their veteran father
told them the story of his long campaigns. So, curiously enough, it
appears that Wolfe, the soldier who won Canada for England in 1759,
sat under the arms of the king in whose service the sailor Cabot
hoisted the flag of England over Canadian soil in 1497. This house has
been called Quebec House ever since the victory in 1759. The other
house is Squerryes Court, belonging then and now to the Warde family,
the Wolfes' closest friends. Wolfe and George Warde were chums from
the first day they met. Both wished to go into the Army; and both, of
course, 'played soldiers,' like other virile boys. Warde lived to be
an old man and actually did become a famous cavalry leader. Perhaps
when he charged a real enemy, sword in hand, at the head of thundering
squadrons, it may have flashed through his mind how he and Wolfe had
waved their whips and cheered like mad when they galloped their ponies
down the common with nothing but their barking dogs behind them.

    *    *    *    *    *

Wolfe's parents presently moved to Greenwich, where he was sent to
school at Swinden's. Here he worked quietly enough till just before he
entered on his 'teens. Then the long-pent rage of England suddenly
burst in war with Spain. The people went wild when the British fleet
took Porto Bello, a Spanish port in Central America. The news was
cried through the streets all night. The noise of battle seemed to be
sounding all round Swinden's school, where most of the boys belonged
to naval and military families. Ships were fitting out in English
harbours. Soldiers were marching into every English camp. Crowds were
singing and cheering. First one boy's father and then another's was
under orders for the front. Among them was Wolfe's father, who was
made adjutant-general to the forces assembling in the Isle of Wight.
What were history and geography and mathematics now, when a whole
nation was afoot to fight! And who would not fight the Spaniards when
they cut off British sailors' ears? That was an old tale by this time;
but the flames of anger threw it into lurid relief once more.

Wolfe was determined to go and fight. Nothing could stop him. There
was no commission for him as an officer. Never mind! He would go as a
volunteer and win his commission in the field. So, one hot day in July
1740, the lanky, red-haired boy of thirteen-and-a-half took his seat
on the Portsmouth coach beside his father, the veteran soldier of
fifty-five. His mother was a woman of much too fine a spirit to grudge
anything for the service of her country; but she could not help being
exceptionally anxious about the dangers of disease for a sickly boy in
a far-off land of pestilence and fever. She had written to him the
very day he left. But he, full of the stir and excitement of a big
camp, had carried the letter in his pocket for two or three days
before answering it. Then he wrote her the first of many letters from
different seats of war, the last one of all being written just before
he won the victory that made him famous round the world.


Newport, Isle of Wight,
August 6th, 1740.

      I received my dearest Mamma's letter on Monday last,
      but could not answer it then, by reason I was at camp
      to see the regiments off to go on board, and was too
      late for the post; but am very sorry, dear Mamma, that
      you doubt my love, which I'm sure is as sincere as
      ever any son's was to his mother.

      Papa and I are just going on board, but I believe
      shall not sail this fortnight; in which time, if I can
      get ashore at Portsmouth or any other town, I will
      certainly write to you, and, when we are gone, by
      every ship we meet, because I know it is my duty.
      Besides, if it is not, I would do it out of love, with
      pleasure.

      I am sorry to hear that your head is so bad, which I
      fear is caused by your being so melancholy; but pray,
      dear Mamma, if you love me, don't give yourself up to
      fears for us. I hope, if it please God, we shall soon
      see one another, which will be the happiest day that
      ever I shall see. I will, as sure as I live, if it is
      possible for me, let you know everything that has
      happened, by every ship; therefore pray, dearest
      Mamma, don't doubt about it. I am in a very good state
      of health, and am likely to continue so. Pray my love
      to my brother. Pray my service to Mr Streton and his
      family, to Mr and Mrs Weston, and to George Warde when
      you see him; and pray believe me to be, my dearest
      Mamma, your most dutiful, loving and affectionate son,

                                                   J. Wolfe.

To Mrs. Wolfe, at her house in Greenwich, Kent.


Wolfe's 'very good state of health' was not 'likely to continue so,'
either in camp or on board ship. A long peace had made the country
indifferent to the welfare of the Army and Navy. Now men were suddenly
being massed together in camps and fleets as if on purpose to breed
disease. Sanitation on a large scale, never having been practised in
peace, could not be improvised in this hurried, though disastrously
slow, preparation for a war. The ship in which Wolfe was to sail had
been lying idle for years; and her pestilential bilge-water soon began
to make the sailors and soldiers sicken and die. Most fortunately,
Wolfe was among the first to take ill; and so he was sent home in time
to save him from the fevers of Spanish America.

Wolfe was happy to see his mother again, to have his pony to ride and
his dogs to play with. But, though he tried his best to stick to his
lessons, his heart was wild for the war. He and George Warde used to
go every day during the Christmas holidays behind the pigeon-house at
Squerryes Court and practise with their swords and pistols. One day
they stopped when they heard the post-horn blowing at the gate; and
both of them became very much excited when George's father came out
himself with a big official envelope marked 'On His Majesty's Service'
and addressed to 'James Wolfe, Esquire.' Inside was a commission as
second lieutenant in the Marines, signed by George II and dated at St
James's Palace, November 3, 1741. Eighteen years later, when the fame
of the conquest of Canada was the talk of the kingdom, the Wardes had
a stone monument built to mark the spot where Wolfe was standing when
the squire handed him his first commission. And there it is to-day;
and on it are the verses ending,

    This spot so sacred will forever claim
    A proud alliance with its hero's name.

Wolfe was at last an officer. But the Marines were not the corps for
him. Their service companies were five thousand miles away, while war
with France was breaking out much nearer home. So what was his delight
at receiving another commission, on March 25, 1742, as an ensign in
the 12th Regiment of Foot! He was now fifteen, an officer, a soldier
born and bred, eager to serve his country, and just appointed to a
regiment ordered to the front! Within a month an army such as no one
had seen since the days of Marlborough had been assembled at
Blackheath. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, they were all
there when King George II, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of
Cumberland came down to review them. Little did anybody think that the
tall, eager ensign carrying the colours of the 12th past His Majesty
was the man who was to play the foremost part in winning Canada for
the British crown.




CHAPTER II

THE YOUNG SOLDIER

1741-1748


Wolfe's short life may be divided into four periods, all easy to
remember, because all are connected with the same number--seven. He
was fourteen years a boy at home, with one attempt to be a soldier.
This period lasted from 1727 to 1741. Then he was seven years a young
officer in time of war, from 1741 to 1748. Then he served seven years
more in time of peace, from 1748 to 1755. Lastly, he died in the
middle, at the very climax, of the world-famous Seven Years' War, in
1759.

After the royal review at Blackheath in the spring of 1742 the army
marched down to Deptford and embarked for Flanders. Wolfe was now off
to the very places he had heard his father tell about again and again.
The surly Flemings were still the same as when his father knew them.
They hated their British allies almost as much as they hated their
enemies. The long column of redcoats marched through a scowling mob of
citizens, who meanly grudged a night's lodging to the very men coming
there to fight for them. We may be sure that Wolfe thought little
enough of such mean people as he stepped out with the colours flying
above his head. The army halted at Ghent, an ancient city, famous for
its trade and wealth, and defended by walls which had once resisted
Marlborough.

At first there was a good deal to do and see; and George Warde was
there too, as an officer in a cavalry regiment. But Warde had to march
away; and Wolfe was left without any companion of his own age, to pass
his spare time the best way he could. Like another famous soldier,
Frederick the Great, who first won his fame in this very war, he was
fond of music and took lessons on the flute. He also did his best to
improve his French; and when Warde came back the two friends used to
go to the French theatre. Wolfe put his French to other use as well,
and read all the military books he could find time for. He always kept
his kit ready to pack; so that he could have marched anywhere within
two hours of receiving the order. And, though only a mere
boy-officer, he began to learn the duties of an adjutant, so that he
might be fit for promotion whenever the chance should come.

Months wore on and Wolfe was still at Ghent. He had made friends
during his stay, and he tells his mother in September: 'This place is
full of officers, and we never want company. I go to the play once or
twice a week, and talk a little with the ladies, who are very civil
and speak French.' Before Christmas it had been decided at home--where
the war-worn father now was, after a horrible campaign at
Cartagena--that Edward, the younger son, was also to be allowed to
join the Army. Wolfe was delighted. 'My brother is much to be
commended for the pains he takes to improve himself. I hope to see him
soon in Flanders, when, in all probability, before next year is over,
we may know something of our trade.' And so they did!

The two brothers marched for the Rhine early in 1743, both in the same
regiment. James was now sixteen, Edward fifteen. The march was a
terrible one for such delicate boys. The roads were ankle-deep in mud;
the weather was vile; both food and water were very bad. Even the
dauntless Wolfe had to confess to his mother that he was 'very much
fatigued and out of order. I never come into quarters without aching
hips and knees.' Edward, still more delicate, was sent off on a
foraging party to find something for the regiment to eat. He wrote
home to his father from Bonn on April 7: 'We can get nothing upon our
march but eggs and bacon and sour bread. I have no bedding, nor can
get it anywhere. We had a sad march last Monday in the morning. I was
obliged to walk up to my knees in snow, though my brother and I have a
horse between us. I have often lain upon straw, and should oftener,
had I not known some French, which I find very useful; though I was
obliged the other day to speak _Latin_ for a good dinner. We send for
everything we want to the priest.'

That summer, when the king arrived with his son the Duke of
Cumberland, the British and Hanoverian army was reduced to 37,000
half-fed men. Worse still, the old general, Lord Stair, had led it
into a very bad place. These 37,000 men were cooped up on the narrow
side of the valley of the river Main, while a much larger French army
was on the better side, holding bridges by which to cut them off and
attack them while they were all clumped together. Stair tried to slip
away in the night. But the French, hearing of this attempt, sent
12,000 men across the river to hold the place the British general was
leaving, and 30,000 more, under the Duc de Gramont, to block the road
at the place towards which he was evidently marching. At daylight the
British and Hanoverians found themselves cut off, both front and rear,
while a third French force was waiting to pounce on whichever end
showed weakness first. The King of England, who was also Elector of
Hanover, would be a great prize, and the French were eager to capture
him. This was how the armies faced each other on the morning of June
27, 1743, at Dettingen, the last battlefield on which any king of
England has fought in person, and the first for Wolfe.

The two young brothers were now about to see a big battle, like those
of which their father used to tell them. Strangely enough, Amherst,
the future commander-in-chief in America, under whom Wolfe served at
Louisbourg, and the two men who succeeded Wolfe in command at
Quebec--Monckton and Townshend--were also there. It is an awful moment
for a young soldier, the one before his first great fight. And here
were nearly a hundred thousand men, all in full view of each other,
and all waiting for the word to begin. It was a beautiful day, and the
sun shone down on a splendidly martial sight. There stood the British
and Hanoverians, with wooded hills on their right, the river and the
French on their left, the French in their rear, and the French very
strongly posted on the rising ground straight in their front. The
redcoats were in dense columns, their bayonets flashing and their
colours waving defiance. Side by side with their own red cavalry were
the black German cuirassiers, the blue German lancers, and the gaily
dressed green and scarlet Hungarian hussars. The long white lines of
the three French armies, varied with royal blue, encircled them on
three sides. On the fourth were the leafy green hills.

Wolfe was acting as adjutant and helping the major. His regiment had
neither colonel nor lieutenant-colonel with it that day; so he had
plenty to do, riding up and down to see that all ranks understood the
order that they were not to fire till they were close to the French
and were given the word for a volley. He cast a glance at his brother,
standing straight and proudly with the regimental colours that he
himself had carried past the king at Blackheath the year before. He
was not anxious about 'Ned'; he knew how all the Wolfes could fight.
He was not anxious about himself; he was only too eager for the fray.
A first battle tries every man, and few have not dry lips, tense
nerves, and beating hearts at its approach. But the great anxiety of
an officer going into action for the first time with untried men is
for them and not for himself. The agony of wondering whether they will
do well or not is worse, a thousand times, than what he fears for his
own safety.

Presently the French gunners, in the centre of their position across
the Main, lit their matches and, at a given signal, fired a salvo into
the British rear. Most of the baggage wagons were there; and, as the
shot and shell began to knock them over, the drivers were seized with
a panic. Cutting the traces, these men galloped off up the hills and
into the woods as hard as they could go. Now battery after battery
began to thunder, and the fire grew hot all round. The king had been
in the rear, as he did not wish to change the command on the eve of
the battle. But, seeing the panic, he galloped through the whole of
his army to show that he was going to fight beside his men. As he
passed, and the men saw what he intended to do, they cheered and
cheered, and took heart so boldly that it was hard work to keep them
from rushing up the heights of Dettingen, where Gramont's 30,000
Frenchmen were waiting to shoot them down.

Across the river Marshal Noailles, the French commander-in-chief, saw
the sudden stir in the British ranks, heard the roaring hurrahs, and
supposed that his enemies were going to be fairly caught against
Gramont in front. In this event he could finish their defeat himself
by an overwhelming attack in flank. Both his own and Gramont's
artillery now redoubled their fire, till the British could hardly
stand it. But then, to the rage and despair of Noailles, Gramont's
men, thinking the day was theirs, suddenly left their strong position
and charged down on to the same level as the British, who were only
too pleased to meet them there. The king, seeing what a happy turn
things were taking, galloped along the front of his army, waving his
sword and calling out, 'Now, boys! Now for the honour of England!' His
horse, maddened by the din, plunged and reared, and would have run
away with him, straight in among the French, if a young officer called
Trapaud had not seized the reins. The king then dismounted and put
himself at the head of his troops, where he remained fighting, sword
in hand, till the battle was over.

Wolfe and his major rode along the line of their regiment for the last
time. There was not a minute to lose. Down came the Royal Musketeers
of France, full gallop, smash through the Scots Fusiliers and into the
line in rear, where most of them were unhorsed and killed. Next, both
sides advanced their cavalry, but without advantage to either. Then,
with a clear front once more, the main bodies of the French and
British infantry rushed together for a fight to a finish. Nearly all
of Wolfe's regiment were new to war and too excited to hold their
fire. When they were within range, and had halted for a moment to
steady the ranks, they brought their muskets down to the 'present.'
The French fell flat on their faces and the bullets whistled
harmlessly over them. Then they sprang to their feet and poured in a
steady volley while the British were reloading. But the second British
volley went home. When the two enemies closed on each other with the
bayonet, like the meeting of two stormy seas, the British fought with
such fury that the French ranks were broken. Soon the long white waves
rolled back and the long red waves rolled forward. Dettingen was
reached and the desperate fight was won.

Both the boy-officers wrote home, Edward to his mother, James to his
father. Here is a part of Edward's letter:

      My brother and self escaped in the engagement and,
      thank God, are as well as ever we were in our lives,
      after not only being cannonaded two hours and
      three-quarters, and fighting with small arms [muskets
      and bayonets] two hours and one-quarter, but lay the
      two following nights upon our arms; whilst it rained
      for about twenty hours in the same time, yet are ready
      and as capable to do the same again. The Duke of
      Cumberland behaved charmingly. Our regiment has got a
      great deal of honour, for we were in the middle of the
      first line, and in the greatest danger. My brother has
      wrote to my father and I believe has given him a small
      account of the battle, so I hope you will excuse it
      me.

A manly and soldier-like letter for a boy of fifteen! Wolfe's own is
much longer and full of touches that show how cool and observant he
was, even in his first battle and at the age of only sixteen. Here is
some of it:

      The Gens d'Armes, or Mousquetaires Gris, attacked the
      first line, composed of nine regiments of English
      foot, and four or five of Austrians, and some
      Hanoverians. But before they got to the second line,
      out of two hundred there were not forty living. These
      unhappy men were of the first families in France.
      Nothing, I believe, could be more rash than their
      undertaking. The third and last attack was made by the
      foot on both sides. We advanced towards one another;
      our men in high spirits, and very impatient for
      fighting, being elated with beating the French Horse,
      part of which advanced towards us; while the rest
      attacked our Horse, but were soon driven back by the
      great fire we gave them. The major and I (for we had
      neither colonel nor lieutenant-colonel), before they
      came near, were employed in begging and ordering the
      men not to fire at too great a distance, but to keep
      it till the enemy should come near us; but to little
      purpose. The whole fired when they thought they could
      reach them, which had like to have ruined us.
      However, we soon rallied again, and attacked them with
      great fury, which gained us a complete victory, and
      forced the enemy to retire in great haste. We got the
      sad news of the death of as good and brave a man as
      any amongst us, General Clayton. His death gave us all
      sorrow, so great was the opinion we had of him. He
      had, 'tis said, orders for pursuing the enemy, and if
      we had followed them, they would not have repassed the
      Main with half their number. Their loss is computed to
      be between six and seven thousand men, and ours three
      thousand. His Majesty was in the midst of the fight;
      and the duke behaved as bravely as a man could do. I
      had several times the honour of speaking with him just
      as the battle began and was often afraid of his being
      dashed to pieces by the cannon-balls. He gave his
      orders with a great deal of calmness and seemed quite
      unconcerned. The soldiers were in high delight to have
      him so near them. I sometimes thought I had lost poor
      Ned when I saw arms, legs, and heads beat off close by
      him. A horse I rid of the colonel's, at the first
      attack, was shot in one of his hinder legs and threw
      me; so I was obliged to do the duty of an adjutant
      all that and the next day on foot, in a pair of heavy
      boots. Three days after the battle I got the horse
      again, and he is almost well.

Shortly after Dettingen Wolfe was appointed adjutant and promoted to a
lieutenancy. In the next year he was made a captain in the 4th Foot
while his brother became a lieutenant in the 12th. After this they had
very few chances of meeting; and Edward, who had caught a deadly
chill, died alone in Flanders, not yet seventeen years old. Wolfe
wrote home to his mother:

      Poor Ned wanted nothing but the satisfaction of seeing
      his dearest friends to leave the world with the
      greatest tranquillity. It gives me many uneasy hours
      when I reflect on the possibility there was of my
      being with him before he died. God knows it was not
      apprehending the danger the poor fellow was in; and
      even that would not have hindered it had I received
      the physician's first letter. I know you won't be able
      to read this without shedding tears, as I do writing
      it. Though it is the custom of the army to sell the
      deceased's effects, I could not suffer it. We none of
      us want, and I thought the best way would be to
      bestow them on the deserving whom he had an esteem for
      in his lifetime. To his servant--the most honest and
      faithful man I ever knew--I gave all his clothes. I
      gave his horse to his friend Parry. I know he loved
      Parry, and for that reason the horse will be taken
      care of. His other horse I keep myself. I have his
      watch, sash, gorget, books, and maps, which I shall
      preserve to his memory. He was an honest and good lad,
      had lived very well, and always discharged his duty
      with the cheerfulness becoming a good officer. He
      lived and died as a son of you two should. There was
      no part of his life that makes him dearer to me than
      what you so often mentioned--_he pined after me_.

It was this pining to follow Wolfe to the wars that cost poor Ned his
life. But did not Wolfe himself pine to follow his father?

The next year, 1745, the Young Pretender, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie,'
raised the Highland clans on behalf of his father, won several
battles, and invaded England, in the hope of putting the Hanoverian
Georges off the throne of Great Britain and regaining it for the
exiled Stuarts. The Duke of Cumberland was sent to crush him; and with
the duke went Wolfe. Prince Charlie's army retreated and was at last
brought to bay on Culloden Moor, six miles from Inverness. The
Highlanders were not in good spirits after their long retreat before
the duke's army, which enjoyed an immense advantage in having a fleet
following it along the coast with plenty of provisions, while the
prince's wretched army was half starved. We may be sure the lesson was
not lost on Wolfe. Nobody understood better than he that the fleet is
the first thing to consider in every British war. And nobody saw a
better example of this than he did afterwards in Canada.

At daybreak on April 16, 1746, the Highlanders found the duke's army
marching towards Inverness, and drew up in order to prevent it. Both
armies halted, each hoping the other would make the mistake of
charging. At last, about one o'clock, the Highlanders in the centre
and right could be held back no longer. So eager were they to get at
the redcoats that most of them threw down their muskets without even
firing them, and then rushed on furiously, sword in hand. ''Twas for
a time,' said Wolfe, 'a dispute between the swords and bayonets, but
the latter was found by far the most destructable [_sic_] weapon.' No
quarter was given or taken on either side during an hour of desperate
fighting hand to hand. By that time the steady ranks of the redcoats,
aided by the cavalry, had killed five times as many as they had lost
by the wild slashing of the claymores. The Highlanders turned and
fled. The Stuart cause was lost for ever.

    *    *    *    *    *

Again another year of fighting: this time in Holland, where the
British, Dutch, and Austrians under the Duke of Cumberland met the
French at the village of Laffeldt, on June 21, 1747. Wolfe was now a
brigade-major, which gave him the same sort of position in a brigade
of three battalions as an adjutant has in a single one; that is, he
was a smart junior officer picked out to help the brigadier in command
by seeing that orders were obeyed. The fight was furious. As fast as
the British infantry drove back one French brigade another came
forward and drove the British back. The village was taken and lost,
lost and taken, over and over again. Wolfe, though wounded, kept up
the fight. At last a new French brigade charged in and swept the
British out altogether. Then the duke ordered the Dutch and Austrians
to advance. But the Dutch cavalry, right in the centre, were seized
with a sudden panic and galloped back, knocking over their own men on
the way, and making a gap that certainly looked fatal. But the right
man was ready to fill it. This was Sir John Ligonier, afterwards
commander-in-chief of the British Army at the time of Wolfe's
campaigns in Canada. He led the few British and Austrian cavalry,
among them the famous Scots Greys, straight into the gap and on
against the dense masses of the French beyond. These gallant horsemen
were doomed; and of course they knew it when they dashed themselves to
death against such overwhelming odds. But they gained the few precious
moments that were needed. The gap closed up behind them; and the army
was saved, though they were lost.

During the day Wolfe was several times in great danger. He was thanked
by the duke in person for the splendid way in which he had done his
duty. The royal favour, however, did not make him forget the gallant
conduct of his faithful servant, Roland: 'He came to me at the hazard
of his life with offers of his service, took off my cloak and brought
a fresh horse; and would have continued close by me had I not ordered
him to retire. I believe he was slightly wounded just at that time.
Many a time has he pitched my tent and made the bed ready to receive
me, half-dead with fatigue.' Nor did Wolfe forget his dumb friends: 'I
have sold my poor little gray mare. I lamed her by accident, and
thought it better to dismiss her the service immediately. I grieved at
parting with so faithful a servant, and have the comfort to know she
is in good hands, will be very well fed, and taken care of in her
latter days.'

After recovering from a slight wound received at Laffeldt Wolfe was
allowed to return to England, where he remained for the winter. On the
morrow of New Year's Day, 1748, he celebrated his coming of age at his
father's town house in Old Burlington Street, London. In the spring,
however, he was ordered to rejoin the army, and was stationed with the
troops who were guarding the Dutch frontier. The war came to an end in
the same year, and Wolfe went home. Though then only twenty-one, he
was already an experienced soldier, a rising officer, and a marked
man.




CHAPTER III

THE SEVEN YEARS' PEACE

1748-1755


Wolfe was made welcome in England wherever he went. In spite of his
youth his name was well known to the chief men in the Army, and he was
already a hero among the friends of his family. By nature he was fond
of the society of ladies, and of course he fell in love. He had had a
few flirtations before, like most other soldiers; but this time the
case was serious. The difference was the same as between a sham fight
and a battle. His choice fell on Elizabeth Lawson, a maid of honour to
the Princess of Wales. The oftener he saw her the more he fell in love
with her. But the course of true love did not, as we shall presently
see, run any more smoothly for him than it has for many another famous
man.

In 1749, when Wolfe was only twenty-two, he was promoted major of the
20th Regiment of Foot. He joined it in Scotland, where he was to
serve for the next few years. At first he was not very happy in
Glasgow. He did not like the people, as they were very different from
the friends with whom he had grown up. Yet his loneliness only added
to his zeal for study. He had left school when still very young, and
he now found himself ignorant of much that he wished to know. As a man
of the world he had found plenty of gaps in his general knowledge.
Writing to his friend Captain Rickson, he says: 'When a man leaves his
studies at fifteen, he will never be justly called a man of letters. I
am endeavouring to repair the damages of my education, and have a
person to teach me Latin and mathematics.' From his experience in his
own profession, also, he had learned a good deal. In a letter to his
father he points out what excellent chances soldiers have to see the
vivid side of many things: 'That variety incident to a military life
gives our profession some advantages over those of a more even nature.
We have all our passions and affections aroused and exercised, many of
which must have wanted their proper employment had not suitable
occasions obliged us to exert them. Few men know their own courage
till danger proves them, or how far the love of honour or dread of
shame are superior to the love of life. This is a knowledge to be best
acquired in an army; our actions are there in presence of the world,
to be fully censured or approved.'

Great commanders are always keen to learn everything really worth
while. It is only the little men who find it a bore. Of course, there
are plenty of little men in a regiment, as there are everywhere else
in the world; and some of the officers were afraid Wolfe would insist
on their doing as he did. But he never preached. He only set the
example, and those who had the sense could follow it. One of his
captains wrote home: 'Our acting colonel here is a paragon. He neither
drinks, curses, nor gambles. So we make him our pattern.' After a year
with him the officers found him a 'jolly good fellow' as well as a
pattern; and when he became their lieutenant-colonel at twenty-three
they gave him a dinner that showed he was a prime favourite among
them. He was certainly quite as popular with the men. Indeed, he soon
became known by a name which speaks for itself--'the soldier's
friend.'

By and by Wolfe's regiment marched into the Highlands, where he had
fought against Prince Charlie in the '45. But he kept in touch with
what was going on in the world outside. He wrote to Rickson at
Halifax, to find out for him all he could about the French and British
colonies in America. In the same letter, written in 1751, he said he
should like to see some Highland soldiers raised for the king's army
and sent out there to fight. Eight years later he was to have a
Highland regiment among his own army at Quebec. Other themes filled
the letters to his mother. Perhaps he was thinking of Miss Lawson when
he wrote: 'I have a certain turn of mind that favours matrimony
prodigiously. I love children. Two or three manly sons are a present
to the world, and the father that offers them sees with satisfaction
that he is to live in his successors.' He was thinking more gravely of
a still higher thing when he wrote on his twenty-fifth birthday,
January 2, 1752, to reassure his mother about the strength of his
religion.

Later on in the year, having secured leave of absence, he wrote to his
mother in the best of spirits. He asked her to look after all the
little things he wished to have done. 'Mr Pattison sends a pointer to
Blackheath; if you will order him to be tied up in your stable, it
will oblige me much. If you hear of a servant who can dress a wig it
will be a favour done me to engage him. I have another favour to beg
of you and you'll think it an odd one: 'tis to order some currant
jelly to be made in a crock for my use. It is the custom in Scotland
to eat it in the morning with bread.' Then he proposed to have a
shooting-lodge in the Highlands, long before any other Englishman
seems to have thought of what is now so common. 'You know what a
whimsical sort of person I am. Nothing pleases me now but hunting,
shooting, and fishing. I have distant notions of taking a very little
house, remote upon the edge of the forest, merely for sport.'

In July he left the Highlands, which were then, in some ways, as wild
as Labrador is now. About this time there was a map made by a
Frenchman in Paris which gave all the chief places in the Lowlands
quite rightly, but left the north of Scotland blank, with the words
'Unknown land here, inhabited by the "Iglandaires"!' When his leave
began Wolfe went first to Dublin--'dear, dirty Dublin,' as it used to
be called--where his uncle, Major Walter Wolfe, was living. He wrote
to his father: 'The streets are crowded with people of a large size
and well limbed, and the women very handsome. They have clearer
skins, and fairer complexions than the women in England or Scotland,
and are exceeding straight and well made'; which shows that he had the
proper soldier's eye for every pretty girl. Then he went to London and
visited his parents in their new house at the corner of Greenwich
Park, which stands to-day very much the same as it was then. But,
wishing to travel, he succeeded, after a great deal of trouble, in
getting leave to go to Paris. Lord Bury was a friend of his, and Lord
Bury's father, the Earl of Albemarle, was the British ambassador
there. So he had a good chance of seeing the best of everything.
Perhaps it would be almost as true to say that he had as good a chance
of seeing the worst of everything. For there were a great many corrupt
and corrupting men and women at the French court. There was also much
misery in France, and both the corruption and the misery were soon to
trouble New France, as Canada was then called, even more than they
troubled Old France at home.

Wolfe wished to travel about freely, to see the French armies at work,
and then to go on to Prussia to see how Frederick the Great managed
his perfectly disciplined army. This would have been an excellent
thing to do. But it was then a very new thing for an officer to ask
leave to study foreign armies. Moreover, the chief men in the British
Army did not like the idea of letting such a good colonel go away from
his regiment for a year, even though he was going with the object of
making himself a still better officer. Perhaps, too, his friends were
just a little afraid that he might join the Prussians or the
Austrians; for it was not, in those days, a very strange thing to join
the army of a friendly foreign country. Whatever the reason, the long
leave was refused and he went no farther than Paris.

Louis XV was then at the height of his apparent greatness; and France
was a great country, as it is still. But king and government were both
corrupt. Wolfe saw this well enough and remembered it when the next
war broke out. There was a brilliant society in 'the capital of
civilization,' as the people of Paris proudly called their city; and
there was a great deal to see. Nor was all of it bad. He wrote home
two days after his arrival.

      The packet [ferry] did not sail that night, but we
      embarked at half-an-hour after six in the morning and
      got into Calais at ten. I never suffered so much in so
      short a time at sea. The people [in Paris] seem to be
      very sprightly. The buildings are very magnificent,
      far surpassing any we have in London. Mr Selwin has
      recommended a French master to me, and in a few days I
      begin to ride in the Academy, but must dance and fence
      in my own lodgings. Lord Albemarle [the British
      ambassador] is come from Fontainebleau. I have very
      good reason to be pleased with the reception I met
      with. The best amusement for strangers in Paris is the
      Opera, and the next is the playhouse. The theatre is a
      school to acquire the French language, for which
      reason I frequent it more than the other.

In Paris he met young Philip Stanhope, the boy to whom the Earl of
Chesterfield wrote his celebrated letters; 'but,' says Wolfe, 'I fancy
he is infinitely inferior to his father.' Keeping fit, as we call it
nowadays, seems to have been Wolfe's first object. He took the same
care of himself as the Japanese officers did in the Russo-Japanese
War; and for the same reason, that he might be the better able to
serve his country well the next time she needed him. Writing to his
mother he says:

      I am up every morning at or before seven and fully
      employed till twelve. Then I dress and visit, and dine
      at two. At five most people go to the public
      entertainments, which keep you till nine; and at
      eleven I am always in bed. This way of living is
      directly opposite to the practice of the place. But no
      constitution could go through all. Four or five days
      in the week I am up six hours before any other fine
      gentleman in Paris. I ride, fence, dance, and have a
      master to teach me French. I succeed much better in
      fencing and riding than in the art of dancing, for
      they suit my genius better; and I improve a little in
      French. I have no great acquaintance with the French
      women, nor am likely to have. It is almost impossible
      to introduce one's self among them without losing a
      great deal of money, which you know I can't afford;
      besides, these entertainments begin at the time I go
      to bed, and I have not health enough to sit up all
      night and work all day. The people here use umbrellas
      to defend them from the sun, and something of the
      same kind to secure them from the rain and snow. I
      wonder a practice so useful is not introduced into
      England.

While in Paris Wolfe was asked if he would care to be military tutor
to the Duke of Richmond, or, if not, whether he knew of any good
officer whom he could recommend. On this he named Guy Carleton, who
became the young duke's tutor. Three men afterwards well known in
Canada were thus brought together long before any of them became
celebrated. The Duke of Richmond went into Wolfe's regiment. The next
duke became a governor-general of Canada, as Guy Carleton had been
before him. And Wolfe--well, he was Wolfe!

One day he was presented to King Louis, from whom, seven years later,
he was to wrest Quebec. 'They were all very gracious as far as
courtesies, bows, and smiles go, for the Bourbons seldom speak to
anybody.' Then he was presented to the clever Marquise de Pompadour,
whom he found having her hair done up in the way which is still known
by her name to every woman in the world. It was the regular custom of
that time for great ladies to receive their friends while the barbers
were at work on their hair. 'She is extremely handsome and, by her
conversation with the ambassador, I judge she must have a great deal
of wit and understanding.' But it was her court intrigues and her
shameless waste of money that helped to ruin France and Canada.

In the midst of all these gaieties Wolfe never forgot the mother whom
he thought 'a match for all the beauties.' He sent her 'two black
laced hoods and a _vestale_ for the neck, such as the Queen of France
wears.' Nor did he forget the much humbler people who looked upon him
as 'the soldier's friend.' He tells his mother that his letters from
Scotland have just arrived, and that 'the women of the regiment take
it into their heads to write to me sometimes.' Here is one of their
letters, marked on the outside, 'The Petition of Anne White':

      Collonnell,--Being a True Noble-hearted Pittyful
      gentleman and Officer your Worship will excuse these
      few Lines concerning ye husband of ye undersigned,
      Sergt. White, who not from his own fault is not
      behaving as Hee should towards me and his family,
      although good and faithfull till the middle of
      November last.

We may be sure 'Sergt. White' had to behave 'as Hee should' when Wolfe
returned!

In April, to his intense disgust, Wolfe was again in Glasgow.

      We are all sick, officers and soldiers. In two days we
      lost the skin off our faces with the sun, and the
      third were shivering in great coats. My cousin
      Goldsmith has sent me the finest young pointer that
      ever was seen; he eclipses Workie, and outdoes all. He
      sent me a fishing-rod and wheel at the same time, of
      his own workmanship. This, with a salmon-rod from my
      uncle Wat, your flies, and my own guns, put me in a
      condition to undertake the Highland sport. We have
      plays, we have concerts, we have balls, with dinners
      and suppers of the most execrable food upon earth, and
      wine that approaches to poison. The men of Glasgow
      drink till they are excessively drunk. The ladies are
      cold to everything but a bagpipe--I wrong them--there
      is not one that does not melt away at the sound of
      money.'the end of this year, however, he had left
      Scotland for good. He did not like the country as he
      saw it. But the times were greatly against his doing
      so. Glasgow was not at all a pleasant place in those
      narrowly provincial days for any one who had seen much
      of the world. The Highlands were as bad. They were
      full of angry Jacobites, who could never forgive the
      redcoats for defeating Prince Charlie. Yet Wolfe was
      not against the Scots as a whole; and we must never
      forget that he was the first to recommend the raising
      of those Highland regiments which have fought so nobly
      in every British war since the mighty one in which he
      fell.

During the next year and part of the year following, 1754-55, Wolfe
was at Exeter, where the entertainments seem to have been more to his
taste than those at Glasgow. A lady who knew him well at this time
wrote: 'He was generally ambitious to gain a tall, graceful woman to
be his partner, as well as a good dancer. He seemed emulous to display
every kind of virtue and gallantry that would render him amiable.'

In 1755 the Seven Years' Peace was coming to an end in Europe. The
shadow of the Seven Years' War was already falling darkly across the
prospect in America. Though Wolfe did not leave for the front till
1757, he was constantly receiving orders to be ready, first for one
place and then for another. So early as February 18, 1755, he wrote to
his mother what he then thought might be a farewell letter. It is full
of the great war; but personal affairs of the deeper kind were by no
means forgotten. 'The success of our fleet in the beginning of the war
is of the utmost importance.' 'It will be sufficient comfort to you
both to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if
it be His pleasure, continue to do so. If not, it is but a few days
more or less, and those who perish in their duty and the service of
their country die honourably.'

The end of this letter is in a lighter vein. But it is no less
characteristic: it is all about his dogs. 'You are to have Flurry
instead of Romp. The two puppies I must desire you to keep a little
longer. I can't part with either of them, but must find good and
secure quarters for them as well as for my friend Csar, who has great
merit and much good humour. I have given Sancho to Lord Howe, so that
I am reduced to two spaniels and one pointer.' It is strange that in
the many books about dogs which mention the great men who have been
fond of them--and most great men are fond of dogs--not one says a word
about Wolfe. Yet 'my friend Csar, who has great merit and much good
humour,' deserves to be remembered with his kind master just as much,
in his way, as that other Csar, the friend of Edward VII, who
followed his master to the grave among the kings and princes of a
mourning world.




CHAPTER IV

THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR

1756-1763


Wolfe's Quebec campaign marked the supreme crisis of the greatest war
the British Empire ever waged: the war, indeed, that made the Empire.
To get a good, clear view of anything so vast, so complex, and so
glorious, we must first look at the whole course of British history to
see how it was that France and England ever became such deadly rivals.
It is quite wrong to suppose that the French and British were always
enemies, though they have often been called 'historic' and
'hereditary' foes, as if they never could make friends at all. As a
matter of fact, they have had many more centuries of peace than of
war; and ever since the battle of Waterloo, in 1815, they have been
growing friendlier year by year. But this happy state of affairs is
chiefly because, as we now say, their 'vital interests no longer
clash'; that is, they do not both desire the same thing so keenly
that they have to fight for it.

Their vital interests do not clash now. But they did clash twice in
the course of their history. The first time was when both governments
wished to rule the same parts of the land of France. The second time
was when they both wished to rule the same parts of the oversea world.
Each time there was a long series of wars, which went on inevitably
until one side had completely driven its rival from the field.

The first long series of wars took place chiefly in the fourteenth
century and is known to history as the Hundred Years' War. England
held, and was determined to hold, certain parts of France. France was
determined never to rest till she had won them for herself. Whatever
other things the two nations were supposed to be fighting about, this
was always the one cause of strife that never changed and never could
change till one side or other had definitely triumphed. France won.
There were glorious English victories at Cressy and Agincourt. Edward
III and Henry V were two of the greatest soldiers of any age. But,
though the English often won the battles, the French won the war. The
French had many more men, they fought near their own homes, and, most
important of all, the war was waged chiefly on land. The English had
fewer men, they fought far away from their homes, and their ships
could not help them much in the middle of the land, except by bringing
over soldiers and food to the nearest coast. The end of it all was
that the English armies were worn out; and the French armies, always
able to raise more and more fresh men, drove them, step by step, out
of the land completely.

The second long series of wars took place chiefly in the eighteenth
century. These wars have never been given one general name; but they
should be called the Second Hundred Years' War, because that is what
they really were. They were very different from the wars that made up
the first Hundred Years' War, because this time the fight was for
oversea dominions, not for land in Europe. Of course navies had a good
deal to do with the first Hundred Years' War and armies with the
second. But the navies were even more important in the second than the
armies in the first. The Second Hundred Years' War, the one in which
Wolfe did such a mighty deed, began with the fall of the Stuart kings
of England in 1688 and went on till the battle of Waterloo in 1815.
But the beginning and end that meant most to the Empire were the naval
battles of La Hogue in 1692 and Trafalgar in 1805. Since Trafalgar the
Empire has been able to keep what it had won before, and to go on
growing as well, because all its different parts are joined together
by the sea, and because the British Navy has been, from that day to
this, stronger than any other navy in the world.

How the French and British armies and navies fought on opposite sides,
either alone or with allies, all over the world, from time to time,
for these hundred and twenty-seven years; how all the eight wars with
different names formed one long Second Hundred Years' War; and how the
British Navy was the principal force that won the whole of this war,
made the Empire, and gave Canada safety then, as it gives her safety
now--all this is much too long a story to tell here. But the gist of
it may be told in a very few words, at least in so far as it concerns
the winning of Canada and the deeds of Wolfe.

The name 'Greater Britain' is often used to describe all the parts of
the British Empire which lie outside of the old mother country. This
'Greater Britain' is now so vast and well established that we are apt
to forget those other empires beyond the seas which, each in its own
day, surpassed the British Empire of the same period. There was a
Greater Portugal, a Greater Spain, a Greater Holland, and a Greater
France. France and Holland still have large oversea possessions; and a
whole new-world continent still speaks the languages of Spain and
Portugal. But none of them has kept a growing empire oversea as their
British rival has. What made the difference? The two things that made
all the difference in the world were freedom and sea-power. We cannot
stop to discuss freedom, because that is more the affair of statesmen;
but, at the same time, we must not forget that the side on which Wolfe
fought was the side of freedom. The point for us to notice here is
that all the freedom and all the statesmen and all the soldiers put
together could never have made a Greater Britain, especially against
all those other rivals, unless Wolfe's side had also been the side of
sea-power.

Now, sea-power means more than fighting power at sea; it means trading
power as well. But a nation cannot trade across the sea against its
rivals if its own ships are captured and theirs are not. And long
before the Second Hundred Years' War with France the other sea-trading
empires had been gradually giving way, because in time of war their
ships were always in greater danger than those of the British were.
After the English Navy had defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 the
Spaniards began, slowly but surely, to lose their chance of making a
permanent Greater Spain. After the great Dutch War, when Blake
defeated Van Tromp in 1653, there was no further chance of a permanent
Greater Holland. And, even before the Dutch War and the Armada, the
Portuguese, who had once ruled the Indian Ocean and who had conquered
Brazil, were themselves conquered by Spain and shut out from all
chance of establishing a Greater Portugal.

So the one supreme point to be decided by the Second Hundred Years'
War lay between only two rivals, France and Britain. Was there to be a
Greater France or a Greater Britain across the seas? The answer
depended on the rival navies. Of course, it involved many other
elements of national and Imperial power on both sides. But no other
elements of power could have possibly prevailed against a hostile and
triumphant navy.

Everything that went to make a Greater France or a Greater Britain had
to cross the sea--men, women, and children, horses and cattle, all the
various appliances a civilized people must take with them when they
settle in a new country. Every time there was war there were battles
at sea, and these battles were nearly always won by the British. Every
British victory at sea made it harder for French trade, because every
ship between France and Greater France ran more risk of being taken,
while every ship between Britain and Greater Britain stood a better
chance of getting safely through. This affected everything on both
competing sides in America. British business went on. French business
almost stopped dead. Even the trade with the Indians living a thousand
miles inland was changed in favour of the British and against the
French, as all the guns and knives and beads and everything else that
the white man offered to the Indian in exchange for his furs had to
come across the sea, which was just like an enemy's country to every
French ship, but just like her own to every British one. Thus the
victors at sea grew continually stronger in America, while the losers
grew correspondingly weaker. When peace came, the French only had time
enough to build new ships and start their trade again before the next
war set them back once more; while the British had nearly all their
old ships, all those they had taken from the French, and many new
ones.

But where did Wolfe come in? He came in at the most important time and
place of all, and he did the most important single deed of all. This
brings us to the consideration of how the whole of the Second Hundred
Years' War was won, not by the British Navy alone, much less by the
Army alone, but by the united service of both, fighting like the two
arms of one body, the Navy being the right arm and the Army the left.
The heart of this whole Second Hundred Years' War was the Seven Years'
War; the British part of the Seven Years' War was then called the
'Maritime War'; and the heart of the 'Maritime War' was the winning of
Canada, in which the decisive blow was dealt by Wolfe.

We shall see presently how Navy and Army worked together as a united
service in 'joint expeditions' by sea and land, how Wolfe took part in
two other joint expeditions before he commanded the land force of the
one at Quebec, and how the mighty empire-making statesman, William
Pitt, won the day for Britain and for Greater Britain, with Lord
Anson at the head of the Navy to help him, and Saunders in command at
the front. It was thus that the age-long vexed question of a Greater
France or a Greater Britain in America was finally decided by the
sword. The conquering sword was that of the British Empire as a whole.
But the hand that wielded it was Pitt; the hilt was Anson, the blade
was Saunders, and the point was Wolfe.




CHAPTER V

LOUISBOURG

1758


In 1755 Wolfe was already writing what he thought were farewell
letters before going off to the war. And that very year the war,
though not formally declared till the next, actually did break out in
America, where a British army under Braddock, with Washington as his
aide-de-camp, was beaten in Ohio by the French and Indians. Next year
the French, owing to the failure of Admiral Byng and the British fleet
to assist the garrison, were able to capture Minorca in the
Mediterranean; while their new general in Canada, Montcalm, Wolfe's
great opponent, took Oswego. The triumph of the French fleet at
Minorca made the British people furious. Byng was court-martialled,
found guilty of failure to do his utmost to save Minorca, and
condemned to death. In spite of Pitt's efforts to save him, the
sentence was carried out and he was shot on the quarter-deck of his
own flagship. Two other admirals, Hawke and Saunders, both of whom
were soon to see service with Wolfe, were then sent out as a 'cargo of
courage' to retrieve the British position at sea. By this time
preparations were being hurried forward on every hand. Fleets were
fitting out. Armies were mustering. And, best of all, Pitt was just
beginning to make his influence felt.

[Illustration: WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM
From the National Portrait Gallery]

In 1757, the third year of war, things still went badly for the
British at the front. In America Montcalm took Fort William Henry, and
a British fleet and army failed to accomplish anything against
Louisbourg. In Europe another British fleet and army were fitted out
to go on another joint expedition, this time against Rochefort, a
great seaport in the west of France. The senior staff officer, next to
the three generals in command, was Wolfe, now thirty years of age. The
admiral in charge of the fleet was Hawke, as famous a fighter as Wolfe
himself. A little later, when both these great men were known
throughout the whole United Service, as well as among the millions in
Britain and in Greater Britain, their names were coupled in countless
punning toasts, and patriots from Canada to Calcutta would stand up to
drink a health to 'the eye of a Hawke and the heart of a Wolfe.' But
Wolfe was not a general yet; and the three pottering old men who were
generals at Rochefort could not make up their minds to do anything but
talk. These generals had been ordered to take Rochefort by complete
surprise. But after spending five days in front of it, so that every
Frenchman could see what they had come for, they decided to
countermand the attack and sail home.

Wolfe was a very angry and disgusted man. Yet, though this joint
expedition was a disgraceful failure, he had learned some useful
lessons, which he was presently to turn to good account. He saw, at
least, what such expeditions should not attempt; and that a general
should act boldly, though wisely, with the fleet. More than this, he
had himself made a plan which his generals were too timid to carry
out; and this plan was so good that Pitt, now in supreme control for
the next four years, made a note of it and marked him down for
promotion and command.

Both came sooner than any one could have expected. Pitt was sick of
fleets and armies that did nothing but hold councils of war and then
come back to say that the enemy could not be safely attacked. He made
up his mind to send out real fighters with the next joint expedition.
So in 1758 he appointed Wolfe as the junior of the three
brigadier-generals under Amherst, who was to join Admiral
Boscawen--nicknamed 'Old Dreadnought'--in a great expedition meant to
take Louisbourg for good and all.

Louisbourg was the greatest fortress in America. It was in the extreme
east of Canada, on the island of Cape Breton, near the best
fishing-grounds, and on the flank of the ship channel into the St
Lawrence. A fortress there, in which French fleets could shelter
safely, was like a shield for New France and a sword against New
England. In 1745, just before the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion
in Scotland, an army of New Englanders under Sir William Pepperrell,
with the assistance of Commodore Warren's fleet, had taken this
fortress. But at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, when Wolfe had
just come of age, it was given back to France.

Ten years later, when Wolfe went out to join the second army that was
sent against it, the situation was extremely critical. Both French and
British strained every nerve, the one to hold, the other to take, the
greatest fortress in America. A French fleet sailed from Brest in the
spring and arrived safely. But it was not nearly strong enough to
attempt a sea-fight off Louisbourg, and three smaller fleets that were
meant to join it were all smashed up off the coast of France by the
British, who thus knew, before beginning the siege, that Louisbourg
could hardly expect any help from outside. Hawke was one of the
British smashers this year. The next year he smashed up a much greater
force in Quiberon Bay, and so made 'the eye of a Hawke and the heart
of a Wolfe' work together again, though they were thousands of miles
apart and one directed a fleet while the other inspired an army.

The fortress of Louisbourg was built beside a fine harbour with an
entrance still further defended by a fortified island. It was
garrisoned by about four thousand four hundred soldiers. Some of these
were hired Germans, who cared nothing for the French; and the
French-Canadian and Indian irregulars were not of much use at a
regular siege. The British admiral Boscawen had a large fleet, and
General Amherst an army twelve thousand strong. Taking everything into
account, by land and sea, the British united service at the siege was
quite three times as strong as the French united service. But the
French ships, manned by three thousand sailors, were in a good
harbour, and they and the soldiers were defended by thick walls with
many guns. Besides, the whole defence was conducted by Drucour, as
gallant a leader as ever drew sword.

Boscawen was chosen by Pitt for the same reason as Wolfe had been,
because he was a fighter. He earned his nickname of 'Old Dreadnought'
from the answer he made one night in the English Channel when the
officer of the watch called him to say that two big French ships were
bearing down on his single British one. 'What are we to do, sir?'
asked the officer. 'Do?' shouted Boscawen, springing out of his berth,
'Do?--Why, damn 'em, fight 'em, of course!' And they did. Amherst was
the slow-and-sure kind of general; but he had the sense to know a good
man when he saw one, and to give Wolfe the chance of trying his own
quick-and-sure way instead.

A portion of the British fleet under Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Hardy
had been cruising off Louisbourg for some time before Boscawen's
squadron hove in sight on June 2. This squadron was followed by more
than twice its own number of ships carrying the army. All together,
there were a hundred and fifty-seven British vessels, besides Hardy's
covering squadron. Of course, the men could not be landed under the
fire of the fortress. But two miles south of it, and running westward
from it for many miles more, was Gabarus Bay with an open beach. For
several days the Atlantic waves dashed against the shore so furiously
that no boat could live through their breakers. But on the eighth the
three brigades of infantry made for three different points,[1]
respectively two, three, and four miles from the fortress. The French
sent out half the garrison to shoot down the first boatloads that came
in on the rollers. To cover the landing, some of Boscawen's ships
moved in as close as they could and threw shells inshore: but without
dislodging the enemy.

Each of the three brigades had its own flag--one red, another blue,
and the third white. Wolfe's brigade was the red, the one farthest
west from Louisbourg, and Wolfe's did the fighting. While the boats
rose and fell on the gigantic rollers and the enemy's cannon roared
and the waves broke in thunder on the beach, Wolfe was standing up in
the stern-sheets, scanning every inch of the ground to see if there
was no place where a few men could get a footing and keep it till the
rest had landed. He had first-rate soldiers with him: grenadiers,
Highlanders, and light infantry.

[Illustration: VIEW OF LOUISBOURG IN 1758
From an engraving in the Dominion Archives]

[Footnote 1: White Point, Flat Point, and Kennington Cove. See the
accompanying Map of the siege.]

The boats were now close in, and the French were firing cannon and
muskets into them right and left. One cannon-ball whizzed across
Wolfe's own boat and smashed his flagstaff to splinters. Just then
three young light infantry officers saw a high ledge of rocks, under
shelter of which a few men could form up. Wolfe, directing every
movement with his cane, like Gordon in China a century later, shouted
to the others to follow them; and then, amid the crash of artillery
and the wild welter of the surf, though many boats were smashed and
others upset, though some men were shot and others drowned, the
landing was securely made. 'Who were the first ashore?' asked Wolfe,
as the men were forming up under the ledge. Two Highlanders were
pointed out. 'Good fellows!' he said, as he went up to them and handed
each a guinea.

While the ranks were forming on the beach, the French were firing into
them and men were dropping fast. But every gap was closed as soon as
it was made. Directly Wolfe saw he had enough men he sprang to the
front; whereupon they all charged after him, straight at the batteries
on the crest of the rising shore. Here there was some wild work for a
minute or two, with swords, bayonets, and muskets all hard at it. But
the French now saw, to their dismay, that thousands of other redcoats
were clambering ashore, nearer in to Louisbourg, and that these men
would cut them off if they waited a moment longer. So they turned and
ran, hotly pursued, till they were safe in under the guns of the
fortress. A deluge of shot and shell immediately belched forth against
the pursuing British, who wisely halted just out of range.

After this exciting commencement Amherst's guns, shot, shell, powder,
stores, food, tents, and a thousand other things had all to be landed
on the surf-lashed, open beach. It was the sailors' stupendous task to
haul the whole of this cumbrous material up to the camp. The
bluejackets, however, were not the only ones to take part in the work,
for the ships' women also turned to, with the best of a gallant
goodwill. In a few days all the material was landed; and Amherst,
having formed his camp, sat down to conduct the siege.

Louisbourg harbour faces east, runs in westward nearly a mile, and is
over two miles from north to south. The north and south points,
however, on either side of its entrance, are only a mile apart. On the
south point stood the fortress; on the north the lighthouse; and
between were several islands, rocks, and bars that narrowed the
entrance for ships to only three cables, or a little more than six
hundred yards. Wolfe saw that the north point, where the lighthouse
stood, was undefended, and might be seized and used as a British
battery to smash up the French batteries on Goat Island at the harbour
mouth. Acting on this idea, he marched with twelve hundred men across
the stretch of country between the British camp and the lighthouse.
The fleet brought round his guns and stores and all other necessaries
by sea. A tremendous bombardment then silenced every French gun on
Goat Island. This left the French nothing for their defence but the
walls of Louisbourg itself.

Both French and British soon realized that the fall of Louisbourg was
only a question of time. But time was everything to both. The British
were anxious to take Louisbourg and then sail up to Quebec and take it
by a sudden attack while Montcalm was engaged in fighting
Abercromby's army on Lake Champlain. The French, of course, were
anxious to hold out long enough to prevent this; and Drucour, their
commandant at Louisbourg, was just the man for their purpose. His
wife, too, was as brave as he. She used to go round the batteries
cheering up the gunners, and paying no more attention to the British
shot and shell than if they had been only fireworks. On June 18, just
before Wolfe's lighthouse batteries were ready to open fire, Madame
Drucour set sail in the venturesome _Echo_, a little French man-of-war
that was making a dash for it, in the hope of carrying the news to
Quebec. But after a gallant fight the _Echo_ had to haul down her
colours to the _Juno_ and the _Sutherland_. We shall hear more of the
_Sutherland_ at the supreme moment of Wolfe's career.

Nothing French, not even a single man, could now get into or out of
Louisbourg. But Drucour still kept the flag up, and sent out parties
at night to harass his assailants. One of these surprised a British
post, killed Lord Dundonald who commanded it, and retired safely after
being almost cut off by British reinforcements. Though Wolfe had
silenced the island batteries and left the entrance open enough for
Boscawen to sail in, the admiral hesitated because he thought he might
lose too many ships by risking it. Then the French promptly sank some
of their own ships at the entrance to keep him out. But six hundred
British sailors rowed in at night and boarded and took the only two
ships remaining afloat. The others had been blown up a month before by
British shells fired by naval gunners from Amherst's batteries.
Drucour was now in a terrible plight. Not a ship was left. He was
completely cut off by land and sea. Many of his garrison were dead,
many more were lying sick or wounded. His foreigners were ready for
desertion. His French Canadians had grown down-hearted. All the
non-combatants wished him to surrender at once. What else could he do
but give in? On July 27 he hauled down the fleurs-de-lis from the
great fortress. But he had gained his secondary object; for it was now
much too late in the year for the same British force to begin a new
campaign against Quebec.

Wolfe, like Nelson and Napoleon, was never content to 'let well enough
alone,' if anything better could possibly be done. When the news came
of Montcalm's great victory over Abercromby at Ticonderoga, he told
Amherst he was ready to march inland at once with reinforcements. And
after Louisbourg had surrendered and Boscawen had said it was too late
to start for Quebec, he again volunteered to do any further service
that Amherst required. The service he was sent on was the soldier's
most disgusting duty; but he did it thoroughly, though he would have
preferred anything else. He went with Hardy's squadron to destroy the
French settlements along the Gulf of St Lawrence, so as to cut off
their supplies from the French in Quebec before the next campaign.

    *    *    *    *    *

After Rochefort Wolfe had become a marked man. After Louisbourg he
became an Imperial hero. The only other the Army had yet produced in
this war was Lord Howe, who had been killed in a skirmish just before
Ticonderoga. Wolfe knew Howe well, admired him exceedingly, and called
him 'the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best
soldier in the army.' He would have served under him gladly. But
Howe--young, ardent, gallant, yet profound--was dead; and the hopes of
discerning judges were centred on Wolfe. The war had not been going
well, and this victory at Louisbourg was the first that the British
people could really rejoice over with all their heart.

[Illustration: Bartholomew, Edin.]

The British colonies went wild with delight. Halifax had a state ball,
at which Wolfe danced to his heart's content; while his unofficial
partners thought themselves the luckiest girls in all America to be
asked by the hero of Louisbourg. Boston and Philadelphia had large
bonfires and many fireworks. The chief people of New York attended a
gala dinner. Every church had special thanks-givings.

In England the excitement was just as great, and Wolfe's name and fame
flew from lip to lip all over the country. Parliament passed special
votes of thanks. Medals were struck to celebrate the event. The king
stood on his palace steps to receive the captured colours, which were
carried through London in triumph by the Guards and the Household
Brigade. And Pitt, the greatest--and, in a certain sense, the
only--British statesman who has ever managed people, parliament,
government, navy, and army, all together, in a world-wide Imperial
war--Pitt, the eagle-eyed and lion-hearted, at once marked Wolfe down
again for higher promotion and, this time, for the command of an army
of his own. And ever since the Empire Year of 1759 the world has known
that Pitt was right.




CHAPTER VI

QUEBEC

1759


In October 1758 Wolfe sailed from Halifax for England with Boscawen
and very nearly saw a naval battle off Land's End with the French
fleet returning to France from Quebec. The enemy, however, slipped
away in the dark. On November 1 he landed at Portsmouth. He had been
made full colonel of a new regiment, the 67th Foot (Hampshires), and
before going home to London he set off to see it at Salisbury.[2]
Wolfe's old regiment, the 20th (Lancashire Fusiliers), was now in
Germany, fighting under the command of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick,
and was soon to win more laurels at Minden, the first of the three
great British victories of 1759--Minden, Quebec, and Quiberon.

[Footnote 2: Ten years later a Russian general saw this regiment at
Minorca and was loud in his praise of its all-round excellence, when
Wolfe's successor in the colonelcy, Sir James Campbell, at once said:
'The only merit due to me is the strictness with which I have followed
the system introduced by the hero of Quebec.']

Though far from well, Wolfe was as keen as ever about anything that
could possibly make him fit for command. He picked out the best
officers with a sure eye: generals and colonels, like Carleton;
captains, like Delaune, a man made for the campaigns in Canada, who,
as we shall see later, led the 'Forlorn Hope' up the Heights of
Abraham. Wolfe had also noted in a third member of the great Howe
family a born leader of light infantry for Quebec. Wolfe was very
strong on light infantry, and trained them to make sudden dashes with
a very short but sharp surprise attack followed by a quick retreat
under cover. One day at Louisbourg an officer said this reminded him
of what Xenophon wrote about the Carduchians who harassed the rear of
the world-famous 'Ten Thousand.' 'I had it from Xenophon' was Wolfe's
reply. Like all great commanders, Wolfe knew what other great
commanders had done and thought, no matter to what age or nation they
belonged: Greek, Roman, German, French, British, or any other. Years
before this he had recommended a young officer to study the Prussian
Army Regulations and Vauban's book on Sieges. Nor did he forget to
read the lives of men like Scanderbeg and Ziska, who could teach him
many unusual lessons. He kept his eyes open everywhere, all his life
long, on men and things and books. He recommended his friend, Captain
Rickson, who was then in Halifax, to read Montesquieu's not yet famous
book _The Spirit of Laws_, because it would be useful for a government
official in a new country. Writing home to his mother from Louisbourg
about this new country, that is, before Canada had become British,
before there was much more than a single million of English-speaking
people in the whole New World, and before most people on either side
of the Atlantic understood what a great oversea empire meant at all,
he said: 'This will, sometime hence, be a vast empire, the seat of
power and learning. Nature has refused them nothing, and there will
grow a people out of our little spot, England, that will fill this
vast space, and divide this great portion of the globe with the
Spaniards, who are possessed of the other half of it.'

On arriving in England Wolfe had reported his presence to the
commander-in-chief, Lord Ligonier, requesting leave of absence in
order that he might visit his relatives. This was granted, and the
Wolfe family met together once more and for the last time.

Though he said little about it, Wolfe must have snatched some time for
Katherine Lowther, his second love, to whom he was now engaged. What
had happened between him and his first love, Miss Lawson, will
probably never be known. We know that his parents were opposed to his
marrying her. Perhaps, too, she may not have been as much in love as
he was. But, for whatever reason, they parted. Then he fell in love
with beautiful Katherine Lowther, a sister to the Earl of Lonsdale and
afterwards Duchess of Bolton.

Meanwhile Pitt was planning for his Empire Year of 1759, the year of
Ferdinand at Minden, Wolfe at Quebec, and Hawke in Quiberon Bay.
Before Pitt had taken the war in hand nearly everything had gone
against the British. Though Clive had become the British hero of India
in 1757, and Wolfe of Louisbourg in 1758, there had hitherto been more
defeats than victories. Minorca had been lost in 1756; in America
Braddock's army had been destroyed in 1755; and Montcalm had won
victories at Oswego in 1756, at Fort William Henry in 1757, and at
Ticonderoga in 1758. More than this, in 1759 the French were
preparing fleets and armies to invade England, Ireland, and Scotland;
and the British people were thinking rather of their own defence at
home than of attacking the French abroad.

Pitt, however, rightly thought that vigorous attacks from the sea were
the best means of defence at home. From London he looked out over the
whole world: at France and her allies in the centre, at French India
on his far left, and at French Canada on his far right; with the sea
dividing his enemies and uniting his friends, if only he could hold
its highways with the British Navy.

To carry out his plans Pitt sent a small army and a great deal of
money to Frederick the Great, to help him in the middle of Europe
against the Russians, Austrians, and French. At the same time he let
Anson station fleets round the coast of France, so that no strong
French force could get at Britain or Greater Britain, or go to help
Greater France, without a fight at sea. Then, having cut off Canada
from France and taken her outpost at Louisbourg, he aimed a death-blow
at her very heart by sending Saunders, with a quarter of the whole
British Navy, against Quebec, the stronghold of New France, where the
land attack was to be made by a little army of 9000 men under Wolfe.
Even this was not the whole of Pitt's plan for the conquest of Canada.
A smaller army was to be sent against the French on the Great Lakes,
and a larger one, under Amherst, along the line of Lake Champlain,
towards Montreal.

Pitt did a very bold thing when he took a young colonel and asked the
king to make him a general and allow him to choose his own brigadiers
and staff officers. It was a bold thing, because, whenever there is a
position of honour to be given, the older men do not like being passed
over and all the politicians who think of themselves first and their
country afterwards wish to put in their own favourites. Wolfe, of
course, had enemies. Dullards often think that men of genius are
crazy, and some one had told the king that Wolfe was mad. 'Mad, is
he?' said the king, remembering all the recent British defeats on
land; 'then I hope he'll bite some of my other generals!' Wolfe was
not able to give any of his seniors his own and Lord Howe's kind of
divine 'madness' during that war. But he did give a touch of it to
many of his juniors; with the result that his Quebec army was better
officered than any other British land force of the time.

The three brigadiers next in command to Wolfe--Monckton, Townshend,
and Murray--were not chosen simply because they were all sons of
peers, but because, like Howe and Boscawen, they were first-rate
officers as well. Barr and Carleton were the two chief men on the
staff. Each became celebrated in later days, Barr in parliament, and
Carleton as both the saviour of Canada from the American attack in
1775 and the first British governor-general. Williamson, the best
gunnery expert in the whole Army, commanded the artillery. The only
troublesome officer was Townshend, who thought himself, and whose
family and political friends thought him, at least as good a general
as Wolfe, if not a better one. But even Townshend did his duty well.
The army at Halifax was supposed to be twelve thousand, but its real
strength was only nine thousand. The difference was mostly due to the
ravages of scurvy and camp fever, both of which, in their turn, were
due to the bad food supplied by rascally contractors. The action of
the officers alone saved the situation from becoming desperate.
Indeed, if it had not been for what the officers did for their men in
the way of buying better food, at great cost, out of their own not
well-filled pockets, there might have been no army at all to greet
Wolfe on his arrival in America.

The fleet was the greatest that had ever sailed across the seas. It
included one-quarter of the whole Royal Navy. There were 49 men-of-war
manned by 14,000 sailors and marines. There were also more than 200
vessels--transports, store ships, provision ships, etc.--manned by
about 7000 merchant seamen. Thus there were at least twice as many
sailors as soldiers at the taking of Quebec. Saunders was a most
capable admiral. He had been flag-lieutenant during Anson's famous
voyage round the world; then Hawke's best fighting captain during the
war in which Wolfe was learning his work at Dettingen and Laffeldt;
and then Hawke's second-in-command of the 'cargo of courage' sent out
after Byng's disgrace at Minorca. After Quebec he crowned his fine
career by being one of the best first lords of the Admiralty that ever
ruled the Navy. Durell, his next in command, was slower than Amherst;
and Amherst never made a short cut in his life, even to certain
success. Holmes, the third admiral, was thoroughly efficient. Hood, a
still better admiral than any of those at Quebec, afterwards served
under Holmes, and Nelson under Hood; which links Trafalgar with
Quebec. But a still closer link with 'mighty Nelson' was Jervis, who
took charge of Wolfe's personal belongings at Quebec the night before
the battle and many years later became Nelson's commander-in-chief.
Another Quebec captain who afterwards became a great admiral was
Hughes, famous for his fights in India. But the man whose subsequent
fame in the world at large eclipsed that of any other in this fleet
was Captain Cook, who made the first good charts of Canadian waters
some years before he became a great explorer in the far Pacific.

There was a busy scene at Portsmouth on February 17, when Saunders and
Wolfe sailed in the flagship H.M.S. _Neptune_, of 90 guns and a crew
of 750 men. She was one of the well-known old 'three-deckers,' those
'wooden walls of England' that kept the Empire safe while it was
growing up. The guard of red-coated marines presented arms, and the
hundreds of bluejackets were all in their places as the two commanders
stepped on board. The naval officers on the quarter-deck were very
spick and span in their black three-cornered hats, white wigs, long,
bright blue, gold-laced coats, white waistcoats and breeches and
stockings, and gold-buckled shoes. The idea of having naval uniforms
of blue and white and gold--the same colours that are worn
to-day--came from the king's seeing the pretty Duchess of Bedford in a
blue-and-white riding-habit, which so charmed him that he swore he
would make the officers wear the same colours for the uniforms just
then being newly tried. This was when the Duke of Bedford was first
lord of the Admiralty, some years before Pitt's great expedition
against Quebec.

The sailors were also in blue and white; but they were not so spick
and span as the officers. They were a very rough-and-ready-looking
lot. They wore small, soft, three-cornered black hats, bright blue
jackets, open enough to show their coarse white shirts, and coarse
white duck trousers. They had shoes without stockings on shore, and
only bare feet on board. They carried cutlasses and pistols, and wore
their hair in pigtails. They would be a surprising sight to modern
eyes. But not so much so as the women! Ships and regiments in those
days always had a certain number of women for washing and mending the
clothes. There was one woman to about every twenty men. They drew pay
and were under regular orders, just like the soldiers and sailors.
Sometimes they gave a willing hand in action, helping the
'powder-monkeys'--boys who had to pass the powder from the barrels to
the gunners--or even taking part in a siege, as at Louisbourg.

The voyage to Halifax was long, rough, and cold, and Wolfe was
sea-sick as ever. Strangely enough, these ships coming out to the
conquest of Canada under St George's cross made land on St George's
Day near the place where Cabot had raised St George's cross over
Canadian soil before Columbus had set foot on the mainland of America.
But though April 23 might be a day of good omen, it was a very bleak
one that year off Cape Breton, where ice was packed for miles and
miles along the coast. On the 30th the fleet entered Halifax. Slow old
Durell was hurried off on May 5 with eight men-of-war and seven
hundred soldiers under Carleton to try to stop any French ships from
getting up to Quebec. Carleton was to go ashore at Isle-aux-Coudres,
an island commanding the channel sixty miles below Quebec, and mark
out a passage for the fleet through the 'Traverse' at the lower end of
the island of Orleans, thirty miles higher up.

On the 13th Saunders sailed for Louisbourg, where the whole expedition
was to meet and get ready. Here Wolfe spent the rest of May, working
every day and all day. His army, with the exception of nine hundred
American rangers, consisted of seasoned British regulars, with all the
weaklings left behind; and it did his heart good to see them on
parade. There was the 15th, whose officers still wear a line of black
braid on their uniforms in mourning for his death. The 15th and five
other regiments--the 28th, 43rd, 47th, 48th, and 58th--were English.
But the 35th had been forty years in Ireland, and was Irish to a man.
The whole seven regiments were dressed very much alike:
three-cornered, stiff black hats with black cockades, white wigs,
long-tailed red coats turned back with blue or white in front, where
they were fastened only at the neck, white breeches, and long white
gaiters coming over the knee. A very different corps was the 78th, or
'Fraser's,' Highlanders, one of the regiments Wolfe first recommended
and Pitt first raised. Only fourteen years before the Quebec campaign
these same Highlanders had joined Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender,
in the famous ''45.' They were mostly Roman Catholics, which accounts
for the way they intermarried with the French Canadians after the
conquest. They had been fighting for the Stuarts against King George,
and Wolfe, as we have seen, had himself fought against them at
Culloden. Yet here they were now, under Wolfe, serving King George.
They knew that the Stuart cause was lost for ever; and all of them,
chiefs and followers alike, loved the noble profession of arms. The
Highlanders then wore 'bonnets' like a high tam-o'-shanter, with one
white curly feather on the left side. Their red coats were faced with
yellow, and they wore the Fraser plaid hung from the shoulders and
caught up, loopwise, on both hips. Their kilts were very short and not
pleated. Badger sporrans, showing the head in the middle,
red-and-white-diced hose, and buckled brogues completed their wild but
martial dress, which was well set off by the dirks and claymores that
swung to the stride of the mountaineer.

Each regiment had one company of grenadiers, picked out for their
size, strength, and steadiness, and one company of light infantry,
picked out for their quickness and good marksmanship. Sometimes all
the grenadier companies would be put together in a separate battalion.
The same thing was often done with the light infantry companies,
which were then led by Colonel Howe. Wolfe had also made up a small
three-company battalion of picked grenadiers from the five regiments
that were being left behind at Louisbourg to guard the Maritime
Provinces. This little battalion became famous at Quebec as the
'Louisbourg Grenadiers.' The grenadiers all wore red and white, like
the rest, except that their coats were buttoned up the whole way, and
instead of the three-cornered hats they wore high ones like a bishop's
mitre. The artillery wore blue-grey coats turned back with red, yellow
braid, and half-moon-shaped black hats, with the points down towards
their shoulders.

The only remaining regiment is of much greater interest in connection
with a Canadian campaign. It was the 60th Foot, then called the Royal
Americans, afterwards the Sixtieth Rifles or 'Old Sixtieth,' and now
the King's Royal Rifle Corps. It was the first regiment of regulars
ever raised in Greater Britain, and the first to introduce the
rifle-green uniform now known all over the Empire, especially in
Canada, where all rifle regiments still follow 'the 60th's' lead so
far as that is possible. Many of its officers and men who returned
from the conquest of Canada to their homes in the British colonies
were destined to move on to Canada with their families as United
Empire Loyalists. This was their first war; and they did so well in it
that Wolfe gave them the rifleman's motto they still bear in token of
their smartness and dash--_Celer et Audax_. Unfortunately they did not
then wear the famous 'rifle green' but the ordinary red.
Unfortunately, too, the rifleman's green has no connection with the
'green jackets of American backwoodsmen in the middle of the
eighteenth century.' The backwoodsmen were not dressed in green as a
rule, and they never formed any considerable part of the regiment at
any time. The first green uniform came in with the new 5th battalion
in 1797; and the old 2nd and 3rd battalions, which fought under Wolfe,
did not adopt it till 1815. It was not even of British origin, but an
imitation of a German hussar uniform which was itself an imitation of
one worn by the Hungarians, who have the senior hussars of the world.
But though Wolfe's Royal Americans did not wear the rifle green, and
though their coats and waistcoats were of common red, their uniforms
differed from those of all other regiments at Quebec in several
particulars. The most remarkable difference was the absence of lace,
an absence specially authorized only for this corps, and then only in
view of special service and many bush fights in America. The
double-breasted coats were made to button across, except at the top,
where the lapels turned back, like the cuffs and coat-tails. All these
'turnbacks' and the breeches were blue. The very long gaiters, the
waist and cross belts, the neckerchief and hat piping were white.
Wearing this distinctively plain uniform, and led by their buglers and
drummers in scarlet and gold, like state trumpeters, the Royal
Americans could not, even at a distance, be mistaken for any other
regiment.

On June 6 Saunders and Wolfe sailed for Quebec with a hundred and
forty-one ships. Wolfe's work in getting his army safely off being
over, he sat down alone in his cabin to make his will. His first
thought was for Katherine Lowther, his _fiance_, who was to have her
own miniature portrait, which he carried with him, set in jewels and
given back to her. Warde, Howe, and Carleton were each remembered. He
left all the residue of his estate to 'my good mother,' his father
having just died. More than a third of the whole will was taken up
with providing for his servants. No wonder he was called 'the
soldier's friend.'

There was a thrilling scene at Louisbourg as regiment after regiment
marched down to the shore, with drums beating, bugles sounding, and
colours flying. Each night, after drinking the king's health, they had
drunk another toast--'British colours on every French fort, port, and
garrison in North America.' Now here they were, the pick of the Army
and Navy, off with Wolfe to raise those colours over Quebec, the most
important military point on the whole continent. On they sailed, all
together, till they reached the Saguenay, a hundred and twenty miles
below Quebec. Here, on the afternoon of June 20, the sun shone down on
a sight such as the New World had never seen before, and has never
seen again. The river narrows opposite the Saguenay and is full of
shoals and islands; so this was the last day the whole one hundred and
forty-one vessels sailed together, in their three divisions, under
those three ensigns--'The Red, White, and Blue'--which have made the
British Navy loved, feared, and famous round the seven seas. What a
sight it was! Thousands and thousands of soldiers and sailors crowded
those scores and scores of high-decked ships; while hundreds and
hundreds of swelling sails gleamed white against the sun, across the
twenty miles of blue St Lawrence.

Wolfe, however, was not there to see it. He had gone forward the day
before. A dispatch-boat had come down from Durell to say that, in
spite of his advanced squadron, Bougainville, Montcalm's ablest
brigadier, had slipped through with twenty-three ships from France,
bringing out a few men and a good deal of ammunition, stores, and
food. This gave Quebec some sorely needed help. Besides, Montcalm had
found out Pitt's plan; and nobody knew where the only free French
fleet was now. It had wintered in the West Indies. But had it sailed
for France or the St Lawrence? At the first streak of dawn on the 23rd
Durell's lookout off Isle-aux-Coudres reported many ships coming up
the river under a press of sail. Could the French West Indian fleet
have slipped in ahead of Saunders, as Bougainville had slipped in
ahead of Durell himself? There was a tense moment on board of Durell's
squadron and in Carleton's camp, in the pale, grey light of early
morning, as the bugles sounded, the boatswains blew their whistles and
roared their orders, and all hands came tumbling up from below and
ran to battle quarters with a rush of swift bare feet. But the
incoming vanship made the private British signal, and both sides knew
that all was well.

For a whole week the great fleet of one hundred and forty-one ships
worked their way through the narrow channel between Isle-aux-Coudres
and the north shore, and then dared the dangers of the Traverse, below
the island of Orleans, where the French had never passed more than one
ship at a time, and that only with the greatest caution. The British
went through quite easily, without a single accident. In two days the
great Captain Cook had sounded and marked out the channel better than
the French had in a hundred and fifty years; and so thoroughly was his
work done that the British officers could handle their vessels in
these French waters better without than with the French pilots. Old
Captain Killick took the _Goodwill_ through himself, just next ahead
of the _Richmond_, on board of which was Wolfe. The captured French
pilot in the _Goodwill_ was sure she would be lost if she did not go
slow and take more care. But Killick laughed at him and said: 'Damn
me, but I'll convince you an Englishman can go where a Frenchman
daren't show his nose!' And he did.

On June 26 Wolfe arrived at the west end of the island of Orleans, in
full view of Quebec. The twenty days' voyage from Louisbourg had ended
and the twelve weeks' siege had begun.

At this point we must take the map and never put it aside till the
final battle is over. A whole book could not possibly make Wolfe's
work plain to any one without the map. But with the map we can easily
follow every move in this, the greatest crisis in both Wolfe's career
and Canada's history.

What Wolfe saw and found out was enough to daunt any general. He had a
very good army, but it was small. He could count upon the help of a
mighty fleet, but even British fleets cannot climb hills or make an
enemy come down and fight. Montcalm, however, was weakened by many
things. The governor, Vaudreuil, was a vain, fussy, and spiteful fool,
with power enough to thwart Montcalm at every turn. The intendant,
Bigot, was the greatest knave ever seen in Canada, and the head of a
gang of official thieves who robbed the country and the wretched
French Canadians right and left. The French army, all together,
numbered nearly seventeen thousand, almost twice Wolfe's own; but the
bulk of it was militia, half starved and badly armed. Both Vaudreuil
and Bigot could and did interfere disastrously with the five different
forces that should have been made into one army under Montcalm
alone--the French regulars, the Canadian regulars, the Canadian
militia, the French sailors ashore, and the Indians. Montcalm had one
great advantage over Wolfe. He was not expected to fight or manoeuvre
in the open field. His duty was not to drive Wolfe away, or even to
keep Amherst out of Canada. All he had to do was to hold Quebec
throughout the summer. The autumn would force the British fleet to
leave for ice-free waters. Then, if Quebec could only be held, a
change in the fortunes of war, or a treaty of peace, might still keep
Canada in French hands. Wolfe had either to tempt Montcalm out of
Quebec or get into it himself; and he soon realized that he would have
to do this with the help of Saunders alone; for Amherst in the south
was crawling forward towards Montreal so slowly that no aid from him
could be expected.

Montcalm's position certainly looked secure for the summer. His left
flank was guarded by the Montmorency, a swift river that could be
forded only by a few men at a time in a narrow place, some miles up,
where the dense bush would give every chance to his Indians and
Canadians. His centre was guarded by entrenchments running from the
Montmorency to the St Charles, six miles of ground, rising higher and
higher towards Montmorency, all of it defended by the best troops and
the bulk of the army, and none of it having an inch of cover for an
enemy in front. The mouth of the St Charles was blocked by booms and
batteries. Quebec is a natural fortress; and above Quebec the high,
steep cliffs stretched for miles and miles. These cliffs could be
climbed by a few men in several places; but nowhere by a whole army,
if any defenders were there in force; and the British fleet could not
land an army without being seen soon enough to draw plenty of
defenders to the same spot. Forty miles above Quebec the St Lawrence
channel narrows to only a quarter of a mile, and the down current
becomes very swift indeed. Above this channel was the small French
fleet, which could stop a much larger one trying to get up, or could
even block most of the fairway by sinking some of its own ships.
Besides all these defences of man and nature the French had floating
batteries along the north shore. They also held the Levis Heights on
the south shore, opposite Quebec, so that ships crowded with helpless
infantry could not, without terrible risk, run through the intervening
narrows, barely a thousand yards wide.

A gale blowing down-stream was the first trouble for the British
fleet. Many of the transports broke loose and a good deal of damage
was done to small vessels and boats. Next night a greater danger
threatened, when the ebb-tide, running five miles an hour, brought
down seven French fireships, which suddenly burst into flame as they
rounded the Point of Levy. There was a display of devil's fireworks
such as few men have ever seen or could imagine. Sizzling, crackling,
and roaring, the blinding flames leaped into the jet-black sky,
lighting up the camps of both armies, where thousands of soldiers
watched these engines of death sweep down on the fleet. Each of the
seven ships was full of mines, blowing up and hurling shot and shell
in all directions. The crowded mass of British vessels seemed doomed
to destruction. But the first spurt of fire had hardly been noticed
before the men in the guard boats began to row to the rescue. Swinging
the grapplinghooks round at arm's length, as if they were heaving the
lead, the bluejackets made the fireships fast, the officers shouted,
'Give way!' and presently the whole infernal flotilla was safely
stranded. But it was a close thing and very hot work, as one of the
happy-go-lucky Jack tars said with more force than grace, when he
called out to the boat beside him: 'Hullo, mate! Did you ever take
hell in tow before?'

Vaudreuil now made Montcalm, who was under his orders, withdraw the
men from the Levis Heights, and thus abandon the whole of the south
shore in front of Quebec. Wolfe, delighted, at once occupied the same
place, with half his army and most of his guns. Then he seized the far
side of the Montmorency and made his main camp there, without,
however, removing his hospitals and stores from his camp on the island
of Orleans. So he now had three camps, not divided, but joined
together, by the St Lawrence, where the fleet could move about between
them in spite of anything the French could do. He then marched up the
Montmorency to the fords, to try the French strength there, and to
find out if he could cross the river, march down the open ground
behind Montcalm, and attack him from the rear. But he was repulsed
at the first attempt, and saw that he could do no better at a second.
Meanwhile his Levis batteries began a bombardment which lasted two
months and reduced Quebec to ruins.

[Illustration: Bartholomew, Edin.]

Yet he seemed as far off as ever from capturing the city. Battering
down the houses of Quebec brought him no nearer to his object, while
Montcalm's main body still stood securely in its entrenchments down at
Beauport. Wolfe now felt he must try something decisive, even if
desperate; and he planned an attack by land and water on the French
left. Both French and British were hard at work on July 31. In the
morning Wolfe sent one regiment marching up the Montmorency, as if to
try the fords again, and another, also in full view of the French, up
along the St Lawrence from the Levis batteries, as if it was to be
taken over by the ships to the north shore above Quebec. Meanwhile
Monckton's brigade was starting from the Point of Levy in row-boats,
the _Centurion_ was sailing down to the mouth of the Montmorency, two
armed transports were being purposely run ashore on the beach at the
top of the tide, and the _Pembroke_, _Trent_, _Lowestoff_, and_
Racehorse_ were taking up positions to cover the boats. The
men-of-war and Wolfe's batteries at Montmorency then opened fire on
the point he wished to attack; and both of them kept it up for eight
hours, from ten till six. All this time the Levis batteries were doing
their utmost against Quebec. But Montcalm was not to be deceived. He
saw that Wolfe intended to storm the entrenchments at the point at
which the cannon were firing, and he kept the best of his army ready
to defend it.

Wolfe and the Louisbourg Grenadiers were in the two armed transports
when they grounded at ten o'clock. To his disgust and to Captain
Cook's surprise both vessels stuck fast in the mud nearly half a mile
from shore. This made the grenadiers' muskets useless against the
advanced French redoubt, which stood at high-water mark, and which
overmatched the transports, because both of these had grounded in such
a way that they could not bring their guns to bear in reply. The
stranded vessels soon became a death-trap. Wolfe's cane was knocked
out of his hand by a cannon ball. Shells were bursting over the deck,
smashing the masts to pieces and sending splinters of wood and iron
flying about among the helpless grenadiers and gunners. There was
nothing to do but order the men back to the boats and wait. The tide
was not low till four. The weather was scorchingly hot. A thunderstorm
was brewing. The redoubt could not be taken. The transports were a
failure. And every move had to be made in full view of the watchful
Montcalm, whose entrenchments at this point were on the top of a
grassy hill nearly two hundred feet above the muddy beach.

But Wolfe still thought he might succeed with the main attack at low
tide, although he had not been able to prepare it at high tide. His
Montmorency batteries seemed to be pitching their shells very thickly
into the French, and his three brigades of infantry were all ready to
act together at the right time. Accordingly, for the hottest hours of
that scorching day, Monckton's men grilled in the boats while
Townshend's and Murray's waited in camp. At four the tide was low and
Wolfe ordered the landing to begin.

The tidal flats ran out much farther than any one had supposed. The
heavily laden boats stuck on an outer ledge and had to be cleared,
shoved off, refilled with soldiers, and brought round to another
place. It was now nearly six o'clock; and both sides were eager for
the fray. Townshend's and Murray's brigades had forded the mouth of
the Montmorency and were marching along to support the attack, when,
suddenly and unexpectedly, the grenadiers spoiled it all! Wolfe had
ordered the Louisbourg Grenadiers and the ten other grenadier
companies of the army to form up and rush the redoubt. But, what with
the cheering of the sailors as they landed the rest of Monckton's men,
and their own eagerness to come to close quarters at once, the
Louisbourg men suddenly lost their heads and charged before everything
was ready. The rest followed them pell-mell; and in less than five
minutes the redoubt was swarming with excited grenadiers, while the
French who had held it were clambering up the grassy hill into the
safer entrenchments.

The redoubt was certainly no place to stay in. It had no shelter
towards its rear; and dozens of French cannon and thousands of French
muskets were firing into it from the heights. An immediate retirement
was the only proper course. But there was no holding the men now. They
broke into another mad charge, straight at the hill. As they reached
it, amid a storm of musket balls and grape-shot, the heavens joined in
with a terrific storm of their own. The rain burst in a perfect
deluge; and the hill became almost impossible to climb, even if there
had been no enemy pouring death-showers of fire from the top. When
Wolfe saw what was happening he immediately sent officers running
after the grenadiers to make them come back from the redoubt, and
these officers now passed the word to retire at once. This time the
grenadiers, all that were left of them, obeyed. Their two mad rushes
had not lasted a quarter of an hour. Yet nearly half of the thousand
men they started with were lying dead or wounded on that fatal ground.

Wolfe now saw that he was hopelessly beaten and that there was not a
minute to lose in getting away. The boats could take only Monckton's
men; and the rising tide would soon cut off Townshend's and Murray's
from their camp beyond the mouth of the Montmorency. The two stranded
transports, from which he had hoped so much that morning, were set on
fire; and, under cover of their smoke and of the curtain of torrential
rain, Monckton's crestfallen men got into their boats once more.
Townshend's and Murray's brigades, enraged at not being brought into
action, turned to march back by the way they had come so eagerly only
an hour before. They moved off in perfect order; but, as they left the
battlefield, they waved their hats in defiance at the jeering
Frenchmen, challenging them to come down and fight it out with
bayonets hand to hand.

Many gallant deeds were done that afternoon; but none more gallant
than those of Captain Ochterloney and Lieutenant Peyton, both
grenadier officers in the Royal Americans. Ochterloney had just been
wounded in a duel; but he said his country's honour came before his
own, and, sick and wounded as he was, he spent those panting hours in
the boats without a murmur and did all he could to form his men up
under fire. In the second charge he fell, shot through the lungs, with
Peyton beside him, shot through the leg. When Wolfe called the
grenadiers back a rescue party wanted to carry off both officers, to
save them from the scalping-knife. But Ochterloney said he would never
leave the field after such a defeat; and Peyton said he would never
leave his captain. Presently a Canadian regular came up with two
Indians, grabbed Ochterloney's watch, sword and money, and left the
Indians to finish him. One of these savages clubbed him with a musket,
while the other shot him in the chest and dashed in with a
scalping-knife. In the meantime, Peyton crawled on his hands and knees
to a double-barrelled musket and shot one Indian dead, but missed the
other. This savage now left Ochterloney, picked up a bayonet and
rushed at Peyton, who drew his dagger. A terrible life-and-death fight
followed; but Peyton at last got a good point well driven home,
straight through the Indian's heart. A whole scalping party now
appeared. Ochterloney was apparently dead, and Peyton was too
exhausted to fight any more. But, at this very moment, another British
party came back for the rest of the wounded and carried Peyton off to
the boats.

Then the Indians came back to scalp Ochterloney. By this time,
however, some French regulars had come down, and one of them, finding
Ochterloney still alive, drove off the Indians at the point of the
bayonet, secured help, and carried him up the hill. Montcalm had him
carefully taken into the General Hospital, where he was tenderly
nursed by the nuns. Two days after he had been rescued, a French
officer came out for his clothes and other effects. Wolfe then sent in
twenty guineas for his rescuer, with a promise that, in return for
the kindness shown to Ochterloney, the General Hospital would be
specially protected if the British took Quebec. Towards the end of
August Ochterloney died; and both sides ceased firing while a French
captain came out to report his death and return his effects.

This was by no means the only time the two enemies treated each other
like friends. A party of French ladies were among the prisoners
brought in to Wolfe one day; and they certainly had no cause to
complain of him. He gave them a dinner, at which he charmed them all
by telling them about his visit to Paris. The next morning he sent
them into Quebec with his aide-de-camp under a flag of truce. Another
time the French officers sent him a kind of wine which was not to be
had in the British camp, and he sent them some not to be had in their
own.

But the stern work of war went on and on, though the weary month of
August did not seem to bring victory any closer than disastrous July.
Wolfe knew that September was to be the end of the campaign, the
now-or-never of his whole career. And, knowing this, he set to
work--head and heart and soul--on making the plan that brought him
victory, death, and everlasting fame.




CHAPTER VII

THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM

September 13, 1759


On August 19 an aide-de-camp came out of the farmhouse at Montmorency
which served as the headquarters of the British army to say that Wolfe
was too ill to rise from his bed. The bad news spread like wildfire
through the camp and fleet, and soon became known among the French. A
week passed; but Wolfe was no better. Tossing about on his bed in a
fever, he thought bitterly of his double defeat, of the critical month
of September, of the grim strength of Quebec, formed by nature for a
stronghold, and then--worse still--of his own weak body, which made
him most helpless just when he should have been most fit for his duty.

Feeling that he could no longer lead in person, he dictated a letter
to the brigadiers, sent them the secret instructions he had received
from Pitt and the king, and asked them to think over his three new
plans for attacking Montcalm at Beauport. They wrote back to say they
thought the defeats at the upper fords of the Montmorency and at the
heights facing the St Lawrence showed that the French could not be
beaten by attacking the Beauport lines again, no matter from what side
the attack was made. They then gave him a plan of their own, which
was, to convey the army up the St Lawrence and fight their way ashore
somewhere between Cap Rouge, nine miles above Quebec, and
Pointe-aux-Trembles, twenty-two miles above. They argued that, by
making a landing there, the British could cut off Montcalm's
communications with Three Rivers and Montreal, from which his army
drew its supplies. Wolfe's letter was dictated from his bed of
sickness on the 26th. The brigadiers answered him on the 29th.
Saunders talked it all over with him on the 31st. Before this the fate
of Canada had been an affair of weeks. Now it was a matter of days;
for the morrow would dawn on the very last possible month of the
siege--September.

After his talk with Saunders Wolfe wrote his last letter home to his
mother, telling her of his desperate plight:

      The enemy puts nothing to risk, and I can't in
      conscience put the whole army to risk. My antagonist
      has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible
      entrenchments, so that I can't get at him without
      spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to
      little purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head
      of a great number of bad soldiers and I am at the head
      of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing
      so much as to fight him; but the wary old fellow
      avoids an action, doubtful of the behaviour of his
      army. People must be of the profession to understand
      the disadvantages and difficulties we labour under,
      arising from the uncommon natural strength of the
      country.

On September 2 he wrote his last letter to Pitt. He had asked the
doctors to 'patch him up,' saying that if they could make him fit for
duty for only the next few days they need not trouble about what might
happen to him afterwards. Their 'patching up' certainly cleared his
fevered brain, for this letter was a masterly account of the whole
siege and the plans just laid to bring it to an end. The style was so
good, indeed, that Charles Townshend said his brother George must
have been the real author, and that Wolfe, whom he dubbed 'a
fiery-headed fellow, only fit for fighting,' could not have done any
more than sign his name. But when George Townshend's own official
letter about the battle in which Wolfe fell was also published, and
was found to be much less effective than Wolfe's, Selwyn went up to
Charles Townshend and said: 'Look here, Charles, if your brother wrote
Wolfe's letter, who the devil wrote your brother's?'

Wolfe did not try to hide anything from Pitt. He told him plainly
about the two defeats and the terrible difficulties in the way of
winning any victory. The whole letter is too long for quotation, and
odd scraps from it give no idea of Wolfe's lucid style. But here are a
few which tell the gist of the story:

      I found myself so ill, and am still so weak, that I
      begged the generals to consult together. They are all
      of opinion, that, as more ships and provisions are now
      got above the town, they should try, by conveying up
      five thousand men, to draw the enemy from his present
      position and bring him to an action. I have acquiesced
      in their proposal, and we are preparing to put it
      into execution. The admiral will readily join in any
      measure for the public service. There is such a choice
      of difficulties that I own myself at a loss how to
      determine. The affairs of Great Britain I know require
      the most vigorous measures. You may be sure that the
      small part of the campaign which remains shall be
      employed, as far as I am able, for the honour of His
      Majesty and the interest of the nation. I am sure of
      being well seconded by the admirals and generals;
      happy if our efforts here can contribute to the
      success of His Majesty's arms in any other part of
      America.

On the 31st, the day he wrote to his mother and had his long talk with
Saunders, Wolfe began to send his guns and stores away from the
Montmorency camp. Carleton managed the removal very cleverly; and on
September 3 only the five thousand infantry who were to go up the St
Lawrence were left there. Wolfe tried to tempt Montcalm to attack him.
But Montcalm knew better; and half suspected that Wolfe himself might
make another attack on the Beauport lines. When everything was ready,
all the men at the Point of Levy who could be spared put off in boats
and rowed over towards Beauport, just as Monckton's men had done on
the disastrous last day of July. At the same time the main division of
the fleet, under Saunders, made as if to support these boats, while
the Levis batteries thundered against Quebec. Carleton gave the signal
from the beach at Montmorency when the tide was high; and the whole
five thousand infantry marched down the hill, got into their boats,
and rowed over to where the other boats were waiting. The French now
prepared to defend themselves at once. But as the two divisions of
boats came together, they both rowed off through the gaps between the
men-of-war. Wolfe's army had broken camp and got safely away, right
under the noses of the French, without the loss of a single man.

A whole week, from September 3 to 10, was then taken up with trying to
see how the brigadiers' plan could be carried out.

This plan was good, as far as it went. An army is even harder to
supply than a town would be if the town was taken up bodily and moved
about the country. An army makes no supplies itself, but uses up a
great deal. It must have food, clothing, arms, ammunition, stores of
all kinds, and everything else it needs to keep it fit for action. So
it must always keep what are called 'communications' with the places
from which it gets these supplies. Now, Wolfe's and Montcalm's armies
were both supplied along the St Lawrence, Wolfe's from below Quebec
and Montcalm's from above. But Wolfe had no trouble about the safety
of his own 'communications,' since they were managed and protected by
the fleet. Even before he first saw Quebec, a convoy of supply ships
had sailed from the Maritime Provinces for his army under the charge
of a man-of-war. And so it went on all through the siege. Including
forty-nine men-of-war, no less than 277 British vessels sailed up to
Quebec during this campaign; and not one of them was lost on the way,
though the St Lawrence had then no lighthouses, buoys, or other aids
to navigation, as it has now, and though the British officers
themselves were compelled to take the ships through the worst places
in these foreign and little-known waters. The result was that there
were abundant supplies for the British army the whole time, thanks to
the fleet.

But Montcalm was in a very different plight. Since the previous
autumn, when Wolfe and Hardy had laid waste the coast of Gasp, the
supply of sea-fish had almost failed. Now the whole country below
Quebec had been cut off by the fleet, while most of the country round
Quebec was being laid waste by the army. Wolfe's orders were that no
man, woman, or child was to be touched, nor any house or other
buildings burnt, if his own men were not attacked. But if the men of
the country fired at his soldiers they were to be shot down, and
everything they had was to be destroyed. Of course, women and children
were strictly protected, under all circumstances, and no just
complaint was ever made against the British for hurting a single one.
But as the men persisted in firing, the British fired back and
destroyed the farms where the firing took place, on the fair-play
principle that it is right to destroy whatever is used to destroy you.

It thus happened that, except at a few little villages where the men
had not fired on the soldiers, the country all round Quebec was like a
desert, as far as supplies for the French were concerned. The only way
to obtain anything for their camp was by bringing it down the St
Lawrence from Montreal, Sorel, and Three Rivers. French vessels would
come down as far as they dared and then send the supplies on in
barges, which kept close in under the north shore above Quebec, where
the French outposts and batteries protected them from the British
men-of-war that were pushing higher and higher up the river. Some
supplies were brought in by land after they were put ashore above the
highest British vessels. But as a hundred tons came far more easily by
water than one ton by land, it is not hard to see that Montcalm's men
could not hold out long if the St Lawrence near Quebec was closed to
supplies.

Wolfe, Montcalm, the brigadiers, and every one else on both sides knew
this perfectly well. But, as it was now September, the fleet could not
go far up the much more difficult channel towards Montreal. If it did,
and took Wolfe's army with it, the few French men-of-war might dispute
the passage, and some sunken ships might block the way, at all events
for a time. Besides, the French were preparing to repulse any landing
up the river, between Cap Rouge, nine miles above Quebec, and
Deschambault, forty miles above; and with good prospect of success,
because the country favoured their irregulars. Moreover, if Wolfe
should land many miles up, Montcalm might still hold out far down in
Quebec for the few days remaining till October. If, on the other hand,
the fleet went up and left Wolfe's men behind, Montcalm would be
safer than ever at Beauport and Quebec; because, how could Wolfe reach
him without a fleet when he had failed to reach him with one?

The life-and-death question for Wolfe was how to land close enough
above Quebec and soon enough in September to make Montcalm fight it
out on even terms and in the open field.

The brigadiers' plan of landing high up seemed all right till they
tried to work it out. Then they found troubles in plenty. There were
several places for them to land between Cap Rouge, nine miles above
Quebec, and Pointe-aux-Trembles, thirteen miles higher still. Ever
since July 18 British vessels had been passing to and fro above
Quebec; and in August, Murray, under the guard of Holmes's squadron,
had tried his brigade against Pointe-aux-Trembles, where he was beaten
back, and at Deschambault, twenty miles farther up, where he took some
prisoners and burnt some supplies. To ward off further and perhaps
more serious attacks from this quarter, Montcalm had been keeping
Bougainville on the lookout, especially round Pointe-aux-Trembles, for
several weeks before the brigadiers arranged their plan. Bougainville
now had 2000 infantry, all the mounted men--nearly 300--and all the
best Indian and Canadian scouts, along the thirteen miles of shore
between Cap Rouge and Pointe-aux-Trembles. His land and water
batteries had also been made much stronger. He and Montcalm were in
close touch and could send messages to each other and get an answer
back within four hours.

On the 7th Wolfe and the brigadiers had a good look at every spot
round Pointe-aux-Trembles. On the 8th and 9th the brigadiers were
still there; while five transports sailed past Quebec on the 8th to
join Holmes, who commanded the up-river squadron. Two of Wolfe's
brigades were now on board the transports with Holmes. But the whole
three were needed; and this need at once entailed another difficulty.
A successful landing on the north shore above Quebec could only be
made under cover of the dark; and Wolfe could not bring the third
brigade, under cover of night, from the island of Orleans and the
Point of Levy, and land it with the other two twenty miles up the
river before daylight. The tidal stream runs up barely five hours,
while it runs down more than seven; and winds are mostly down. Next,
if, instead of sailing, the third brigade marched twenty miles at
night across very rough country on the south shore, it would arrive
later than ever. Then, only one brigade could be put ashore in boats
at one time in one place, and Bougainville could collect enough men to
hold it in check while he called in reinforcements at least as fast on
the French side as the British could on theirs. Another thing was that
the wooded country favoured the French defence and hindered the
British attack. Lastly, if Wolfe and Saunders collected the whole five
thousand soldiers and a still larger squadron and convoy up the river,
Montcalm would see the men and ships being moved from their positions
in front of his Beauport entrenchments, and would hurry to the
threatened shore between Cap Rouge and Pointe-aux-Trembles almost as
soon as the British, and certainly in time to reinforce Bougainville
and repulse Wolfe.

The 9th was Wolfe's last Sunday. It was a cheerless, rainy day; and he
almost confessed himself beaten for good, as he sat writing his last
official letter to one of Pitt's friends, the Earl of Holderness. He
dated it, 'On board the _Sutherland_ at anchor off Cap Rouge,
September 9, 1759.' He ended it with gloomy news: 'I am so far
recovered as to be able to do business, but my constitution is
entirely ruined, without the consolation of having done any
considerable service to the state, or without any prospect of it.'

The very next day, however, he saw his chance. He stood at Etchemin,
on the south shore, two miles above Quebec, and looked long and
earnestly through his telescope at the Foulon road, a mile and a half
away, running up to the Plains of Abraham from the Anse au Foulon,
which has ever since been called Wolfe's Cove. Then he looked at the
Plains themselves, especially at a spot only one mile from Quebec,
where the flat and open ground formed a perfect field of battle for
his well-drilled regulars. He knew the Foulon road must be fairly
good, because it was the French line of communication between the Anse
au Foulon and the Beauport camp. The Cove and the nearest point of the
camp were only two miles and a quarter apart, as the crow flies. But
between them rose the tableland of the Plains, 300 feet above the
river. Thus they were screened from each other, and a surprise at the
Cove might not be found out too soon at the camp.

Now, Wolfe knew that the French expected to be attacked either above
Cap Rouge (up towards Pointe-aux-Trembles) or below Quebec (down in
their Beauport entrenchments). He also knew that his own army thought
the attack would be made above Cap Rouge. Thus the French were still
very anxious about the six miles at Beauport, while both sides were
keenly watching each other all over the thirteen miles above Cap
Rouge. Nobody seemed to be thinking about the nine miles between Cap
Rouge and Quebec, and least of all about the part nearest Quebec.

Yes, one man was thinking about it, and he never stopped thinking
about it till he died. That man was Montcalm. On the 5th, when Wolfe
began moving up-stream, Montcalm had sent a whole battalion to the
Plains. But on the 7th, when the British generals were all at
Pointe-aux-Trembles, Vaudreuil, always ready to spite Montcalm,
ordered this battalion back to camp, saying, 'The British haven't got
wings; they can't fly up to the Plains!' Wolfe, of course, saw that
the battalion had been taken away; and he soon found out why.
Vaudreuil was a great talker and could never keep a secret. Wolfe knew
perfectly well that Vaudreuil and Bigot were constantly spoiling
whatever Montcalm was doing, so he counted on this trouble in the
French camp as he did on other facts and chances.

He now gave up all idea of his old plans against Beauport, as well as
the new plan of the brigadiers, and decided on another plan of his
own. It was new in one way, because he had never seen a chance of
carrying it out before. But it was old in another way, because he had
written to his uncle from Louisbourg on May 19, and spoken of getting
up the heights four or five miles above Quebec if he could do so by
surprise. Again, even so early in the siege as July 18 he had been
chafing at what he called the 'coldness' of the fleet about pushing up
beyond Quebec. The entry in his private diary for that day is: 'The
_Sutherland_ and _Squirrell_, two transports, and two armed sloops
passed the narrow passage between Quebec and Levy _without losing a
man_.' Next day, his entry is more scathing still: 'Reconnoitred the
country immediately above Quebec and found that _if we had ventured
the stroke that was first intended we should infallibly have
succeeded_.' This shows how long he had kept the plan waiting for the
chance. But it does not prove that he had missed any earlier chances
through the 'coldness' of the fleet. For it is significant that he
afterwards struck out 'infallibly' and substituted _'probably'_;
while it must be remembered that the _Sutherland_ and her consorts
formed only a very small flotilla, that they passed Quebec in the
middle of a very dark night, that the St Lawrence above the town was
intricate and little known, that the loss of several men-of-war might
have been fatal, that the enemy's attention had not become distracted
in July to anything like the same bewildering extent as it had in
September, and that the intervening course of events--however
disappointing in itself--certainly helped to make his plan suit the
occasion far better late than soon. Moreover, in a note to Saunders in
August, he had spoken about a 'desperate' plan which he could not
trust his brigadiers to carry out, and which he was then too sick to
carry out himself.

Now that he was 'patched up' enough for a few days, and that the
chance seemed to be within his grasp, he made up his mind to strike at
once. He knew that the little French post above the Anse au Foulon was
commanded by one of Bigot's blackguards, Vergor, whose Canadian
militiamen were as slack as their commander. He knew that the Samos
battery, a little farther from Quebec, had too small a garrison, with
only five guns and no means of firing them on the landward side; so
that any of his men, once up the heights, could rush it from the rear.
He knew the French had only a few weak posts the whole way down from
Cap Rouge, and that these posts often let convoys of provision boats
pass quietly at night into the Anse au Foulon. He knew that some of
Montcalm's best regulars had gone to Montreal with Lvis, the
excellent French second-in-command, to strengthen the defence against
Amherst's slow advance from Lake Champlain. He knew that Montcalm
still had a total of 10,000 men between Montmorency and Quebec, as
against his own attacking force of 5000; yet he also knew that the
odds of two to one were reversed in his favour so far as European
regulars were concerned; for Montcalm could not now bring 3000 French
regulars into immediate action at any one spot. Finally, he knew that
all the French were only half-fed, and that those with Bougainville
were getting worn out by having to march across country, in a
fruitless effort to keep pace with the ships of Holmes's squadron and
convoy, which floated up and down with the tide.

Wolfe's plan was to keep the French alarmed more than ever at the two
extreme ends of their line--Beauport below Quebec and Pointe-aux-Trembles
above--and then to strike home at their undefended centre, by a
surprise landing at the Anse au Foulon. Once landed, well before
daylight, he could rush Vergor's post and the Samos battery, march
across the Plains, and form his line of battle a mile from Quebec
before Montcalm could come up in force from Beauport. Probably he
could also defeat him before Bougainville could march down from some
point well above Cap Rouge.

There were chances to reckon with in this plan. But so there are in
all plans; and to say Wolfe took Quebec by mere luck is utter
nonsense. He was one of the deepest thinkers on war who ever lived,
especially on the British kind of war, by land and sea together; and
he had had the preparation of a lifetime to help him in using a fleet
and army that worked together like the two arms of one body. He simply
made a plan which took proper account of all the facts and all the
chances. Fools make lucky hits, now and then, by the merest chance.
But no one except a genius can make and carry out a plan like Wolfe's,
which meant at least a hundred hits running, all in the selfsame
spot.

No sooner had Wolfe made his admirable plan that Monday morning,
September 10, than he set all the principal officers to work out the
different parts of it. But he kept the whole a secret. Nobody except
himself knew more than one part, and how that one part was to be
worked in at the proper time and place. Even the fact that the Anse au
Foulon was to be the landing-place was kept secret till the last
moment from everybody except Admiral Holmes, who made all the
arrangements, and Captain Chads, the naval officer who was to lead the
first boats down. The great plot thickened fast. The siege that had
been an affair of weeks, and the brigadiers' plan that had been an
affair of days, both gave way to a plan in which every hour was made
to tell. Wolfe's seventy hours of consummate manoeuvres, by land and
water, over a front of thirty miles, were followed by a battle in
which the fighting of only a few minutes settled the fate of Canada
for centuries.

During the whole of those momentous three days--Monday, Tuesday, and
Wednesday, September 10, 11, and 12, 1759--Wolfe, Saunders, and Holmes
kept the French in constant alarm about the thirteen miles _above_ Cap
Rouge and the six miles _below_ Quebec; but gave no sign by which any
immediate danger could be suspected along the nine miles _between_ Cap
Rouge and Quebec.

Saunders stayed below Quebec. On the 12th he never gave the French a
minute's rest all day and night. He sent Cook and others close in
towards Beauport to lay buoys, as if to mark out a landing-place for
another attack like the one on July 31. It is a singular coincidence
that while Cook, the great British circumnavigator of the globe, was
trying to get Wolfe into Quebec, Bougainville, the great French
circumnavigator, was trying to keep him out. Towards evening Saunders
formed up his boats and filled them with marines, whose own red coats,
seen at a distance, made them look like soldiers. He moved his fleet
in at high tide and fired furiously at the entrenchments. All night
long his boatloads of men rowed up and down and kept the French on the
alert. This feint against Beauport was much helped by the men of
Wolfe's third brigade, who remained at the island of Orleans and the
Point of Levy till after dark, by a whole battalion of marines
guarding the Levis batteries, and by these batteries themselves,
which, meanwhile, were bombarding Quebec--again like the 31st of July.
The bombardment was kept up all night and became most intense just
before dawn, when Wolfe was landing two miles above.

At the other end of the French line, above Cap Rouge, Holmes had kept
threatening Bougainville more and more towards Pointe-aux-Trembles,
twenty miles above the Foulon. Wolfe's soldiers had kept landing on
the south shore day after day; then drifting up with the tide on board
the transports past Pointe-aux-Trembles; then drifting down towards
Cap Rouge; and then coming back the next day to do the same thing over
again. This had been going on, more or less, even before Wolfe had
made his plan, and it proved very useful to him. He knew that
Bougainville's men were getting quite worn out by scrambling across
country, day after day, to keep up with Holmes's restless squadron and
transports. He also knew that men who threw themselves down, tired
out, late at night could not be collected from different places, all
over their thirteen-mile beat, and brought down in the morning, fit to
fight on a battlefield eight miles from the nearest of them and
twenty-one from the farthest.

Montcalm was greatly troubled. He saw redcoats with Saunders opposite
Beauport, redcoats at the island, redcoats at the Point of Levy, and
redcoats guarding the Levis batteries. He had no means of finding out
at once that the redcoats with Saunders and at the batteries were
marines, and that the redcoats who really did belong to Wolfe were
under orders to march off after dark that very night and join the
other two brigades which were coming down the river from the squadron
above Cap Rouge. He had no boats that could get through the perfect
screen of the British fleet. But all that the skill of mortal man
could do against these odds he did on that fatal eve of battle, as he
had done for three years past, with foes in front and false friends
behind. He ordered the battalion which he had sent to the Plains on
the 5th, and which Vaudreuil had brought back on the 7th, 'now to go
and camp at the Foulon'; that is, at the top of the road coming up
from Wolfe's landing-place at the Anse au Foulon. But Vaudreuil
immediately gave a counter-order and said: 'We'll see about that
tomorrow.' Vaudreuil's 'tomorrow' never came.

That afternoon of the 12th, while Montcalm and Vaudreuil were at
cross-purposes near the mouth of the St Charles, Wolfe was only four
miles away, on the other side of the Plains, in a boat on the St
Lawrence, where he was taking his last look at what he then called the
Foulon and what the world now calls Wolfe's Cove. His boat was just
turning to drift up in midstream, off Sillery Point, which is only
half a mile above the Foulon. He wanted to examine the Cove well
through his telescope at dead low tide, as he intended to land his
army there at the next low tide. Close beside him sat young Robison,
who was not an officer in either the Army or Navy, but who had come
out to Canada as tutor to an admiral's son, and who had been found so
good at maps that he was employed with Wolfe's engineers in making
surveys and sketches of the ground about Quebec. Shutting up his
telescope, Wolfe sat silent a while. Then, as afterwards recorded by
Robison, he turned towards his officers and repeated several stanzas
of Gray's _Elegy_. 'Gentlemen,' he said as he ended, 'I would sooner
have written that poem than beat the French tomorrow.' He did not know
then that his own fame would far surpass the poet's, and that he
should win it in the very way described in one of the lines he had
just been quoting--

      The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

At half-past eight in the evening he was sitting in his cabin on board
Holmes's flagship, the _Sutherland_, above Cap Rouge, with 'Jacky
Jervis'--the future Earl St Vincent, but now the youngest captain in
the fleet, only twenty-four. Wolfe and Jervis had both been at the
same school at Greenwich, Swinden's, though at different times, and
they were great friends. Wolfe had made up a sealed parcel of his
notebook, his will, and the portrait of Katherine Lowther, and he now
handed it over to Jervis for safe keeping.

But he had no chance of talking about old times at home, for just then
a letter from the three brigadiers was handed in. It asked him if he
would not give them 'distinct orders' about 'the place or places we
are to attack.' He wrote back to the senior, Monckton, telling him
what he had arranged for the first and second brigades, and then,
separately, to Townshend about the third, which was not with Holmes
but on the south shore. After dark the men from the island and the
Point of Levy had marched up to join this brigade at Etchemin, the
very place where Wolfe had made his plan on the 10th, as he stood and
looked at the Foulon opposite.

His last general orders to his army had been read out some hours
before; but, of course, the Foulon was not mentioned. These orders
show that he well understood the great issues he was fighting for, and
what men he had to count upon. Here are only three sentences; but how
much they mean! 'The enemy's force is now divided. A vigorous blow
struck by the army at this juncture may determine the fate of Canada.
The officers and men will remember what their country expects of
them.' The watchword was 'Coventry,' which, being probably suggested
by the saying, 'Sent to Coventry,' that is, condemned to silence, was
as apt a word for this expectant night as 'Gibraltar,' the symbol of
strength, was for the one on which Quebec surrendered.

Just before dark Holmes sent every vessel he could spare to make a
show of force opposite Pointe-aux-Trembles, in order to hold
Bougainville there overnight. But after dark the main body of Holmes's
squadron and all the boats and small transports came together opposite
Cap Rouge. Just before ten a single lantern appeared in the
_Sutherland's_ main topmast shrouds. On seeing this, Chads formed up
the boats between the ships and the south shore, the side away from
the French. In three hours every man was in his place. Not a sound
was to be heard except the murmur of the strong ebb-tide setting down
towards Quebec and a gentle south-west breeze blowing in the same
direction. 'All ready, sir!' and Wolfe took his own place in the first
boat with his friend Captain Delaune, the leader of the twenty-four
men of the 'Forlorn Hope,' who were to be the first to scale the
cliff. Then a second lantern appeared above the first; and the whole
brigade of boats began to move off in succession. They had about eight
miles to go. But the current ran the distance in two hours. As they
advanced they could see the flashes from the Levis batteries growing
brighter and more frequent; for both the land gunners there and the
seamen gunners with Saunders farther down were increasing their fire
as the hour for Wolfe's landing drew near.

A couple of miles above the Foulon the _Hunter_ was anchored in
midstream. As arranged, Chads left the south shore and steered
straight for her. To his surprise he saw her crew training their guns
on him. But they held their fire. Then Wolfe came alongside and found
that she had two French deserters on board who had mistaken his boats
for the French provision convoy that was expected to creep down the
north shore that very night and land at the Foulon. He had already
planned to pass his boats off as this convoy; for he knew that the
farthest up of Holmes's men-of-war had stopped it above
Pointe-aux-Trembles. But he was glad to know that the French posts
below Cap Rouge had not yet heard of the stoppage.

From the _Hunter_ his boat led the way to Sillery Point, half a mile
above the Foulon. 'Halt! Who comes there!'--a French sentry's voice
rang out in the silence of the night. 'France!' answered young Fraser,
who had been taken into Wolfe's boat because he spoke French like a
native. 'What's your regiment?' asked the sentry. 'The Queen's,'
answered Fraser, who knew that this was the one supplying the escort
for the provision boats the British had held up. 'But why don't you
speak out?' asked the sentry again. 'Hush!' said Fraser, 'the British
will hear us if you make a noise.' And there, sure enough, was the
_Hunter_, drifting down, as arranged, not far outside the column of
boats. Then the sentry let them all pass; and, in ten minutes more,
exactly at four o'clock, the leading boat grounded in the Anse au
Foulon and Wolfe jumped ashore.

He at once took the 'Forlorn Hope' and 200 light infantry to the side
of the Cove towards Quebec, saying as he went, 'I don't know if we
shall all get up, but we must make the attempt.' Then, while these men
were scrambling up, he went back to the middle of the Cove, where Howe
had already formed the remaining 500 light infantry. Captain
Macdonald, a very active climber, passed the 'Forlorn Hope' and was
the first man to reach the top and feel his way through the trees to
the left, towards Vergor's tents. Presently he almost ran into the
sleepy French-Canadian sentry, who heard only a voice speaking perfect
French and telling him it was all right--nothing but the
reinforcements from the Beauport camp; for Wolfe knew that Montcalm
had been trying to get a French regular officer to replace Vergor, who
was as good a thief as Bigot and as bad a soldier as Vaudreuil. While
this little parley was going on the 'Forlorn Hope' came up; when
Macdonald promptly hit the sentry between the eyes with the hilt of
his claymore and knocked him flat. The light infantry pressed on close
behind. The dumbfounded French colonial troops coming out of their
tents found themselves face to face with a whole woodful of fixed
bayonets. They fired a few shots. The British charged with a loud
cheer. The Canadians scurried away through the trees. And Vergor ran
for dear life in his nightshirt.

The ringing cheer with which Delaune charged home told Wolfe at the
foot of the road that the actual top was clear. Then Howe went up; and
in fifteen minutes all the light infantry had joined their comrades
above. Another battalion followed quickly, and Wolfe himself followed
them. By this time it was five o'clock and quite light. The boats that
had landed the first brigade had already rowed through the gaps
between the small transports which were landing the second brigade,
and had reached the south shore, a mile and a half away, where the
third brigade was waiting for them.

Meanwhile the suddenly roused gunners of the Samos battery were firing
wildly at the British vessels. But the men-of-war fired back with
better aim, and Howe's light infantry, coming up at a run from behind,
dashed in among the astonished gunners with the bayonet, cleared them
all out, and spiked every gun. Howe left three companies there to hold
the battery against Bougainville later in the day, and returned with
the other seven to Wolfe. It was now six o'clock. The third brigade
had landed, the whole of the ground at the top was clear; and Wolfe
set off with 1000 men to see what Montcalm was doing.

Quebec stands on the eastern end of a sort of promontory, or narrow
tableland, between the St Lawrence and the valley of the St Charles.
This tableland is less than a mile wide and narrows still more as it
approaches Quebec. Its top is tilted over towards the St Charles and
Beauport, the cliffs being only 100 feet high there, instead of 300,
as they are beside the St Lawrence; so Wolfe, as he turned in towards
Quebec, after marching straight across the tableland, could look out
over the French camp. Everything seemed quiet; so he made his left
secure and sent for his main body to follow him at once. It was now
seven. In another hour his line of battle was formed, his reserves had
taken post in his rear, and a brigade of seamen from Saunders's fleet
were landing guns, stores, blankets, tents, entrenching tools, and
whatever else he would need for besieging the city after defeating
Montcalm. The 3000 sailors on the beach were anything but pleased with
the tame work of waiting there while the soldiers were fighting up
above. One of their officers, in a letter home, said they could
hardly stand still, and were perpetually swearing because they were
not allowed to get into the heat of action.

The whole of the complicated manoeuvres, in face of an active enemy,
for three days and three nights, by land and water, over a front of
thirty miles, had now been crowned by complete success. The army of
5000 men had been put ashore at the right time and in the right way;
and it was now ready to fight one of the great immortal battles of the
world.

'The thin red line.' The phrase was invented long after Wolfe's day.
But Wolfe invented the fact. The six battalions which formed his
front, that thirteenth morning of September 1759, were drawn up in the
first two-deep line that ever stood on any field of battle in the
world since war began. And it was Wolfe alone who made this 'thin red
line,' as surely as it was Wolfe alone who made the plan that
conquered Canada.

Meanwhile Montcalm had not been idle; though he was perplexed to the
last, because one of the stupid rules in the French camp was that all
news was to be told first to Vaudreuil, who, as governor-general,
could pass it on or not, and interfere with the army as much as he
liked. When it was light enough to see Saunders's fleet, the island
of Orleans, and the Point of Levy, Montcalm at once noticed that
Wolfe's men had gone. He galloped down to the bridge of boats, where
he found that Vaudreuil had already heard of Wolfe's landing. At first
the French thought the firing round the Foulon was caused by an
exchange of shots between the Samos battery and some British
men-of-war that were trying to stop the French provision boats from
getting in there. But Vergor's fugitives and the French patrols near
Quebec soon told the real story. And then, just before seven, Montcalm
himself caught sight of Wolfe's first redcoats marching in along the
Ste Foy road. Well might he exclaim, after all he had done and
Vaudreuil had undone: 'There they are, where they have no right to
be!'

He at once sent orders, all along his six miles of entrenchments, to
bring up every French regular and all the rest except 2000 militia.
But Vaudreuil again interfered; and Montcalm got only the French and
Canadian regulars, 2500, and the same number of Canadian militia with
a few Indians. The French and British totals, actually present on the
field of battle, were, therefore, almost exactly equal, 5000 each.
Vaudreuil also forgot to order out the field guns, the horses for
which the vile and corrupt Bigot had been using for himself. At nine
Montcalm had formed up his French and colonial regulars between Quebec
and the crest of rising ground across the Plains beyond which lay
Wolfe. Riding forward till he could see the redcoats, he noticed how
thin their line was on its left and in its centre, and that its right,
near the St Lawrence, had apparently not formed at all. But his eye
deceived him about the British right, as the men were lying down
there, out of sight, behind a swell of ground. He galloped back and
asked if any one had further news. Several officers declared they had
heard that Wolfe was entrenching, but that his right brigade had not
yet had time to march on to the field. There was no possible way of
finding out anything else at once. The chance seemed favourable.
Montcalm knew he had to fight or starve, as he was completely cut off
by land and water, except for one bad, swampy road in the valley of
the St Charles; and he ordered his line to advance.

At half-past nine the French reached the crest and halted. The two
armies were now in full view of each other on the Plains and only a
quarter of a mile apart. The French line of battle had eight small
battalions, about 2500 men, formed six deep. The colonial regulars, in
three battalions, were on the flanks. The five battalions of French
regulars were in the centre. Montcalm, wearing a green and gold
uniform, with the brilliant cross of St Louis over his cuirass, and
mounted on a splendid black charger, rode the whole length of his
line, to see if all were ready to attack. The French regulars--half-fed,
sorely harassed, interfered with by Vaudreuil--were still the victors
of Ticonderoga, against the British odds of four to one. Perhaps they
might snatch one last desperate victory from the fortunes of war?
Certainly all would follow wherever they were led by their beloved
Montcalm, the greatest Frenchman of the whole New World. He said a few
stirring words to each of his well-known regiments as he rode by; and
when he laughingly asked the best of all, the Royal Roussillon, if
they were not tired enough to take a little rest before the battle,
they shouted back that they were never too tired to fight--'Forward,
forward!' And their steady blue ranks, and those of the four white
regiments beside them, with bayonets fixed and colours flying, did
indeed look fit and ready for the fray.

Wolfe also had gone along his line of battle, the first of all
two-deep thin red lines, to make sure that every officer understood
the order that there was to be no firing until the French came close
up, to within only forty paces. As soon as he saw Montcalm's line on
the crest he had moved his own a hundred paces forward, according to
previous arrangement; so that the two enemies were now only a long
musket-shot apart. The Canadians and Indians were pressing round the
British flanks, under cover of the bushes, and firing hard. But they
were easily held in check by the light infantry on the left rear of
the line and by the 35th on the right rear. The few French and British
skirmishers in the centre now ran back to their own lines; and before
ten the field was quite clear between the two opposing fronts.

Wolfe had been wounded twice when going along his line; first in the
wrist and then in the groin. Yet he stood up so straight and looked so
cool that when he came back to take post on the right the men there
did not know he had been hit at all. His spirit already soared in
triumph over the weakness of the flesh. Here he was, a sick and doubly
wounded man; but a soldier, a hero, and a conqueror, with the key to
half a continent almost within his eager grasp.

At a signal from Montcalm in the centre the French line advanced about
a hundred yards in perfect formation. Then the Canadian regulars
suddenly began firing without orders, and threw themselves flat on the
ground to reload. By the time they had got up the French regulars had
halted some distance in front of them, fired a volley, and begun
advancing again. This was too much for the Canadians. Though they were
regulars they were not used to fighting in the open, not trained for
it, and not armed for it with bayonets. In a couple of minutes they
had all slunk off to the flanks and joined the Indians and militia,
who were attacking the British from under cover.

This left the French regulars face to face with Wolfe's front: five
French battalions against the British six. These two fronts were now
to decide the fate of Canada between them. The French still came
bravely on; but their six-deep line was much shorter than the British
two-deep line, and they saw that both their flanks were about to be
over-lapped by fire and steel. They inclined outwards to save
themselves from this fatal overlap on both right and left. But that
made just as fatal a gap in their centre. Their whole line wavered,
halted oftener to fire, and fired more wildly at each halt.

In the meantime Wolfe's front stood firm as a rock and silent as the
grave, one long, straight, living wall of red, with the double line of
deadly keen bayonets glittering above it. Nothing stirred along its
whole length, except the Union Jacks, waving defiance at the
fleurs-de-lis, and those patient men who fell before a fire to which
they could not yet reply. Bayonet after bayonet would suddenly flash
out of line and fall forward, as the stricken redcoat, standing there
with shouldered arms, quivered and sank to the ground.

Captain York had brought up a single gun in time for the battle, the
sailors having dragged it up the cliff and run it the whole way across
the Plains. He had been handling it most gallantly during the French
advance, firing showers of grape-shot into their ranks from a position
right out in the open in front of Wolfe's line. But now that the
French were closing he had to retire. The sailors then picked up the
drag-ropes and romped in with this most effective six-pounder at full
speed, as if they were having the greatest fun of their lives.

Wolfe was standing next to the Louisbourg Grenadiers, who, this time,
were determined not to begin before they were told. He was to give
their colonel the signal to fire the first volley; which then was
itself to be the signal for a volley from each of the other five
battalions, one after another, all down the line. Every musket was
loaded with two bullets, and the moment a battalion had fired it was
to advance twenty paces, loading as it went, and then fire a
'general,' that is, each man for himself, as hard as he could, till
the bugles sounded the charge.

Wolfe now watched every step the French line made. Nearer and nearer
it came. A hundred paces!--seventy-five!--fifty!--forty!!--_Fire_!!!
Crash! came the volley from the grenadiers. Five volleys more rang out
in quick succession, all so perfectly delivered that they sounded more
like six great guns than six battalions with hundreds of muskets in
each. Under cover of the smoke Wolfe's men advanced their twenty paces
and halted to fire the 'general.' The dense, six-deep lines of
Frenchmen reeled, staggered, and seemed to melt away under this awful
deluge of lead. In five minutes their right was shaken out of all
formation. All that remained of it turned and fled, a wild, mad mob of
panic-stricken fugitives. The centre followed at once. But the Royal
Roussillon stood fast a little longer; and when it also turned it had
only three unwounded officers left, and they were trying to rally it.

Montcalm, who had led the centre and had been wounded in the advance,
galloped over to the Royal Roussillon as it was making this last
stand. But even he could not stem the rush that followed and that
carried him along with it. Over the crest and down to the valley of
the St Charles his army fled, the Canadians and Indians scurrying away
through the bushes as hard as they could run. While making one more
effort to rally enough men to cover the retreat he was struck again,
this time by a dozen grape-shot from York's gun. He reeled in the
saddle. But two of his grenadiers caught him and held him up while he
rode into Quebec. As he passed through St Louis Gate a terrified woman
called out, 'Oh! look at the marquis, he's killed, he's killed!' But
Montcalm, by a supreme effort, sat up straight for a moment and said:
'It is nothing at all, my kind friend; you must not be so much
alarmed!' and, saying this, passed on to die, a hero to the very last.

In the thick of the short, fierce fire-fight the bagpipes began to
skirl, the Highlanders dashed down their muskets, drew their
claymores, and gave a yell that might have been heard across the
river. In a moment every British bugle was sounding the 'Charge' and
the whole red, living wall was rushing forward with a roaring cheer.

But it charged without Wolfe. He had been mortally wounded just after
giving the signal for those famous volleys. Two officers sprang to his
side. 'Hold me up!' he implored them, 'don't let my gallant fellows
see me fall!' With the help of a couple of men he was carried back to
the far side of a little knoll and seated on a grenadier's folded
coat, while the grenadier who had taken it off ran over to a spring to
get some water. Wolfe knew at once that he was dying. But he did not
yet know how the battle had gone. His head had sunk on his breast, and
his eyes were already glazing, when an officer on the knoll called
out, 'They run! They run! 'Egad, they give way everywhere!' Rousing
himself, as if from sleep, Wolfe asked, 'Who run?'--'The French,
sir!'--'Then I die content!'--and, almost as he said it, he breathed
his last.

He was not buried on the field he won, nor even in the country that he
conquered. All that was mortal of him--his poor, sick, wounded
body--was borne back across the sea, and carried in mourning triumph
through his native land. And there, in the family vault at Greenwich,
near the school he had left for his first war, half his short life
ago, he was laid to rest on November 20--at the very time when his own
great victory before Quebec was being confirmed by Hawke's
magnificently daring attack on the French fleet amid all the dangers
of that wild night in Quiberon Bay.

Canada has none of his mortality. But could she have anything more
sacred than the spot from which his soaring spirit took its flight
into immortal fame? And could this sacred spot be marked by any words
more winged than these:

      HERE DIED
        WOLFE
      VICTORIOUS




CHAPTER VIII

EPILOGUE--THE LAST STAND


Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham proved decisive in the end;
but it was not the last of the great struggle for the Key of Canada.

After Wolfe had died on the field of battle, and Monckton had been
disabled by his wounds, Townshend took command, received the surrender
of Quebec on the 18th, and waited till the French field army had
retired towards Montreal. Then he sailed home with Saunders, leaving
Murray to hold what Wolfe had won. Saunders left Lord Colville in
charge of a strong squadron, with orders to wait at Halifax till the
spring.

Both French and British spent a terrible winter. The French had better
shelter in Montreal than the British had among the ruins of Quebec;
and, being more accustomed to the rigours of the climate, they would
have suffered less from cold in any case. But their lot was, on the
whole, the harder of the two; for food was particularly bad and
scarce in Montreal, where even horseflesh was thought a luxury. Both
armies were ravaged by disease to a most alarming extent. Of the eight
thousand men with whom Murray began that deadly winter not one-half
were able to bear arms in the spring; and not one-half of those who
did bear arms then were really fit for duty.

[Illustration: THE DEATH OF WOLFE
After the painting by Benjamin West]

Montcalm's successor, Lvis, now made a skilful, bold, and gallant
attempt to retake Quebec before navigation opened. Calling the whole
remaining strength of New France to his aid, he took his army down in
April, mostly by way of the St Lawrence. The weather was stormy. The
banks of the river were lined with rotting ice. The roads were almost
impassable. Yet, after a journey of less than ten days, the whole
French army appeared before Quebec. Murray was at once confronted by a
dire dilemma. The landward defences had never been strong; and he had
not been able to do more than patch them up. If he remained behind
them Lvis would close in, batter them down, and probably carry them
by assault against a sickly garrison depressed by being kept within
the walls. If, on the other hand, he marched out, he would have to
meet more than double numbers at the least; for some men would have to
be left to cover a retreat; and he knew the French grand total was
nearly thrice his own. But he chose this bolder course; and at the
chill dawn of April 28, he paraded his little attacking force of a
bare three thousand men on the freezing snow and mud of the Esplanade
and then marched out.

The two armies met at Ste Foy, a mile and a half beyond the walls; and
a desperate battle ensued. The French had twice as many men in action,
but only half of these were regulars; the others had no bayonets; and
there was no effective artillery to keep down the fire of Murray's
commanding guns. The terrific fight went on for hours, while victory
inclined neither to one side nor the other. It was a far more stubborn
and much bloodier contest than Wolfe's of the year before. At last a
British battalion was fairly caught in flank by overwhelming numbers
and driven across the front of Murray's guns, whose protecting fire it
thus completely masked at a most critical time. Murray thereupon
ordered up his last reserve. But even so he could no longer stand his
ground. Slowly and sullenly his exhausted men fell back before the
French, who put the very last ounce of their own failing strength
into a charge that took the guns. Then the beaten British staggered in
behind their walls, while the victorious French stood fast, worn out
by the hardships of their march and fought to a standstill in the
battle.

Lvis rallied his army for one more effort and pressed the siege to
the uttermost of his power. Murray had lost a thousand men and could
now muster less than three thousand. Each side prepared to fight the
other to the death. But both knew that the result would depend on the
fleets. There had been no news from Europe since navigation closed;
and hopes ran high among the besiegers that perhaps some friendly
men-of-war might still be first; when of course Quebec would have to
surrender at discretion, and Canada would certainly be saved for
France if the half-expected peace would only follow soon.

Day after day all eyes, both French and British, looked seaward from
the heights and walls; though fleets had never yet been known to come
up the St Lawrence so early in the season. At last, on May 9, the tops
of a man-of-war were sighted just beyond the Point of Levy. Either she
or Quebec, or both, might have false colours flying. So neither
besiegers nor besieged knew to which side she belonged. Nor did she
know herself whether Quebec was French or British. Slowly she rounded
into the harbour, her crew at quarters, her decks all cleared for
action. She saluted with twenty-one guns and swung out her captain's
barge. Then, for the first time, every one watching knew what she was;
for the barge was heading straight in towards the town, and redcoats
and bluejackets could see each other plainly. In a moment every
British soldier who could stand had climbed the nearest wall and was
cheering her to the echo; while the gunners showed their delight by
loading and firing as fast as possible and making all the noise they
could.

But one ship was not enough to turn the scale; and Lvis redoubled his
efforts. On the night of the 15th French hopes suddenly flared up all
through the camp when the word flew round that three strange
men-of-war just reported down off Beauport were the vanguard of a
great French fleet. But daylight showed them to be British, and
British bent on immediate and vigorous attack. Two of these frigates
made straight for the French flotilla, which fled in wild confusion,
covered by the undaunted Vauquelin in the _Atalante_, which fought a
gallant rearguard action all the twenty miles to Pointe-aux-Trembles,
where she was driven ashore and forced to strike her colours, after
another, and still more desperate, resistance of over two hours. That
night Lvis raised the siege in despair and retired on Montreal. Next
morning Lord Colville arrived with the main body of the fleet, having
made the earliest ascent of the St Lawrence ever known to naval
history, before that time or since.

[Illustration: LORD AMHERST
From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds]

Then came the final scene of all this moving drama. Step by step
overpowering British forces closed in on the doomed and dwindling army
of New France. They closed in from east and west and south, each one
of their converging columns more than a match for all that was left of
the French. Whichever way he looked, Lvis could see no loophole of
escape. There was nothing but certain defeat in front and on both
flanks, and starvation in the rear. So when the advancing British met,
all together, at the island of Montreal, he and his faithful regulars
laid down their arms without dishonour, in the fully justifiable
belief that no further use of them could possibly retrieve the great
lost cause of France in Canada.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Wolfe is one of the great heroes in countless books of modern British
history, by far the greatest hero in the many books about the fight
for Canada, and the single hero of four biographies. It was more than
a century after his triumphant death before the first of these
appeared: _The Life of Major-General James Wolfe_ by Robert Wright. A
second Life of Wolfe appeared a generation later, this time in the
form of a small volume by A. G. Bradley in the 'English Men of Action'
series. The third and fourth biographies were both published in 1909,
the year which marked the third jubilee of the Battle of the Plains.
One of them, Edward Salmon's _General Wolfe_, devotes more than the
usual perfunctory attention to the important influence of sea-power;
but it is a sketch rather than a complete biography, and it is by no
means free from error. The other is _The Life and Letters of James
Wolfe_ by Beckles Willson.

The histories written with the best knowledge of Wolfe's career in
Canada are: the contemporary _Journal of the Campaigns in North
America_ by Captain John Knox, Parkman's _Montcalm and Wolfe, and The
Siege of Quebec and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham_ by A. G.
Doughty and G. W. Parmelee. Knox's two very scarce quarto volumes have
been edited by A. G. Doughty for the Champlain Society for
republication in 1914. Parkman's work is always excellent. But he
wrote before seeing some of the evidence so admirably revealed in Dr
Doughty's six volumes, and, like the rest, he failed to understand the
real value of the fleet.




INDEX


Amherst, General, at battle of Dettingen, 14;
  and Wolfe, 55, 57, 64, 74, 87, 115.

Anse au Foulon. See Wolfe's Cove.

Anson, Lord, 51;
  and Pitt's plans against France, 71.


Barr, Colonel, with Wolfe at Quebec, 73.

Bigot, Franois, intendant of New France, and Montcalm, 86-7, 131.

Boscawen, Admiral, 55; 'Old Dreadnought,' 57;
  at siege of Louisbourg, 63.

Bougainville, Colonel, slips past Admiral Durell into the St Lawrence, 84;
  in conjunction with Montcalm above Quebec, 108-9, 115, 118.

Braddock, General, defeated by the French in Ohio, 52.

Byng, Admiral, court-martialled and shot, 52.


Campbell, Sir James, succeeds Wolfe as colonel of 67th Foot, 67 note.

Cap Rouge, and the siege of Quebec, 107, 108, 123.

Carleton, Colonel Guy, 37;
  with Wolfe at Quebec, 68, 73,77 103, 104;
  and Wolfe's will, 82.

Chads, Captain, and the landing at Wolfe's Cove, 117, 123, 124.

Colville, Lord, 140;
  his early ascent of the St Lawrence saves Quebec for the British, 145.

Cook, Captain, with Wolfe at Quebec as navigating officer, 75, 85, 92, 118.

Culloden Moor, battle of, 24-5.

Cumberland, Duke of, 9;
  at Dettingen, 13-14, 19, 21;
  at Culloden, 24;
  at Laffeldt, 25, 26.


Delaune, Captain, leader of the 'Forlorn Hope' in ascent of the
    Heights, 68, 124, 127.

Dettingen, battle of, 14-22.

Drucour, Chevalier de, French commander at Louisbourg, 57, 62;
  surrenders, 63.

Dundonald, Lord, killed at Louisbourg, 62.

Durell, Admiral, 74, 77;
  lets French ships slip through to Quebec, 84.


Ferdinand of Brunswick, victorious at Minden, 67, 70.

'Forlorn Hope,' the, in ascent of the Heights, 125-6.

France, her relations with Great Britain, 43-6, 48;
  preparing to invade British Isles, 71.

Fraser, Simon, at the landing at Wolfe's Cove, 125.


Gabarus Bay, the landing of the British at, 58-60.

George II and Wolfe, 8, 9;
  at Dettingen, 13-14, 16, 17-18, 21;
  and his appreciation of Wolfe, 72.

Glasgow, Wolfe with the 20th at, 28-30, 39-40.

Goldsmith, Oliver, and Wolfe, 2, 39.

Gray's 'Elegy,' Wolfe and, 121.

Great Britain, her relations with France, 43-6;
  her sea-power, 47-51;
  joy in at capture of Louisbourg, 65.


Halifax, Wolfe at ball in, 65;
  the fleet at, 77.

Hardy, Admiral Sir Charles, at Louisbourg, 57.

Hawke, Admiral, at Rochefort, 53;
  at Quiberon Bay, 56, 139.

Highlanders, Wolfe's idea of raising a regiment of, 31;
  with Wolfe at Quebec, 78;
  dress of, 79.

Holmes, Admiral, 74;
  keeps Bougainville employed above Quebec while Wolfe is making his
    landing and ascent, 117, 119, 123.

Howe, Lord, 41;
  Wolfe's opinion of, 64.

Howe, Colonel, with Wolfe at Quebec, 68, 73, 80;
  and Wolfe's will, 82;
  at landing at Wolfe's Cove, 126, 127.

Hughes, Admiral, with Wolfe at Quebec, 75.

Hundred Years' War, 44-5;
  Second Hundred Years' War, 45-6.


Jervis, Captain, 75;
  receives Wolfe's will on the eve of the Battle of the Plains, 122.


Killick, Captain, and the French pilot, 85-6.

King's Royal Rifle Corps, the, with Wolfe at Quebec, 80-2.


Lawson, Elizabeth, and Wolfe, 28, 31, 70.

Lvis, General, 115;
  his victory at Ste Foy, 141-3;
  besieges Quebec, 143-5;
  lays down his arms, 145.

Levis Heights, 89;
 abandoned by the French and occupied by Wolfe, 90.

Ligonier, Sir John (afterwards Lord), in battle of Laffeldt, 26;
  and Wolfe, 69.

Louis XV receives Wolfe, 34, 37.

Louisbourg, position and garrison of, 55-7, 61;
  surrender of, 63.

Louisbourg Grenadiers, with Wolfe at Quebec, 80, 92, 94-95, 136.

Lowther, Katherine (afterwards Duchess of Bolton), engaged
    to Wolfe, 70, 82.


Macdonald, Captain, in the ascent of the Heights, 126.

Monckton, General, at Dettingen, 14;
  with Wolfe at Quebec, 73, 122;
  disabled, 140.

Montcalm, Marquis de, takes Oswego, 52;
  takes Fort William Henry, 53;
  his victory at Ticonderoga, 62, 64;
  finds out Pitt's plan, 84;
  thwarted by Vaudreuil and Bigot, 86-7, 90, 112, 119-20;
  his defence of Quebec, 87-9, 100, 101, 103, 105-7, 115;
  on the morning of Wolfe's landing at the Foulon, 129-30;
  the Battle of the Plains, 131-8.

Montmorency river, 87;
  Wolfe repulsed at upper fords, 90-1;
  his camp at, 93, 99, 103.

Murray, General, with Wolfe at Quebec, 73, 108;
  in command in Quebec, 140;
  forced to retire at Ste Foy, 141-3.


Noailles, Marshal, French commander at Dettingen, 17.


Ochterloney, Captain, his gallant conduct on the battlefield, 96;
  is the cause of an exchange of courtesies between Wolfe
  and Montcalm, 97-8.


Pepperrell, Sir William, takes Louisbourg, 55.

Peyton, Lieutenant, his deadly combat while wounded at Quebec, 96-7.

Pitt, William, and the Seven Years' War, 50-1, 52, 53;
  and Wolfe, 54, 65-6;
  his Empire Year of 1759, 70-2.

Pointe-aux-Trembles, and the siege of Quebec, 108.

Pompadour, Marquise de, and Wolfe, 37-8.

Portsmouth, Wolfe at, 67, 75.


Quebec, 71-3; its defences, 87-9;
  siege of, 90-140;
  position of, 128;
  besieged by Lvis, 141-5.


Richmond, Duke of, and Wolfe, 37.

Rickson, Captain, and Wolfe's letters to, 29, 31, 69.

Robison, with Wolfe at Quebec, 121.

Rochefort, Wolfe learns value of combined action of army and
    fleet at, 53-4.

Roland, Wolfe's servant, 26-7.


Saguenay, the British fleet opposite the, 83.

St Vincent, Earl. See Jervis.

Ste Foy, battle of, 142-3.

Samos battery, spiked by British, 127.

Saunders, Admiral, 51, 53, 71;
  personnel of his fleet at Quebec, 74-7, 78, 82;
  and Wolfe's plans, 100, 103;
  by threatening a landing below Quebec he enables Wolfe to land
    at the Foulon, 117-18.

Scotland, Wolfe in, 28-32, 39-40;
  a French map of, 32.

Seven Years' War, the, 50.


Townshend, Charles, and Wolfe's letter to Pitt, 101-2.

Townshend, General, at Dettingen, 14;
  with Wolfe at Quebec, 73, 102, 122;
  receives the surrender of Quebec, 140.


Vaudreuil, Marquis de, and Montcalm, 86-7, 90, 112, 129, 130.

Vauquelin, Captain, his gallant rearguard action against British
    frigates, 144-5.

Vergor, commands post above the Foulon, 114;
  is surprised by the British, 127.


Warde, George, and Wolfe, 4, 7, 8, 11, 82.

Williamson, Colonel, with Wolfe at Quebec, 73.

Wolfe family, the, descendants of in Canada, 1.

Wolfe, Edward, joins his brother in Flanders, 12-13;
  at Dettingen, 14-16, 18-19;
  his death, 22.

Wolfe, General James, his ancestry, parentage, and birth, 1-3, 5, 8;
  when at school volunteers to serve in war against Spain, 4-8;
  receives his first commission as second lieutenant in Marines, 8-9;
  as ensign in 12th Foot, 9-11;
  joined by his brother in Flanders, 12;
  as adjutant at Dettingen, 14-16, 18-22;
  promoted to a captaincy in 4th Foot, 22; at Culloden, 24-5;
  as brigade-major wounded at Laffeldt, 25-7;
  as major of the 20th in Glasgow, 28-9;
  as lieutenant-colonel earns the name of 'the soldier's friend,' 30, 38-9;
  his love of sport, 32;
  his opinion of Irish women, 32-3;
  meets Philip Stanhope in Paris, 35;
  his daily life in Paris, 36-7;
  presented to Louis XV and Marquise de Pompadour, 37-8;
  back in Glasgow, 39-40;
  his love of dogs, 41-2;
  his place in the Seven Years' War, 50, 51;
  as senior staff officer at Rochefort, 53;
  comes under the notice of Pitt, 54;
  as brigadier-general under Amherst at Louisbourg, 55;
  at landing at Gabarus Bay, 58-60;
  silences guns on Goat Island, 61;
  an Imperial hero, 64-6;
  made full colonel of the 67th, 67;
  his choice of officers for the Quebec campaign, 68-9, 72-3;
  his departure from Portsmouth, 75;
  the regiments under his command, and their dress, 78-82;
  makes this will before leaving Louisbourg for Quebec, 82-3;
  his voyage to Quebec, 83-6;
  where he is confronted with a stiff problem, 86-9;
  occupies Levis Heights and is repulsed at the Montmorency fords, 90;
  his first combined attack on Quebec fails, 91-5;
  an exchange of courtesies with the French, 97-8;
  falls ill at Montmorency, 99;
  his brigadiers' plan of attack fails, 100-11, 113;
  his own plan by way of Wolfe's Cove, 111-21;
  on the eve of the Battle of the Plains, 122-3;
  the landing at Wolfe's Cove, 123-5;
  the assent of the Heights, 127-8;
  the Battle of the Plains, 133-9;
  his letters, 6-7, 20-2, 22-3, 29-30, 31-2, 34-5, 36-7, 39, 41,
    69, 100-1, 101-3, 110-11.

Wolfe, Major Walter, Wolfe's uncle in Dublin, 32, 39.

Wolfe's Cove, 111, 115, 125-6.


York, Captain, with his six-pounder at the Battle of the
    Plains, 135-6, 137.


_THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA_

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton of the University of
Toronto.

A series of thirty-two freshly-written narratives for popular reading,
designed to set forth, in historic continuity, the principal events
and movements in Canada, from the Norse Voyages to the Railway
Builders.

    *    *    *    *    *

PART I. THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

1. _The Dawn of Canadian History_
    A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
        BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

2. _The Mariner of St Malo_
    A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier
        BY STEPHEN LEACOCK


PART II. THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

3. _The Founder of New France_
    A Chronicle of Champlain
        BY CHARLES W. COLBY

4. _The Jesuit Missions_
    A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness
        BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

5. _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_
    A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism
        BY WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO

6. _The Great Intendant_
    A Chronicle of Jean Talon
        BY THOMAS CHAPAIS

7. _The Fighting Governor_
    A Chronicle of Frontenac
        BY CHARLES W. COLBY


PART III. THE ENGLISH INVASION

8. _The Great Fortress_
    A Chronicle of Louisbourg
        BY WILLIAM WOOD

9. _The Acadian Exiles_
    A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
        BY ARTHUR G. DOUGHTY

10. _The Passing of New France_
    A Chronicle of Montcalm
        BY WILLIAM WOOD

11. _The Winning of Canada_
    A Chronicle of Wolfe
        BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

12. _The Father of British Canada_
    A Chronicle of Carleton
        BY WILLIAM WOOD

13. _The United Empire Loyalists_
    A Chronicle of the Great Migration
        BY W. STEWART WALLACE

14. _The War with the United States_
    A Chronicle of 1812
        BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART V. THE RED MAN IN CANADA

15. _The War Chief of the Ottawas_
    A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
        BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

16. _The War Chief of the Six Nations_
    A Chronicle of Joseph Brant
        BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

17. _Tecumseh_
    A Chronicle of the last Great Leader of his People
        BY ETHEL T. RAYMOND


PART VI. PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

18. _The 'Adventurers of England' on Hudson Bay_
    A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North
        BY AGNES C. LAUT

19. _Pathfinders of the Great Plains_
    A Chronicle of La Vrendrye and his Sons
        BY LAWRENCE J. BURPEE

20. _Adventurers of the Far North_
    A Chronicle of the Arctic Seas
        BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

21. _The Red River Colony_
    A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba
        BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

22. Pioneers of the Pacific Coast
    A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters
        BY AGNES C. LAUT

23. _The Cariboo Trail_
    A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
        BY AGNES C. LAUT


PART VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

24. _The Family Compact_
    A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Upper Canada
        BY W. STEWART WALLACE

25. _The Patriotes of '37_
    A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lower Canada
        BY ALFRED D. DECELLES

26. _The Tribune of Nova Scotia_
    A Chronicle of Joseph Howe
        BY WILLIAM LAWSON GRANT

27. _The Winning of Popular Government_
    A Chronicle of the Union of 1841
        BY ARCHIBALD MACMECHAN


PART VIII. THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

28. _The Fathers of Confederation_
    A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion
        BY A. H. U. COLQUHOUN

29. _The Day of Sir John Macdonald_
    A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Dominion
        BY SIR JOSEPH POPE

30. _The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier_
    A Chronicle of Our Own Times
        BY OSCAR D. SKELTON


PART IX. NATIONAL HIGHWAYS

31. _All Afloat_
    A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
        BY WILLIAM WOOD

32. _The Railway Builders_
    A Chronicle of Overland Highways
        BY OSCAR D. SKELTON


Published by
Glasgow, Brook & Company

TORONTO, CANADA



[End of _The Winning of Canada_ by William Wood]
