The cover line on D. Peter Macleod’s new book — “Eight minutes of gunfire that shaped a continent” — is misleading, and likely deliberately so.
That’s because Macleod — the pre-Confederation historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa — knows full well that the siege of Quebec was not an eight-minute affair, but rather the culmination of a months-long campaign of vicious fighting throughout the St. Lawrence River region, from Montreal to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond.
Anyone with even a little sense of Canadian history knows the basic story of the battle for Quebec. On one side, there was Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, marquis de Saint-Véran, the supreme commander of French forces in North America, secure in the knowledge that his impregnable Gibraltar of the New World could not be taken. On the other side was the ruthless yet effective British general James Peter Wolfe, the man who had previously taken the French fortress Louisbourg and who would sneak his troops through Quebec’s “back door,” only to die at the moment of his greatest victory. This great and terrible conflict would claim the lives of both men, and even 250 years later it provokes intense emotions among French and English Canadians.
This is all true — but it’s only a small part of the tale. Macleod understands that the real story is more complex and much more human, filled with everyday folk who found themselves in the middle of one of the great game-changing moments in history.
It’s these myriad narrative strings — which Macleod so expertly weaves together — that make Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham so thoroughly enjoyable.
Take, for instance, the story of the anonymous clerk who worked during the siege at Quebec’s Magasin du Roy (Royal Storehouse), trying to ensure that the French troops had all the basic necessities to win the war. Using the clerk’s own unsigned journal as a source, Macleod shows us the war through the eyes of a frustrated civil servant; we can all sympathize as the fed-up quartermaster writes of the ineptness of the bureaucracy and leadership, which, he feared, would lose the war for the French.
We also learn about William Hunter, a British sailor who felt his career was going nowhere and who hoped to win a promotion by accompanying Wolfe during his assault on Quebec.
Macleod mines countless journals, diaries, and official records for tales that bring the grand battle down to a more human scale. It’s these personal vignettes that remind us that wars are not won or lost by generals alone, but by the troops on the ground, the sailors on the seas, and the thousands of anonymous actors who play supporting roles in battle.
As this review was being written, a long-planned re-enactment of the siege of Quebec was cancelled. The re-enactment was to have been timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the battle in September 2009.
Those who fought to stop the re-enactment probably wish that the actual conflict could be forgotten as well. It would benefit both sides of the debate to read Northern Armageddon, if only to remind them that there is far more to our shared history — and to contentious conflicts such as the siege of Quebec — than simply the end result.
— Mark Collin Reid (Read bio)
Mark Collin Reid is the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's History.