Death or Victory Page 40
Wolfe’s restless energy returned. The following day he dragged all the key officers along the river to see his new suggested landing place. They were accompanied by an escort from Knox’s own regiment, the 43rd. Mackellar reports that ‘the General took with him Admiral Holmes, Brigadier Generals Monckton and Townshend, with some other officers, to reconnoitre the place he had fixed upon’. Among the other officers, as well as Mackellar were Colonel Howe, commander of the light infantry, and Captain Chads of the Vesuvius, who was the naval officer given the job of coordinating all the landing craft. They landed on the south side of the river at a place they had named Gorham’s Post just below where the Etchemin River flowed into the St Lawrence. The group stood on a rise and stared across at the north bank. It was, and still is, an imposing sight. The shoreline is ‘steep and woody’; in certain parts the topsoil has been unable to cling to the almost sheer slopes and patches of bare rock break up the otherwise uniform spread of trees. A mile and a half downriver from Foulon the smoking ruins of the Lower Town were just visible on the headland. Mackellar records that at Foulon itself the route up to the heights ‘was thought so impracticable by the French themselves that they had only a single picket to defend it’. They guessed it was about a hundred men strong and they were camped ‘near the top of a narrow winding path, which runs up from the shore’. Mackellar agreed with his commander’s choice, ‘the circumstances in conjunction with the distance of the place from succours seemed to promise a fair chance of success’.83
Holmes was less impressed. Later he wrote a letter saying that this ‘alteration of the plan of operations was not I believe approved of by many, beside [Wolfe]’. Foulon was ‘a very strong ground’ with a steep slope, supplemented by a guard and an abatis. Wolfe ‘thought that a sudden brisk attack, a little before day break’, would overcome these difficulties and take his army up onto the plain above. Holmes was surprised that such a plan had been rejected in July when the area was undefended, only to be resurrected now when the French were waiting and considered it as ‘highly improbable he should succeed’. Holmes believed it to be an act of desperation, he understood that ‘the season was far spent, and it was necessary to strike some stroke’.84
The cabal of senior officers all peering at the opposite shore through telescopes was a very obvious signal to an observer that something important was brewing in that sector. Wolfe had thought of this and tried to disguise the group in ‘grenadier’s coats’ borrowed from the 43rd Regiment. His dissimulation was not entirely successful. Rémigny, an efficient French officer at Sillery, spotted the British officers. He reported to Bougainville that ‘yesterday at three in the afternoon three barges landed on the shore’. The sharp-eyed Rémigny spotted that one of the men was wearing a uniform ‘under a blue overcoat [which] was heavily decorated’. It could well have been Townshend wearing his militia uniform of which he was so proud. Rémigny reported that the men waited until the flood tide when they embarked and headed back up the river.85 This information was either lost or ignored. It was yet more activity to be added to the bewildering intelligence picture that the French were struggling to piece together. No extra units were sent to Foulon or Sillery. Instead, Bougainville’s men continued to shadow Wolfe’s fleet as it moved with the tide. They had no choice but to wait.
The same day as his reconnoitre, Wolfe wrote to his confidant and friend Lieutenant Colonel Burton, who was in command at the Lévis camp. He described how he had been forced to land many of his troops to relieve pressure on his crowded ships, saying that his army ‘must have perished if they had continued forty eight hours longer on board’. He then laid out the plan. The fleet would sail upriver ‘as if intending to land above upon the north shore’ but all the while ‘keeping a convenient distance for the boats and armed vessels to fall down to the Foulon’. He urged Burton to be ‘careful not to drop it [the plan] to any, for fear of desertion’. He also mused on the state of the enemy force. French deserters were telling him that bread was being made from this year’s wheat, which meant that ‘scarcity in the colony’ was ‘excessive’. ‘Their army,’ Wolfe believed, ‘is kept together by the violent strong hand of the government and by the terror of savages, joined to a situation which makes it difficult to evade. The Canadians have neither affection for their government, nor no tie so strong as their wives and children; they are a disjointed, discontented, dispirited peasantry, beat into cowardice’ by their leaders. Returning to the subject of the landings Wolfe hoped that they ‘may produce an action, which may produce the total conquest of Canada; in all cases it is our duty to try the most likely way, whatever may be the event’.86
Wolfe began drawing up the detailed plans. He fixed on dawn of 13 September for the attack. On 11 September the troops on the south shore, drying off and resting, were told to stand by to re-embark. They were to ‘hold themselves in readiness to land and attack the enemy’.87 Obviously, no more information was given to the men. They would have no idea where the attack was to be launched until they were delivered there in flat-bottomed boats. Rather more unorthodox was Wolfe’s refusal to take even his brigadiers into his full confidence, despite outlining his thinking to Burton. On 12 September only hours before the start of the operation Monckton, Townshend, and Murray wrote a letter to their commander. In it these ‘obedient, humble servants’ told Wolfe that ‘we do not think ourselves sufficiently informed of the several parts which may fall to our share in the execution of the descent you intend tomorrow’. They begged him to issue ‘as distinct orders as the nature of the thing will admit of, particularly to the place or places we are to attack’. They would be ‘very sorry no less for the public, than our own sakes, to commit any mistakes’. The scale of the breakdown in their relationship with their commander is illustrated by the fact that they are forced to assure him that ‘we are persuaded you will see the necessity of this application which can proceed from nothing but a desire to execute your orders with the utmost punctuality’.88
Wolfe’s reply was curt and addressed only to Monckton. ‘My reason for desiring the honour of your company with me to Gorham’s Post yesterday,’ he wrote, ‘was to show you, as well as the distance would permit, the situation of the enemy, and the place where I meant they should be attacked.’ ‘The place is called Foulon,’ he continued, ‘distant upon 2 miles or 21/2 from Quebec, where you remember an encampment of 12 or 13 tents and an abatis below it.’ He then quickly sketched out the plan: ‘I have desired Mr Holmes to send the boats down, so that we may arrive about half an hour before day, as you desired to avoid the disorder of a night attack.’ Wolfe did not let the imminence of the decisive clash of his entire career stop him from having a dig at his subordinates. ‘It is not a usual thing to point out in the public orders the direct spot of our attack, nor for any inferior officers not charged with a particular duty to ask instructions upon that point.’ The letter came to a haughty end:
I had the honour to inform you today that is my duty to attack the French army. To the best of my knowledge and abilities I have fixed upon that spot where we can act with the most force, and are most likely to succeed. If I am mistaken, I am sorry for it, and must be
answerable to His Majesty and the public for the consequence.89
Townshend got the briefest of notes from his commander: ‘General Monckton is charged with the first landing and attack at the Foulon, if he succeeds you will be pleased to give directions that the troops afloat be set on shore with the utmost expedition.’ Wolfe finished by saying that, ‘I have no manner of doubt but that we are able to fight and to beat the French army, in which I know you will give your best assistance.’90 Murray, the junior brigadier and, in the opinion of Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’, senior troublemaker, was not sent a letter at all. Both letters end with the formal, ‘I have the honour to be, Sir, etc, James Wolfe.’ His note to Burton ended with the altogether more intimate, ‘Yours affectionately.’
The indiscreet ‘Family Journal’ sheds more light on these strained relati
ons. It recounts that ‘orders were given to prepare for landing and attacking the enemy, when Mr Wolfe received a letter signed by each of the brigadiers, setting forth that they did not know where they were to land and attack the enemy’. On the morning of 12 September Monckton arrived on the Sutherland for a meeting with Wolfe, after which the commander told his close staff that ‘the brigadiers had brought him up the river and now flinched. He did not hesitate to say that two of them were cowards and one a villain.’91
Wolfe had to deal with yet another concerned subordinate in these last few hours before the attack began. The ‘Regulating Captain’ of the boats, the man responsible for the coordination of the large flotilla of little vessels, Captain Chads, suddenly appeared in his cabin with serious reservations. He was worried that ‘the heat of the tide would hurry the boats beyond the object’. Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’, with its entrenched hostility to all sailors, called Chads’ objections ‘frivolous’. Wolfe and his staff assumed ‘someone had tampered with him’. Wolfe assured Chads that ‘he should have made his objection earlier, that should the disembarkation miscarry, that he would shelter him from any blame, that all that could be done was to do his utmost’. Chads was still nervous. Wolfe’s patience frayed and he told him that he ‘would write any thing to testify that the miscarriage was General Wolfe’s and not Captain Chads’ and that he would sign it’. None of this seemed to convince the naval officer: ‘Chads persisted in his absurdity; the general told him he could do no more than lay his head to the block to save Chad and left the cabin.’ Such was Wolfe’s paranoia that he now saw a conspiracy lurking in the perfectly reasonable concerns of a naval officer. Events were to prove that Chads’ worries were not as ‘frivolous’ or ‘absurd’ as Wolfe and his staff considered them.92
As throughout the campaign no mention of their generals’ bickering appears in any account of it written by the officers and men who served under them. In blissful ignorance, the troops started to re-embark on the morning of 12 September. It immediately became clear that they would be involved in a last throw to seize victory after a long summer of disappointment. Knox reports in his journal that ‘great preparations are making throughout the fleet and army, to surprise the enemy, and compel them to decide the fate of Quebec by a battle’.93
A few people were a good deal less bullish than the enthusiastic Knox. One man reported that ‘by this day’s orders it appears the General intends a most vigorous attack, supposed behind the town, where to appearance a landing is impracticable’.94 The men would have had plenty of time to look at the north shore, from the south side of the river and from their various trips up and down the river by boat and ship. They were obviously not hugely encouraged by what they had seen. John Johnson reported that ‘it was verily believed at the time, that no man, except the General Officers, or the Superior Officers of the regiments, had the least intimation of the duty we were going upon; although everyone believed it to be some very hazardous undertaking’.95
It was all too much for one Royal American who deserted during the twelfth. This could have been catastrophic had the landing place been widely circulated through the army. But he absconded, as Townshend wrote in his journal, ‘before orders were given out to the men’.96 This was lucky for the British, although one also suspects that after a summer which had seen deserters bringing information of a multitude of definite attacks that failed to happen the French would be rather jaded in their receipt of another such message. Either way the deserter did not compromise the secrecy to the operation.
Wolfe’s inability to communicate with his senior officers was not reflected in his dealings with the mass of men in his army. During the afternoon of 12 September he delivered a short, upbeat, and quietly inspiring general order. He started by outlining the strategic picture. He told them of the miserable condition of the enemy, how they were ‘now divided’ and suffering from a ‘great scarcity of provisions in their camp and universal discontent among the Canadians’. He encouraged the belief that Amherst was on his way to help and told them that ‘a vigorous blow struck by the army at this juncture may determine the fall of Canada’. Like all great pre-battle exhortations Wolfe moves from the strategic to the tactical. He assured the men that they had the troops, artillery, and support to do the job: ‘Our troops below are in readiness to join us. All the Light Artillery and tools are embarked at the Point of Levy, and the troops will land where the French seem least to expect them.’ Technical advice followed. The first wave, as soon as it landed, was to ‘march directly to the enemy, and drive them from any little post they may occupy’. Officers should look out that their soldiers did not fire on other British units while the light was low and the tension high. When all the supplies were landed Wolfe would endeavour ‘to bring the French and Canadians to a battle’. In this event ‘the officers and men will remember what their country expects from them, and what a determined body of soldiers, inured to war are capable of doing against five very weak French battalions, mingled in with a disorderly peasantry’. His final advice to the soldiers was to be ‘attentive to their officers and resolute in the execution of their duty’.97
The order inspired John Johnson. Hearing these ‘tender and expressive terms’ about ‘the nature of the undertaking, as well as the dangers and difficulties attending it; as also what it was our country expected from us’, Johnson was certain that it was ‘sufficient to inspire the most frozen constitution with a thirst for glory, and with a fervent desire to be a partaker in the event’.98
Many of the men were no doubt less moved than Johnson, but the majority of the army were keen to strike a blow against the French. These men had been in and out of flat-bottomed boats all summer for a series of attacks, feints, raids, and aborted missions. New flints were fitted to the firing mechanism of their muskets. The sharper the edge of the flint, the better the chance of creating the all-important spark that would ignite the gunpowder. There were plenty of tasks to keep nervous hands and minds off the prospect of battle. Malcolm Fraser wrote that ‘we were busied in cleaning our arms and distributing ammunition to our men’.99 Muskets were burnished until they shone. Men mixed brick dust with sweet oil and then polished any patches of corrosion that had appeared in the damp conditions. They took great pains not to drizzle any oil into the touch-hole, which had to remain free from any obstruction. Then they worked the barrel with a series of wet and dry rags. Eighteenth-century soldiers had such affection for buffing the barrel that they thinned the metal and often dangerously weakened it. Men adjusted the straps holding their cartridge boxes in position and cleaned their long bayonets. Everyone was given two days’ worth of ammunition, food, and rum. This meant they were carrying about seventy rounds; each one consisted of a paper cartridge containing powder and a musket ball. Rum was poured into the men’s canteens, which were then topped up with water. No blankets or tents were to be brought onto the packed flat-bottomed boats. They would follow later on the transports.
After nightfall Colonel Howe summoned all eight gentlemen volunteers in the light infantry. Fitz-Gerald, Robertson, Stewart, McAllester, Mackenzie, MacPherson, Cameron, and Bell duly reported to their commander. He told them, in the words of one witness, that ‘the General intends that a few men may land before the light infantry and army, and scramble up the rock’. It was a dangerous mission but ‘if any of us survived, [we] might depend on our being recommended to the General’. Promotion was the common reward for demonstrating suicidal bravery in situations like this. The volunteers replied that they ‘were sensible of the honour he did, in making us the first offer of an affair of such importance as our landing first, where an opportunity occurred to distinguish ourselves, assuring him his agreeable order would be put in execution with the greatest activity, care and vigour in our power’. Each of them was to take two men ‘of our own choice from the three companies of light infantry which in all made 24 men’.100
At last light the French sentries saw the British fleet heading west, away from Quebec. Wolf
e’s ‘Family Journal’ explains that ‘the ships moved up the river…to draw their enemy’s attention upriver’.101 Wolfe wanted Bougainville to believe that the target of any landing would be Cap Rouge or Pointe aux Trembles.
At 2100 hours, near high water, the British soldiers started the laborious process of getting into the boats. Just before sunset there had been a burst of activity below the town as Saunders launched every longboat he had and filled them with seamen, marines, and any spare troops that could be found from the two camps in the Quebec basin. During the day six buoys had been laid off Beauport as if an attack was imminent. Cook wrote in his log that there was a sharp skirmish as the French tried to cut the buoys away and the Richmond fought them off. Knox explained that the boatloads of troops below Quebec were to make ‘a feint of Beauport…and engross the attention of the Sieur de Montcalm, while the army are to force a descent on this side of the town’.102 The French remained bewildered. Récher reports that these moves convinced Quebecers: ‘everyone expects that they are coming for the town,’ he wrote.103 Montcalm admitted in his journal that ‘buoys are worrying us’. He had spent the whole day on the twelfth closely inspecting his entrenchments at Beauport, which even he now considered ‘invincible’.104 Vaudreuil wrote a letter to Lévis on the twelfth containing details of all the confusing activity above and below Quebec with ships and boats moving seemingly at random. He concluded: ‘I foresee in every way possible that General Wolfe will fail if he attempts to try us before he leaves.’105