The abandoned battlefield
The abandoned battlefield
Shortly after eleven a.m.
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| The Battle of the Plains of Abraham left 1,300 men killed or wounded. (As portrayed in Canada: A People's History) |
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on September 13, 1759, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville arrived on the Plains with 1,200 French troops but by that time the battle was over and the field had been left to the dead and dying. Colonel étienne-Guillaume de Senezergues, mortally wounded, would die the next day. François Clement Boucher de la Perrière, who had fought though his eyes were failing him, would be dead by evening.
James Wolfe, the British General who had been sick and frail before the battle, lived only a few minutes after receiving a fatal shot to the chest. His body was sent back to England where he became the Empire's newest hero. His coffin was carried through streets filled with silent mourners and he was buried beside his father at St.
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| The French and English dead were buried in large common pits on the Plains. The location of their graves was never marked. (As portrayed in Canada: A People's History) |
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Alfege's, Greenwich. He was 32 years old.
Louis-Joseph, the Marquis de Montcalm, would survive for one more day. He died of his wounds at the General Hospital, glad, he said, not to have seen the fall of Quebec. There were no coffins left and his body was put into a makeshift box and buried in a crater made by a British cannonball that had landed in the Ursuline nuns' chapel. He was 47 years old.
One thousand, three hundred men were killed or wounded on the Plains of Abraham. The Canadians from the parishes and cities of New France, the youths of the English Midlands, the dispossessed of the Scottish Highlands, the unemployed from Normandy and Provence – all were buried, French and English together, in common pits on the Plains.
The location of their graves would never be marked.
Ten days after the Battle, the French artillery commander Fiacre-François de Montbeillard wrote in his journal: "I have nothing but misfortune to write about. Twenty times I have picked up my pen and twenty times sorrow has made it fall from my hands. How can I bring to mind such overwhelming events?... We were saved and now we are lost."
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