Wolfe made an attempt to carry a battery above the Montmorency mouth, but failed, and was repulsed with considerable loss. He then cast about him if it were possible to attack the town from the Heights of Abraham on the southern side. It seemed on the face of it an impossibility. How was it possible for the attacking force to make its way unseen by the French up the precipitous cliffs to the Heights of Abraham? Luckily, there was a young man in Wolfe's army, a Lieutenant McCulloch, who had been held prisoner in Quebec in 1756. With a view to future possibilities, he employed his time in surveying the cliffs, and he thought that he had discovered a particular spot where the steep hills might be successfully scaled by an attacking force. He now communicated this to Wolfe. Indeed, the idea of attack in this way seems to have been suggested by him, and on the memorable September night the attempt was made.
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[Sidenote: 1759—Wolfe's tribute to literature]
Who has not heard—who has not been touched and thrilled by the story of Wolfe, while being rowed across the spreading waters of the St. Lawrence to the cove where the attempt was to be made, repeating in low tones to his officers near him Gray's "Elegy in a Country Church-yard"? Who does not remember Wolfe's famous saying that he would rather have written the Elegy than take Quebec? It is a fine saying, akin to that of Caesar when he swore that he would rather be the first man in an obscure Italian village than the second man in Rome. We may perhaps take the liberty of questioning the absolute accuracy of either saying. In Caesar's case he was, no doubt, sufficiently conscious that he was going to be the first man in Rome. In Wolfe's case we may well believe that his exquisite tribute to literature, and to the most charming work of one of the most charming men of letters then alive, was not meant very seriously. He was a soldier; Quebec was his duty; Quebec was to be his fame. But it is one of those sayings that live forever, and the mere thought of it at once calls up two widely different pictures, pictures of places in two widely different parts of the world. One shows the shining, swelling St. Lawrence River and the dead hour of night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand where Gray conceived his Elegy.
Wolfe carried out his plan to perfection. Day was dawning as the majority of his forces formed upon the Heights of Abraham. It was six in the morning before Montcalm's irregulars were upon the field, and nine o'clock before the French army was in position for action. At ten o'clock the battle began. It did not last very long. Whether the French were utterly disheartened or not by the appearance so unexpectedly of the {290} English on the ground, which they had deemed unassailable, certain is it that they made a poor fight of it. Though the French forces amounted to nearly double the English strength, the whole battle, from the first French advance to their utter rout and flight, did not last a quarter of an hour. It was one of the sharpest and the strangest battles in history. Both sides lost their generals. Montcalm was killed; Wolfe, charging gallantly at the head of his men, fell mortally wounded. The wild cry, "They run!" echoed in his dying ears. He seemed to recover a kind of alertness at the sound, and shaking himself from his deadly stupor, asked, "Who run?" We can imagine the momentary trepidation in that gallant heart: could it be his outnumbered followers? In a moment he was reassured; it was the enemy who fled; with his last breath he gave some strategical orders, and then fell back. "God be praised, I die in peace," he said, and so passed away. The time may, perhaps, come when the great game of war will no longer stir the pulses, and men will no longer feel that they die in peace after the bloody defeat of their enemies. But so long as the pulses of men's hearts do answer to any martial music, so long men will say of Wolfe that he died well as became a soldier, a hero, and a gentleman. He sleeps in Greenwich Church.
[Sidenote: 1759—An old French province]
The pride of England's colonial empire might find new stimulus in the way in which the memory of one of the most brilliant scenes in the story of England's career is kept green in Quebec. The traveller, standing on Dufferin Terrace to-day, may in his mind's eye see Wolfe crossing the stream on his perilous expedition, may in his mind's ear hear him reciting to his officers those lines from Gray's Elegy, and telling them that he would rather have written such verses than be sure of taking Quebec. His monument is near to the promenade on Dufferin Terrace—his monument which, a rare event in war, is the monument also of his rival, the French commander, Montcalm, killed in the hour of defeat, as Wolfe was at the moment of victory. Quebec itself seems to illustrate in {291} its own progress and its own history the moral of that common monument. Quebec is as loyal to the British Crown as Victoria or as the Channel Islands. But it is still in great part an old-fashioned French city. The France that survives there and all through the province is not the France of to-day, but the France of before the great Revolution. The stranger seeking his way through the streets had better, in most cases, question the first crossing-sweeper he meets in French, and not in English. The English residents are all expected to speak French. But the English residents and the French live on terms of the most cordial fraternity. Little quarrels, local quarrels of race and sect, do unquestionably spring up here and there now and again, but they are only like the disputes of Churchmen and Dissenters in an English city, and they threaten no organic controversy. England has great reason to be proud of Quebec. The English flag has a home on those heights which we have already said may challenge the world for bold picturesqueness and beauty.
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