The eventful night of the twelfth was clear and calm, with no light but that of the stars. Within two hours before daybreak, thirty boats, crowded with sixteen hundred soldiers, cast off from the vessels, and floated downward, in perfect order, with the current of the ebb tide. To the boundless joy of the army, Wolfe’s malady had abated, and he was able to command in person. His ruined health, the gloomy prospects of the siege, and the disaster at Montmorenci, had oppressed him with the deepest melancholy, but never impaired for a moment the promptness of his decisions, or the impetuous energy of his action.[126] He sat in the stern of one of the boats,
pale and weak, but borne up to a calm height of resolution. Every order had been given, every arrangement made, and it only remained to face the issue. The ebbing tide sufficed to bear the boats along, and nothing broke the silence of the night but the gurgling of the river, and the low voice of Wolfe, as he repeated to the officers about him the stanzas of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which had recently appeared and which he had just received from England. Perhaps, as he uttered those strangely appropriate words,—
“The paths of glory lead but to the grave,”
the shadows of his own approaching fate stole with mournful prophecy across his mind. “Gentlemen,” he said, as he closed his recital, “I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow.”[127]
As they approached the landing-place, the boats edged closer in towards the northern shore, and the woody precipices rose high on their left, like a wall of undistinguished blackness.
“Qui vive?” shouted a French sentinel, from out the impervious gloom.
“La France!” answered a captain of Fraser’s Highlanders, from the foremost boat.
“A quel régiment?” demanded the soldier.
“De la Reine!” promptly replied the Highland captain, who chanced to know that the regiment so designated formed part of Bougainville’s command. As boats were frequently passing down the river with supplies for the garrison, and as a convoy from Bougainville was expected that very night, the sentinel was deceived, and allowed the English to proceed.