Next Wolfe tried to enter the country on the Quebec side of the river, near the Falls of Montmorency, where the water falls two hundred and fifty feet over high cliffs. These falls are so beautiful that some of the English risked being shot by the Canadians in order to see them. The region between the Falls of Montmorency and Quebec was so well guarded by French and Canadians that Montcalm was sure the English could never get behind Quebec. He sent word to the British general: “You will, no doubt, demolish the town, but you shall never get inside of it.” Wolfe answered back: “I will have Quebec if I stay here till the end of November.” But every English attack failed, and even the brave young commander became discouraged. He had never known good health, and he was now quite ill.
When he was urged to attack the English general and capture or drive him back, Montcalm said with a smile, “Let him amuse himself where he is. If we drive him off he may go to some place where he can do us harm.”
But the French made another attempt to set fire to the British fleet with seventy rafts, small boats, and schooners. Again they failed, and the French themselves explained that this was due only to the courage of the English sailors, who swarmed out in little boats to fight the fire before it could do any harm to their fleet.
In August General Wolfe was ill in bed, and it was reported in the British army that he was not likely to live long. But even while he was so ill, the young commander’s one thought was the capture of Quebec. On the last day of August he said to his physician that he now had a plan to carry out if he could only live to lead his army in person. “I know too well that you cannot cure me,” he continued, “but pray make me so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty. That is all I want.”
In his letter to his mother that day he wrote:
“The enemy puts nothing to risk, and I can’t in conscience put the whole army to risk. He has wisely shut himself up so that I can’t get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little or no purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones that wish for nothing so much as to fight him, but the wary old fellow avoids an action.”
Early in September Wolfe seemed himself again, though he realized that he had only a few days to live. The French saw the British fleet pass their fort on the way up the river at night, although the cannon of the fort belched lightnings and bellowed thunder at them. Montcalm wondered what the English were going to try to do, after all. “They mean to land somewhere,” he said.
Wolfe did “mean to land somewhere,” and that somewhere was the very place Montcalm did not dream of, a steep cliff back of the town. When any one spoke of the danger of the capture of Quebec, the French general would shrug and smile and say, “But the English cannot fly!”
One night when it was very dark, sixteen hundred British soldiers came floating down the river in their ships’ boats till they came opposite the town. Wolfe was with them in person, as he had hoped and prayed to be. As they were slowly floating, the young commander repeated the familiar lines by Gray,
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour—
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”