The Frenchman lifted a chunk
of American earth on his sword,
cleared his throat, and began his
long, tortuously worded, and
amazingly sweeping pronouncement
to the little group near him.
He claimed for Louis XIV not only the
land on which he stood, at the juncture
of two of the Great Lakes, but "all other
countries, lakes, tributaries, contiguous
and adjacent thereto, as well discovered
as to be discovered, which are bounded on
the one side by the North and West Seas
and on the other by the South Sea, including
all its length and breadth."
The audience of French soldiers, Jesuits,
and Indians gathered there at Sault Saint-Marie that day in June, 1671,
listened respectfully as the Sieur de
Lusson repeated his speech three times. It
was, after all, a mouthful to recite. It
would also be - thanks to the British who
already occupied much of the territory he
claimed - a mouthful for the French
Empire to try to swallow.
It was British competition, as much as
France's self-generated colonial ambitions,
which had impelled these Frenchmen
to the very middle of the great, wild New World where they now planted their
symbols of sovereignty. The two nations
had been scrambling for footholds in
America for almost two centuries.
An English voyager, John Cabot, had
been the first to reach "New Found Land"
in 1497, but the French were not shy
about exploiting what he discovered
offshore: one of the world's most bountiful
fisheries. An abundant supply from
France of cheap salt for preserving their
catches gave French fishermen an advantage.
This commercial handicap nudged
the British into an historically important
step, however. Forced ashore to dry their
harvests of cod, they established a base the
first of any European nation - on the
coast of what is now Canada.
Still, it was France that most persistently
probed the wonders of the new
continent. In 1535, Jacques Cartier,
drawn by Iroquois tales of gold, jewels
and furs, sailed up the St. Lawrence River
to a place the Indians called Kebec. He
stayed only one winter and found neither
gold nor jewels, but furs there were
aplenty, and furs were enough to arouse
commercial interest. Although Cartier
founded no colony, there was from the
time of his expedition - some 70 years
before Englishmen successfully settled
in Virginia - a continuing French presence
in Canada.
Demand for furs grew, for Paris fashion,
as influential then as now, dictated that
stylish gentlemen should wear high crowned
felt hats made from beaver
skins. But the supply, dependent on
migratory Indians, was irregular. Traders
at first worked only the coastal regions.
Then, in 1608, a wise, devout and patriotic
Frenchman named Samuel de Champlain
led a company of fur-traders back to
Cartier's Quebec and built a settlement.
He brought in missionaries and craftsmen,
made alliances with the Indians,
and through long years of arduous
struggle managed to put both his
colony and its trade on a permanent
basis. Champlain died in 1634; it is almost entirely because of
his work that New France survived.
New France's development was very different from that of the British colonies to the south. The products of the farmers contending with the St Lawrence Valley's short growing season was miniscule compare with that of Virginia's sprawling sun favoured plantations. The few small
communities - Quebec, Montreal, Trois Rivieres
- were mere villages measured
against New England's bustling towns.
In 1666, there were only 3418 people in
all of New France ; British America had
passed the 50,000 mark a quarter of a
century earlier. Canada was not primarily
a country of settlers, but of fur -traders
and adventurers. It was the land of the
coureurs-de-bois.
Champlain had first set these "forest
runners" on their legendary paths, sending
young French boys to live with
Indians and learn the ways of the wilderness.
The coureur-de-bois was the symbol
and the leading edge of New France. With
the stealth, skill and endurance of the
native, he moved deeper and deeper into
the dense woodlands, seeking new fur supplies and finding the trails along
which European civilization would one
day follow, to build roads and towns.
Ironically, a pair of these hardy French
frontiersmen were responsible for bringing
the British into the north. The Sieur
de Groseillers and his brother-in-law,
Pierre Radisson, spent years exploring
the great forests round Hudson Bay and
trying to persuade their government to
establish direct trade with the Indians
there. Repeatedly rebuffed - their reward
for arriving at Quebec in canoes crammed
with high-quality skins was a fine for
illegal trading - Groseillers and Radisson
journeyed to England in an effort to
promote their scheme.
In 1668, Messrs. "Gooseberry and
Radishes," as their new British sponsors
were wont to call them, led a party of
Englishmen to those far north shores
where they soon amassed a shipment of
furs worth '90,000. Delighted, Charles II
granted a royal charter to the "Company
of Adventurers of England tradeing into
Hudson's Bay" and almost casually
assigned the new company control of the
area watered by rivers emptying into the Bay - a domain that turned out to be one
and a half million square miles, ten times
the size of the British Isles.
The Hudson's Bay Company had little
interest in governing this vast territory,
but exploited its trading franchise with
vigour and speed, qualities made necessary
by the short period the Bay was navigable
each year. Ships carrying weapons,
trinkets and utensils for the Indians left
England in June, reached the Bay just
after the summer sun had cleared it of
ice, hurriedly took on their return cargoes
of furs, and sailed for home before the
autumn freeze took hold. From the
beginning the enterprise was successful
for the English and painful for the French,
whose Indian suppliers began diverting
the flow of furs northward.
French Canadians smarted from the
geopolitical sting as much as from the
commercial competition, for they now
felt squeezed between expanding British
presences both north and south. Chafing
at this pressure, New France looked inland.
New territories that could be gained
and exploited by French explorers, missionaries.
soldiers and traders to the northwest
and south-west might enable France
to meet the British commercial challenge
peacefully. If not, if the conflict escalated
from trade to arms, she would control the
area vital to military and economic power
in the interior of the continent, the water
cross-roads of Lakes Superior and Huron.
This was the reason why the French had
journeyed to Sault-Sainte-Marie in r67r
and would travel far beyond in the decades
that followed.
Frenchmen went west. On the far side
of Lake Superior they formed alliances
with Indians and regained for Montreal
some of the trade lost to Hudson Bay.
Frenchmen went south. In 1682, Robert
Chevalier de La Salle reached the Gulf of
Mexico via the Mississippi River. And
they went north; in that same year, having
turned his coat once again', Pierre Radisson
led a French company to Hudson Bay.
This rapid territorial growth, buttressed
by strategically placed forts, was remarkable
for such a small colony. It was
also less than prudent.
New France was totally committing
itself to the economically fickle fur trade
and the westward expansion necessary
to sustain it, an undertaking for which its
population and financial resources were
insufficient. Considering the British challenge
it would have to answer, New
France was spreading itself too thin on
the ground.
For one truth was becoming more and
more apparent: even so vast a continent
as North America was not going to be big
enough for both empires. La Salle warned
his countrymen that the British would
"complete the ruin of New France which
they had already hemmed in by their
establishments in Virginia, Pennsylvania,
New England and Hudson's Bay."
Nor were the English less resentful of
French ambitions. Thomas Douggan, the
testy Governor of New York, heaped
scorn on the idea that the French King
had a claim to Britain's American colonies
"because some rivers that run through
them rise in the Canadian lakes. He might
as well pretend to all the countries that
drink claret and brandy." Cotton Mather
of Boston called Canada "the chief
source of New England's miseries," and
during the Massachusetts witchcraft trials
jurors nodded understandingly when told
that Satan used Canadians as his familiars.
A governor of Montreal succinctly described
the seriousness of the confrontation:
"It would be difficult for our colony
or theirs to subsist other than through
the destruction of one by the other." He
was correct; the future of the continent
would be determined by arms.
The issue would take four wars
- all of them on-the-spot versions
of European conflicts - and
more than 70 years to settle. The
fighting began in 1689 with King
William's War, eight bloody years of
inter-colonial raids and retaliations which
ended encouragingly for the French. The
Treaty of Ryswick gave the Canadians
most of the British posts on Hudson Bay,
and the French held Acadia, the province
on the Atlantic seaboard later renamed
Nova Scotia. It was all the encouragement
the French were to get. The five
years of peace that followed constituted
the high-water mark of their North
American Empire.
With the next war, that of the Spanish
Succession, the tide began running the
other way. New France only narrowly
avoided total defeat. In the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Hudson's Bay Company
'regained its forts, and the French
were compelled to cede the provinces of
Newfoundland and Acadia to Britain.
Fatigued by the contest, both sides
backed off to recuperate and North
America enjoyed a generation of peace,
during which New France readied herself
for the inevitable resumption of conflict.
New forts went up to guard the frontier
to the south. On Ile-Royale, one of two
islands the French retained in the Gulf of
St. Lawrence, the biggest shore defence
in all America slowly took shape: Louisbourg.
III conceived and badly built, a
monument to administrative fiddles and
shoddy workmanship, the massive stone
fortress was formidable only in appearance
and cost. As a stronghold to defend New
France, it was to prove peculiarly vulnerable
to attack.
The French had better results
building up their commercial
strength during this period. Pierre
La Verendrye tramped. through
the swamps and forests of the
north-west for 12 years, opening new
routes that siphoned into Montreal much
of the fur trade that had been going to
Hudson Bay. This development was more
valuable to the French, and more galling
to the English, than a dozen Louisbourgs.
When fighting resumed with the War of
the Austrian Succession in 1744, France's
policy was to seek victory in Europe while
simply holding on to her American possessions.
Without reinforcements from
France this latter task was difficult,
especially in the case of Louisbourg. A
well-planned expedition (it was 'even
supplied with cannon-balls to fit the
French guns) led by William Pepperell,
the Maine lumber baron, made this
abundantly clear in 1745. With the aid of
the Royal Navy, the New England
volunteers dealt "the severest blow that
could have been given to the Enemy, and
in the tenderest part," by capturing
Louisbourg at small cost.
France did better in Europe, and by the
Treaty of Aix-Ia-Chapelle, to the indignation
of Britain's colonists, regained
Louisbourg in 1748. In America, this
"peace" was not an end to war. Its terms
only further inflamed the New Englanders,
already enraged by terrible
French and Indian attacks on their frontier settlements. (Throughout these
wars, both sides employed Indian allies,
but the French were more successful at
it.) At most, Aix-Ia-Chapelle was regarded
by British and French colonists as
a truce. The main event was yet to come.
Both sides prepared for a showdown.
The French began strengthening Louisbourg
as soon as they got it back. The
British, in turn, built a naval base at
Halifax and planted their own settlers 3,000
immigrants by 1749 - among the
Frenchmen of what was now called Nova
Scotia. These French Acadians, humble
farmers for the most part, were considered
a threat by their British masters
despite their protestations of neutrality.
Later, when war began, they were forcibly expelled in an episode which for years was
the stuff of legend and verse. Six thousand
were uprooted from the land of their
ancestors, separated from friends and
often from families, and shipped off to less
vulnerable corners of the Empire. (Many
of them ultimately found their' way to
Louisiana where their French-speaking
descendants are still called Acadians.)
By the time the Acadians were deported,
New France and British America
were at war far to the south-west, in the
Ohio Valley. Both nations claimed this
area between Virginia and France's inland
empire. The French reinforced their
claim in 1753, sending 2,200 Canadian
soldiers to build and man Fort le Breuf
on the Ohio River. Soon after it was completed, a 21-year-old English American
named George Washington arrived at its
gates with a letter from the Governor of
Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie,
in no uncertain terms, demanded to know
why the Canadians were on land "so
notoriousJy known to be the property of
the crown of Great Britain."
"They told me," Washington reported
back to his Governor, "that it was their
absolute design to take possession of the
Oh.io, and by God they would do it."
Dinwiddie was not impressed. He must
have had a high opinion of Washington's
abilities or a low one of the French. for
he sent the young officer back to the Ohio
with about 200 colonial militiamen.
The French, meanwhile, had advanced
farther down the river, captured a half.
finished outpost being built by a British
party on the site of modern Pittsburgh,
completed it, and named it Fort
Duquesne. When Washington arrived to
evict the interlopers, his Virginians were
severely trounced. Driven into hastily dug
defences named by Washington Fort
Necessity (it was certainly necessary, but
knee-deep trenches in an open meadow
hardly merited the title of "fort") the men
were surrounded and forced to surrender.
The French allowed their captives to
go home to Virginia, but this generosity
did not assuage offended British sensibilities.
From a backwoods border clash
fought by colonial militia, the Ohio
question was promoted to an imperial
crisis. George II announced to Parliament
that he would defend his American possessions,
and sent Major-General Edward
Braddock with two regiments of regular
infantry to expel the trespassers.
Braddock, a 60-year-old veteran of the
Coldstream Guards and a military traditionalist,
was so confident of an easy
campaign that he took his mistress along.
Behind fluttering banners and beating
drums, his redcoats were a smart, martial
sight - and easy targets - as they marched
over the Appalachian Mountains. On the
other side, the French, who had learned
much about forest fighting from their
Indian allies, were waiting. Now they
were about to display this knowledge to
the British.
The French-Indian force numbered less than half Braddock's
2,100 men, but the British never
had a chance to count them. Braddock's close-ranked column met the enemy on a
road near Fort Duquesne in the late
afternoon of July 9, 1755. The way ahead
quickly cleared when the British delivered
a few bursts of grapeshot from a small
cannon. Jubilant at seeing the enemy
yield so easily, Braddock's men rushed
forward - and then .began toppling like
ninepins as the woods on either side spat
a torrent of musket-balls.
Unable to see the enemy marksmen,
hapless British troops began firing wildly
in all directions, hitting many of their
own comrades. Braddock, himself possibly
struck by an English bullet, died
muttering " better luck next time." Half
his expedition fell in the slaughter. The
rest fled for their lives, hurriedly destroying
valuable stores and munitions
rather than encumber their retreat, which
was creditably commanded by George
Washington. Braddock's mistress also
died. It was rumoured that Indians, celebrating
their victory, afterwards consumed
her rather substantial body.
Braddock's march was one thrust in a
four-pronged British offensive that .was
meant to end with the conquest of Canada.
The British also failed to penetrate
French defences either at Fort Niagara on
Lake Ontario or farther east along the
Lake Champlain-Richelieu River route
to the St. Lawrence. Only in Acadia,
wh~re two French forts surrendered, did
Britain achieve her initial objectives.
The two great Empires, although neither
officially acknowledged it yet, were at
war once more, and so far New France
was putting up a remarkably good show
fora country of 55,000 defying a neighbour
20 times as big.
Britain officially declared war on France
in May, 1756, the start in Europe of the
Seven Years War, which,in America was
known as the French and Indian War.
Little happened until December, when
William Pitt became Prime Minister. Pitt
the Elder has been called the only Prime
Minister in the history of Britain who
purposefully and successfully made war
an instrument of imperial policy. Whether
or not he deserves that less than wholly
flattering distinction, he certainly understood
the importance of strategy and
initiative to national aims.
The three previous Anglo-French wars
had been decided, ultimately, on the
battlefields of Europe. Pitt determined to go this time directly for the prizes themselves:
French colonies and the control
of sea-routes leading to them. The future
of New France would be settled in North
America, and not this time by volunteer
armies and colonial militia, but by all the
military and naval power that Britain
could bring to bear on that sector of the
world-wide conflict.
It was because of one man, the Marquis
de Montcalm, that French arms continued
to prevail in America for a year after
Pitt took office. Montcalm was probably
the greatest commander of the Seven
Years War on either side. He also had the
greatest problems. One was his mistrust
of and lack of sympathy for the Canadians,
which they returned in kind. On his
arrival he was surprised to learn that they
actually spoke passable French. Believing
that as soldiers they were inclined to
strike one fast blow and go home, he
preferred to rely on his French regulars
whenever possible.
Montcalm also faced trouble from the
men with whom he shared authority in
the colony: Pierre de Vaudreuil, the first
Canadian-born Governor - in effect a
viceroy - and Francois Bigot, the Intendant
or chief administrator. Vaudreuil
was jealous of Montcalm and frequently
interfered with his command. The Canadian
had a nice grasp of guerrilla warfare
which Montcalm could have employed to
some advantage, but the French General
seems to have regarded Vaudreuil as a nuisance. "Youth must learn," Montcalm
sighed, when the 61-year-old Governor
toured a defensive position. "As he had
never in his life seen either an army or an
earthwork, these things struck him as
being as novel as they were entertaining."
Bigot, the Intendant, was no more than
an amusing crook. He headed a syndicate
that bought surplus stores from the
Crown cheap and sold them back at
ridiculously inflated prices. "What a
country, what a country," lamented
.Montcalm, "where knaves grow rich and
honest men are ruined." Still, he tolerated
the use of Crown money to support
Bigot's friends on padded regimental
rosters. He had to get along with the
Intendant in order to fight the war, and
besides, Bigot was an intelligent raconteur
whose famed table and vivacious
mistress could lend some brightness to
the long, grim Canadian winter.
Montcalm's greatest problem was the
British Royal Navy. Twice as large as
France's, it was rapidly gaining control
of the Atlantic. This meant that Montcalm's
command - a few thousand French
regulars and about 9,000 Canadian militia,
very small in comparison to British
manpower in America - could not expect
a steady flow of reinforcements. He
realized that eventually the French fleet s
would be blockaded at home, the entrance
to the St. Lawrence would fall to the
British, and that his force at Quebec
would have to face the enemy alone.
Montcalm's glory derives mainly from
the fact that he refused to let these considerations
lock him into a defensive
posture until it was absolutely necessary.
There were three invasion routes the
British could take to pierce the Canadian
heartland. One was the St. Lawrence
itself. Another was up Lake Champlain
and the Richelieu River. The third was
in the west, through the Ohio River and
the Lower Lakes. Instead of waiting
behind his forts for the British to force
their way in, Montcalm marched out to
push his enemy back. He struck first and
hard - in the west.
On August 10, 1756, Colonel ] ames
Mercer, who commanded the important
British base at Oswego on Lake Ontario,
awoke to find 3,300 Frenchmen and
Canadians outside his walls. Four days
later he was killed by French fire and the
fort surrendered. The victory was at
least partly Vaudreuil's; his Indian guerrillas
had isolated the British post through
a long winter of terror raids. It did not
increase amicability within the FrenchCanadian
command structure when
Montcalm claimed that his regulars deserved
all the credit for the victory.
The next summer Montcalm moved
8,000 men against Fort William Henry on
the eastern lake route. The siege began
on August 3. Six days later, having
learned no help was coming, the British
surrendered. Montcalm admonished his
Indians to treat the prisoners humanely,
but his orders were violated. "They killed
and scalp'd all the sick and wounded
before our faces," testified one AngloAmerican
soldier, "and then took from
our troops, all the Indians and negroes.
. . . One of the former they burnt alive
afterwards. "
About a dozen were killed, including
"Officers, privates, Women and Children,"
and the incident added little lustre
to French-Canadian reputations in the
area. New Yorkers began destroying
boats, bridges and roads to block Montcalm's
expected advance towards Albany.
But he was not going to Albany. Facing
transport and supply problems and knowing
his Canadian auxiliaries wanted to go
home for the harvest, he fell back on Fort
Ticonderoga, which the French called
Carillon. The British were pleasantly
surprised; Vaudreuil was disgusted; and Bigot's friends were delighted to have an
interlude in the fighting, during which
they purchased the spoils of Fort William
Henry, including 36,000 pounds of
powder, at a knock-down price, later
selling it back to the Crown at a staggeringly
high profit.
Montcalm should have moved. By the
next year it was too late, as Pitt's men
and Pitt 's policies at last took hold and
robbed Montcalm of his initiative. Probably
the most important of those men
was James Wolfe, a temperamental,
chronically ill (besides a generally frail
constitution, he suffered from "rheumatism
and gravel"), bold and devoted
soldier. Wolfe was aware of his own
reputation for moodiness and stormy
outbursts. "Better be a savage of some
use," he said, "than a gentle, amorous
puppy, obnoxious to all the world." His
superiors suffered his rudeness to gain the
benefit of his courage and imagination.
The Duke of Newcastle told George II
that Pitt's new general was insane. "Mad
is he?" responded the King. "Then I hope
he will bite some others of my generals. "
On June I , 1758, 200 British vessels,
including 23 ships of the line and carrying
13,000 troops, appeared off Louisbourg.
Lord Jeffrey Amherst was in charge of the
show, but the 3z-year-old Wolfe, making
his debut in the American war, stole it. It
was Wolfe, armed only with a cane, who
leapt into the surf under a shower of
French fire and bullied his men ashore
after several previous attempts to establish
a beachhead had failed. It was Wolfe
who directed the movement of British
artillery through the siege that followed,
closer and closer to the fortress with ever
more devastating effect, until the desperate
French were plugging the holes in
the walls with hogsheads of tea, and the
return fire, according to a French officer,
sounded "more like funeral guns than
defence." On July z6, Louisbourg capitulated.
The St. Lawrence was unlocked.
But the man who had as much as anyone
turned the key went back to England
in a pique, because Amherst had decided
it was too late to press on to Quebec that
year. " If you will attempt to cut up New
France by the roots," Wolfe told him
impatiently before departing, "I will
come back with pleasure to assist."
The year was not altogether Britain's.
At Ticonderoga, Montcalm scored a splendid
victory over an army of 15,000 trying
to force its way to the St. Lawrence.
Ralph Abercromby lost almost 2,000
men, the French less than 400. "What a
day for France!" wrote Montcalm. "Ah what soldiers are ours! I never saw the
like. Why were they not at Louisbourg?"
Why were they not also, he might later
have asked, in the west, where the French
lost Forts Frontenac and Duquesne? The
triumph at Ticonderoga was glorious
enough, but the eventuality Montcalm
had foreseen for the last two years was
now reality: New France was confined to
the St. Lawrence Valley and it was only a
matter of time before the enemy struck
at its heart.
Before' a year was up Wolfe kept his
promise and returned "to cut up New
France by the roots." While the mercurial
General was without doubt the
hero of the Seven Years War, it is worth
recalling the well-worn adage that Britain's
real army was her navy. Pitt
certainly never forgot it.
British sea-power had isolated Montcalm
from the reinforcements he needed.
It had invalidated the presence of a
French fleet off Louisbourg. Now the
Royal Navy had carried Wolfe and his
army of 10,000 into the heart of the North
American land mass, sailing up the
treacherous St. Lawrence on a course
charted by a promising young naval
officer named J ames Cook. While Cook
would be remembered for later achievements,
this task was as dangerous as any
he ever undertook. He worked at night in
enemy territory. Once he had to leap off
the bows of his boat while Indians
jumped on to the stern. But he did the
job well; his charts took Wolfe where the
General wanted to go.
Once before Quebec, Wolfe, who was
even more ill than usual, showed less than
his normal impatience to conclude the
issue. Perhaps he believed the fortifications
to be stronger than they actually
were. If so, his conviction was not shared
by the French commander. After surveying
his defences, Montcalm dispatched
, his aide Louis Bougainville to plead for
reinforcements in Paris. The hard-pressed
French Treasury had no money to spare
for Canada. "When a house is on fire,"
said the Minister, Berryer, "one doesn't
bother about the stables." "At least,
Monsieur," replied Bougainville rather
acidly, "one could not accuse you of
talking like a horse."
Wolfe put his main battery on Point
Levis across the river from Quebec, and
bombarded the town throughout July.
Houses that survived the fire collapsed
under the sheer weight of cannon-balls.
In the lower town, ISO dwellings were
destroyed in one night of incendiary
shelling. To destroy a town, however,
was not to conquer it, as Wolfe found
when he lost 400 men in late July while
attempting to make a landing on the
French side of the river.
He knew he had to act before the
autumn freeze forced his expedition out
of the St. Lawrence, but professed he did
not know what to do. In early September
he wrote to Pitt that he had "such a
Choice of Difficulties, that I own myself
at a loss how to determine." Wolfe as well
as his disappointed officers knew that his
depression and indecision were caused by
his physical afflictions. "I know perfectly
well you cannot cure my complaint," he
told his surgeon about this time, "but
patch me up so that I may be able to do
my duty for the next few days, and r shall
be content."
Shortly afterwards, Wolfe broke camp
and moved a large part of his force upstream.
There were several possible
motives for the mysterious shift. Among
the least likely would be an attempt to
scale the towering cliffs and reach the
Plains of Abraham above the town. Wolfe
kept his plan to himself.
About 4 a.m. on September 13, a
French sentry near the Anse au
Foulon, one of the few places
where a steep, tortuous path
climbed up the formidable
wall, heard a sound from the darkened
river. "Qui vive?" he challenged.
"France," came the quiet reply.
"Why don't you speak louder?" persisted
the sentry.
"Be quiet. We will be heard," answered
the commanding voice, in excellent
French. Sensing he was dealing with an
officer, the sentry kept his silence. The
voice from the dark was indeed an
officer's, that of a Highlander named
Simon Gray who was in the leading boat
of a flotilla carrying almost 5,000 British
soldiers. A few minutes later Wolfe
stepped on to the shingled beach of the
Anse du Foulon. He was honest with his
men. "I don't think we can by any means
get up here," he said, "but we must use
our best endeavour." He was too pessimistic:
his advance guard had already
crept to the top and silenced the small
body of French troops on the summit.
At sunrise two hours later, Montcalm
was astounded to see a red-clad British
army assembling on the Plains of Abraham.
The war that had begun with an
ambush in thick forest was about to be
decided on a field that was practically a
parade-ground. Here regular soldiers were
better suited than irregulars, and Montcalm's
army of 4,500 consisted mainly of
the latter. But he did not hesitate. "If
we give the enemy time to dig in," he
said, ordering his men from their trenches,
"we shall never be able to attack him with
the few troops we have."
The formal British ranks held their fire
until the French were within 40 paces,
then dispensed two volleys in such precise
unison that they were said to sound like
two cannon-shots. The Frenchmen who
were left standing turned and fled. Wolfe,
personally leading the counter-charge,
was hit three times. From where he lay on
the ground he calmly issued an order to
cut off ' the French retreat. He then
turned on his side, said "Now, God be
praised, I will die in peace," and did so.
Montcalm, covered with blood from his
own wounds, rode with dignity back into
the walled city before dying. The generals
were two of some 1,200 casualties in this
critical battle that had lasted less than
half an hour.
Another year elapsed before a British
army of 18,000 compelled the surrender
of Montreal and completed the conquest
of Canada. Great Britain could take her
time; she was riding a world-wide groundswell
of victory. In Germany the French
were being beaten back. At sea, the Royal
Navy achieved decisive victories in the
Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the
Caribbean. In the West Indies, Guadeloupe
had already surrendered and other
French sugar islands were to follow costing
France a fifth of her overseas
trade, whereas in Canada she lost only a
twentieth of it. Spain's late and injudicious
entry into the war only provided
more prizes - Havana in the west and
Manila in the east - for English arms.
When the European powers finally sat
down at the conference table, Great
Britain held all the winning cards.
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