GENERAL WOLFE AND THE TAKING

OF QUEBEC.

A French Version: with Wolfe's Orders,
selected from his MS. Book.

BY MR. W. L. SARGANT.

May 3rd, 1881.

FEW incidents in English history are more heroic and more renowned than the taking of Quebec in September, 1759, and the death of General Wolfe its captor. The tale might be worth telling over again even if nothing new had offered itself; but new authorities have appeared in the form of letters found in the archives of the French Ministry of Marine and hitherto unpublished, and this gives us the opportunity of comparing the French with the English appreciation of Wolfe. It is well for us to correct our estimate by that of an enemy. The writer of the letters was the Marquis de Montcalm, the general of the French forces; a soldier of capacity and bravery; and who by a singular fate, died a few hours after Wolfe, of wounds received in the same battle. Besides; much as we know of Wolfe, I fear we know little of his opponent, though the French have classed him among their great commanders, and many of their excellent writers have chanted his praise.

Of Wolfe's previous history I need not say much. He had fought in the Austrian-Succession war under George II. and the Duke of Cumberland, at Dettingen and Fontenoy, besides taking a part at Laffeldt and a leading part in the capture of Louisburg. His courage and conduct had recommended him to the notice of Lord Chatham, who sent him to command in Canada. His manner

was awkward. He had a worse fault, that of indulging in gasconade. The orthodox notion of a hero is of a man as simple as he is brave: indeed we cannot conceive of Sir Philip Sidney as brandishing his sword at court and announcing his future exploits. Yet many truly brave men have shared the frailty: as Marshal Villeroi for example, who was hated by Louis XIV.'s courtiers for his egotism and vaunting: as even our Nelson, who had an undue eagerness for popular applause. It is not given to every great soldier to have the grace of Marlborough, or the stoical self restraint of Wellington. If I have mentioned these foibles, it is because every portrait, like every landscape, should have shadows as well as lights. The stain after all, is but a slight one, and disappears by the side of what history places on that of his adversary; though, as we shall see, the French assert that it is undeserved.

Of Montcalm, the French hero, as I have said, we most of us know little: but much deserves to be known. It is his greatness which makes our Wolfe so great: for if Hector had been little, where would have been the glory of Achilles?

Montcalm, like other French officers before the Revolution, was of gentle birth: he came from Provence, of a loyal and rather austere family. He entered the army at fourteen, but had previously received so good an education, that he was able to read in the original his favourite author, Plutarch. He made a good use of his attainments: for when the effervescence of youth had passed, he devoted himself to the study of other Greek classics, as a protection from the attractions of gambling and other vices. He married early and happily, and escaped the vicious contagion of his century and his class,

He was 29 years old in 1741, when the Austrian-Succession War broke out. He was soon promoted to a colonelcy, and narrowly escaped death at Placentia, where he received five sabre-wounds, and was left on the field of battle, untended, till the next day. In another engagement he was wounded by a musket ball in the forehead, but was carried to the rear. and bravery on these and on other occasions, he highest reputation as an officer. His air was dignified; his manners

By his ability

had earned the

uous.

were courteous; his temper was as calm as his energy was impetHe was untainted by the scoffing and libertine philosophy of Diderot and the Encyclopédie; but he had a practical philosophy, a Christian stoicism of his own: "a hero," he said, "does not make his glory consist in reducing others to hunger and wretchedness, but in bearing these himself in behalf of his country; not in inflicting death on others, but in braving it himself."

Such was the man sent to Canada during the Seven-Years' War that opened in 1756, between France allied at last with her hereditary enemy, Austria, against Protestant Prussia backed by Protestant England; by Louis XV. and Maria Theresa, against Frederick the Great and George II. Canada was at that time, far more extensive than it afterwards became stretching to the South West until it met the northern boundary of Louisiana. Its vast extent made its scanty European settlers appear even fewer than they really were: among endless forests of oaks, beeches, pines, and birches, a few white men disputed the ground with the Red Indians.

The French colonists were bold and hardy men, inured to cold and hardships, and trained to war of a guerilla kind by constant disputes and skirmishes with the English settlers in the south. The whole French population amounted to little more than 80,000; and these were governed, not by their own assemblies, like the English Colonists, but by the king and his ministers in Paris.

Montcalm on his arrival in Canada as commander of the forces found the feeblest of resources at his command: few and scattered Europeans, weak fortifications, and a mere handful of troops far overmatched by the British. He had excellent colleagues in Lévis, Bouganville, and Bourlamaque: but what were officers without soldiers? Even reinforcements were not forthcoming; for when Montcalm urged upon the Ministry in France his sore need of them, he got a flat refusal :-" when a gentleman's château is on fire, the stables must shift for themselves."

Montcalm went through several Canadian campaigns before his final one in 1759. His most noted exploit was the capture of Fort William-Henry; and it was there that he contracted the stain I

alluded to above. This stigma has become widely known through Fenimore Cooper's interesting romance, "The Last of the Mohicans." The British garrison had capitulated on honourable terms, and were marching out, when, says Cooper, "More than 2,000 raging savages broke from the forest, and threw themselves across the fatal plain, with instinctive alacrity. We shall not dwell on the revolting horrors that succeeded. Death was everywhere, and in his most terrific and disgusting aspects. The flow of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of a gushing torrent; and as the natives became heated and maddened by the sight, many among them even kneeled to the earth, and drank freely, exultingly, of the crimson tide."

But was Montcalm, the gentleman and the soldier, a participator in this butchery, aggravated by shameless treachery? Hear Fenimore Cooper. "This massacre so far deepened the stain which a previous and very similar event had left upon the reputation of the French commander, that it was not entirely erased by his early and glorious death. .. thousands have yet to learn how much he was deficient in that moral courage without which no man can be truly great." Two charges have been made against Montcalm: first, the connivance at this perfidious massacre; secondly, the having employed Indians at all. The second charge, I think, falls to the ground, when we remember that Montcalm had probably no choice; having been sent out by Louis XV. with very few European troops, and with instructions express or implied, to act with the French Canadians and their Indian allies. At any rate, it is not for us British to throw a stone at the accused: for twenty years later, in our contest with the revolted colonists, we enlisted the inhuman savages to use the tomahawk and scalping-knife on our side; not brigading them in disciplined ranks, with European officers and the restraints of civilization, as we now do with Hindoos and Indian Mahometans, but leaving them to practise their own barbarous customs and slake their thirst for the blood of their enemies. This was one of the crying grievances of the rebellious Americans. Refer to Benjamin Franklin: you will find the following among his justifications for withdrawing allegiance from a king:

"If a king declares his people to be out of his protection:

If he hires foreign mercenaries to help him in their destruction:

If he engages savages to murder their defenceless farmers, women and children.' Elsewhere he publishes, as Swift might have done, a counterfeit Supplement to a Boston Chronicle. He says:

"To the Governor of Canada.

May it please your Excellency;

Jany. 3rd, 1782.

At the request of the Sennaka Chiefs, I send herewith eight packs of Scalps, cured, dried, hooped, and painted, with all the Indian triumphal marks; of which the following is invoice and explanation:

No. 1, containing 43 scalps of Congress soldiers: these are stretched on black hoops four inches in diameter; the inside of the skin painted red, with a small black spot to note their being killed with bullets. Also 62 of farmers killed in their houses; the hoops red, the skins painted brown, and marked with a hoe; a black circle all round, to denote their being surprised in the night; and a black hatchet in the middle, signifying their being killed with that weapon."

Other horrors follow in elaborate succession, with a gravity and sickening exactness worthy of the cynical Swift. But under Franklin's fiction lay the truth, that to put down the rebellion we did ally ourselves with the cruel Indians; and therefore it is not for us to reproach Montcalm for having done the same thing.

But now as to Cooper's second charge :-"On every side the captured were flying before their relentless persecutors, while the armed columns of the Christian king stood fast, in an apathy which has never been explained, and which has left an immoveable blot on the fair escutcheon of their leader."

Let us compare this frightful narrative with that of the latest French Biographer, who does not deny the occurrence of the massacre, but indignantly repudiates Montcalm's complicity, and even affirms that Montcalm anxiously watched the Indians, dreading. an infraction of the treaty. Montcalm, according to this writer, had previously convoked a meeting of the chiefs and made them swear to restrain their braves from violence. A few of these savages however, had penetrated into the hospital and scalped some sick and wounded English. But this outrage was soon stopped, and it was hoped that no further violence would occur. Unfortunately the English aggravated the danger by distributing a quantity