Video: See an animated trailer for the September 2009 issue of The Walrus, feautring Helen Humphreys’ article on the Plains of Abraham.THE RIVER
It is a river as big as an ocean.
I am used to the small streams at home, streams that rush down the hillside, flickering with fish, where the sunlight illuminates the mossy stream beds and the water rattles with its own emptiness.
Here, the river is silent. It has filled its voice. The swift and changing currents are invisible. No light can breach the watery darkness. This river cannot be known, so it cannot be trusted.
The last time we tried to invade, in 1711, we came with no understanding of the St. Lawrence, and eight of our ships ran aground near the Île aux Oeufs. Almost 900 men drowned in the wreckage.
This time, for this invasion, we are determined not to be defeated before we start, not to be defeated by the river before we even reach Quebec. So we are constructing a map. We are noting the shoals and the currents. We are sounding the depths, dropping the knotted, weighted rope over the side of the ship to measure the length of the darkness that slopes beneath the hull. Already we know that the river bottom will not hold an anchor well. Already we know that there are shoals and shallows along the Beauport shore, and so we have come prepared with landing craft that have no keel, that can be rowed in less than two feet of water by eighteen men and carry sixty soldiers amidships.
But I am getting ahead of myself. We are nowhere near ready to land, to attack. The French control the heights. They have all the advantage. We are camped on moving water, on a surface that is constantly shifting beneath us.
I am not deceived into thinking we will ever really know this great river. I listen to the numbers called out by the men on the sounding rope. I look at the drawings being made of the shoreline that slowly drifts past. These bits of knowledge make the men confident, but I am not confident.
I am used only to small streams, but I understand them. I know that a river is always allied with the land that borders it. That these two things work together. They are not separate. One creates the other.
Some men stand beside a rushing stream and feel restless, feel that the relentless force of the water wants to move them into action. Other men stand beside the same stream and are grateful for the forward surge of the water. They can remain motionless, because the water is doing the moving for them.
This is the question a river asks, and one to which we, the 16,000 men in this navy, have no answer.
This is the question: when to be the river, and when to be the land? When to push forward, and when to remain perfectly still?
THE WOODCOCK
Every night, James Gibson, a naval chaplain, stands on deck and watches the bombardment fall on the city. The sky is lit up with fire. The noise of the cannons shudders the planks beneath his feet.
The church has been shelled. The city is in ruins. This should help Wolfe’s cause, but it does not. The French soldiers are not primarily within the city walls. They are spread out along the Beauport shore, with some high up on the cliffs that run the length of the promontory. They are largely unaffected by the shelling of the city.
General Wolfe has rarely been defeated in battle. Now he cannot figure out how to attack the French soldiers, so instead he attacks a city filled with civilians. He is a man of action. He is driven to attack.
James Gibson is not such a man. He is troubled by thoughts of the citizens of Quebec suffering the bombardment. He regrets coming on the voyage. At thirty-eight, he is too old to be interested in battle, even if he were that way inclined.
Gibson is the curate of the parish church in Upham, a small village in Hampshire, seven miles from Winchester. A small village. A small life. Not this stuttering inferno. Not this endless landscape. He fears he is losing his hearing from the cannon fire. If the ship sails close enough for the French to fire on them, he might even have cause to lose his life.
And all because of a bird.
James Gibson is obsessed with birds. At home in England, he catalogues those he sees, goes regularly on forays into the countryside to search for different varieties. He has come to Canada to look at the Canadian birds, to write his observations of them. Even, if he is so lucky, to kill and stuff specimens to take back home with him at the end of this violent ordeal.
