Death or Victory Page 23
Wolfe made no attempt to disguise the nature and purpose of the attack. He regarded terror as an entirely appropriate weapon for this war. On setting out upon the campaign he had assured Amherst that, even if he failed to capture Quebec, ‘trust me, they shall feel us’.11 The French, their settlers, and Native allies were to be punished. The year before he had written another chilling letter to Amherst, then his commander during the siege of Louisbourg, saying that when ‘the French are in a scrape, they are ready to cry out on behalf of the human species; when fortune favours them, none more bloody, more inhuman’. He believed that ‘Montcalm has changed the very nature of war, and has forced us, in some measure, to a deterring and dreadful vengeance.’12 Wolfe wrote around the same time, in similar terms, to a friend and patron justifying the bombardment of Louisbourg on the grounds that ‘the American war was different from all others’. The French had ‘thought fit to establish’ a type of combat that was in defiance of civilized norms. Thanks to the ‘unheard of, and unprecedented, barbarities exercised by the French, Canadians and Indians, upon such of our people as had the misfortune to fall into their hands’, Wolfe regarded the destruction of their capital as straight revenge, punishment for the scalping, abductions, and murder that had terrorized the British American frontier for years. Under Wolfe’s command were men who had served at Monongahela where prisoners were burnt alive and even eaten, or at Fort William Henry where even the dead had been dug up to be scalped. As a result they were every bit as cold blooded as their commander. In the same letter Wolfe says that he was ‘extremely sorry’ that Louisbourg surrendered because if the town had been assaulted by British troops, ‘we might at one blow [have given] the troops the revenge they wished for’.13
Even the most hardened and unflinching enemy of New France would have been satiated by the avalanche of destruction that now engulfed its capital. Starting on the evening of 12 July the guns were hardly ever completely silent for the rest of the summer. Day and night the batteries pounded the city. Wolfe added to them until thirty-nine guns and mortars were hurling death and destruction into the town.14 By the middle of August British gunners were rearranging the rubble of what had been the finest town in North America. Quebec, like all towns and cities, always struggled with fire. Tightly packed buildings and high winds had regularly led to devastating blazes that swept through the Lower Town in particular. As a result successive governors had attempted to ban wood buildings and insist on ‘fire-walls’ that separated each house from its neighbour. These jutted up a yard beyond the roofline and still give Quebec’s terraced houses their unmistakable shape. Cheap wood-shingle roofs were banned and expensive imported French slate encouraged. Heavy wooden planks were tolerated, although flammable, at least they would not catch fire and fly around in the wind as the shingles had done. In theory, all houses were supposed to have a stone floor in their attic, so that the house might be saved if the roof burnt; many did although this was obviously hardest to police.
The British were ingenious in their destruction. Incendiary devices would start fires that the gunners would then target with their cannonballs to stop the townspeople dousing the flames before they could get out of control. On several occasions firestorms swept through the city. The bombardment differed widely in intensity. In the heat of action as two ships of the line pounded each other to destruction a gun crew could fire one shot in just over a minute, but this soon placed the barrel under extreme pressure and continuing that rate of fire for longer than a few minutes risked the gun itself blowing up. As a result the bombardment would oscillate between a few lazy shots a day and great crescendos of fire. At the siege of Havana three years later a British officer was impressed by the sailors:
our sea folks began a new kind of fire, unknown, or at all events, unpractised by artillery people. The greatest fire from one piece of cannon is reckoned by them from eighty to ninety times in twenty-four hours; but our people went on the sea system, firing extremely quick, and with the best direction ever seen, and in sixteen hours fired their guns one hundred and forty five times.15
Rarely would the British batteries in Quebec have fired with that intensity. The greatest brake on the bombardment there was not the tolerance of the gun barrels. It was the consumption of powder, shot, and shell, all of which had to be rowed in from the ships anchored in the river, while resupplying the ships meant a long and hazardous journey from Britain or her American colonies.
Thousands of men and women around the basin of Quebec watched the destruction in awe. The unofficial chronicler of the Highlanders, Iain Campbell, provides a glimpse of what the soldiers must have seen night after night: ‘With bombs detonating/ and with huge explosions/ setting fire to every wall/ in that fair city;/ it was difficult to look upon,/ let alone relate again,/ the dead in their slumber/ being thrown up into the air.’16
By 15 July Panet says that the Lower Town was ‘riddled with cannon shots’ and the church of Notre Dame des Victoires had received ‘several cannonballs’.17 Récher wrote that one of his parishioners, an elderly and infirm woman, was killed. ‘She had,’ he noted, ‘been to confession, fortunately, the day before.’18 On 16 July a French source records that the Point Lévis battery, ’which had not hitherto very considerably damaged the town, was now productive of prodigious destruction. Several houses fell down, and the fire which caught in the centre of the town entirely consumed five or six of the finest houses in it—the enemy strove to augment this fire, by redoubling the discharges from their battery.’ Three thousand bushels of flour were lost and ‘several persons crushed this day by the bursting of shells’.19 The following day Panet reported that ‘Collet, a merchant, officer of the battery of M. Parent, which is in front of his house, was killed by a cannonball, as well as Gauvreau, a cooper. One named Pouliot, from Ste. Foye, was hit by a bomb that annihilated him. Two men were hurt.’20 Alongside the guns already firing, sweating pioneers were digging out new trenches for more weapons. While the batteries on Point Lévis were wreaking havoc in Quebec the bomb ketches, anchored in the river, had not been a success. Wolfe, obviously, blamed this on the timidity of the crews. His journal for 12 July says, ‘the Bomb Ketches who were to have joined their fire would not be induced to go near enough for the purpose: so that their fire ceased immediately’. Wolfe clearly complained about this publicly because it also records that ‘the Admiral displeased with me for speaking harshly upon the subject of the irregularities committed by the seamen’.21 In fact, hitting a target from a tossing bomb vessel was very difficult. Mortars were fired at a high trajectory but that did mean they had to be fairly close to their target. It may have been that enemy gunboats were too threatening to go close enough to the city to make their fire tell. A French journal records that the British bomb ketches ‘were unable to reach so far; and not daring to approach any nearer, ceased to fire and retired’.22 However, the real culprit was almost definitely the limitations of the ships and difficult conditions. The rigging restricted the field of fire; the mortar could only fire at targets which were at right angles to the direction of the ship, sending its bomb up between the two masts. This meant anchoring the ship across the tide which would have buffeted it around and made a mockery of any attempts to keep the ship stable and direct its fire accurately. Wolfe’s engineer Mackellar is more generous than his boss: in his journal he records that a ketch, ‘could not lay her broadside to the town for the strength of the current’, it was decided that they should be ‘employed by land’.23
Any guns that were situated on stable, if muddy, ground found the target presented by the town was too good to imagine. Quebec’s founders had looked upon Point Lévis as a view, not a threat. The magnificent palaces and religious buildings all offered themselves up for destruction. The first ‘considerable’ fire on 22 July was, according to Mackellar, started by a carcass and it ‘burnt the Cathedral and ten or twelve good houses in the neighbourhood’.24 The French accounts are more emotive; to one diarist the night ’was made memorable by the horro
rs of a prodigious number of bombs, which fell in the town, and set it on fire in two or three different places; there was no possibility of extinguishing the flames, the conflagration soon became dreadful, burnt all the centre of the town, and entirely consumed the cathedral’.25 Marguerite Gosselin had fled from her farm on the Île d’Orléans where she had raised sixteen children. She was now a refugee living in the woods to the north of Quebec. There she received some terrible news. ‘What sorrow!’ she wrote. ‘My son Joseph is dead. He was only 22.’ Her son had been killed during the bombardment ‘when he tried to rescue an old lady who refused to leave her house’. ‘My heart is heavy when I look at my other children, sleeping around me, so far from our home.’26
Notre Dame de Quebec was seat of the diocese of Quebec, the oldest see in the New World north of Mexico. It was built in the 1630s and was the first Roman Catholic cathedral in North America. It was ‘entirely consumed’ according to the log of the Stirling Castle, which like all the other ships’ logs kept a careful note of the nightly devastation.27 The cathedral’s stone walls remained standing but now without windows, doors, or a roof, like an ancient ruin. Until hours before it had been the thriving heart of Canadian spiritual life. Many of its treasures, collected over a century, were lost. Some survived: a magnificent model of a French frigate, the Brézé, had been donated by a French soldier, de Tracy, as an ex-voto, fulfilling a promise he had made God if He delivered him and his crew from a particularly rough crossing. It was suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral. A British cannonball sent it crashing to the floor where the pieces were scooped up and preserved by a monk.
Nearby, at the Ursuline Convent, the chapel with its two naves, one for the nuns and their young novices, the other for members of the public, both of which could see the priest in the pulpit but not each other, contained magnificent wood-carved ornamentation. This was made by colonial craftsmen at the beginning of the eighteenth century in a spirited attempt to imitate high baroque style. St Joseph and the Christ child gazed down on the congregation while the altar had an image of the sacred heart and was surrounded by relics. During the bombardment the chapel lost its roof and had holes punched in the sturdy walls yet somehow the carvings survived. The nuns fled to the General Hospital, a convent situated half a mile outside the city walls to the west, where one sister who kept a diary commented that the cannons fired ‘in a manner to excite the greatest alarm in our unfortunate Communities of religious ladies’. The Ursulines were not the only ones who flooded west. She writes that ‘as our house was beyond the range of the enemy’s artillery, the poor people of the city did not fail to seek refuge there. All the out-houses, stables, barns, garrets, etc. were well filled.’28
The nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu took shelter in the strong vaulted cellars under the convent where they prayed around makeshift altars that are still down there today. Other Quebecers were less pious. One journal recounts that, ‘during these disasters, the persons who were left in the town for the defence, became, for the most part, robbers; no sooner had the bursting of a bomb shattered the doors or windows of a house during the night, than it was pillaged and stripped’. The authorities forbade plunder on pain of death and ‘to strike greater terror by menace, than reality, a double gibbet was erected near the ramparts’.29 A few days later, on the twenty-sixth, a sailor manning the cannon batteries was hanged for looting. On the thirtieth Récher describes ‘two soldiers…one of them 20 the other 16, who stole a barrel of eau de vie from a cellar and rolled it from St Roch’. They bottled and sold it. ‘They were discovered at 6 in the morning. Prosecuted at 10. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon they are hanged.’30
Falling bombs destroyed huge numbers of houses and killed and wounded ‘many persons’ as fires spread throughout the packed dwellings. One added consequence ‘of the devastation of the fire and the continual falling of the bombs’ was that ‘all the ovens in the town ceased to bake; and people were obliged to eat only biscuit, till ovens could be built in the suburbs’.31
The fires started on the night of 22 July carried on for ‘all the next day’ in the words of a watching British sergeant.32 Three bells in a parish church melted so intense was the heat.33 As usual the British did everything they could to stop the French dousing the flames. One journal reports that ‘much terror was caused by the large number of bombs which the enemy threw to prevent the extinguishment of the fire’.34 During these ‘terrible’ nights up to six bombs would rain down on the city at once. Another French diarist wrote that the population was ‘astonished’ at ‘so very harsh [a bombardment] pursued against inanimate objects’. No one could understand why Wolfe was ‘acting so contrary to the ordinary uses of war’.35
There was no let-up. The night of 8/9 August witnessed an unimaginable fire in the Lower Town. Panet wrote that it was ‘fateful for me and for many others’.36 The Dauphin Battery, a hundred yards north of the Royal Battery, took a direct hit. A British eyewitness says that this ‘blew up their magazine, platforms, and burnt with such violence that some of the garrison were obliged to get into boats to save themselves from the flames’.37 The rest of the Lower Town was totally consumed in a fire that, according to a French diarist, ‘destroyed the greater part of it, as well as the Dauphin Battery. The fire lasted about 80 hours, without our being able to extinguish it.’38 According to Mackellar, ‘by eight o’clock [p.m. on 9 August] it was burnt to ashes, all but four or five houses’.39 French sources say that no less than ‘152 houses were reduced to ashes there’ and that many of them belonged to ‘persons heretofore accounted very rich’ who now had their ‘whole property reduced to ashes’.40 Among the victims was Panet, whose house in the Lower Town took a direct hit from a carcass and was totally destroyed. ‘In vain did we try,’ he wrote, ‘to cut off and put out the fire at my house, when there came a small wind from the northeast, and soon the lower-city was nothing more than an inferno’.41
Knox heard that it was begun by a British shell that ‘forced its way into a vaulted cellar, hitherto deemed bomb proof’. As a result of this false designation the French had packed the cellar with brandy and ‘several smaller casks of other spirituous liquors’.42 The British saw the fire catch and redoubled their efforts to stop the French putting it out. The flames ‘attained to such a height that there was no possibility of putting a stop to its progress; no sooner had the flames broke out in any place than the troops retired from it’. The heart had been ripped out of Quebec, the Governor General’s palace, the Bishop’s palace, the cathedral, even more worryingly for the superstitious Quebecers, the church of Notre Dame des Victoires, all lay in ruins.43 By early September Saunders could report to Pitt that ‘the town of Quebec is not habitable, being almost entirely burnt and destroyed’.44
Surviving British accounts exude satisfaction at a job well done. One journal blamed this ‘dismal consequence to Quebec, the pride of America, who now sits mourning in ashes’ on the ‘delusive hopes of her aspiring monarch’.45 Not one diary or letter mentions the people of Quebec; instead the entire bombardment is treated as a technical exercise. After the August fire, the chief artilleryman, Colonel Williamson, reported to London that ‘about 300 of their homes are burned down…among which is almost all of the eastern part of the lower town which makes a wretched appearance indeed’. His batteries ‘have done infinite damage to the houses remaining many of them are in a tottering condition and more which cannot be repaired’.46 In a neat calculation of the expenditure and the remaining supplies of ammunition Williamson drew up on 18 August 1759 he records that the thirty-two-pound guns in the Lévis batteries had fired 1,589 cannonballs, and the mortars had fired 2,326 thirteen-inch shells and 1,590 ten-inch shells. Two hundred and ninety destructive thirteen-inch carcasses had been fired at the town and 125 of a ten-inch variety. In the column for supplies he scribbled ‘nil’. There were no carcasses left, but had they known it would have given the French little cause to cheer; across the river there was nothing left for them to burn.47 The people of Quebec had
moved to suburbs or nearby woodland, packed together in lean-to shelters. A few people lived among the ruins of the town, sleeping in basements surrounded by grotesque, mangled masonry.
The vehemence of the bombardment and the satisfaction that British officers took from it were closely linked to their frustrations elsewhere. As the days passed they were no closer to landing in a place which would threaten to capture the town and thus force Montcalm’s army to fight them. Wolfe remained fixated by a frontal attack on the Beauport shore. He would bludgeon his way onto the beach in the teeth of opposition from Montcalm’s waiting forces. On 16 July he wrote to Monckton telling him to prepare his men to take to some hurriedly constructed rafts, unless they were ‘defective’. In which case ‘we must make the best shift we can, with the long boats of the fleet’. Despite the strength of the enemy entrenchments he was confident that heavy fire from the British cannon ‘will make the enterprise easy’.48 Yet again the grenadiers of the various regiments would be massed together and used as shock troops. Wolfe ordered that ‘the six Grenadier companies of the line are to be at the water side tonight at 9 O’clock with all their baggage’; a staff officer would ‘attend on the opposite shore and provide them with carts’.49