The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure

by Robert Neilson Stephens

At midnight the men repaired to quarters from the farms and drinking-houses whereat they had been scattered. At two, they began their march, struggling against a biting wind, their faces stung by the snow horizontally driven, the locks of their guns held under the lappets of their coats to avoid being wetted by the snow. Old Tom and the other riflemen were in their usual place in Arnold's division, which was to enter the lower town at its narrow northern end, passing between the promontory's foot and the frozen St. Charles River. Through the suburb and streets of St. Roque, they breasted the snowy darkness; first went Arnold, at the head of a forlorn hope of twenty-five men, one hundred yards before the main body; then Captain Lamb and his artillery company, drawing a field-piece on a sledge; next, a company with ladders and other scaling implements; then, Morgan and his company, heading the riflemen; next, the Lancaster company, led, in Captain Smith's absence, by Steele; then the Cumberland County men, with their own captain, for Hendricks, though the command of the guard that morning belonged to him, had got leave to take part in the attack; and last, the New England troops. The division would have first to pass a battery on a wharf, which the field-piece was to attack and the forlorn hope scale with ladders, while Morgan should lead the riflemen around the wharf on the ice.

Old Tom plodded not far behind Hendricks, the men straggling onward in single file. As they approached the houses below Palace Gate, which led from the upper town on their right, there suddenly burst forth a thunder of cannon, which mingled soon with the alarming clang of all the bells in the city. "They've spied our intentions," muttered old Tom to the man ahead, and strode on.

Presently muskets blazed from the ramparts above. Men began to drop here and there and to writhe in the snow, but their comrades hurried over or around them. Hendricks's soldiers could not see far ahead, for the darkness and the blinding snow; nor could they always make out the path left by Arnold, Lamb, and the riflemen in advance. They could see nothing of the foe save the flashes of the muskets from the walls crowning the ascent at their right.

Presently they became aware of some kind of stoppage ahead; it was made by the artillerymen, whose field-piece had stuck hopelessly in a snowdrift. The company with the scaling-ladders made as if to stop also; but Morgan was at their heels, forcing them forward, hastening on his own company, and swearing terribly in a voice that rivalled the tumult of bells and cannon. So the riflemen, preceded by the ladder-bearers, passed on through the opening made for them by the artillery company.

They were nearing the first barrier now; the uproar of the unseen enemy's fire was more terrific. And now Hendricks's men saw pass a group that was returning as with reluctance and difficulty,—two men supporting between them a third, who was so badly wounded in the leg that he could not stand unaided. It was Colonel Arnold, upheld by Parson Spring and Mr. Ogden. "Forward, my brave men!" cried Arnold, in a strong and heartening voice, and the riflemen cheered and passed on.

They soon saw that Morgan had taken command, and, amid the inevitable crowding together near the barrier, they found themselves in close company with the forlorn hope, headed now by Arnold's secretary, Oswald, and with Lamb and his artillerymen, who had left their field-piece in order to wield muskets and bayonets.

Forward rushed Morgan and the advance companies, right through a discharge of grape-shot from the two cannon commanding the defile. Forward, without slackening, upon the battery, some scaling the walls, some firing through the embrasures; pouring over and through, seizing the captain and thirty of his men as prisoners, driving the rest of the guard away, and taking the enemy's dry muskets to use instead of their own damp ones.

Then Morgan formed his men as he could, and led them on to take the second barrier. The day was about to dawn now, and, although Morgan's men knew it not, the false attack planned against St. John's Gate had failed of being made; the feint against the Bastion of Cape Diamond had served its purpose to conceal Montgomery's march along the shore of the St. Lawrence, but Montgomery, while leading his men from the stockade whence Dick Wetheral had once been fired upon, towards the blockhouse within, had fallen in death before a discharge of grape-shot, while his triumphant cry, "Push on, my brave boys, Quebec is ours!" still rang in the ears of his New Yorkers. Montgomery's men had thereupon retreated, and thus the British force, warned of the very first movements by a too early discharge of the signal-rockets, was enabled to concentrate against the division now between the first and second northern barriers of the lower town.

Morgan's advance followed a curving course along the sides of houses, to where the narrow street was crossed, not far up from its mouth, by the second barrier, which was at least twelve feet high. Meanwhile Morgan had despatched Captain Dearborn, with a party, to prevent the enemy's coming from the upper town through Palace Gate and down the promontory's St. Charles side, which was neither as high nor as steep as the St. Lawrence side.

Behind the barrier now to be taken, was a platform whence cannon poured grape-shot, defended by two ranges of musketeers with fixed bayonets. The enemy fired also from the upper windows of houses beyond. The Americans speedily upbuilt an elevation to a height approaching that of the barrier, men falling all the while beneath the fire from the barrier, the houses beyond, and the walls far above at the right. Morgan's first lieutenant, Humphreys, climbed this mound to scale the barrier, but a row of bayonets forced him back.