Quebec, September 1759: a militiaman of Lorette is sent home from the cliff-top post at the Foulon to cut his wheat on the night the English come up the cliff. He hears the battle from his field. A story of the blow no one expected, and of the peace that followed it.
by B.H. Liddell Hart, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The post at the Foulon faced the wrong way, and every man in it knew which way that was.
It stood on the lip of the cliff half a league above the city, a guardhouse of squared logs, a tent for the captain, a fire that was kept low, and a line of felled trees laid across the head of the one path that came up from the cove. The path was a watercourse more than a path. In spring it ran with snowmelt. In September it was a ditch of loose shale, steep enough that a man going down it held on to the roots. Below lay the strip of beach, and the river, and on the far side the dark shore of Lévis where the English had their guns. The guns had been firing into the city since July. From the Foulon at night you could see the flash, and count, and then hear the sound.
Nobody watched the guns. They were not the business of the post. The post watched the river, and the river, for most of the summer, had been empty.
Ignace Hamel had been at the Foulon eleven days. He was thirty-four years old, a habitant of the parish of Lorette, a militiaman because every man in the parish between sixteen and sixty was a militiaman. He owned a musket that had been his father's and a powder horn with a crack in it that he had stopped with wax. He owned forty arpents, more or less, on the côte behind the church, and on thirty of them the wheat was standing, and had been standing ripe for eight days, and nobody was cutting it.
On the afternoon of the twelfth the captain came out of his tent and read a paper to the post.
The English had gone up the river. Their ships had been seen off Cap Rouge and above it, a long way above it, as far as Pointe-aux-Trembles. Monsieur de Bougainville was following them along the north shore with the best troops in the colony, and would meet them wherever they tried to land. Tonight boats would come down the river with provisions for the city, flour and pork from the upper parishes. The posts along the shore were not to fire on boats. The boats would answer if challenged. They were to be let pass.
Then the captain folded the paper, and looked at the men from Lorette, and said that the wheat would not wait for the English.
Ignace understood him before the others did. Twelve of them could go. They could go home tonight, cut what they could tomorrow, and be back by the following night. The post would hold with those who stayed; the post had never had anything to hold.
He looked at the cliff. He had looked at it every day for eleven days. It went straight down to the beach, near two hundred feet of slate and scrub cedar, with the felled trees across the one gap. Nobody had come up it since the French had first built Quebec on the rock, and nobody had needed to. The English were leagues upriver with Bougainville at their heels. The boats tonight would be French boats.
He took his musket and went.
It was two hours to Lorette by the back road through Sillery and the woods of Sainte-Foy. He walked it in the dark with Baptiste Drolet, whose land adjoined his, and neither of them said much. There was nothing to say that both did not know. The wheat had been sown in May, in the week after the ice left the river. It had come up well. It had stood through the siege because the English had not come this far inland to burn it. In August they had burned the Côte-de-Beaupré from Montmorency to Saint-Joachim, every house and barn along the shore, and from the high ground above the Foulon you could see the smoke lying along the river for days. The English burned, the curé said, the farms of men who fired on them. Ignace had fired on nobody. He had stood at the Foulon for eleven days watching a river where nothing came.
Marguerite had the lamp lit when he came in. She did not ask whether he had leave. She asked how long, and he said until tomorrow night, and she went to wake the boy.
They did not cut in the dark. You cannot cut wheat in the dark; the sheaves fall badly and half the ears are lost in the stubble. They slept three hours with their clothes on, and at the first grey, before the sun was over the trees, Ignace was at the top of the long field with the sickle and Marguerite behind him binding, and Toussaint, who was twelve, making the stooks.
The wheat was dry, and heavy in the head. It was good wheat. He cut with his back to the east.
At about the fourth hour of the morning's work, when the sun was high enough to take the dew off, he heard the guns.
It was not the Lévis batteries. He knew their sound, the long, spaced booms that had gone on all summer. This was close together, a few scattered shots and then, far off to the east beyond Sainte-Foy, a noise like a board being torn along its length. Then another. Then a great many shots, all loose, ragged, falling off. Then nothing.
He straightened. Marguerite straightened beside him, holding a half-bound sheaf against her apron. Toussaint had climbed on a stook to see, though there was nothing to see but the woods.
The whole of it had taken less time than it took to cut one row.
"That was on the heights," Marguerite said.
"Yes."
"Beauport is the other way."
"Yes."
The sound had come from where there was nothing, from the high flat ground behind the city where the townspeople pastured their cows, where no enemy could be, because to be there he would have had to come up the cliff, and the cliff could not be climbed, and the post at its head faced the river and let the boats go by.
He stood with the sickle in his hand, and the question that came to him was not whether to go. It was which road. The road through Sainte-Foy ran straight to the heights, and whatever had made that sound was on it. The other ran north round the marshes to Charlesbourg and would bring him to the city from behind, a day late. He stood long enough to see that he had no need of either, because whatever had happened on the heights had happened already, in less time than a row.
Then he bent and went on cutting.
Drolet came across the field at noon. He had gone back towards the Foulon at first light, as a good man should, and at Sainte-Foy had met the others running, and stopped there, and waited for news.
He sat on the edge of the ditch with his musket across his knees and told it, not in order. There had been boats. The sentry had challenged them, qui vive, and a voice had answered France, and then, when the sentry asked what regiment, the voice had said something, the sentry had not heard what, and had said something about the provision boats and to keep quiet or the English would hear them. It was good French. The sentry would swear to it; it was better French than the captain's. The boats had gone by into the cove. Then there had been men on the path, where the trees were, and men on the cliff to the left of the path, where there was no path at all, only cedar and slate, pulling themselves up by the roots. There were more of them at the top than there had been in the whole post. The captain had been shot through the leg and taken in his tent. The rest had run.
And then there had been the whole English army on the heights, drawn up in a line two deep across the pasture as if it had grown there, and the Marquis had come out of the city with everything he had and marched straight at them. Straight up the slope, Drolet said. He had it from a man of Charlesbourg who had been on the left. They had gone up the slope in columns, the regulars and the militia mixed, firing as they came, far too soon, out of range, and then the English, who had not fired at all, had fired, all together. Twice. That was the sound of the board tearing.
"And after?" said Ignace.
"After, everybody ran."
Drolet looked at the stooks, the long neat rows of them standing down the slope. Then he looked at his own field over the ditch, which was standing ripe and uncut, and got up, and went home to it without saying anything else.
The city capitulated on the eighteenth. The news came to Lorette with the curé, who had it from the curé of Charlesbourg: the garrison had marched out with the honours of war, the inhabitants were to keep their houses, their goods and their religion, and the militia of the country parishes might go home if they gave up their arms and did not take them up again.
The English came to Lorette in the first week of October, when the wheat was threshed.
There were twenty of them, on foot, in the short red coats and the kilts of a Highland regiment, with a cart for the arms. Their officer was a lieutenant, a thin young man with red hands and a cough, who stood in the church door after Mass and read out, in French, what the parish was to do. He did not read it well. He had the words by heart and did not need the paper. Every man who had borne arms was to bring them to the church by noon and to swear the oath, and would thereafter be left in peace on his land. Any soldier who took anything from any house without payment was to be reported to him by name, and would be flogged.
The men of Lorette listened to this without moving. When he had finished, Drolet said, loudly enough, that they had heard the same promise at Beaupré.
The lieutenant looked for the man who had spoken and found him.
"At Beaupré," he said, in his careful French, "they were firing on us from the houses." He folded the paper. "Here you are cutting wheat."
Ignace brought his father's musket to the church an hour before noon. The cart stood in the square with the arms piled in it anyhow, fowling pieces and old army muskets and a halberd that had come out of someone's rafters. A sergeant took the musket from him and wrote his name in a book. Then the sergeant held out his hand again, and Ignace understood that he meant the powder horn, and gave it to him, and the sergeant turned it over and saw the crack stopped with wax and handed it back. It was no use to anybody.
He swore the oath with the others, with his hand on a book held by the curé, who did not look at any of them.
That should have been all. But in the afternoon the lieutenant came out along the côte on foot, with the sergeant and a soldier leading a horse, and stopped at each farm, and at the Hamel farm he stopped longer.
He had seen the stooks from the road, he said, in September. Was it threshed?
It was threshed.
He asked how much. Ignace told him less than there was. The lieutenant nodded as though he had expected that, and said the garrison would buy wheat, and flour if there was a mill working, and pay for it at the rate they had paid in the city before the siege, in coin.
Marguerite said something from the doorway, and the lieutenant turned and asked her to say it again.
"In what coin," she said.
The lieutenant took a purse from inside his coat and poured some of it into his red hand and held it out for her to see. Spanish dollars, mostly, and some English silver with a king's head on it. Not the paper ordonnances the Intendant had been paying the parishes with for three years, which the merchants in the city would no longer take at half their face.
Ignace looked at the coins and then up at the loft over the byre, where the second musket was, the one that had been his brother's, wrapped in sacking under the hay. He did not know whether the lieutenant had seen him look. The lieutenant was coughing into his sleeve. When he had done coughing he was looking at the wheat bags stacked by the door, not at the loft, and he went on looking at them.
"Four minots," he said. "If you can spare four. The men are sick. It is the salt meat, the surgeon says. They need bread."
Ignace sold him six.
The soldier loaded them on the horse. The lieutenant counted the coins into Marguerite's hand, not his, and she counted them again after him, aloud, and he waited while she did it. Then he wrote something in the sergeant's book, and said that the garrison would buy again in the spring if the parish had any left, and that the mill at Lorette should be kept working, and went on down the côte towards the Drolet farm, where Drolet was standing in his yard with his arms folded, watching him come.
That night Marguerite took the tin box down from the shelf above the hearth. It held the paper money, three years of it, the Intendant's promises in faded ink, the pay for the wheat the parish had sent into the city in the siege summer. She put the silver in on top of it and shut the lid.
In January, when the paper would no longer buy salt from anyone in Lorette, she used it to light the stove.
Ignace kept back the seed wheat from the best of the field, the heaviest heads, as his father had, and hung it in bags from the rafters of the loft where the mice could not reach it, beside the thing in the sacking. In May, when the ice went out of the river, he took the seed down and sowed the long field again, from the top, with his back to the east.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Kalendās Octōbrēs (29 September 2026), ā Basiliō Liddell Hart per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
B.H. Liddell Hart, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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