Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (80 page)

1
Articles de Capitulation,
18
Sept
. 1759.

2
Letter to an Honourable Brigadier-General
[Townshend], printed in 1760. A
Refutation
soon after appeared, angry, but not conclusive. Other replies will be found in the
Imperial Magazine
for 1760.

Notes - 10

1
See
ante,
p. 167.

2
Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Guerre,
1
Nov
. 1759.

Notes - 11

1
See
ante,
p. 31.

2
Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine,
30
Oct
. 1759.

Notes - 12

1
Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres
.

Notes - 13

1
Letters of Horace Walpole,
III. 254, 257 (ed. Cunningham, 1857).

2
Walpole,
Memoirs of George II
., II. 384.

XXIX

S
AINTE-
F
OY

Quebec after the Siege · Captain Knox and the Nuns · Escape of French Ships · Winter at Quebec · Threats of Lévis · Attacks · Skirmishes · Feat of the Rangers · State of the Garrison · The French prepare to retake Quebec · Advance of Lévis · The Alarm · Sortie of the English · Rash Determination of Murray · Battle of Ste.-Foy · Retreat of the English · Lévis besieges Quebec · Spirit of the Garrison · Peril of their Situation · Relief · Quebec Saved · Retreat of Lévis · The News in England

The fleet was gone; the great river was left a solitude; and the chill days of a fitful November passed over Quebec in alternations of rain and frost, sunshine and snow. The troops, driven by cold from their encampment on the Plains, were all gathered within the walls. Their own artillery had so battered the place that it was not easy to find shelter. The Lower Town was a wilderness of scorched and crumbling walls. As you ascended Mountain Street, the Bishop’s Palace, on the right, was a skeleton of tottering masonry, and the buildings on the left were a mass of ruin, where ragged boys were playing at see-saw among the fallen planks and timbers.
¹
Even in the Upper Town few of the churches and public buildings had escaped. The Cathedral was burned to a shell. The solid front of the College of the Jesuits was pockmarked by numberless cannon-balls, and the adjacent church of the Order was woefully shattered. The church of the Recollets suffered still more. The bombshells that fell through the roof had broken into the pavement, and as they burst had thrown up the bones and skulls of the dead from the graves beneath.
²
Even the more distant Hôtel-Dieu was pierced by fifteen projectiles, some of which had exploded in the halls and chambers.
³

The Commissary-General, Berniers, thus describes to Bourlamaque the state of the town: “Quebec is nothing but a shapeless mass of ruins. Confusion,
disorder, pillage reign even among the inhabitants, for the English make examples of severity every day. Everybody rushes hither and thither, without knowing why. Each searches for his possessions, and, not finding his own, seizes those of other people. English and French, all is chaos alike. The inhabitants, famished and destitute, escape to the country. Never was there seen such a sight.”
¹

Quebec swarmed with troops. There were guardhouses at twenty different points; sentinels paced the ramparts, squads of men went the rounds, soldiers off duty strolled the streets, some in mitre caps and some in black three-cornered hats; while a ceaseless rolling of drums and a rigid observance of military forms betrayed the sense of a still imminent danger. While some of the inhabitants left town, others remained, having no refuge elsewhere. They were civil to the victors, but severe towards their late ruler. “The citizens,” says Knox, “particularly the females, reproach M. Vaudreuil upon every occasion, and give full scope to bitter invectives.” He praises the agreeable manners and cheerful spirit of the Canadian ladies, concerning whom another officer also writes: “It is very surprising with what ease the gayety of their tempers enables them to bear misfortunes which to us would be insupportable. Families whom the calamities of war have reduced from the height of luxury to the want of common necessaries laugh, dance, and sing, comforting themselves with this reflection—
Fortune de guerre
. Their young ladies take the utmost pains to teach our officers French; with what view I know not, if it is not that they may hear themselves praised, flattered, and courted without loss of time.”
²

Knox was quartered in a small stable, with a hayloft above and a rack and manger at one end: a lodging better than fell to the lot of many of his brother officers; and, by means of a stove and some help from a carpenter, he says that he made himself tolerably comfortable. The change, however, was an agreeable one when he was ordered for a week to the General Hospital, a mile out of the town, where he was to command the guard stationed to protect the inmates and watch the enemy. Here were gathered the sick and wounded of both armies, nursed with equal care by the nuns, of whom Knox speaks with gratitude and respect. “When our poor fellows were ill and ordered to be removed from their odious regimental hospital to this general receptacle, they were indeed rendered inexpressibly happy. Each patient has his bed, with curtains, allotted to him, and a nurse to attend him. Every sick or wounded officer has an apartment to himself, and is attended by one of these religious sisters, who in general are young, handsome, courteous, rigidly reserved, and very respectful. Their office of nursing the sick furnishes them with opportunities of taking great latitudes if they are so disposed; but I never heard any of them charged with the least levity.” The nuns, on their part, were well pleased with the conduct of their new masters, whom one of them describes as the “most moderate of all conquerors.”

“I lived here,” Knox continues, “at the French King’s table, with an agreeable, polite society of officers, directors, and commissaries. Some of the gentlemen were married, and their ladies honored us with their company. They were generally cheerful, except when we discoursed on the late revolution and the affairs of the campaign; then they seemingly gave way to grief, uttered by profound sighs, followed by an
O mon Dieu!
” He walked in the garden with the French officers, played at cards with them, and passed the time so pleasantly that his short stay at the hospital seemed an oasis in his hard life of camp and garrison.

Mère de Sainte-Claude, the Superior, a sister of Ramesay, late commandant of Quebec, one morning sent him a note of invitation to what she called an English breakfast; and though the repast answered to nothing within his experience, he says that he “fared exceedingly well, and passed near two hours most agreeably in the society of this ancient lady and her virgin sisters.”

The excellent nuns of the General Hospital are to-day what their predecessors were, and the scene of their useful labors still answers at many points to that described by the careful pen of their military guest. Throughout the war they and the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu had been above praise in their assiduous devotion to the sick and wounded.

Brigadier Murray, now in command of Quebec, was a gallant soldier, upright, humane, generous, eager for distinction, and more daring than prudent. He befriended the Canadians, issued strict orders against harming them in person or property, hanged a soldier who had robbed a citizen of Quebec, and severely punished others for slighter offences of the same sort. In general the soldiers themselves showed kindness towards the conquered people; during harvest they were seen helping them to reap their fields, without compensation, and sharing with them their tobacco and rations. The inhabitants were disarmed, and required to take the oath of allegiance. Murray reported in the spring that the whole country, from Cap-Rouge downward, was in subjection to the British Crown.
¹

Late in October it was rumored that some of the French ships in the river above Quebec were preparing to run by the batteries. This was the squadron which had arrived in the spring with supplies, and had lain all summer at Batiscan, in the Richelieu, and at other points beyond reach of the English. After nearly a month of expectancy, they at length appeared, anchored off Sillery on the twenty-first of November, and tried to pass the town on the dark night of the twenty-fourth. Seven or eight of them succeeded; four others ran aground and were set on fire by their crews, excepting one which was stranded on the south shore and abandoned. Captain Miller, with a lieutenant and above forty men, boarded her; when, apparently through their own carelessness, she blew up.
²
Most of the party were killed by the explosion, and the rest, including the
two officers, were left in a horrible condition between life and death. Thus they remained till a Canadian, venturing on board in search of plunder, found them, called his neighbors to his aid, carried them to his own house, and after applying, with the utmost kindness, what simple remedies he knew, went over to Quebec and told of the disaster. Fortunately for themselves, the sufferers soon died.

December came, and brought the Canadian winter, with its fierce light and cold, glaring snowfields, and piercing blasts that scorch the cheek like a firebrand. The men were frost-bitten as they dug away the dry, powdery drifts that the wind had piled against the rampart. The sentries were relieved every hour; yet feet and fingers were continually frozen. The clothing of the troops was ill-suited to the climate, and, though stoves had been placed in the guard and barrack rooms, the supply of fuel constantly fell short. The cutting and dragging of wood was the chief task of the garrison for many weeks. Parties of axemen, strongly guarded, were always at work in the forest of Ste.-Foy, four or five miles from Quebec, and the logs were brought to town on sledges dragged by the soldiers. Eight of them were harnessed in pairs to each sledge; and as there was always danger from Indians and bushrangers, every man carried his musket slung at his back. The labor was prodigious; for frequent snowstorms made it necessary again and again to beat a fresh track through the drifts. The men bore their hardships with admirable good humor; and once a party of them on their return, dragging their load through the street, met a Canadian, also with a load of wood, which was drawn by a team of dogs harnessed much like themselves. They accosted them as yoke-fellows, comrades, and brothers; asked them what allowance of pork and rum they got; and invited them and their owner to mess at the regimental barracks.

The appearance of the troops on duty within the town, as described by Knox, was scarcely less eccentric. “Our guards on the grand parade make a most grotesque appearance in their different dresses; and our inventions to guard us against the extreme rigor of this climate are various beyond imagination. The uniformity as well as nicety of the clean, methodical soldier is buried in the rough, fur-wrought garb of the frozen Laplander; and we rather resemble a masquerade than a body of regular troops, insomuch that I have frequently been accosted by my acquaintances, whom, though their voices were familiar to me, I could not discover, or conceive who they were. Besides, every man seems to be in a continual hurry; for instead of walking soberly through the streets, we are obliged to observe a running or trotting pace.”

Early in January there was a storm of sleet, followed by severe frost, which glazed the streets with ice. Knox, being ordered to mount guard in the Lower Town, found the descent of Mountain Street so slippery that it was impossible to walk down with safety, especially as the muskets of the men were loaded; and the whole party, seating themselves on the ground, slid one after another to the foot of the hill. The Highlanders, in spite of their natural hardihood, suffered more from the cold than the other troops, as their national costume was but a sorry defence against the Canadian winter. A detachment of these breechless
warriors being on guard at the General Hospital, the nuns spent their scanty leisure in knitting for them long woollen hose, which they gratefully accepted, though at a loss to know whether modesty or charity inspired the gift.

From the time when the English took possession of Quebec, reports had come in through deserters that Lévis meant to attack and recover it. Early in November there was a rumor that he was about to march upon it with fifteen thousand men. In December word came that he was on his way, resolved to storm it on or about the twenty-second, and dine within the walls, under the French flag, on Christmas Day. He failed to appear; but in January a deserter said that he had prepared scaling-ladders, and was training his men to use them by assaults on mock ramparts of snow. There was more tangible evidence that the enemy was astir. Murray had established two fortified outposts, one at Ste.-Foy, and the other farther on, at Old Lorette. War-parties hovered round both, and kept the occupants in alarm. A large body of French grenadiers appeared at the latter place in February, and drove off a herd of cattle; when a detachment of rangers, much inferior in number, set upon them, put them to flight, and recovered the plunder. At the same time a party of regulars, Canadians, and Indians took up a strong position near the church at Point Levi, and sent a message to the English officers that a large company of expert hairdressers were ready to wait upon them whenever they required their services. The allusion was of course to the scalp-lifting practices of the Indians and bushrangers.

The river being now hard frozen, Murray sent over a detachment of light infantry under Major Dalling. A sharp fight ensued on the snow, around the church, and in the neighboring forest, where the English soldiers, taught to use snowshoes by the rangers, routed the enemy, and killed or captured a considerable number. A third post was then established at the church and the priest’s house adjacent. Some days after, the French came back in large numbers, fortified themselves with felled trees, and then attacked the English position. The firing being heard at Quebec, the light infantry went over to the scene of action, and Murray himself followed on the ice, with the Highlanders and other troops. Before he came up, the French drew off and retreated to their breastwork, where they were attacked and put to flight, the nimble Highlanders capturing a few, while the greater part made their escape.

As it became known that the French held a strong post at Le Calvaire, near St. Augustin, two days’ march from Quebec, Captain Donald MacDonald was sent with five hundred men to attack it. He found the enemy behind a breastwork of logs protected by an abattis. The light infantry advanced and poured in a brisk fire; on which the French threw down their arms and fled. About eighty of them were captured; but their commander, Herbin, escaped, leaving to the victors his watch, hat and feather, wine, liquor-case, and mistress. The English had six men wounded and nearly a hundred frost-bitten.
¹