Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow

with his duty as a gentleman. Indeed, the officers of all the ancien régime armies counted themselves as members of a supranational group espousing the principles of honour and gentility. They would even socialize freely during the regular truces or breaks in fighting. The prospect of total war was anathema; it was believed that it would destroy religion and property, and invert the social order. Anarchy of this sort threatened to be catastrophic for the combatant powers and would certainly outweigh any short-term military advantage gained.

      In North America war had none of this refined veneer. War was total, and cold-blooded slaughter was common. Communities, French or British, white or Native, faced utter annihilation at the hands of the enemy. Native Americans routinely enslaved prisoners or tortured them to death with excruciating exactness. Settlers on both sides faced an existence of scarcity and brutality with no reward for civility. Faced with the bloody realities of life on the frontier Montcalm was appalled. Yet Canadians were certain that their strongest weapon against the encroachments of the far more populous British settlers from the south had always been their Native American allies. Native raids could throw back British colonists almost to the coastal cities, as time and again they were hopelessly outmatched by tribes bred to fight among the rivers, lakes, and forests of the backcountries of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Armed with French muskets, powder, and knives, fed when necessary with French provisions and paid in brandy and gold, the Native war parties terrorized vast swathes of frontier. Among them were handfuls of Canadian colonial soldiers, fluent in their language, dressed and painted like Natives so that it was hard to tell the difference. These men attempted to channel Native American aggression along avenues that would serve the cause of New France. Montcalm and many French officers regarded the Native Americans with at best suspicion, but usually utter disdain. As for the Canadians who served alongside them, men who chose to live like the ‘savages’ even when presented with the opportunities of Christian civilization, they were worse than the ‘savages’ themselves. Traders, the voyageurs, travelled to the far west adopting the attitudes, dress, language, and women of the Natives. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, wrote of these men, that ‘one recognizes them easily by their looks, by their size and because all of them are tattooed on their bodies with figures of plants or animals’. Tattooing in New France was a ‘long and painful’ process with burning gunpowder poured into holes pricked in the skin. Bougainville observed that ‘one would not pass for a man among the Indians of the Far West if he had not had himself tattooed’.⁹

      Montcalm argued strongly that a new era of warfare had dawned in North America. No longer would small numbers of tough, tattooed fighters and their Native American allies protect New France. Since the outbreak of this round of fighting, the scale of the resources sent by the French and the British had brought modern warfare to the continent. ‘The war had changed character in Canada,’ he wrote to France in the spring of 1759, ‘the vast forces of the English’ meant that the Canadian way of making war was obsolete. Previously, ‘the Canadians thought they were making war, and were making, so as to speak, hunting excursions’. Once, ‘Indians formed the basis; now, the accessory.’ He made little attempt to disguise his disdain; apparently he had tried to tell the Canadians, ‘but old prejudices continue’.¹⁰ In 1758, he asserted that ‘it is no longer the time when a few scalps, or the burning [of] a few houses is any advantage or even an object. Petty means, petty ideas, petty councils about details are now dangerous and waste material and time.’¹¹ Bougainville loyally agreed with his commander. ‘Now war is established here on the European basis,’ he wrote. ‘It no longer is a matter of making a raid but of conquering or being conquered. What a revolution! What a change!’ The effect of Montcalm’s dismissal of the traditional tactics of Native Americans and Canadians was malignant. As the war progressed rifts between French regulars sent out from Europe and the home-grown defenders of New France grew ever wider. Regular troops robbed the habitants and their officers snubbed their opposite numbers in the militia. Both Montcalm and Bougainville were withering in their criticism of Canadians. New France ‘will perish’ predicted Bougainville, ‘victim of its prejudices, of its blind confidence, of the stupidity or of the roguery of its chiefs’.¹² To Montcalm, one man personified Canadian attitudes, and, in his view, failings. He sat at the pinnacle of New French society: the Canadian-born Governor and Lieutenant General, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Marquis de Vaudreuil.

      Vaudreuil’s father had been sent out from France at the end of the seventeenth century to command the royal troops in the colony, and had then been appointed Governor General of New France. Vaudreuil had been enrolled as an ensign at the grand old age of 6, was a captain at 13, and a major at 27. He had campaigned in the west against the Fox Indians during the 1720s and from 1743 to 1753 he was Governor of the portion of New France called Louisiana: the lands from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi up the river to the Great Lakes. He was appointed Governor General in 1755, the first to have been born in Canada. In 1759 he was 60.

      Vaudreuil was proud, indecisive and deeply defensive about the abilities of Canadians. Like many colonial soldiers, he was extremely keen not to be seen as inferior to French-born officers. Vaudreuil had tried to convince the Minister of Marine in France that he did not need to send out a commander for the regular troops. Vaudreuil himself knew how to save Canada; he just needed an infusion of regular troops. But the army were having none of it. French regulars would fight under their own officers, not Canadians.

      Vaudreuil was disliked by the influx of French officers. Montcalm regarded him as a meddling amateur. Bougainville described him as a ‘timid man and who neither knows how to make a resolution nor to keep one once made’.¹³ For three years Montcalm and Vaudreuil had clashed over strategy. In 1758 Bougainville noted in his journal: ‘I see with grief the growing misunderstanding between our leaders.’¹⁴ Vaudreuil lacked the stomach for direct confrontation but his letters to his masters at the French court in Versailles are full of complaints about Montcalm and reveal a great sensitivity over his position within the colony. At the end of the campaigning season of 1758 he informed Versailles of the ‘indecent observations made by the officers of the regular troops of which I had the largest share’. He feared they had ‘even become so public that they form the conversation of the soldiers and the Canadians’. He knew full well who was to blame: Montcalm, who had given ‘too great liberty’ to his officers who were ‘giving an unrestrained course to their expressions’. The situation was clearly grave, but ‘I pass the matter by in silence, I even affect to ignore it, in the sole view of the good of the king’s service, already aware of the consequences which might attend an open rupture with the Marquis’.¹⁵ In this Vaudreuil was right, Montcalm made no secret of his dislike of the Governor General. He talked openly of it with his junior officers and his official journal is littered with snide comments. It was unprofessional and deeply harmful to relations between the French and the Canadians.

      Vaudreuil’s policy of raids deep into British-held territories had proved remarkably successful in the first few years of the war. A smattering of French officers brought gold, trade goods, and brandy to the Native Americans along the British frontier from the Great Lakes down to Georgia, to encourage them to hurl back vulnerable British settlements. The British sphere of influence had been shrunk by a hundred miles as Native raids had burnt homes and scalped farmers deep into Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Fort Granville, in modern Lewistown, Pennsylvania, just over one hundred miles from Philadelphia, was captured and burnt by Native Americans and Canadians. All the resources, manpower, and treasure of the wealthy and populous central colonies, in particular of Virginia and Pennsylvania, were poured into protecting their own frontiers, largely without success.

      In northern New York, the other front between the British and French zones of influence in North America, along the traditional invasion route of Lake George, or Lac du Saint-Sacrement as the French called it, the lumbering red-coated armies of King George II had been fought to a standstill over three consecutive