A British
Soldier.
Water Sluice.
But Wolfe chose his battle-ground nearer the town, on the world-famous Plains of Abraham. There he drew up his men “in the first of all thin red lines”; there the French, forced to fight at last, made their gallant charge; there “fell Wolfe victorious”; there noble Montcalm received his mortal wound; and there was sounded the death-knell of the dominion of France in North America. But “the dramatic ending of the old order blessed the birth of the new.” It has been well said that “in a sense, which it is easier to feel than to express—two rival races, under two rival leaders, unconsciously joined hands on the Plains of Abraham.”
Old St. Louis Gate.
Not yet, however, would all the French admit that their cause was irretrievably lost. Though Montcalm lay under the Ursuline Chapel, in “his soldier’s grave dug for him, while yet alive, by the bursting of a shell”; though Governor de Vaudreuil had fled and Quebec had opened her gates to the foe, the gallant De Lévis had no thought of acquiescing in the passing of New France.
Gathering ten thousand men at Montreal, he marched in the spring upon Quebec. The English general, Murray, came out, with a far inferior force, to meet him, and again French and English locked in desperate strife on the plateau behind the city. A tall shaft, surmounted by a statue of Bellona, on the Ste. Foy road, marks the battlefield where the French won their last victory in a lost cause.
The English had to retreat within their walls, but Murray, calling even on the sick and maimed for such aid as they could give, gallantly defended his crumbling battlements till a fleet from England came to his relief.