Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
exemplary punishment to those habitants who resisted his orders.39
De Léry’s journal hints at the struggle involved in prising Canadians from their farms. They ‘refused to believe’ him at first, then told him that they had not started ‘seeding the oats’ yet and they declined to leave. By 6 June he records that large numbers of Canadians were deserting the ranks of the militia.40 Back in Quebec, Vaudreuil’s letters grew more hysterical. While cursing the unseasonable regularity of the north-east wind that was pushing the British ships closer to the city, he threatened everyone with disciplinary action. He apologized for having to use such language but men and food were required to save Quebec. De Léry had to make it clear to the foot-dragging habitants that ‘the enemy are out to destroy everything that calls itself Canada’.41
The author of one journal was scathing about the evacuation: ‘these hurried and ill-judged orders…caused much greater injury to thousands of the inhabitants, than even the enemy could have inflicted upon them—numbers of families were ruined by these precipitate measures—three fourths of the cattle died’.42 The whole operation was far too hurried; the British ships, of course, had been only the advance guard and had not pushed on towards Quebec. But in the rushed flight supplies of grain and herds of cattle were abandoned. Panet commented that the operation was conducted ‘with such a haste that no honour can be given to those who were charged with its execution’.43 Marguerite Gosselin lived on the tip of the Île d’Orléans on a prosperous farm and had a horde of children. She obeyed orders to evacuate, which turned out to be a ‘real nightmare’. ‘If it had been more carefully planned,’ she wrote, ‘we would never have lost our cattle.’44 Another journalist wrote that ‘several of the inhabitants, women and children unhappily perished…Without any means having been previously taken of providing food for their sustenance, boats for their conveyance or places to which they could retire.’45
Around Quebec huge preparations were underway to prepare the city for a siege. Montcalm hoped that ‘the navigation of the River St Lawrence, often difficult, may afford him time to take those precautions which have been neglected, and might, in my opinion, have been taken beforehand’.46 He had a large body of soldiers of many different varieties available for its defence. Every kind from the grenadiers of his regular army battalions, who had stood motionless on battlefields in Europe as muskets and cannon tore down their comrades beside them, to young boys with no training, scarcely strong enough to carry a firearm. He had eight battalions of French regular troops, troupes de terre, which roughly translates as ‘soldiers of the land’; so named because French battalions were raised from certain geographical parts of France. They had been shipped over since the outbreak of hostilities and now numbered in all 3,200 men. There were also full-time colonial soldiers or ‘regulars’, the Compagnies franches de la marine, so called because they were provided by the Ministry of Marine which oversaw the colonies. They were largely recruited in France and answered to Canadian-born officers. They served in Canada for their whole careers and usually settled in the colony when they were discharged. Montcalm calculated that they could put ‘at most, fifteen hundred men in the field’. As well as these full-time, professional regulars, every Canadian man was made to serve in the militia. Many nations had some kind of arrangement for raising amateur soldiers in times of crisis. These part-time warriors were generally despised by professional officers all around the world for their inexpert fumbling. But in Canada, despite Montcalm’s sneering, things were different. Wolfe himself, the arch professional snob, wrote that ‘every man in Canada is a soldier’.47 Generations of warfare, combined with the tough life of a trapper or hunter, had produced a strong military ethos among all Canadians that was unique.
Canada was vast but empty. Although the European population was doubling every generation, in 1759 it numbered just over seventy thousand people. The prospect of a dangerous North Atlantic crossing, cold winters, isolated settlements, and almost continual war had discouraged mass migration. Nor were conditions suitable for growing a cash crop like tobacco which had financed the population explosions in British colonies like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Montcalm estimated at the beginning of the campaign that 12,000 Canadians were capable of bearing arms. He deducted from this figure those away trapping furs on the frontier and those involved in the movement of supplies by road and boat and estimated that he could muster around five thousand militia. But even if he was able to, it would take too many people away from the land, nothing would get planted and ‘famine would follow’. In all he expected to face the enemy with just over ten thousand troops. ‘What is that,’ he wailed, ‘against at least fifty thousand men which the English have!’48
Typically Montcalm underestimated his own strength and exaggerated that of his enemy. The British had 20,000 regular soldiers in North America but they were parcelled out in different groups. Wolfe’s army was one of these but it was badly understrength; most of his battalions numbering between five hundred and eight hundred men. Colonial levies would be mobilized but the British colonies showed little enthusiasm, especially if the men were to be used outside their native colony. Virginia raised one rather than two battalions, and the other southern colonies did not come close to recruiting their quota of men. In all less than twenty thousand British Americans signed up for the campaign of 1759.
Montcalm would face less than forty thousand men, and these were divided into three major thrusts. The French force was outnumbered but not overwhelmingly so. They had many other advantages too. Warfare in the vast, inhospitable spaces of North America was quite unlike anything that the British had encountered in their campaigns at home or in the Low Countries. Every European soldier was struck by the scale and majesty of the terrain. Bougainville wrote while travelling through the lands above Montreal that ‘the navigation is very difficult, but there is the most beautiful scenery in the world’.49 It was a glorious spectacle indeed, but a logistical nightmare, especially for anyone seeking to invade Canada. Separated by hundreds of miles of virtually impenetrable forest and lakes, each thrust was unsupported and each risked being defeated in detail by French forces operating over internal lines of communications, using familiar routes along rivers that could see huge numbers of men transferred from front to front with great speed. Vaudreuil had summed it up during the winter by saying that if the enemy attempted to attack Quebec they must be defeated quickly, ‘a single battle gained saves the colony; the fleet departs, and we return to oppose the enemy’s progress’50 up through Lake George. One British marine officer pondered the challenges of attacking ‘so remote, uncultivated, inhospitable a country as that of Canada; where rivers, woods, and mountains break off all communication’. It was a land ‘where the very face of nature is set against the invader, and is strong as the strongest barrier; where uncommon heats and cold are in alliance with and fight for the adversary’.51 And that was in the summer. Between November and March or April all sizeable military operations of whatever kind had to be suspended. Troops fought hard merely to stay alive. During Bougainville’s first winter he wrote, ‘it is impossible to conceive of a viler sort of weather…one could not understand how frightful this country is if he has not been here’.52
Montcalm enjoyed all the advantages of geography but he was also stronger than he had assumed, even though not every one of his men was available for the protection of Quebec. Montcalm was forced to send three of his eight French army battalions to protect the southern invasion route into the colony, which was threatened by General Amherst from Lake George. Joining them were eight companies of colonial regulars and 1,200 militiamen; about three thousand men