Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
the wall, allowing the cannon on them to produce an ‘enfilading’ fire—sideways down the length of the wall. At either end the wall was anchored on the top of the cliffs that surrounded the city with another demibastion. On the southern end a redoubt was built on the very highest point of Cap Diamant.
It was advanced for North America but war on the continent was changing fast. New forts were being built to the latest European designs. For any fortress to survive the hammering of an artillery bombardment it had to be surrounded by low lying stone and earth walls yards thick arranged in geometric patterns to allow cannon to sweep every angle. Soon North American fortifications would look more like state of the art complexes in Flanders than the old stockades of just a generation before. Quebec never reached this level of sophistication. There were a couple of serious drawbacks. High ground on the rolling Plains of Abraham allowed cannon to be placed that would look down on the wall. Also the cost and effort of completing the landward defences was simply too much. When Britain and France made peace in 1748 Louisbourg was returned to Louis in exchange for Madras in India, which had been captured by a French expedition. The work petered out at Quebec. The all-important ditch with a ‘glacis’ or gently sloping, raised earthwork to stop artillerymen getting a clear line of sight to the walls was never completed. One observer later wrote that because the walls were ‘constructed before any ditch was sunk and the soil is of a slaty rock, the blowing of it for that purpose must undoubtedly shake the whole mass of the works’.57 Blasting a ditch would have brought the walls down. Instead, a shallow ditch and a glacis seem to have stretched down from the north end for only a quarter of the wall. In addition the fifty-two cannon on the wall were mounted on the flanks of the bastions to produce a lethal enfilading fire at attacking infantry but this meant they could not fire out over the Plains of Abraham directly away from the city.
By the Seven Years War it was widely accepted, especially by the disdainful French regulars, that if a large modern force could get troops to the west of the city and bring their large siege cannon to bear on the wall it would be only a matter of days before they had pounded a breach and poured infantry into the city itself. The 42-year-old Chief Engineer of New France, Nicolas Sarrebource de Pontleroy, described by Montcalm as ‘an excellent man’ declared that the city ‘is not capable of useful defence in case of siege, having neither ditches, nor counterscarps nor covered way, and being dominated by heights behind which there is cover facilitating the approaches’. Bougainville wrote that Quebec ‘was without fortifications…if the approaches to the city were not defended, the place would have to surrender’.58 Montcalm agreed, a journal relates that ‘he was persuaded that an army, which can get near to the walls of a town, is sure, sooner or later to compel its surrender, whatever may be the numbers engaged in its defence; and must in an especial manner be the case with Quebec, which not being fortified, was merely secured against being taken by surprise’.59 With his usual vitriol for Canadians, he described de Pontleroy’s predecessor as Chief Engineer as ‘a great ignoramus in his profession (you need only look at his works) who robbed the king like the others’. The defences at Quebec, he wrote, were ‘so ridiculous and so bad that it would be taken as soon as besieged’.60
Montcalm’s simple solution was to do everything he could to stop the enemy seizing the Plains of Abraham to the west of the city. The best way to do that was to stop them landing on the north shore at all. As he had written to Versailles that winter, ‘all our hopes depend on preventing the landing’.61 To this end he erected temporary fortifications right along the Beauport shore, ensuring that Wolfe’s men would be unable to simply march ashore as Phips’ men had. One French officer recorded, ‘Quebec, the only barrier of this colony on the river side, being, from the nature of its fortifications, incapable of sustaining a siege, attention was directed…to putting it at least beyond the danger of a coup de main.’ Some work had been progressing over the winter but the news that the British were in the river ‘roused the men from their languor’.62 Montcalm did not let his pessimism erode his determination to prepare Quebec for a siege. He threw himself into improving the defences with huge energy and in the words of one officer, ‘made the necessary dispositions for a vigorous defence’.63 He made his headquarters at the village of Beauport and spent his time inspecting every inch of riverbank with Pontleroy and together they sited cannon batteries, redoubts, and lines of trenches. They both knew that in the open field their part-time soldiers could not face Wolfe’s trained killers on equal terms, but positioned behind fixed defences they could be relied upon to stand firm. Also they would be supported by a massive amount of firepower. In all ‘234 pieces of cannon, 17 mortars, and 4 howitzers’ were available to Montcalm and if even some of these could be brought to bear at the critical moment Wolfe’s army could be pulverized.64 Bougainville was more optimistic than his general. Two years before he had written that ‘defensive lines…which three or four thousand men could hold, would…make the city entirely safe’. Any British attempt on the city would be ‘foolish’.65
Jean Baptiste Nicholas Roch de Ramezay was the King’s Lieutenant (Lieutenant de Roi) in Quebec. He was 50 years old, born in Canada and an embodiment of New France’s interconnected web of military and trading oligarchs. Since the age of 11 he had campaigned for his king against the Fox in Illinois and the British in Acadia. He was now paid 18,000 livres a year to protect Quebec, or more correctly, the Upper Town. Only a year into the job, he was now about to earn his salary as no other King’s Lieutenant had ever done. His account of the siege describes how men hammered stakes into the ground to enclose open areas and placed ‘some cannon on the top of the road that leads from the Lower to the Upper Town’.66 For two weeks thousands of men, the sailors from the merchant and naval ships, regular soldiers and members of the militia, carried, dug, and hacked at the earth. Houses along the Beauport shore were evacuated, barricaded, and had loopholes punched through the walls. Montcalm made it clear that the entire colony would be involved in a supreme effort to ensure its survival; ‘the monks, priests, civil officers and women will perform the field labor’.Women were allowed to stay for the time being but Montcalm did not want to feed the extra mouths when the siege began and gave orders that all the ‘women, children, magistrates and all those persons that embarrass the defense [were to] be immediately sent to Trois Rivières’.67 Angélique Renaud d’Avène des Méloizes de Péan was the wife of one of New France’s richest, and most corrupt, merchants. She wrote that ‘most of the nobles and gentry of Quebec have taken refuge at Trois Rivières or Montreal, but I refused to follow their lead. I will not leave my dear husband.’ The beautiful Madame Péan had less to fear than most. François Bigot was entirely smitten with the young woman and, as she admitted, ‘my house has been transformed into a veritable fortress because he fears for my safety’. ‘Those of an envious disposition,’ she continued gaily, ‘say that all available resources should rather be used to improve the city’s fortifications.’68 There were other young women rather less fortunate than Madame Péan. Quebec had no less than three nunneries, the Ursuline Convent, the Hôtel Dieu, and the General Hospital. The majority of nuns were of noble birth and the rest were from well to do merchant families. Families paid a huge 3,000 livres for the privilege of installing a daughter in the nunnery so only the wealthy could even dream about joining. This was more than fathers paid in all but the most fashionable convents in France.69 The nuns would stay through the siege and provide vital healthcare to the wounded. One kept a journal of the summer and describes the flight of ‘all the families of distinction, merchants, etc’ who were ‘capable of sustaining themselves’. They were ‘removed to Three Rivers and Montreal, thereby relieving the garrison during the siege’.