 | Thinking back to Montcalm's defense of Fort Carillon, the reader may recall how he successfully built entrenchments and abatis to slow the English attack and beat down an enemy that greatly outnumbered him. English General Wolfe undoubtedly knew that account enough to avoid making the same mistakes as Abercromby. Now, with Wolfe bearing down on him in a front further north, Montcalm's "patience and mastery of defensive operations" comes into play once more. As Wolfe put it in a letter to his mother, "My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible entrenchments, so that I can't get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little 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 doubtful of the behaviour of his army." |
Fred Anderson's book, The War that Made America, relates part of Wolfe's next strategy:
Wolfe again tried to make him give battle by attacking the undefended farming settlements below the city, burning churches, houses, barns, and mills, making refugees of the civilian population by allowing his frustrated troops to give rein to their worst impulses...
...[A]n estimated fourteen hundred farmhouses lay in ashes. Alongside a great deal of violence against civilians generally, at least one massacre had occurred, an episode in which a captain of the Forty-third Regiment ordered his men to kill a group of thirty Canadian prisoners and their parish priest. The redcoats scalped the corpses, a practice that Wolfe's prohibition - "The Gen[era]l stricktly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canad[ian]s dressed like Indians" - did nothing to prevent becaus Indians so often dressed like Canadians and spoke such fluent French. Wolfe's own views of the "Canadian vermin," candidly expressed in a 1758 letter that spoke of the "pleasure" he would take in seeing them "sacked and pillaged and justly repaid for their unheard-of cruelty," suggest that he was not unduly disturbed when his troops failed to make find-grained distinctions...
Did I mention that war is ugly?
And yet:
And yet:
...[F]or all its ferocious brutality, August's campaign of "Skirmishing Cruelty & Devastation" did no more than the shelling of Quebec to lure Montcalm out of his lines.
Once the British overtook Quebec, they would run into a new hardship.
...The conquerors of Quebec would have to survive a brutal Canadian winter on the limited stock of salt provisions that the fleet could put ashore before it weighed anchor for Britain in October, and they would have no alternative to living in a town largely ruined by their own merciless bombardment... The winners of this month-long fight look more like Norman Rockwell's 1953 painting of "The Winner". It was one of those cases where the winner looks just as defeated as the loser. I guess that's not what was important to General Wolfe, though, as long as his side could declare themselves to be the winners in this long month of violence and gore. You should see the other guy. |  |
When word of the English finally taking Quebec reached British on both sides of the Atlantic, there were celebrations - fireworks, church bells, cannon salutes, and the like. Even preachers, of whom the "reverend" Jonathan Mayhew of Boston was of one, got in on the party:
Lest his audience lose sight of what would be the most important qualities of this new empire, Mayhew point out the reason that this land would be such a happy one: religion would be "professed and practiced...in far greater purity and perfection, than since the times of the apostles." This realm would have nothing to fear from without or within, for "the Lord [will be]...a wall of fire round about, and the glory in the midst of her! O happy country! happy kingdom!" It was not too much, Mayhew believed, to make direct connections between the impending defeat of the French and the events, prophesied in the Revelation of Saint John, that would "consume and destroy the beast and the false prophet, with their adherents." In the happy fields and villages, the corn-covered valleys, and the rejoicing hills, then, Mayhew and many another New Englander glimpsed nothing less than the face of a dawning Millennium.
That image of this land being the land of the chosen people of deity was over the top, but the idea still lingers in every "one nation under God" t-shirt or billboard. To believe that ours is the only isolated nation accepted by God could be the kind of unbreakable pride in a nation that breaks a nation. When humility and submission to God are left behind in exchange for elitism and haughty pride, a nation could easily find itself easy prey for the world to hunt and consume.
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