Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
had slowed British movements to a crawl, terrified the British soldiers and commanders alike and destroyed convoys of supplies on which any thrust up towards Canada depended. In 1756, Vaudreuil had sent a reluctant Montcalm to attack the British fort of Oswego, their toehold on Lake Ontario. It had fallen but Montcalm was appalled by the behaviour of the Natives who massacred some of the British prisoners after the surrender of the fort. In 1757, a massive force of Native Americans from as far away as the western prairies gathered south of Montreal, recruited by the promise of scalps, slaves, and plunder on a huge scale. Montcalm took Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George and desperately tried to prevent an even larger massacre by Native Americans furious that the Europeans had made peace between themselves, while not a scalp had been taken. He was only partially successful; despite his personal intervention and that of Bougainville and other officers, unarmed British soldiers were enslaved or slaughtered and their corpses maimed. This infamous incident, gruesomely exaggerated in the British press at the time, poisoned relations between the British and French. Montcalm could have followed up his success with a drive towards Albany but blamed the Canadians’ desire to return to collect the harvest and withdrew. In 1758, a British attack on Fort Carillon at the north end of Lake George ended in slaughter as the British threw themselves time and again on a barricade through which the French kept up a regular, terrible musketry. The British commander, Abercrombie, squandered a very favourable situation with this bizarre head-on attack, and then compounded his mistake by panicking and retreating south in headlong flight, leaving much heavy equipment behind. Again Montcalm was cautious. Rather than march south to pursue his stricken enemy he stayed put. He did not want to risk his small force on offensive operations so for the third year running there was no follow-up to a successful encounter.
In the winter of 1758/9 reports from prisoners suggested that the relentless build-up of British forces for an assault on Canada was continuing. The British seemed likely to strike in no less than three places. There was Wolfe’s attack up the St Lawrence. A major overland invasion would move up Lake George, aiming for Montreal. Last, there would be a strike at the forts of the west, with Fort Niagara being the most obvious target. Niagara was the vital link in the chain that led from the main body of the colony on the St Lawrence River to the vast hinterland of forts and trading posts that stretched to the Mississippi and up into present-day Alberta. This was the pays d’en haut, the upper country, an area under the strong influence, if not the control, of France. Both the French and the Native Americans regarded themselves as sovereign. The Natives accepted French forts as a necessary evil to ensure the flow of gunpowder, muskets, and metal work which the French exchanged for furs and without which life was indescribably hard. Were the Frenchmen guests or masters? The answer could wait until after the common British enemy was defeated.
Faced with this triple attack the debate over strategy grew ever fiercer. Vaudreuil wanted to hold the British everywhere; every yard of his precious Canada ceded to the British was too great a sacrifice. He urged the use of irregular troops, Native Americans and Canadians, to launch pre-emptive attacks to sow confusion among the British as they prepared for the invasion. Montcalm took entirely the opposite view. ‘Considering our inferiority,’ he wrote to Versailles, they ought to ‘contract our defensive [perimeter], in order to preserve at least, the body of the colony, and retard its loss’. He was thinking as a European statesman of bargaining chips on an eventual peace table, not of hunting and fishing grounds that were part of the Canadians’ DNA. He was fatalistic about Canada’s chances, and increasingly melodramatic about his own role: ‘prejudice’ or ‘councils of quacks are followed’, he complained, but he would play the martyr, ‘I shall none the less exert myself, as I have always done’ even if it meant he must ‘sacrifice myself for the [public] good’.16
Montcalm and Vaudreuil had reached such an impasse that at the end of 1758 the French court was petitioned to arbitrate. In case Versailles doubted the seriousness of the issue Montcalm effectively offered his resignation by requesting his own recall to France. Two emissaries were sent, one from the Governor, the other from the General. Both carried letters and dispatches brimming with opprobrium towards the other and pleas to ignore whatever they wrote. Montcalm made the wiser choice of messenger; his letters were carried by his 29-year-old aide-de-camp, Captain Bougainville. The young ADC had enjoyed an unusual career. Born into a glittering family he showed an early aptitude for mathematics and in his mid-twenties had published a treatise on integral calculus for which he was elected to the Royal Society in London. He had also established a reputation as a brilliant lawyer. On first meeting Bougainville, Montcalm described him as ‘witty and well educated’.17 This bright, young star would prove an able diplomat for Montcalm, while Vaudreuil’s emissary was ignored.
Bougainville had joined the army at the age of 21, which was far too old to get ahead. However, his unusual talents secured him a series of appointments as ADC to senior officers. He had been assigned to Montcalm and had joined him in Brest before they had sailed for Canada together in 1756. He did not look like a soldier; he was short, overweight, and asthmatic. But he did not flinch during his first battle, at Oswego, where he served alongside Montcalm, and subsequently proved himself an able student of war. Montcalm wrote that his young ADC,
exposes himself readily to gunfire, a matter on which he needs to be restrained rather than encouraged. I shall be much mistaken if he does not have a good head for soldiering when experience has taught him to foresee the potential for difficulties. In the meantime there is hardly a young man who, having received only the theory, knows as much about it as he.18
He was an adept handler of the Native Americans too. He sat on councils, sang the war songs and had even been adopted into the Nipissing tribe. Despite being wounded during the French victory at Carillon in the summer of 1758, Bougainville was the obvious choice to return to France that winter to plead for more military assistance for Canada. Bougainville’s passage was not a pleasant one. Battered by gales as soon as they left the St Lawrence he wrote that ‘we suffer in this wretched machine beyond anything words can express. The rolling is horrible and unceasing…an imagination most prolific in troublesome ideas could not come within a hundredth of outlining the unbearable details of our position.’19 In fact, their actual position was worse than he thought; the captain was mistaken in his navigation and sailed his ship into the Bristol Channel, home to a nest of privateers. Luckily, they realized their mistake, turned round and soon arrived in Morlaix. Within hours Bougainville was on the road to Paris.
In the French capital he received compliments, promotions, and fine parties but little substance. Louis XV’s armies had been defeated in Europe and his fleet was being slowly strangled at sea. The state was rudderless. France was still an autocratic monarchy. All lines of government converged only in the person of the king. Louis’ greatgrandfather, the mighty Louis XIV, had created this system and he alone had had the self-discipline and intelligence to control it. Despite insisting that, ‘in my person alone resides the sovereign power, of which the essence is the spirit of counsel, wisdom, and reason…to me alone belongs the legislative power, independent and entire…public order emanates from me; I am its supreme guardian,’ Louis XV was unequal to the task.20 He was a man of honour who genuinely desired to do good, but he lacked the charisma and the confidence to defend his policies when they came under criticism, and the gargantuan work ethic of his great-grandfather. He hated confrontation and attempted to rule by stealth, becoming ever more secretive and suspicious. He also found it difficult to apply himself to hard work, preferring the company of his many lovers or indulging his passion for hunting. A government that was designed to respond to a forceful central figure slowly became paralysed. Ministers competed to fill the void. There were constant changes of personnel. One dominant figure was Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, once the King’s favourite mistress; she now supplied women of low status for the King’s bed, who would satisfy his lust without challenging her political power. Beautiful and clever, cultured and astute, she played a much debated role in French government throughout the war. Although accused at the time, and subsequently by some historians of dominating the affairs of state, she was not a shadowy