I assembled immediately a council of war, composed of all the commanding officers of the several regiments, to hear their opinion as to what was to be done in our critical situation. Some of them maintained you were busy throwing up breastworks. Others, that you appeared bent on descending in the valley, in order to seize the bridge of boats on the St. Charles river with the hornwork, with the object of cutting off our communication with the left wing of our army, which remained at Beauport pursuant to the order signed by Montreuil. In effect, a movement your army made in that moment towards the windmill and Borgia’s house, upon the edge of the height, seemed to favour this conjecture. But an instant afterwards, the Canadians having set fire to that house and chased you from it, you retook your former position. Others alleged, that the more we delayed attacking you, the more your army would be strong—imagining that your troops had not yet all landed. In short, there was not a single member of the war council who was not of opinion to charge upon you immediately. Can it be credited that these officers—to the dishonour of mankind—who were the most violent to attack you, denied it afterwards, and became the most ardent censors of my conduct in not deferring the battle! What could I do in my desperate situation? Even a Marshal Turenne would have been much puzzled to get out of such a dilemma, in which they had entangled me either through design or ignorance. I listened with attention to their opinion, without opening my lips, and at last answered them:—“It appears to me, gentlemen, that you are unanimous for giving battle; and that the only question now is, how to charge the enemy?” Montreuil said it would be better to attack in columns. I answered him: “That we would be beat before our columns could be formed so near to the enemy; and, besides, that our columns must be very weak, not having Grenadiers to place at their heads.” I added, that “since it is decided to attack, it must be in Front Baudière(?)” I sent all the officers to their posts, and ordered the drummers to beat the charge.
Our onset was neither brisk nor long. We went on in confusion—were repulsed in an instant; and it could not naturally be otherwise from the absence of our Volunteers and Grenadiers, and de Bougainville at Cap Rouge with the best of our Canadians; the Montreal regiments with Poularies at Beauport, a league and a half from the battle-field. The example of the bravest soldiers in a regiment—the Grenadiers and Volunteers—suffices to infuse courage in the most timid, who can follow the road shown to them, but cannot lead the way. The brave Canadian Militia saw us with heavy hearts, grief and despair, from the other side of the St. Charles river, cut to pieces upon the heights, stopped, as they were, in the hornwork, and prevented by superior orders from rushing to our assistance. About two hundred brave and resolute Canadians rallied in the hollow at the bakehouse, and returned upon the heights. They fell instantly upon your left wing with incredible rage; stopped your army for some minutes from pursuing our soldiers in their flight, by attracting your attention to them; resisted, undaunted, the shock of your left; and, when repulsed, they disputed the ground inch by inch from the top to the bottom of the height, pursued by your troops down to the valley at the bakehouse, opposite to the hornwork. These unfortunate heroes—who were most of them cut to pieces—saved your army the loss of a great many men, by not being hotly pursued; and if your left, who followed these two hundred Canadians down to the plain, had crossed it from the bakehouse to the River St. Charles, only three or four hundred paces, they would have cut off the retreat of our army, invested the three-fourths of them in Quebec, without provisions, and M. de Vaudreuil, next day, must have surrendered the town and asked to capitulate for the colony. But your conduct cannot be blamed, as it is always wise and prudent in giving—as Pyrrhus advises—a golden bridge to one’s enemy in flight.
You see, sir, by this true and faithful account of the battle of the 13th September, and of what preceded it, how many different and unforeseen events, fortune was obliged to unite in your favour to render you successful in your expedition against Canada; the failure of any one of which would have sufficed to frustrate your enterprise. It would appear that heaven had decreed that France should lose this colony. Let us now conclude, sir, that I have as little deserved the blame, scorn, contempt and injustice which my country heaped on my memory, as you do the excessive honours they lavished on your’s in England; and that the ablest General in Europe, placed in my circumstances, could not have acted otherwise than I did. Moreover, I was under M. de Vaudreuil—the weakest man alive, although a most obstinate automaton—and could not freely follow my ideas as if I had been Commander-in-Chief. In my country the law is equal: we neither punish, nor recompense.
The Marquis of Montcalm, endeavouring to rally the troops in their disorderly flight, was wounded in the lower part of the belly.[K] He was conveyed immediately to Quebec, and lodged in the house of M. Arnoux, the King’s surgeon, who was absent with M. de Bourlamarque: his brother—the younger Arnoux—having viewed the wound, declared it mortal. This truly great and worthy man heard Arnoux[L] pronounce his sentence of death with a firm and undaunted soul: his mind calm and serene; his countenance soft and pleasing; and with a look of indifference whether he lived or died. He begged of Arnoux to be so kind and outspoken as to tell him how many hours he thought he might yet live? Arnoux answered him, that he might hold out until three in the morning. He spent that short period of life in conversing with a few officers upon indifferent subjects with great coolness and presence of mind, and ended his days about the hour Arnoux had foretold him. His last words were:—“I die[M] content, since I leave the affairs of the King, my dear master, in good hands: I always had a high opinion of the talents of M. de Levis.” I will not undertake the panegyric of this great man: a true patriot and lover of his king and country, possessing many rare and good qualities. Had he by chance been born in England, his memory would have been celebrated, and transmitted with honour to posterity. Illustrious by his virtue and genius, he deserves to live in history; he was an unfortunate victim to the insatiable avarice of some men, and a prey to the immoderate ambition of others. His ashes, mingled with those of Indians, repose neglected far from his native country, without a magnificent tomb or altars; General Wolfe has statues in England in commemoration of the many faults he committed during his expedition in Canada. “How many obscure dead,” says a modern author, “have received the greatest honours by titles yet more vain? O injustice of mankind! The mausolea adorn the temples to repeat continually false praise; and history, which ought to be the sacred asylum of truth, shows that statues and panegyrics are almost always the monuments of prejudice, and that flattery seeks to immortalise unjust reputations.”
When I was informed of M. de Montcalm’s misfortune, I sent him immediately his servant Joseph, begging him to acquaint me if I could be of any service to him, and in that case I would be with him at Quebec immediately. Joseph came back in a moment to the hornwork, and grieved me to the inmost of my soul by M. de Montcalm’s answer: “that it was needless to come to him, as he had only a few hours to live, and he advised me to keep with Poularies until the arrival of M. de Levis at the army.” Thus perished a great man, generally unknown and unregretted by his countrymen—a man who would have become the idol and ornament of any other country in Europe.
The French army in flight, scattered and entirely dispersed, rushed towards the town. Few of them entered Quebec; they went down the heights of Abraham, opposite to the Intendant’s Palace (past St. John’s gate) directing their course to the hornwork, and following the borders of the River St. Charles. Seeing the impossibility of rallying our troops, I determined myself to go down the hill at the windmill, near the bakehouse,[P] and from thence across over the meadows to the hornwork, resolved not to approach Quebec, from my apprehension of being shut up there with a part of our army, which might have been the case if the victors had drawn all the advantage they could have reaped from our defeat. It is true the death of the general-in-chief—an event which never fails to create the greatest disorder and confusion in an army—may plead as an excuse for the English neglecting so easy an operation as to take all our army prisoners.
But, instead of following immediately my ideas, I was carried off by the flow of the fugitives, without being able to stop them or myself until I got to a hollow swampy ground, where some gunners were endeavouring to save a field-piece which stuck there, and I stayed an instant with them to encourage them to draw it to the town. Returning back upon the rising ground, I was astonished to find myself in the centre of the English army, who had advanced whilst I was in the hollow with the gunners, and taking me for a general, on account of my fine black horse, they treated me as such by saluting me with a thousand musket shots from half of the front of their army, which had formed a crescent. I was, nevertheless, bent on reaching the windmill, and I escaped their terrible fire without any other harm than four balls through my clothes, which shattered them; a ball lodged in the pommel of my saddle, and four balls in my horse’s body, who lived, notwithstanding his wounds, until he had carried me to the hornwork.
It is impossible to imagine the disorder and confusion that I found in the hornwork.[Q] The dread and consternation was general. M. de Vaudreuil listened to everybody, and was always of the advice of he who spoke last. No order was given with reflection and with coolness, none knowing what to order or what to do. When the English had repulsed the two hundred Canadians that had gone up the height at the same time that I came down from it, pursuing them down to the bakehouse, our men lost their heads entirely; they became demoralized, imagining that the English troops, then at the bakehouse, would in an instant cross the plain and fly over the St. Charles river into the hornwork as with wings. It is certain that when fear once seizes hold of men it not only deprives them totally of their judgment and reflection, but also of the use of their eyes and their ears, and they become a thousand times worse than the brute creation, guided by instinct only, or by that small portion of reason which the author of nature has assigned it, since it preserves the use of it on all occasions. How much inferior to them do the greater portion of mankind appear, with their boasted reason, when reduced to madness and automata, on occasions when they require the more the use of their reason.
The hornwork had the River St. Charles before it, about seventy paces broad, which served it better than an artificial ditch; its front, facing the river and the heights, was composed of strong, thick, and high palisades, planted perpendicularly, with gunholes pierced for several pieces of large cannon in it; the river is deep and only fordable at low water, at a musket shot before the fort. This made it more difficult to be forced on that side than on its other side of earthworks facing Beauport, which had a more formidable appearance; and the hornwork certainly on that side was not in the least danger of being taken by the English, by an assault from the other side of the river. On the appearance of the English troops on the plain of the bakehouse, Montguet and La Motte, two old captains in the Regiment of Bearn, cried out with vehemence to M. de Vaudreuil, “that the hornwork would be taken in an instant, by an assault, sword in hand; that we would be all cut to pieces without quarter, and that nothing else would save us but an immediate and general capitulation of Canada, giving it up to the English.”
Montreuil told them that “a fortification such as the hornwork was not to be taken so easily.” In short, there arose a general cry in the hornwork to cut the bridge of boats.[R] It is worthy of remark, that not a fourth of our army had yet arrived at it, and the remainder, by cutting the bridge, would have been left on the other side of the river as victims to the victors. The regiment ‘Royal Roussillon’ was at that moment at the distance of a musket shot from the hornwork, approaching to pass the bridge. As I had already been in such adventures, I did not lose my presence of mind, and having still a shadow remaining of that regard, which the army accorded me on account of the esteem and confidence which M. de Levis and M. de Montcalm had always shown me publicly, I called to M. Hugon, who commanded, for a pass in the hornwork, and begged of him to accompany me to the bridge. We ran there, and without asking who had given the order to cut it, we chased away the soldiers with their uplifted axes ready to execute that extravagant and wicked operation.