FROM 1756 TO 1763

How stand both sides at the opening of the year 1756, on the verge of the Seven Years’ War, the struggle for a continent?

There has been open war for more than a year, but war is not formally declared till May 18, 1756.

Take Acadia first.

The French have been expelled. The infamous Le Loutre is still in prison in England, and when he is released, in 1763, he toils till his death, in 1773, trying to settle the Acadian refugees on some of the French islands of the English Channel. The smiling farms of Grand Pre and Port Royal lie a howling waste. Only a small English garrison holds Annapolis, where long ago Marc L’Escarbot and Champlain held happy revel; and the seat of government has been transferred to Halifax, now a settlement and fort of some five thousand people. So much for the English. Across a narrow arm of the sea is Isle Royal or Cape Breton, where the French are intrenched as at a second Gibraltar in the fortress of Louisburg. Since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the fort to the French, millions have been spent strengthening its walls, adding to the armaments; but Intendant Bigot has had charge of the funds, and Intendant Bigot has a sponge-like quality of absorbing all funds that flow through his hands. Cannon have been added, but there are not enough balls to go round. The walls have been repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet plaster.

Take the Ohio next.

“Beautiful River” is the highway between New France and Louisiana. By Braddock’s defeat the English have been driven out to a man. Matters are a thousandfold worse than before, for the savage allies of the French now swarm down the bush road cut by Braddock’s army and carry bloody havoc to all the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. How many pioneers perished in this border war will never be known. It is a tale by itself, and its story is not part of Canada’s history. George Washington was the officer in charge of a thousand bushfighters to guard this frontier.

Take the valley of Lake Champlain.

This is the highway of approach to Montreal north, to Albany south. Johnson had defeated Dieskau here, but neither side was strong enough to advance from the scene of battle into the territory of the enemy. The English take possession of Lake George and intrench themselves at the south end in Fort William Henry. Sir William Johnson strings a line of forts up the Mohawk River towards Oswego on Lake Ontario, and he keeps his forest rangers, under the famous scout Major Robert Rogers, scouring the forest and mountain trails of Lake Champlain for French marauder and news of what the French are doing. Rogers’ Rangers, too, are a story by themselves, but a story which does not concern Canada. Skating and snowshoeing by winter, canoeing by night in summer, Rogers passed and repassed the enemy’s lines times without number, as if his life were charmed, though once his wrist was shot when he had nothing to stanch the blood but the ribbon tying his wig, and once he stumbled back exhausted to Fort William Henry, to lie raging with smallpox for the winter. Among the forest rangers of New Hampshire and New York, Major Robert Rogers was without a peer. No danger was too great, no feat too daring, for his band of scouts. The English have established Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake George. The French checkmate the move by strengthening Crown Point on Lake Champlain and moving a pace farther south into English territory, to Carillon, where the waters of Lake George pour into Champlain. Here on a high angle between the river and the lake, commanding all travel north and south, the French build Carillon or Fort Ticonderoga.

If the disasters of 1755 did nothing more, they at last stirred the home governments to action. Earl Loudon is sent out in 1756 to command the English, and to New France in May comes Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, age forty-four, soldier, scholar, country gentleman, with a staff composed of Chevalier de Levis, Bourlamaque, and one Bougainville, to become famous as a navigator.

Though New France consists of a good three quarters of America, things are in evil plight that causes Montcalm many sleepless nights. Vaudreuil, the French governor, descendant of that Vaudreuil who long ago set the curse of Indian warfare on the borders of New England, had expected to be appointed chief commander of the troops and jealously resents Montcalm’s coming. With the Governor is leagued Intendant Bigot, come up from Louisburg. Bigot is a man of sixty, of noble birth, a favorite of the butterfly woman who rules the King of France, the Pompadour, and he has come to New France to mend his fortunes. How he planned to do it one may guess from his career at Louisburg; but Quebec offered better field, and it was to Bigot’s interest to ply Montcalm and Vaudreuil with such tittle-tattle of enmity as would foment jealousy, keep their attention on each other, and their eyes off his own doings. As he had done at Louisburg, so he now did at Quebec. The King was requisitioned for enormous sums to strengthen the fort. Bigot’s ring of friends acted as contractors. The outlay was enormous, the results trifling. “I think,” complained the King, “that Quebec must be fortified in gold, it has cost so much.” It was time of war. Enormous sums were to be expended for presents to keep the Indians loyal; and the King complains that he cannot understand how baubles of beads and powderhorns cost so much, or how the western tribes seem to become more and more numerous, or how the French officers, who distribute the presents, become millionaires in a few years. A friend of Bigot’s handled these funds. There are meat contracts for the army. A worthless, lowbred scamp is named commissary general. He handles these contracts, and he, too, swiftly graduates into the millionaire class, is hail-fellow well met with Bigot, drinks deep at the Intendant’s table, and gambles away as much as $40,000 in a single night. It is time of war, and it is time of famine too; for the crops have failed. Every inhabitant between the ages of fifteen and fifty has been drafted into the army. Not counting Indians, there is an army of fifteen to twenty thousand to be fed; so Bigot compels the habitants to sell him provisions at a low price. These provisions he resells to the King for the army and to the citizens at famine prices. The King’s warehouse down by the Intendant’s palace becomes known as La Friponne, The Cheat.

And though the country is on verge of ruin, though poor people of the three towns are rioting in the streets for food, old women cursing the little wizened Intendant with his pimpled face as he rolls past resplendent in carriage with horses whose harness is a blaze of silver, the troops threatening to mutiny because they are compelled to use horse flesh, though New France is hovering over a volcano of disaster, they dance to their death, thoughtless as butterflies, gay as children, these manikin imitators of the French court, who are ruining New France that they may copy the vices of an Old World playing at kingcraft. The regular troops are uniformed in white with facings of blue and red and gold and violet, three-cornered hat, and leather leggings to knee. What with chapel bells ringing and ringing, and bugle call and counter call echoing back from Cape Diamond; what with Monsieur Bigot’s prancing horses and Madame Pean’s flashy carriage, Madame Pean of whom Bigot is so enamored he has sent her husband to some far western post and passes each evening at her gay receptions, what with the grounding of the sentry’s arms and the parade of troops, Quebec is a gay place these years of black ruin, and the gossips have all they can do to keep track of the amours and the duels and the high personages cultivating Madame Pean; for cultivated she must be by all who covet place or power. A word from Madame Pean to Bigot is of more value than a bribe. Even Montcalm and De Levis attend her revels.

Twenty people sup with Monsieur Bigot each night, either at the Intendant’s palace down by Charles River, or nine miles out towards Beauport, where he has built himself the Forest Hermitage, now known as Chateau Bigot, a magnificent country manor house of red brick, hidden away among the hills with the gay shrubberies of French gardens set down in an American wilderness. Supper over by seven, the guests sit down to play, and the amount a man may gamble is his social barometer, whether he lose or win, cheat or steal. If dancing follows gambling, the rout will not disperse till seven in the morning. What time is left of the twenty-four hours in a day will be devoted to public affairs.

Montcalm’s salary is only 25,000 francs, or $5,000. To maintain the dignity of the King, the commander in chief must keep the pace, and he too gives weekly suppers, with places set for forty people, “whom I don’t know,” he writes dejectedly to his wife, “and don’t want to know; and wish that I might spend the evenings quietly in my own chamber.” To Montcalm, who was of noble birth with no shamming, this lowbred pretense and play at courtcraft became a bore; to his staff of officers, a source of continual amusement; but De Levis presently falls victim to a pair of fine eyes possessed by the wife of another man.

War filled the summers, but the winters were given up to social life; and of all midwinter social gayeties the most important was the official visit of the Governor and the Intendant to Montreal. By this time a good road had been cut from Quebec to Montreal along the north shore, and the sleighs usually set out in January or February. Bigot added to the occasion all the prestige of a social rout. All the grand dames and cavaliers of Quebec were invited. Baggage was sent on ahead with servants to break the way, find quarters for the night, and prepare meals. After a dinner at the Intendant’s palace the sleighs set out, two horses to each, driven tandem because the sleigh road was too narrow for a team. Each sleigh held only two occupants, and to the damage done by fair eyes was added the glow of exhilaration from driving behind spirited horses in frosty air with the bells of a hundred carryalls ringing across the snow. At seven was pause for supper. High play followed till ten. Then early to bed and early to rise and on the road again by seven in the morning! In Montreal was one continual round of dinners and dances. Between times, appointments were made to the military posts and trading stations of the Up-Country. He who wanted a good post must pay his court to Madame Pean. No wonder Montcalm breathed a sigh of relief when Lent put a stop to the gayeties and he could quietly pass his evenings with the Sulpician priests. To break from Bigot’s ring during the war was impossible. Creatures of his choosing filled the army, handled the supplies, controlled the Indians; and when the King’s reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot’s dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory of artist or poet.

Montcalm had arrived in May of 1756. By midsummer he was leading three thousand French artillerymen across Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac (Kingston), to attack the English post on the south side, Oswego. Inside the fort walls were seven hundred raw English provincials, ill of scurvy from lack of food. The result need scarcely be told. Seven hundred ill men behind wooden walls had no chance against three thousand soldiers in health with heavy artillery. To take the English by surprise, Montcalm had crossed the lake on August 4 by night. Two days later all the transport ships had landed the troops and the cannon had actually been mounted before the English knew of the enemy’s presence. On the east side of the river was Fort Ontario, a barricade of logs built in the shape of a star, housing an outguard of three hundred and seventy men. On discovering the French, the sentry spiked their cannon, threw their powder in the river, and retired at midnight inside Oswego’s walls. Working like beavers, Montcalm’s men dragged twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as “Fort Rascal” because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before Montcalm’s cannonade Oswego’s walls, plastered with clay and rubble, fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers to avoid Indian massacre by surrender. A white flag was waved. Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered themselves prisoners to Montcalm. The Indians fell at once to mad plunder. Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were stripped of everything, and only Montcalm’s promise of $10,000 worth of presents to the savages prevented butchery. The victors decamped to Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier during the entire year.

Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm. The English soldiers were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had left plow and carpenter’s bench and fishing boat. While Montcalm was capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape, “making men out of mud” for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern sign, always on horseback but never rode forward. Instead of striking at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors, Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg. July of 1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent scurvy, “the cabbage campaign” it was derisively called, and waiting for Gorham’s rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg. Gorham’s scouts brought back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four men-of-war and seven thousand men. To overpower such strength meant a prolonged siege. It was already August. Loudon sailed back to New York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.

Montcalm was not the enemy to let the chance of Loudon’s absence from the scene of action pass unimproved. While Loudon is pottering at Halifax, Montcalm marshals his troops to the number of eight thousand, including one thousand Indians at Carillon or Ticonderoga, where Lake George empties into Lake Champlain. Portaging two hundred and fifty flatboats with as many birch canoes up the river, the French invade the mountain wilderness of Lake George. Towards the end of July, Levis leads part of the troops by land up the west shore towards the English post of Fort William Henry. Montcalm advances on the lake with the flatboats and canoes, and the rafts with the heavy artillery. Each night Levis’ troops kindle their signal fires on the mountain slope, and each night Montcalm from the lake signals back with torches. It needs artist’s brush to paint the picture: the forested mountains green and lonely and silent in the shimmering sunlight of the summer sky; the lake gold as molten metal in the fire of the setting sun; the soldiers in their gay uniforms of white and blue, hoisting tent cloths on oar sweeps for sails as a breeze dimples the waters; the French voyageurs clad in beaded buckskin chanting some ditty of Old-World fame to the rhythmic dip of the Indian paddles; the Indians naked, painted for war, with a glitter in their eyes of a sinister intent which they have no mind to tell Montcalm; and then, at the south of Lake George, nestling between the hills and the water, the little palisaded fort, Fort William Henry, with gates fast shut and two thousand bushfighters behind the walls, weak from an epidemic of smallpox, and, as usual, so short of provisions that siege means starvation.

Montcalm follows the same tactics as at Oswego, brings heavy artillery against slab walls. For the first week of August, eight hundred of his men are digging trenches by night to avoid giving target for the fiery bombs whizzing through the dark from Monro’s cannon. By day they lie hidden in the woods with a cordon of sharpshooters encircling the fort, Montcalm encamped on the west to prevent help from Sir William Johnson up the Mohawk, Levis on the southeast to cut off aid from Webb. Monro sends yet one last appeal for help: two thousand men against eight thousand, the odds are eloquent of his need! Montcalm’s scouts let the messenger pass through the lines as if unseen, but they make a point of catching the return messenger and holding Webb’s answer that he cannot come, till their cannon have torn great wounds in the fort walls. Then Bougainville blindfold carries Webb’s answer to Monro and demands the surrender of the fort. Monro still has a little ammunition, still hopes against hope that Johnson or Webb or Loudon will come to the rescue, and he keeps his big guns singing over the heads of the French in their trenches till all the cannon have burst but seven, and there are not ten rounds of shells left. Then Colonel Young, with a foot shot off, rides out on horseback waving a white flag. Three hundred English have been killed, as many again are wounded or ill of smallpox, and to the remaining garrison of sixteen hundred Montcalm promises safe conduct to General Webb at Fort Edward. Then the English march out. That night August 9 the vanquished English camp with Montcalm’s forces. The Indians, meanwhile, ramping through the fort for plunder, have maddened themselves with traders’ rum! Before daybreak they have butchered all the wounded lying in the hospital and cut to pieces the men ill of smallpox, a crime that brought its own punishment in contagion. Next morning, when the French guard tried to conduct the disarmed English along the trail to Fort Edward, the Indians snatched at the clothing, the haversacks, the tent kit of the marchers. With their swords the French beat back the drunken horde. In answer, the war hatchets were waved over the heads of the cowering women. The march became a panic; the panic, a massacre; and for twenty-four hours such bedlam raged as might have put fiends to shame. The frenzied Indians would listen to no argument but blows; and when the English prisoners appealed to the French for protection, the French dared not offend their savage allies by fighting to protect the English victims. “Take to the woods,” they warned the men, and the women were quickly huddled back to shelter of the fort. Of the men, sixty were butchered on the spot and some seven hundred captured to be held for ransom. The remnant of the English soldiers, along with the women, were held till the Indian frenzy had spent itself, then sent to Fort Edward. August 16 a torch was put to the combustibles of the fort ruins, and as the French boats glided out on Lake George for the St. Lawrence, explosion after explosion, flame leaping above flame, proclaimed that of Fort William Henry there would remain naught but ashes and charred ruins and the skeletons of the dead. So closed the campaign of 1857. For three years hand running England had suffered defeat.

The spring of 1758 witnessed a change. The change was the rise to power of a man who mastered circumstances instead of allowing them to master him. Such men are the milestones of human progress, whether heroes, or quiet toilers unknown to the world. The man was Pitt, the English statesman. Instead of a weak ministry fighting the machinations of France, it was now Pitt versus Pompadour, the English patriot against the light woman who ruled the councils of France.

Louisburg first!

No more dillydallying and delay “to plant cabbages!” The thing is to reach Louisburg before the French have entered the harbor. Men-of-war are stationed to intercept the French vessels coming from the Mediterranean, and before winter has passed Admiral Boscawen has sailed for America with one hundred and fifty vessels, including forty men-of-war, frigates, and transports carrying twelve thousand men. General Amherst is to command the land forces, and with Amherst is Brigadier James Wolfe, age thirty-one, a tall, slim, fragile man, whose delicate frame is tenanted by a lion spirit; or, to change the comparison, by a motive power too strong for the weak body that held it. By May the fleet is in Halifax. By June Amherst has joined Boscawen, and the ships beat out for Louisburg through heavy fog, with a sea that boils over the reefs in angry surf.

Louisburg was in worse condition than during the siege of 1745. The broken walls have been repaired, but the filling is false, sand grit. Its population is some four thousand, of whom three thousand eight hundred are the garrison. On the ships lying in the harbor are three thousand marines, a defensive force, in all, of six thousand eight hundred. On walls and in bastions are some four hundred and fifty heavy guns, cannon, and mortars. Imagine a triangle with the base to the west, the two sides running out to sea on the east. The fort is at the apex. The wall of the base line is protected by a marsh. On the northeast side is the harbor protected by reefs and three batteries. Along the south side, Drucourt, the French commander, has stationed two thousand men at three different points where landing is possible, to construct batteries behind barricades of logs.

Fog had concealed the approach of the English, but such a ground swell was raging over the reefs as threatened any ship with instant destruction. For a week Amherst and Wolfe and Lawrence row up and down through the roiling mist and raging surf and singing winds to take stock of the situation. With those batteries at the landing places there is only one thing to do, cannonade them, hold their attention in a life-and-death fight while the English soldiers scramble through the surf for the shore. From sunrise to sundown of the 8th furious cannonading set the green seas churning and tore up the French barricades as by hurricane. At sunset the firing ceased, and three detachments of troops launched out in whaleboats at three in the morning, two of the detachments to make a feint of landing, while Wolfe with the other division was to run through the surf for the shore at Freshwater Cove. The French were not deceived. They let Wolfe approach within range, when the log barricade flashed to flame with a thousand sharpshooters. Wolfe had foreseen the snare and had waved his troops off when he noticed that two boat loads were rowing ashore through a tremendous surf under shelter of a rocky point. Quickly he signaled the other boats to follow. In a trice the boats had smashed to kindling on the reefs, but the men were wading ashore, muskets held high over head, powder pouches in teeth, and rushed with bayonets leveled against the French, who had dashed from cover to prevent the landing. This unexpected landing had cut the French off from Louisburg. Retreating in panic, they abandoned their batteries and fifty dead. The English had lost one hundred and nine in the surf. It is said that Wolfe scrambled from the water like a drowned rat and led the rush with no other weapon in hand but his cane.

To land the guns through the jostling sea was the next task. It was done, as in 1745, by a pontoon bridge of small boats, but the work took till the 29th of June. Wolfe, meanwhile, has marched with twelve hundred men round to the rear of the marsh and comes so suddenly on the Grand and Lighthouse Batteries, which defend the harbor, that the French abandon them to retreat within the walls. This gives the English such control of the harbor entrance that Drucourt, the French commander, sinks six of his ships across the channel to bar out Boscawen’s fleet, the masts of the sunken, vessels sticking above the water. Amherst’s men are working like demons, building a road for the cannon across the marsh and trenching up to the back wall; but they work only at night and are undiscovered by the French till the 9th of July. Then the French rush out with a whoop to drive them off, but the English already have their guns mounted, and Drucourt’s men are glad to dash for shelter behind the cracking walls. It now became a game of cannon play pure and simple. Boscawen from harbor front hurls his whistling bombs overhead, to crash through roofs inside the walls. Wolfe from the Lighthouse Battery throws shells and flaming combustibles straight into the midst of the remaining French fleet. At last, on July 21st, masts, sails, tar ropes, take fire in a terrible conflagration, and three of the fleet burn to the water line with terrific explosions of their powder magazines; then the flames hiss out above the rocking hulls. Only two ships are left to the French, and the deep bomb-proof casemates inside the fort between outer and inner walls, where the families and the wounded have been sheltered, are now in flame. Amherst loads his shells with combustibles and pours one continuous rain of fiery death on the doomed fort. The houses, which are of logs, flame like kindling wood, and now the timber work of the stone bastions is burning from bombs hurtling through the roofs. The walls crash down in masses. The scared surgeons, all bloody from amputating shattered limbs, no longer stand in safety above their operating tables. It is said that Madame Drucourt, the Governor’s wife, actually stayed on the walls to encourage the soldiers, with her own hands fired some of the great guns, and, when the overworked surgeons flagged from terror and lack of sleep, it was Madame Drucourt who attended to the wounded. Drucourt is for holding out to the death, until one dark night the English row into the harbor and capture his two last ships. Then Drucourt asks for terms, July 26; but the terms are stern, utter surrender, and Drucourt would have fought till every man fell from the walls, had not one of the civil officers rushed after the commander’s messenger carrying the refusal, and shouted across the ditches to the English: “We accept! We surrender! We accept your terms!”

Counting soldiers, marines, and townspeople, in all five thousand French pass over to Amherst, to be carried prisoners on Boscawen’s fleet to England. Wolfe was for proceeding at once to Quebec, but Amherst considered the season too late and determined to complete the work where he was. One detachment goes to receive the surrender of Isle St. John, henceforth known as Prince Edward Island. Another division proceeds up St. John River, New Brunswick, burning all settlements that refuse unconditional surrender. Wolfe’s grenadiers are sent to reduce Gaspe and Miramichi and northern New Brunswick. And now, lest blundering statecraft for a second time return the captured fort to France, Amherst and Boscawen order the complete disarmament and destruction of Louisburg. What cannon cannot be removed are tumbled into the marsh or upset into the sea. The stones from the walls are carried away to Halifax. By 1760, of Louisburg, the glory of New France, the pride of America, there remains not a vestige but grassed slopes overgrown by nettles, ditches with rank growth of weeds, stone piles where the wild vines grow, and an inner yard where the cows of the fisher folk pasture.

Not a poor beginning for the campaign of 1758, though bad enough news has come from Major General Abercrombie, which was the real explanation of Amherst’s refusal to push on to Quebec.

Abercrombie, with fifteen thousand men, the pick of the regulars and provincials, had launched out on Lake George on the 5th of July with over one thousand boats, to descend the lake northward to the French fort of Carillon or Ticonderoga. Again, it would require artist’s brush to paint the scene. Rogers’ Rangers, dressed in buckskin, led the way in birch canoes. Lord Howe was there, dressed like a bushfighter; and with bagpipes setting the echoes ringing amid the lonely mountains, were the Highland regiments in their tartan plaids. Flags floated from the prow of every boat. Each battalion had its own regimental band. Scarcely a breath dimpled the waters of the lake, and the sun shone without a cloud. Little wonder those who passed through the fiery Aceldama that was to come, afterwards looked back on this scene as the fairest in their lives.

Montcalm had only arrived at Ticonderoga on June 30th. There was no doubting the news. His bushrovers brought in word that the English were advancing in such multitudes their boats literally covered the lake. It looked as if the fate of Fort William Henry were to be reversed. Montcalm never dreamed of Abercrombie attacking without artillery. To stay cooped up in the fort would invite destruction. Therefore Montcalm ordered his men out to construct a circular breastwork from the River of the Chutes on the southeast, which empties Lake George, round towards Lake Champlain on the northwest. Huge trees were felled, pile on pile, top-most branches spiked and pointed outwards. Behind these Montcalm intrenched his four thousand men, lying in lines three deep, with grenadiers in reserve behind to step up as the foremost lines fell. At a cannon signal from the fort the men were to rise to their places, but not to fire till the English were entangled in the brushwood. It was blisteringly hot weather. It is said that the troops took off their heavy three-cornered hats and lay in their shirt sleeves, hand on musket, speaking no word, but waiting.

Cleaning guns and eating snatches of food, Montcalm’s men slept that night in their places behind the logs. Montcalm had passed from man to man, personally thanking the troops for their valor. When daylight came over the hills with wisps of fog like cloud banners from the mountain tops, and the sunlight pouring gold mist through the valley, the French rose and rubbed their eyes. They could scarcely believe it! Surely Abercrombie would come back with his heavy guns. Like the mists of the morning the English had vanished. Far down the lake they were retreating in such panic terror they had left their baggage. Places were found on the portage by French scouts where the English had fled in such haste, marchers had lost their boots in the mud and not stopped to find them. Such was the battle of Carillon, or Ticonderoga, good reason for Amherst refusing to go on to Quebec.

The year closed with two more victories for the English. Brigadier John Forbes and Washington succeeded in cutting their way up to Fort Duquesne by a new road. They found the fort abandoned, and, taking possession in November, renamed it Pittsburg after the great English statesman. The other victory was at Frontenac, or Kingston. As the French had concentrated at Lake Champlain, leaving Frontenac unguarded, Bradstreet gained permission from Abercrombie to lead three thousand men across Lake Ontario against La Salle’s old fur post. Crossing from the ruins of old Oswego, Bradstreet encamped beneath the palisades of Frontenac on the evening of August 25. By morning he had his cannon in range for the walls. Inside the fort Commandant de Noyan had less than one hundred men. At seven in the evening of August 27 he surrendered. Bradstreet permitted the prisoners to go down to Montreal on parole, to be exchanged for English prisoners held in Quebec. Furs to the value of $800,000, twenty cannon, and nine vessels were captured. Bradstreet divided the loot among his men, taking for himself not so much as a penny’s worth. The fort was destroyed. So were the vessels. The guns and provisions were carried across the lake and deposited at Fort Stanwix, east of old Oswego. The loss of Duquesne on the Ohio and Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario cut French dominion in America in two. Henceforth there was no highway from New France to Louisiana. In September, Abercrombie was recalled. Amherst became chief commander.

Wolfe had gone home to England ill. It was while sojourning at the fashion resort, Bath, that he fell desperately in love with a Miss Lowther, to whom he became engaged. Then came the summons from Pitt to meet the cabinet ministers in the war office of London. Wolfe was asked to take command of the campaign in 1759 against Quebec. It had been his ambition in Louisburg to proceed at once against Quebec. Here was his opportunity. It need not be told, he took it. Amherst now, on the field south of Lake Champlain, received 10 pounds a day as commander in chief. For the greater task of reducing Quebec, Wolfe was to receive 2 pounds a day. Under him were to serve Monckton, Townshend, and Murray. Admiral Saunders was to command the fleet. Wolfe advised sending a few ships beforehand to guard the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and Durell was dispatched for this purpose long before the main armaments set out. By April 30 the combined fleet and army were at Halifax, Wolfe with a force of some 8500 men. Wolfe, now only in his thirty-third year, had been the subject of such jealousy that he was actually compelled to sail from Louisburg in June without one penny of ready money in his army chest. Underling officers, whose duty it was to advance him money on credit, had raised difficulties.

Cheers and cheers yet again rent the air as the fleet at last set out for the St. Lawrence, the soldiers on deck shouting themselves hoarse as Louisburg faded over the watery horizon, the officers at table the first night out at sea drinking toast after toast to British colors on every French fort in America.

At Quebec was fast and furious preparation for the coming siege. Bougainville had been sent to France from Lake Champlain in 1758 with report of the victory at Ticonderoga. In vain he appealed for more money, more men for the coming conflict! The French government sent him back to Quebec with a bundle of advice and platitudes and titles and badges and promotions and soft words, but of the sinew which makes war, men and money, France had naught to spare. The rumor of the English invasion was confirmed by Bougainville. Every man capable of bearing arms was called to Quebec except the small forces at the outposts, and Bourlamaque at Champlain was instructed if attacked by Amherst to blow up Fort Carillon, then Crown Point, and retire. Grain was gathered into the state warehouses, and so stripped of able-bodied men were the rural districts that the crops of 1759 were planted by the women and children. Fire ships and rafts were constructed, the channel of St. Charles River closed by sinking vessels, and a bridge built higher up to lead from Quebec City across the river eastward to Beauport and Montmorency. Along the high cliffs of the St. Lawrence from Montmorency Falls to Quebec were constructed earthworks and intrenchments to command the approach up the river. What frigates had come in with Bougainville were sent higher up the St. Lawrence to be out of danger; but the crews, numbering 1400, were posted on the ramparts of Upper Town. Counting mere boys, Quebec had a defensive force variously given as from 9000 to 14,000; but deducting raw levies, who scarcely know the rules of the drill room, it is doubtful if Montcalm could boast of more than 5000 able-bodied fighters. Still he felt secure in the impregnable strength of Quebec’s natural position. July 29, when the enemy lay encamped beneath his trenches, he could write, “Unless they [the English] have wings, they cannot cross a river and effect a landing and scale a precipice.” One cruel feature there was of Quebec’s preparations. To keep the habitants on both sides the river loyal, Vaudreuil, the governor, issued a proclamation telling the people that the English intended to massacre the inhabitants, men, women, and children. Meanwhile, morning, noon, and night, the chapel bells are ringing . . . ringing . . . lilting . . . and calling the faithful to prayers for the destruction of the heretic invader! Nuns lie prostrate day and night in prayer for the country’s deliverance from the English. Holy processions march through the streets, nuns and priests and little children in white, and rough soldiery in the uniforms with the blue facings, to pray Heaven’s aid for victory. And while the poor people starve for bread, poultry is daily fattened on precious wheat that it may make tenderest meat for Intendant Bigot’s table, where the painted women and drunken gamblers and gay officers nightly feast!

Signal fires light up the hills with ominous warning as the English fleet glides slowly abreast the current of the St. Lawrence, now pausing to sound where the yellow riffle of the current shows shallows, now following the course staked out by flags, here depending on the Frenchman, whom they have compelled to act as pilot! Nightly from hill to hill the signal fires leap to the sky, till one flames from Cape Tourmente, and Quebec learns that the English are surely very near. Among the Englishmen who are out in the advance boats sounding is a young man, James Cook, destined to become a great navigator.

June 25, sail after sail, frigate after frigate bristling with cannon, literally swarming with soldiers and marines, glide round the end of Orleans Island through driving rain and a squall, and to clatter of anchor chains and rattle of falling sails, come to rest. “Pray Heaven they be wrecked as Sir Hovenden Walker’s fleet was wrecked long ago,” sigh the nuns of Quebec. If they had prayed half as hard that their corrupt rulers, their Bigots and their kings and their painted women whose nod could set Europe on fire with war, if the holy sisterhood had prayed for this gang of vampires whose vices had brought doom to the land, to be swallowed in some abyss, their prayers might have been more effective with Heaven.

Next day a band of rangers lands from Wolfe’s ships and finds the Island of Orleans deserted. On the church door the cure has pinned a note, asking the English not to molest his church; and expressing sardonic regret that the invaders have not come soon enough to enjoy the fresh vegetables of his garden.

Wolfe for the first time gazes on the prize of his highest ambition, Quebec. He is at Orleans, facing the city. To his right is the cataract of Montmorency. From the falls past Beauport to St. Charles River, the St. Lawrence banks are high cliffs. Above the cliffs are Montcalm’s intrenched fighters. Then the north shore of the St. Lawrence suddenly sheers up beyond St. Charles River into a lofty, steep precipice. The precipice is Quebec City: Upper Town and the convents and the ramparts and Castle St. Louis nestling on an upper ledge of the rock below Cape Diamond; Lower Town crowding between the foot of the precipice and tide water. Look again how the St. Lawrence turns in a sharp angle at the precipice. Three sides of the city are water, St. Charles River nearest Wolfe, then the St. Lawrence across the steep face of the rock, then the St. Lawrence again along a still steeper precipice to the far side. Only the rear of the city is vulnerable; but it is walled and inaccessible.

Quebec was a prize for any commander’s ambition; but how to win it?

The night of June 28 is calm, warm, pitch-dark, the kind of summer night when the velvet heat touches you as with a hand. The English soldiers of the crowded transports have gone ashore, when suddenly out of the darkness glide fire ships as from an under world, with flaming mast poles, and hulls in shadow, roaring with fire, throwing out combustibles, drifting straight down on the tide towards the English fleet. But the French have managed badly. They have set the ships on fire too soon. The air is torn to tatters by terrific explosions that light up the outlines of the city spires and churn the river to billows. Then the English sailors are out in small boats, avoiding the suck of the undertow. Throwing out grappling hooks, they tow the flaming fire rafts away from their fleet. It is the first play of the game, and the French have lost.

Monckton goes ashore south on Point Levis side next day. Townshend has landed his troops east of the Montmorency on the north shore. It is the second play of the game, and Wolfe has violated every rule of war, for he has separated his forces in three divisions close to a powerful enemy. He is counting on Montcalm’s policy, however, and Montcalm’s play is to lie inactive, sleeping in his boots, refusing to be lured to battle till winter drives the English off. It is usual in all accounts of the great struggle to find that certain facts have been suppressed. Let us frankly confess that when the English rangers went foraging they brought back French scalps, and when the French Indians went scouting they returned with English scalps. However, manners were improving. Strict orders are given: this is not a war on women; neither women nor children are to be touched. Wolfe posts proclamations on the parish churches, calling on the habitants to stand neutral. In answer, they tear the proclamations down. By July 12 Wolfe’s batteries on the south side of the river are preparing to shell the city. A band of five hundred students and habitants rows across from Quebec by night to dislodge the English gunners, but mistaking their own shots for the shots of the enemy, fall on each other in the dark and retreat in wild confusion. Then the English cannon begin to do business. In a single day half the houses of Lower Town are battered to bits, and high-tossed bombs have plunged through roofs of Upper Town, burning the cathedral and setting a multitude of lesser buildings on fire. In the confusion of cannonade and counter-cannonade and a city on fire, shrouding the ruins in a pall of smoke, some English ships slip up the river beyond Quebec, but there the precipice of the river bank is still steeper, and Bougainville is on guard with two thousand men. For thirty miles around the English rangers have laid the country waste. Still Montcalm refuses to come out and fight.

The enforced inaction exasperates Wolfe, whose health is failing him, and who sees the season passing, no nearer the object of his ambition than when he came. As he had stormed the batteries of Louisburg, so now he decides to storm the heights of Montmorency. To any one who has stood on the knob of rock above the gorge where the cataract plunges to the St. Lawrence, or has scrambled down the bank slippery with spray, and watched the black underpool whirl out to the river, Wolfe’s venture must seem madness; for French troops lined the intrenchments above the cliff, and below a redoubt or battery had been built. Below the cataract, when the tide ebbed, was a place which might be forded. From sunrise to sunset all the last days of July, Wolfe’s cannon boomed from Levis across the city, from the fleet in mid channel, from the land camp on the east side of Montmorency. Montcalm rightly guessed, this presaged a night assault. To hide his design, Wolfe kept his transports shifting up and down the St. Lawrence, as if to land at Beauport halfway to the city. All the same, two armed transports, as if by chance, managed to get themselves stranded just opposite the redoubt below the cliff, where their cannon would protect a landing. Montcalm saw the move and strengthened the troops behind the earthworks on the top of the cliff. Toward sunset the tide ebbed, and at that time cannon were firing from all points with such fury that the St. Lawrence lay hidden in smoke. As the air cleared, two thousand men were seen wading and fording below the falls. There was a rush of the tall grenadiers for the redoubt. The French retreated firing, and the cliff above poured down an avalanche of shots. At that moment Wolfe suffered a cruel and unforeseen check. A frightful thunderstorm burst on the river, lashing earth and air to darkness. It was impossible to see five paces ahead or to aim a shot. The cliff roared down with miniature rivulets and the slippery clay bank gave to every step of the climbers slithering down waist-deep in mud and weeds. Powder was soaked. As the rain ceased, Indians were seen sliding down the cliff to scalp the wounded. Wolfe ordered a retreat. The drums rolled the recall and the English escaped pellmell, the French hooting with derision at the top of the banks, the English yelling back strong oaths for the enemy to come out of its rat hole and fight like men. At the ford the men, soaked like water rats, and a sorry rabble, got into some sort of rank and burned the two stranded vessels as they passed back to the east side. In less than an hour four hundred and forty-three men had fallen, the most of them killed, many both dead and wounded, into the hands of the Indian scalpers.

One can guess Wolfe’s fearful despair that night. A month had passed. He had accomplished worse than nothing. In another month the fleet must leave the St. Lawrence to avoid autumn storms. Fragile at all times, Wolfe fell ill, ill of fever and of chagrin, and those officers over whose head he had been promoted did not spare their criticisms, their malice. It is so easy to win battles of life and war in theory.

As for Quebec, it was felt the siege was over, the contest won. Still bad news had come from the west. Niagara had fallen before the English, and the forts on Lake Champlain were abandoned to Amherst. Nothing now barred the English advance down the Richelieu to Montreal. Montcalm dispatches Levis to Montreal with eight hundred men.

It was now September. From their trenches above the river the French could see the English evacuating camp at Montmorency. They were jubilant. Surely the English were giving up the siege. Night after night English transports loaded with soldiers ascended the St. Lawrence above Quebec. What did it mean? Was it a feint to draw Montcalm’s men away from the east side? The French general was sleeplessly anxious. He had not passed a night in bed since the end of June. The fall rains were beginning, and another month of work in the trenches meant half the army invalided.

The most of the English fleet was working up and down with the tide between the western limits of Quebec and Cape Rouge, nine miles away. Bougainville’s force was increased to three thousand men, and he was ordered to keep especial watch westward. The steepness of the precipice was guard enough near the town. Wednesday, the 12th of September, the English troops were ordered to hold themselves in readiness. They passed the day cleaning their arms, and were ordered not to speak after nightfall or permit a sound to be heard from the ranks. Admiral Saunders with the main fleet was to feign attack on the east side of the city. Admiral Holmes with Wolfe’s army, now numbering not four thousand men, was to glide down with the tide from Cape Rouge above Quebec. Because the main fleet lay on the east side Montcalm felt sure the attack would come from that quarter. Deserters had brought word to Wolfe that some flatboats with provisions were coming down the river to Quebec that night.

Here, then, the position! Saunders on the east side, opposite Beauport, feigning attack; Montcalm watching him from the Beauport cliffs; Wolfe nine miles up the river west of the city; Bougainville watching him, watching too for those provisions, for Quebec was down to empty larder.

It is said that as Wolfe rested in his ship, the Sutherland, off Cape Rouge, he felt strange premonition of approaching death, and repeated the words of Gray’s “Elegy,” “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” but this has been denied. Certainly he had such strange consciousness of impending death that, taking a miniature of his fiancee from his breast, he asked a fellow-officer to return it to her. About midnight the tide began to ebb, and two lanterns were hung as a sign from the masthead of the Sutherland. Instantly all the ships glided silent as the great river down with the tide. The night was moonless. Near the little bridle path now known as Wolfe’s Cove the ships draw ashore. Sharp as iron on stone a sentry’s voice rings out, “Who goes?”

“The French,” answers an officer, who speaks perfect French.

“What regiment?”

“The Queen’s,” replies the officer, who chances to know that Bougainville has a regiment of that name. Thinking they were the provision transports, this sentry was satisfied. Not so another. He ran down to the water’s edge, and peering through the darkness called, “Why can’t you speak louder?”

“Hush you! We ’ll be overheard,” answers the English officer in French.

Thus the English boats glided towards the little bridle path that led up to the rear of the city. Wolfe’s Cove is not a path steep as a stair up the face of a rock, as the most of the schoolbooks teach; it is a little weed-grown, stony gully, easy to climb, but slant and narrow, where I have walked many a night to drink from the spring near the foot of the cliff.

Twenty-four volunteers lead the way up the stony path, silent and agile as cats. At the top are the tents of the sentries, who rush from their couches to be overpowered by the English. Before daybreak the whole army has ascended to the plateau behind the city, known as the Plains of Abraham. No use entering here into the dispute whether Wolfe took his place where the goal now stands, or farther back from the city wall. Roughly speaking, the main line of Wolfe’s forces, three deep, with himself, Monckton, and Murray in command, faced the rear of Quebec about three quarters of a mile from what was then the wall. To his left was the wooded road now known as St. Louis. He posts Townshend facing this, at right angles to his front line. Another battalion lay in the woods to the rear. There were, besides, a reserve regiment, and a battalion to guard the landing.

What was Wolfe’s position? Behind him lay Bougainville with three thousand French soldiers, fresh and in perfect condition. In front lay Quebec with three thousand more. To his right was the river; to his left, across the St. Charles, Montcalm’s main army of five thousand men. “When your enemies blunder, don’t interrupt them,” Napoleon is reported to have advised. If some one had not blundered badly now, it might have been a second Ticonderoga with Wolfe; but some one did blunder most tragically.

Montcalm had come from the trenches above Beauport, where he had been guarding against Saunders’ landing, and he had ordered hot tea and beer served to the troops, when he happened to look across the St. Charles River towards Quebec. It had been cloudy, but the sun had just burst out; and there, standing in the morning light, were the English in battle array, red coat and tartan kilt, grenadier and Highlander, in the distance a confused mass of color, which was not the white uniform of the French.

“This is a serious business,” said Montcalm hurriedly to his aide. Then, spurs to his big black horse, he was galloping furiously along the Beauport road, over the resounding bridge across the St. Charles, up the steep cobblestone streets that lead from Lower to Upper Town, and out by the St. Louis road to the Plains of Abraham. In Quebec all was confusion. Who had given the order for the troops to move out against the English without waiting for Bougainville to come from Cape Rouge? But there they were, huddling, disorderly columns that crowded on each other, filing out of the St. Louis and St. John Gates, with a long string of battalions following Montcalm up from the St. Charles. And Ramezay, who was commandant of the city, refused to send out part of his troops; and Vaudreuil, who was at Beauport, delayed to come; and though Montcalm waited till ten o’clock, Bougainville did not come up from Cape Rouge with his three thousand men. Easy to criticise and say Montcalm should have waited till Bougainville and Vaudreuil came. He could not wait, for Wolfe’s position cut his forces in two, and the army was without supplies. With his four thousand five hundred men he accepted fate’s challenge.

Bagpipes shrilling, English flags waving to the wind, the French soldiers shouting riotously, the two armies moved towards each other. Then the English halted, silent, motionless statues. The men were refreshed, for during the four hours’ wait from daylight, Wolfe had permitted them to rest on the grassed plain. The French came bounding forward, firing as they ran, and bending down to reload. The English waited till the French were but forty yards away. “They were not to throw away their fire,” Wolfe had ordered. Now forty yards, if you measure it off in your mind’s eye, is short space between hostile armies. It is not as wide as the average garden front in a suburban city. Then suddenly the thin red line of the English spoke in a crash of fire. The shots were so simultaneous that they sounded like one terrific crash of ear-splitting thunder. The French had no time to halt before a second volley rent the air. Then a clattering fire rocketed from the British like echoes from a precipice. With wild halloo the British were charging, . . . charging, . . . charging, the Highlanders leading with their broadswords flashing overhead and their mountain blood on fire, Wolfe to the fore of the grenadiers till a shot broke his wrist! Wrapping his handkerchief about the wound as he ran, the victorious young general was dashing forward when a second shot hit him and a third pierced his breast. He staggered a step, reeled, fell to the ground. Three soldiers and an officer ran to his aid and carried him in their arms to the rear. He would have no surgeon. It was useless, he said. “But the day is ours, and see that you keep it,” he muttered, sinking back unconscious. A moment later he was roused by wild, hilarious, jubilant, heart-shattering shouts.

“Gad! they run! See how they run!” said an English voice.

“Who run?” demanded Wolfe, roused as if from the sleep of death.

“The enemy, sir. They give way . . . everywhere.”

“Go, one of you,” commanded the dying general; “tell Colonel Burton to march Webb’s regiment down Charles River to cut off retreat by the bridge. Now God be praised!” he added, sinking back; “I die in peace!” And the spirit of Wolfe had departed, leaving as a heritage a New Empire of the North, and an immortal fame.

Fate had gone hard against the gallant Montcalm. The first volley from the English line had mowed his soldiers down like ripe wheat. At the second volley the ranks broke and the ground was thick strewn with the dead. When the English charged, the French fled in wildest panic downhill for the St. Charles. Wounded and faint, Montcalm on his black charger was swept swiftly along St. Louis road in the blind stampede of retreat. Near the walls a ball passed through his groins. Two soldiers caught him from falling, and steadied him on either side of his horse through St. Louis gate, where women, waiting in mad anxiety, saw the blood dripping over his horse.

“My God! My God! Our marquis is slain!” they screamed.

“It is nothing, nothing, good friends; don’t trouble about me,” answered the wounded general as he passed for the last time under the arched gateway of St. Louis road.

“How long have I to live?” he asked the surgeon into whose house he had been carried.

“Few hours, my lord.”

“So much the better,” answered Montcalm. “I shall not live to see Quebec surrendered.”

Before daylight, he was dead. Wrapped in his soldier’s cloak, laid in a rough box, the body was carried that night to the Ursuline Convent, where a bursting bomb had scooped a great hole in the floor. Sad-eyed nuns and priests crowded the chapel. By torchlight, amid tears and sobs, the body was laid to rest.

Both generals had died as they had lived, gallantly. To-day both are regarded as heroes and commemorated by monuments; but how did their governments treat them? Of course there were wild huzzas in London and solemn memorial services over Wolfe; but when his aged mother petitioned the government that her dead son’s salary might be computed at 10 pounds a day, the salary of a commander in chief, instead of 2 pounds a day, she was refused in as curtly uncivil a note as was ever penned. Montcalm had died in debt, and when his family petitioned the French government to pay these debts, the King thought it should be done, but he did not take the trouble to see that his good intention was carried out. It was easy and cheaper for orators to talk of heroes giving their lives for their country. There are no better examples in history of the truth that glory and honor and true service must be their own reward, independent of any compensation, any suffering, any sacrifice.

Though the panic retreat continued for hours and Quebec was not surrendered for some days, the battle was practically decided in ten minutes. The campaign of the next year was gallant but fruitless. In April, before the fleet has come back to the English, De Levis throws himself with the remnants of the French army against the rear wall of Quebec; and as Montcalm had come out to fight Wolfe, so Murray marches out to fight De Levis. Both sides claimed the battle of Ste. Foye as victory, but another such victory would have exterminated the English. Levis outside the walls, Murray glad to be inside the walls, each side waited for the spring fleet. If France had come to Canada’s aid, even yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray’s army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May was British. That decided Canada’s fate. De Levis retreated swiftly for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the east proceeds General Murray. De Levis and Vaudreuil had less than two thousand fighting men at Montreal. September 8th they capitulated, and three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada passed under the dominion of England. Officers, many of the nobility, Bigot and his crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant’s ring were put on trial and punished for their corruption and misrule. Bigot suffered banishment and the confiscation of property. The other members of his clique received like sentences.

Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders, like Champlain and Maisonneuve, spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her explorers, spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights, like Frontenac and Iberville and Montcalm, New France had fallen.

Why?

For two reasons: because of England’s sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered, and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence, the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation. It is Canada, a New Dominion.

To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick walls of Chateau Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada’s doom; but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the rocky heights above the St. Lawrence, chapel spire and cross and domed cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient regime. Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of power they hold in the government of the Dominion?