Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
and bayonets were stored. Wolfe ordered his men not to leave any loaded muskets in these tents as it was known to cause ‘frequent mischiefs [sic]’.29 Behind these were neat double streets of tents for the men of the regiment. The dwellings of officers, non-commissioned officers, and the men were naturally strictly segregated. All the tents were dipped in salt water to stop them getting mildewed but when they eventually reached the end of their useful lives they would be turned into trousers and gaiters for the soldiers. Privates slept with comrades of their own rank, usually six to a tent, but Wolfe had ordered the day before landing that ‘as the months of July and August are generally very warm in Canada, there are to be no more than 5 men to a tent, or if the commanding officer likes it better and has camp equipage enough he may order only four’.30 Most of the officers slept alone but only because they were forced to buy their own tents. The most junior officers, struggling to survive on their tiny salaries, slept two to a tent.
Behind this mass of canvas were the tents of the majors and lieutenant colonels, closest to the river. Each regiment was easily identifiable, their uniforms and equipment bore their distinctive colour. The linings of the men’s jackets, the drums, the colours the regiment carried in battle would all be in this colour. White was the so-called ‘facing colour’ of Kennedy’s 43rd. Knox wore white cuffs and had white facings on his red jacket. The little camp colours that fluttered above their tents were white. These were little flags, eighteen inches square, on which was also emblazoned the number of the regiment. They were flown on poles that the regulations very precisely specified were to be seven feet six inches long except those by the quarter guard which were to be nine feet tall. They were erected by the Quartermaster to mark out where the tents should be pitched and from then on distinguished the regiment from the others in the encampment. The Bells of Arms were painted in the facing colour too and emblazoned with the royal cipher, the crown, and the number of the regiment.
Throughout his career Wolfe had been notably conscientious. His professionalism had won him many admirers in a peacetime army in which units were often left to go to seed. He had always insisted on strict discipline and sartorial correctness from his men. But he was just as hard on officers. He took the patriarchal duties of leadership very seriously indeed and expected his fellow officers to do likewise. In his writings on military life, gathered together and published years later, there are constant reminders to subalterns to pay attention to the welfare of their men. Much of it reads like a very modern manual with the emphasis on leading men into battle rather than driving them. When it came to setting up camp Wolfe insisted ‘that all colonels and commanding officers see their regiments encamped before they quit them: and all captains and subalterns to see their men be encamped before they pitch their own tents’.31 It was an influential work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, read by young men desperate to learn their trade in the absence of any comprehensive training.32
From the road Wolfe and Mackellar would have been able to get a very good sense of the size of the army. The larger regiments like Fraser’s Highlanders or Webb’s 48th had many more tents than the understrength 15th or 28th. Wolfe wrote to his uncle just before entering the St Lawrence and said quite plainly that ‘the army under my command is rather too small for the undertaking’. However, he believed it was ‘well composed’. The troops were ‘firm’ having been ‘brought into fire’ at the siege of Louisbourg the year before.33
These regiments were the basic building blocks of the British army. Bigger units, such as brigades, existed only as ad hoc tactical formations. The regiment recruited the men, trained them, clothed, armed, and disciplined them and occasionally even paid them. Each one had a colonel at its head. Colonels had once literally owned the regiment, paying for its recruitment and weapons and hiring it out to the crown. By the eighteenth century a prolonged assault on this ramshackle late medieval system by Georges I and II had modernized the British army and the colonels’ role had been circumscribed. By 1759 they tended to be senior army officers, and occasionally important politicians, who kept an eye on the regiment on behalf of the crown. It was very rare for one of these colonels to command a regiment in the field. Instead lieutenant colonels or even majors would lead the unit on campaign, where they were known as battalions. A few regiments had second or even third battalions. Two of Wolfe’s battalions belonged to the same regiment, the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 60th Royal American Regiment. Traditionally regiments had simply been known by the names of their colonels. During the 1740s the regiments had been given numbers which, in theory, reflected their seniority. Numbers and colonels’ names were interchangeable throughout the 1750s, although technically the number had become the official method of labelling the regiment.
Nine battalions had disembarked and were putting up their tents; one, the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Royal American Regiment (the 3rd/60th), had stayed on board the ships to give Wolfe the option of striking a blow at another point on the St Lawrence. Wolfe also had a force of marines. Lieutenant Colonel Hector Boisrond commanded twenty-five officers and 577 of these sea soldiers. There could have been as many as a thousand others divided up between the naval ships. They hung their hammocks between the officers and the men, guarded the supplies of rum and the door to the captain’s cabin. Serving at sea prevented them from becoming fully effective soldiers. Crack infantrymen had to be able to run unthinkingly through a set of complicated drills for marching, loading and firing their muskets. Drill was practised again and again until it was second nature. At sea opportunities for this kind of training were limited. There was neither the space nor the numbers to replicate training on land. These marines did, however, represent a reservoir of semi-trained manpower which could free up army units for other duties. Wolfe feared that the shortage of regular troops meant that he could well be forced to stand them in the line of battle. To prepare for that eventuality orders in Wolfe’s army frequently included instructions to the marines to ‘be out at exercise as often as they conveniently can’.34
Alongside the regular infantry Wolfe had a force of rangers. These were Anglo-American colonial troops who had been recruited from frontiersmen, who, it was hoped, would have the necessary skills to challenge the Native Americans in irregular warfare. Unlike Canada the British colonies in America were not brimming with hardened backcountry men. Anglo-Americans were farmers and tradesmen, not hunters and trappers. Perhaps as a result, the rangers had rarely delivered on some of the more extravagant promises of their advocates. Wolfe was utterly dismissive of his rangers, full of a regular officer’s contempt for his more unorthodox colleagues. The year before he had watched them in action and wrote that ‘the Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending on them in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.’35 The following year had not given him cause to adjust his rather unambiguous position. He wrote from Louisbourg before departing for Quebec that he had ‘six new raised companies of North American Rangers—not complete, and the worst soldiers in the universe’. To Pitt he wrote that ‘they are in general recruits, and not to be depended upon’.36 Like so many other British officers sent to North America Wolfe underestimated both the threat posed by the Canadians and Native Americans and the potential utility of irregular troops to combat them. The siege of Louisbourg had largely been a conventional, European-style campaign with limited involvement by the Native troops. The forests, rivers, and hills around Quebec held very different challenges.
On leaving Louisbourg Wolfe had divided his army into three brigades each commanded by a brigadier general. He had written to his uncle describing them as being ‘all men of great spirit’.37 But it had not been his choice of team. When he had been given command of the expedition Wolfe had rather petulantly demanded that he should appoint these three key officers. He had written to the commander in chief of the British army,