Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow

Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire - Dan  Snow


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hungry and unproductive soldiers brought the colony to the edge of starvation. New France had a slim industrial base, there was only one iron forge and the dawning of total war overwhelmed indigenous capabilities. The ships’ holds were packed with food, alcohol, and the stuff of war, including barrels of gunpowder and cannonballs that acted as ballast. Not least, the convoy had also brought news of Wolfe’s expedition, gleaned from intelligence sources in Europe and papers found aboard a captured British ship. Montcalm had spent the winter in Montreal, where he was better placed to strike out in the direction of the first attack that the British would launch on the colony. It was now clear that, despite threats on other fronts, he would be needed in Quebec.

      Montcalm was 47 years old. His dark brown eyes were full of life and he had a passionate drive that could occasionally tip into a fiery temper. Contemporaries called him a typical southerner. He was born in the ancestral chateau of Candiac near Nîmes in southern France and his was an impeccably aristocratic, if not a wealthy line. His ancestors had been raised, lived and killed on the battlefield. Few of the Montcalms had died in their beds. He had been commissioned an officer at the age of 9 and by 17 was a captain. He saw active campaigning in the 1730s under the great Marshal de Saxe and was left in no doubt as to the dangers of high command when he was close to the Duke of Berwick as he was blown to pieces by a cannonball at Philippsburg in Germany in 1734. He had made the all-important advantageous marriage to Angelique Louise Talon de Boulay, daughter of the Marquis de Boulay, a well-connected colonel. Their marriage was a love match and of ten children six had survived, two boys and four girls. His poignant letters to his wife, enquiring after his children and full of longing for his native Provence, have made him an attractive figure to later biographers.

      He had bled for France. Montcalm had been wounded during the defence of Prague in his late twenties and then almost starved to death on the infamous retreat from Bohemia during the War of Austrian Succession. As a colonel he had led his men from the front and twice rallied his fleeing regiment during the crushing French defeat at Piacenza. He ended the battle a pathetic prisoner in Austrian hands, his unit annihilated and his body savaged with no less than five sabre cuts. He was exchanged for an Austrian prisoner of equal rank only to be wounded in another French defeat in a ravine in the Alps. Just after the inconclusive peace that ended the War of Austrian Succession he petitioned the Minister of War for a pension, citing his thirty-one years, eleven campaigns, and five wounds. He was given an annual stipend of 2,000 livres in 1753.3 He could have easily seen out his days as a stout provincial nobleman, a pillar of Montpellier society, finding good matches for his daughters and regiments for his boys, but that was never the fate of the Montcalms.

      Given the jingoistic enthusiasm for empire that swept across the world in the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that the idea of trans-oceanic empire was unfashionable and unpopular for much of the time since its inception in the sixteenth century. Colonies were often seen as expensive millstones around the neck of the mother country, enriching bourgeois merchants or propping up royal egos. Colonies were lethal to the health of Europeans, peopled by new men on the make who sought opportunities denied them in the stratified societies of Europe. They were crucibles of immorality. Colonists often proved willing to adopt the habits and the women of the Natives. ‘Civilized’ values were eroded and social barriers scaled as turbulent young societies coalesced and fragmented. Above all, for military men, there was nothing glorious about a war of ambush, stockades, river crossings, and forests. The eighteenth-century officer regarded the plains of northern Europe as the natural theatre for war. Here honour was to be won, in battles of foot, cavalry, and artillery which were fought as their fathers, and grandfathers, had done, under the eyes of royal dukes or perhaps even the sovereign himself. Even Wolfe dreamt about commanding a cavalry regiment on the Continent, in the Anglo-Pruss-ian force that was defending George II’s small German Electorate of Hanover from the armies of Louis XV. French policymakers and military men also regarded this as the primary theatre. Traditionally British gains in West Africa, India, the Caribbean, or North America were wiped out at the peace table as long as French armies occupied strategically important Channel ports or German cities.

      The capture of the Baron Dieskau, commander of French forces in Canada, in a skirmish on the banks of Lake George at the very fringe of empire was a case in point. Few senior officers were willing to replace him and serve in the New World. It was a forgotten theatre of war, and one in which the imbalance was slowly increasing as every spring more reinforcements were sent from Britain than from France. Montcalm’s name was chosen from the list of junior field officers. It was ‘a commission that I had neither desired nor asked for’, he recorded in his journal. But ‘I felt I had to accept this honourable and delicate commission’, because it ‘ensured my son’s fortunes’. Like many a proud, noble but impecunious family, the Montcalms depended solely on the crown for patronage. Part of the package was a promise that ‘the King would give my regiment to my son’. He was also promoted to Maréchal de camp, a Major General in British parlance, with a 25,000 livres salary, resettlement money, and living expenses. He would receive a pension of 6,000 livres a year, and half for his wife if he failed to return. This last provision was ‘dear to my heart’, he wrote and ‘touched me because I owe Madame de Montcalm so much’. On 11 March 1756 he had gone to Versailles, to collect his commission and present his son to the King, who duly made the teenager a colonel. Having guaranteed the social, military, and financial stability of his line, he had ridden for Brest on the fifteenth where he met his staff and boarded ship for Canada.4

      The crossing had taken five weeks. Like Wolfe, he tired of being cooped up aboard ship and he disembarked as soon as he could, below Quebec, travelling up the last thirty miles of the St Lawrence to the town on horseback. As he rode he no doubt cast his practised eye over the shoreline, placing artillery batteries and forts in his mind’s eye to impede the progress of the British fleet that he knew one day would try to penetrate up the river. He had arrived in Quebec in May 1756 and stayed a week. Long enough to realize that this was ‘a country and a war where everything is so different from European practice’.5 It was not a compliment.

      Three years later he had not changed his mind. He never came to love Canada nor its rugged inhabitants. The deeply conservative aristocrat could not bring himself to embrace the mobility of Canadian culture. Skilled labourers or fur traders could amass fortunes, buy enough land to become seigneurs, obtain military commissions for their sons, who could then build the family’s reputation on the battlefield and eventually acquire noble rank. Soldiers could make fortunes from the massive funds that were earmarked for the colony. Montcalm complained that Le Mercier, the commandant of the artillery for Quebec, ‘came out twenty years ago a simple soldier, [but] will soon be worth about six or seven hundred thousand livres, perhaps a million if these things continue’.6 ‘He does not care for much,’ Montcalm confided to his journal, ‘other than his own interest.’7 One of his aides wrote that ‘one must agree that this spirit of greed, of gain, of commerce, will always destroy the spirit of honor, of glory, and military spirit’. He worried about the effect of this brave new world on the men under their command. ‘Soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘corrupted by the great amount of money, [and] by the example of the Indians and Canadians, breathing an air permeated with independence, work indolently.’ He concluded that ‘this country is dangerous for discipline’.8

      The art of war was another area in which Montcalm found himself deeply at odds with Canadian thinking. He saw warfare only through the lens of a regular officer, unable to escape the mindset in which he had been immersed all his life. He regarded war in America as barbaric. For generations Canada had defended herself from the Native Americans and British settlers alike by adopting the tactics of the former. Raids, ambushes, massacres, and farm burning were the norm for Canadians, much to the horror of regular officers sent out from France. In Europe the behaviour of armies was tightly circumscribed. Rules and conventions protected women, civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. Enemy commanders wrote shocked letters to each other, always in impeccable French, if any of their subordinates


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