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

       PROLOGUE

      AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE the hated drummers marched along the rows of tents. Their sticks beat the ‘General’, driving a clear message into the sleeping brains of the men. Even those befuddled by ‘screech’, cheap rum brewed by boiling the sediment from molasses barrels, were dragged from their slumbers. Men clambered over their drowsy comrades and emerged into the open air. Their feet squelched in the urine-soaked ground, for soldiers invariably eased themselves at the entrance to their tents or even inside where they slept. For an hour a mass of figures in the semi-darkness jostled and cursed. But as the light grew so did their regularity. By the time the drummers beat the ‘Assembly’ at 0500 hours the tents had been struck, kit packed, weapons retrieved and the men bundled onto the assembly area to line up by company and regiment, ready for inspection, colours unfurled, sharp new flints securely fastened in the jaws of their muskets. Companies of between 50 and 100 men were commanded by a captain who knew every one of them by name. When he was happy that his men were properly attired, their weapons clean and thirty-six rounds in their cartridge cases he reported to the major or lieutenant colonel and soon the whole force was ready to march.

      Groups of light infantrymen and rangers set off first. The British force had been in the heart of Canada for less than a week and they had been given a shocking immersion into the world of insurgency, sniping, ambush and Native American warfare. Bodies of soldiers that strayed from the riverbank were found horribly killed and mutilated, their scalps taken as trophies by Native Americans and the Canadians who had learnt their way of war from them. Civilians in this populous part of Canada were trapped in between. Their farmhouses ransacked, their provisions confiscated by hungry warriors. That very morning a patrol of British light troops had searched one house and finding no one set it on fire. A British officer reported that ‘they were alarmed with bitter shrieks and cries of women and children’. They had, apparently, ‘foolishly concealed themselves among some lumber in a cellar’. British troops ‘very humanely exerted themselves for the relief of those miserable wretches, but their best endeavours were ineffectual…these unhappy people perished in the flames’. The officer wrote in his diary that ‘Such alas! are the direful effects of war.’¹ By the end of the summer an incident like this would barely raise a comment as atrocity fed atrocity and the campaign became a nightmare of terror, retribution, and disease.

      This was the first serious push away from the beaches where the British had landed just days before. Major General James Wolfe, their commander, had ordered this force to move west, away from the comforting presence of the fleet anchored in the river, to tighten the noose around Quebec, a fortress said to be impregnable, capital of the vast French North American empire. They were to seize a prominent piece of ground called Point Lévis from where British guns could fire across the river into Quebec. The soldiers knew the French would not let this probing force march with impunity. The terrain favoured the defence with thick woodland and a steep rise overlooking the track. One British officer described the route as ‘no regular road’ but ‘only a serpentine path with trees and under-wood on every side of us’.²

      Rangers led the column. They looked more like Native Americans than Christian subjects of King George with tomahawks at their waists, moccasins and powder horns, while a few even carried scalps of fallen enemies hanging from their belts. They were nearly all Americans recruited from the frontiers and despite their appearance and their unruly reputation (the French dubbed them ‘the English savages’) their skill in this kind of conflict meant that they could command twice the pay of red-coated regular infantrymen. Some carried the long, accurate rifle but most thought that the Brown Bess musket, possibly with a few inches sawed off the end to make it lighter, was a better weapon for close quarters bush fighting. It was quicker to reload and capable of firing buckshot. Alongside them was a new brand of British regular, the light infantryman. They had been introduced by innovative officers to try to improve the British army’s woeful performance in the wilderness fighting of North America. They were picked men who had been selected for having a sharp mind, an ability to improvise and a true aim. Major General Wolfe had written careful instructions. The light troops were to ‘post detachments in all the suspected places on the road to prevent the columns from being fired at, from behind trees, by rascals who dare not show themselves’. As the column marched past the light troops would then fall in as the rear guard.³ They had not advanced far before the woods echoed to the bangs of muskets and rifles, the howls of wounded and the shriek of the Native Americans, allies of the French.

      The men of the North American tribes were bred as warriors. Martial prowess was highly prized and even in times of peace young men picked fights with neighbouring groups in order to win acclaim. Prisoners, in Native cultures, could replace relatives who had fallen in battle or could be tortured expertly so that their pain assuaged that of the family of a fallen brave. In the two centuries since Europeans had introduced gunpowder into North America the Native Americans had mastered the musket and rifle and men had honed their marksmanship for hunting as well as war. At close quarters they were just as skilled with tomahawk or knife. Their terrible reputation for savagery, together with expert bushcraft, exotic tattoos, and haunting war cries, had all conspired to send many British units into total panic at even the prospect of an encounter. The Canadians of European descent were