Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
either, ‘miserable soil—hills, rocks, swamps, lakes and morasses—incapable of producing anything’.53 It was the most modern of all the French fortifications in North America, and looked to visitors like a textbook Flanders fortress. Indeed, some of the cut stone had been shipped out from the Rochefort area of France, used as ballast on vessels crossing the Atlantic.54 The defences had been battered during the previous summer’s siege, many of the houses and the ‘King’s Bastion’, or citadel, had been reduced to rubble by British cannon and a large breach had been smashed in the curtain wall. As Wolfe had predicted the regiments that had occupied this broken city over the winter were in a parlous state. Scurvy had crippled hundreds of men; recruiting parties sent to the American colonies had proved unsuccessful at persuading young men to surrender their independence in return for a precarious existence at the former French fortress courtesy of King George. So desperate was the need for recruits that no less than 131 former French soldiers were absorbed into British units. Amherst, the senior British officer in North America, expected them to ‘immediately desert’ to their former masters, ‘as soon as we come near to the enemy’.55
There was still snow on the ground in the hollows and Saunders reported to London that ‘the harbour was entirely filled up with ice, that for several days it was not practicable for boats to pass’. The weather would cause further delays; in fact, its severity ‘has, by much, exceeded any that can be remembered by the oldest inhabitants of this part of the world’.56 Another senior officer wrote that there was so much ice ‘for several days that there was no getting on board or ashore without a great deal of trouble and some danger’.57 The sailors were undeterred. Lieutenant John Knox, of the 43rd Regiment, who left the liveliest and most detailed of all the journals of the campaign, arrived in Halifax with his regiment to find ‘foolhardy seamen’ getting from ship to shore and back again using the floating ice as stepping stones, ‘stepping from one to another, with boat-hooks…in their hands; I own I was in some pain while I saw them, for, had their feet slipped from under them, they must have perished’.58
Knox was Irish, the third son of a Sligo merchant with an uncle who had attended Trinity College, Dublin and became a priest. He was typical of the educated, ‘middling’ sort of men who considered themselves gentlemen but lacked the money or connections to scale the heights of eighteenth-century society. The army offered men like Knox an honourable career path, with possibilities of glory, reward, and advancement. As was normal he joined as a ‘volunteer’, a civilian given permission to serve with a regiment with a view to obtaining a vacancy in the officer corps when disease or a bullet created one. They carried muskets and served as ordinary soldiers but ate and socialized with the officers. Gallant conduct was the surest way to gain attention and throughout the eighteenth century these young men would show suicidal bravery on countless occasions. Knox’s moment came at the defeat at the battle of Lauffeld, after which Cumberland awarded him an ensigncy (the most junior officer’s rank) in the 43rd Regiment of Foot. He seems to have made a good marriage to a wealthy woman but her money was held by a trustee who went bankrupt. It was clearly to be on the field of battle that Knox would have to make his fortune.59
Knox and his men had spent nearly two lonely years in Nova Scotia around Annapolis and Fort Cumberland. His experience of frontier life was typical: extraordinary seasonal extremes of hot and cold weather, long periods of boredom punctuated with moments of utter terror. He was honest about the realities on the ground that belied the carefully coloured maps of Whitehall,
though we are said to be in possession of Nova Scotia, yet it is in reality of a few fortresses only, the French and Indians disputing the country with us on every occasion, inch by inch, even within the range of our artillery; so that, as I have observed before, when the troops are not numerous, they cannot venture in safety beyond their walls.60
Seventeen fifty-nine was to be different; the 43rd was finally going to take part in active campaigning. There was a sense of excitement as Knox’s ship fell in with the other transports and arrived at Louisbourg, with its narrow entrance, passed the large naval ships and anchored under the walls of the town. The ice and thick fog forced many of the supply ships to wait off the coast for days at a time before attempting to enter the port, their crews straining their ears for the sound of breakers on the rocky beach to let them know when they were too close to shore.61 A cannon roared from a battery on the island in the middle of the bay to give navigators and lookouts a reference point. Despite the conditions Knox was thrilled to be a part of the gathering force: ‘every person seems cheerfully busy here in preparing for the expedi-tion’.62 Wolfe noted the arrival of Knox and his fellow soldiers in Kennedy’s 43rd Regiment in his journal: ‘Webb’s, Kennedy’s, part of Lascelles’s Artillery and Military from Boston arrived. A ship with Webb’s Light Infantry ran upon the rocks in Gabarus Bay. Coldness on that occasion. The troops got safe on shore.’63 Knox hoped to catch a glimpse of his young commander and he managed to watch as General Wolfe made inspections. On 25 May Knox reports that Wolfe ‘was highly pleased’ with the ‘exactness and spirit’ of some troops who were demonstrating their ‘manoeuvres and evolutions’. So impressive were these particular troops that other commanding officers apologized to Wolfe in advance, saying that the long period in winter quarters had limited their abilities to drill the men and implement a new exercise, which Wolfe favoured, of firing musket volleys. According to Knox, Wolfe cheerfully dismissed their concerns, ‘“Poh! Poh!—new exercise—new fiddlesticks; if they are otherwise well disciplined and will fight,that’s all I shall require of them.”’64
The peacetime British army was small, scattered, and poorly trained. Even the existence of a standing army in peacetime was controversial. The British political class revelled in its perceived freedoms and could become hysterical in defending their ‘ancient liberties’. A standing army was seen as a buttress of tyranny. The Stuart kings of the seventeenth century, Charles I and his two sons, and Cromwell, the imperial antiking, had demonstrated dangerously autocratic tendencies, epitomized by their maintenance of large standing armies. Across the Channel Europe provided a multitude of examples of arbitrary government, regimes whose existence rested on the muskets of conscripted peasants. A central plank of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ settlement of 1688-9 was the passing of the Mutiny Act which stated clearly that it was illegal to recruit and maintain a standing army without the consent of Parliament. From then on numbers of troops depended entirely on Parliament’s willingness to pay for them.
By the 1750s the peacetime British army numbered just under thirty thousand men, well below half the size of the Prussian army and equivalent to that commanded by the King of Sardinia. King George could also call on the 12,000 men of the Irish army paid for by his Irish subjects but the Parliament in Dublin got nervous when more than two thousand of these men were sent to serve abroad. The Westminster Parliament proved itself unwilling to impose taxes to maintain even the small British army properly. There were virtually no purposebuilt barracks with facilities to allow whole regiments, let alone brigades or bigger units, to train together. Instead regiments were broken up and billeted upon reluctant landlords in pubs and hostelries across wide areas. The resulting lack of tactical cohesion, not to mention deep antipathy of the civilian population, is not hard to imagine. Wartime was really the only opportunity to concentrate several regiments in single encampments and drill them together. Camp commanders could then enforce a standard drill, equalizing the length and speed of pace, imposing uniform musketry practice and recognizable command signals. As soon as Knox had landed in North America in 1757 his regiment was to join the others and ‘take all opportunities for exercise’. Entrenchments were built ‘in order to discipline and instruct the troops, in the methods