Quebec was once a Frenchman’s town, but twenty years ago,
King George the Second sent a man called General Wolfe, you know,
To clamber up a precipice and look into Quebec,
As you’d look down a hatchway when standing on the deck.[[5]]
Upon the 5th and 6th of September he embarked his forces and planned to take the French by surprise. It was a very dark night, and no moon shining, when Wolfe’s force, including Fraser’s Highlanders, took to their boats, and soon, in absolute silence, the transports were gliding like ghosts over the water.
Wolfe, spent with sickness, sat amongst his officers, and it is recorded that as the boats reached the cliff up which they hoped to find the way to victory, he repeated to himself some verses from ‘An Elegy in a Country Churchyard,’ remarking, “I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec.”
By a simple ruse the boats arrived at the shore. They were challenged by a sentry, but a Highland officer replied with more resource than truthfulness that they were French. For the moment the danger was negotiated, and soon they were at the foot of a precipitous cliff which rose some 200 feet sheer above them. Landing in absolute silence, the Highlanders began to move up its front, hoisting and pulling each other from foot to foot, and ledge to ledge, clinging to roots and trees with bleeding hands and knees—but always nearing the top. The few French pickets, nodding in the darkness above, saw the danger that had crept out of the night too late. They were speedily overcome and silenced, and at dawn of day some 4000 British troops were drawn up upon the Plains of Abraham. Well might Montcalm say, “They have at last got to the weak side of this miserable garrison; we must give battle and crush them before midday.” Quebec was, in that admission, already half won.
The forces of Montcalm, composed of French soldiers, Canadians, and Indians, advanced with reckless daring against the British lines, and the bravery of the French leader must ever command our respect and admiration. He led five largely undisciplined battalions against the veterans of the British Army.
Wolfe, ever in the forefront of the fight, was almost immediately hit, but it took a third shot to send him to the ground. In the meantime Montcalm had hurled his forces at the British troops, himself cheering them on, and taking no heed of his wounds, as brave and gallant a leader as Wolfe himself.
But the British regulars met the broken lines of the enemy as they met the charging clansmen at Culloden. They reserved their fire until the French were a bare forty yards distant, and in a few minutes the victory was already won, for “the Highlanders, taking to their broadswords, fell in among them with irresistible impetuosity, and drove them back with great slaughter.” At the moment that Wolfe led his men to the decisive charge he fell upon the field of victory.