14 March 2018

Sufferings In The Captured City


Summer In Quebec, Quebec, Canada

Lieutenant-General John Maunsell's winter in Quebec:

But if gallantry was displayed in scaling the precipice with Wolfe and routing the French on their own ground, it was far more conspicuous in enduring the dangers and sufferings of the terrible winter which the shattered remnant of the army spent in the captured city. Besides their ever-active enemies in the flesh they were compelled to face frost and cold, hunger and nakedness, scurvy and fever. The officers shared the labors of the men, so that a sergeant records: "None but those who were present on the spot can imagine the grief of heart the soldiers felt to see their officers yoked in the harness, dragging up cannon from the lower town; to see gentlemen who were set over them by his majesty to command and keep them to their duty, working at the batteries with the pick-axe and spade." Maunsell survived these dangers, labors, and privations, and when Levis, who had succeeded Montcalm, came against them in the spring with three times their number, he was one of the three thousand left from Wolfe's nine thousand whom General Murray gallantly but unsuccessfully led out to meet them on the same field where their heroic chief had fallen. [Source]


Quebec Map Circa 1759



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