Background to French Position in Canada
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.

Images
map of campaign
Maps
Forts around Great Lakes
Claims before the War
North America after Treaty of Paris
British Acquisitions
French Map of Continent
Suggested Reading
Armies of the Seven Years War: Commanders, Equipment, Uniforms and Strategies of the 'First World War'
by Digby Smith

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by Stephen Luscombe