Wolfe wrote a barrage of letters to superiors in London and New York, describing the condition of the four battalions that had spent the winter in Halifax. They were ‘in good order’, but ‘are at a very low ebb’. Measles had recently ‘got amongst them’, and they would have suffered far worse had it not been for the ‘more than common care of the officers that command them’. Their officers had attempted to obtain fresh provisions where possible, maintain good hospitals, and lay on plenty of the local anti-scorbutic, ‘spruce beer’, a mildly alcoholic drink brewed from molasses and spruce tips and a good source of vitamin C. These precautions, combined with strict discipline, had ‘preserved these battalions from utter ruin’, without them, ‘these regiments would have been utterly annihilated’. Even so, Wolfe warned that their numbers were still well below expectations. Many of the battalions at Halifax numbered around five hundred men each, just over half their ideal complement. Wolfe feared that the two battalions left further north in Louisbourg, cut off from the outside world over the winter, were ‘in a worse condition’. He stated glumly that ‘the number of regular forces can hardly exceed the half’ of 12,000 that London had promised him during the planning phase. Any losses during the sail up the St Lawrence or a bad outbreak of disease during the campaign would result in ‘some difficulties’, and Wolfe was convinced that the risky nature of this amphibious assault meant that they were ‘very liable to accidents’. He would fight this campaign with no reserve, no margin for error. However, he told his superiors in London, ‘our troops, indeed, are good and very well disposed. If valour can make amends for want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.’44
Wolfe set about preparing his army for the expedition with the relentless energy for which he had become famous. At 32 he was young for so important a command. In a letter to his uncle he blamed his appointment on ‘the backwardness of some of the older officers’, which ‘in some measure forced the Government to come down so low’.45 As so often the pre-war hierarchy had failed to shine in the first few years of combat and promising young officers had been rapidly promoted. Wolfe certainly had shown potential but he was not Achilles reborn. He was exceptionally tall at six foot, but thin and ungainly, with pale skin, long red hair that looked fine and lank, a pointy, fragile nose, and a weak, receding chin: in all a strange ‘assemblage of feature’.46 He had piercing blue eyes but they could not detract from an overall sense of physical infirmity, reinforced by his own constant commentary on his ill health. He suffered from ‘the gravel’, a painful condition caused by the build-up of crystals in the urinary tract, which he tried to douse with regular doses of liquid soap. It no doubt aggravated a pronounced tendency to hypochondria; he often described himself as a broken man. He wrote to his mother that ‘folks are surprised to see [my] meagre, consumptive, decaying figure’. He blamed hard campaigning that ‘stripped me of my bloom’ and brought him ‘to old age and infirmity’. A repeated lament of his letters is that ‘I am perhaps somewhat nearer my end than other of my time.’47 To his uncle he wrote, ‘If I have health and constitution enough for the campaign, I shall think myself a lucky man; what happens afterwards is of no great consequence.’48
Wolfe is strangely inaccessible. He was certainly melodramatic, sensitive, and prone to self-pity. Many of his letters drip with disapproval for fellow officers and contain an almost puritanical adherence to duty. As a result he is often portrayed as aloof and uneasy among his peers, and yet there are hints of a more relaxed side to him. One officer under his command recorded that ‘his gestures [were] as open as those of an actor who feels no constraint’ and he displayed ‘a certain animation in the countenance and spirit in his manner that solicited attention and interested most people in his favour’.49 He certainly had a very loyal group of close friends. His attitude to the men under his command varied wildly depending on his mood and their performance in battle. But he was unwavering in his strong paternalism and the men in return seemed to harbour a genuine affection for their commander. He was certainly visible, his claims of physical infirmity are belied by his behaviour on campaign; he was always where the action was hottest and had the scars to prove it. He never shrank from the rigours of active service and it is possible that his maladies were exaggerated for effect.
His grandfather and father had both been soldiers. He was commissioned an officer aged 14, thanks to his father’s influence, first into the marines and then into an army regiment destined for service on the Continent. He tasted action for the first time at 16 against the French at the battle of Dettingen, where he caught the eye of a powerful patron, the 22-year-old Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, second and favourite son of King George II. With Cumberland’s support, plus his own impeccable family and social army network and his real talent, he ascended quickly through the ranks. He proved himself an excellent regimental commander; his battalions were disciplined and drilled to the highest standards that the army’s peacetime penury would allow. He also thought and wrote with genuine insight on tactics in the age of musket, bayonet, and cannon.
Wolfe’s plan had been to leave Louisbourg and sail up the St Lawrence on 7 May. This was wildly optimistic; the sea ice and the slow Atlantic crossing had delayed operations but so too had the sheer scale of North America and the inadequacy of eighteenth-century communications. Some regiments which had wintered in the colonies only heard about their inclusion in the amphibious force in April. Many were scattered across swathes of country to minimize the impact on the community of the number of extra mouths to feed during the long winter. Four companies of the 78th Regiment had been garrisoning Fort Stanwix over the winter, two-thirds of the way between Albany and Lake Ontario. They had suffered terribly from scurvy, been the target of a daring and bloody Native American raid and were only relieved on 10 April. They were buffeted by blocks of ice on the Mohawk River as they made their way to Albany, then bundled on ships to take them to New York City where, without being allowed to land, they were transferred onto transports and shipped to join Wolfe’s army. It is impressive that they arrived at all. Provisions for the operation arrived from the rich pastures of Pennsylvania, shipped over seven hundred miles from Philadelphia. These were huge logistical achievements on a continent which had not witnessed warfare on this scale before.
On 13 May the Neptune, with Wolfe and Saunders on board, loosed her main course and fired two guns, the prearranged signal for the fleet to weigh anchor.50 Then she stood out to sea and made for Louisbourg ‘with all the ships that were in readiness’.51 Two days later they arrived off Louisbourg. ‘The coast was still full of ice’52 but this time there were sufficient gaps for Saunders to be able to thread his ships into the harbour.
Perched on a barren landscape, Louisbourg was a squat, grey fortress that commanded the mouth of the St Lawrence and was the key to Canada as well as providing French fishermen on the Grand Banks, the most lucrative fishing grounds in the world, with a secure harbour. It had been captured the year before, but had held out long enough to deny the British the chance to enter the St Lawrence and attack the heart of New France. Wolfe had commanded a brigade in the besieging force and his energy and courage had won him a reputation and a promotion back in Britain. Chevalier Johnstone, a Scottish exile serving with the French forces, had painted a bleak picture of life in this desolate stronghold: ‘the climate, like the soil, is abominable at Louisbourg: clouds of thick fogs, which come from the south-west, cover it, generally from the month of April until the end of July, to such a degree