chap. XIV.} 1759. Sept. |
This text is part of:
[334]
information,—‘Then,’ he cried, ‘they have at last
got to the weak side of this miserable garrison; we must give battle and crush them before mid-day.’
And before ten the two armies, equal in numbers, each being composed of less than five thousand men, were ranged in presence of one another for battle.
The English, not easily accessible from intervening shallow ravines and rail fences, were all regulars, perfect in discipline, terrible in their fearless enthusiasm, thrilling with pride at their morning's success, commanded by a man whom they obeyed with confidence and love.
The doomed and devoted Montcalm had what Wolfe had called but ‘five weak French battalions,’ of less than two thousand men, ‘mingled with disorderly peasantry,’1 formed on ground which commanded the position of the English.
The French had three little pieces of artillery; the English one or two.
The two armies cannonaded each other for nearly an hour; when Montcalm, having summoned Bougainville to his aid, and dispatched messenger after messenger for De Vaudreuil, who had fifteen hundred men at the camp, to come up, before he should be driven from the ground, endeavored to flank the British and crowd them down the high bank of the river.
Wolfe counteracted the movement
1 Three several French accounts represent Montcalm's forces in the battle as only equal, or even inferior, to the British. Augement Impartial sur les Operations Militaires de la Campagne en Canada en 1759, 5, printed at Quebec in 1840. Compare also, in the New York Paris Papers, Extrait Journal, tenu à l'armee, &c., and the letter of Bigot to the Minister, of October 25, 1759. Knox, in Journal, i., 74, which seems to be followed in the New Picture of Quebec, 345, makes the number of Canadian militia in the battle 5,000. But Bougainville had 2,000 up the river; 1,500 remained at the camp with Vaudreuil; De Levi had also been sent with a detachment to as-sist in opposing Amherst. There d'un were not Indians enough with the French to be of moment. In the summer of 1837, I examined the country round Quebec.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.