service beyond
the neighbourhood of Quebec, thus being very much like
the Home Guards raised all over Canada and the rest of
the Empire during the Great World War of 1914. All the
militia wore dark green coats with buff waistcoats and
breeches. The total of eighteen hundred was completed by
a hundred and twenty 'artificers,' that is, men who would
now belong to the Engineers, Ordnance, and Army Service
Corps. As the composition of this garrison has been so
often misrepresented, it may be as well to state distinctly
that the past or present regulars of all kinds, soldiers
and sailors together, numbered eight hundred and the
militia and other non-regulars a thousand. The French
Canadians, very few of whom were or had been regulars,
formed less than a third of the whole.

Montgomery and Arnold had about the same total number of
men. Sometimes there were more, sometimes less. But what
made the real difference, and what really turned the
scale, was that the Americans had hardly any regulars
and that their effectives rarely averaged three-quarters
of their total strength. The balance was also against
them in the matter of armament. For, though Morgan's
Virginians had many more rifles than were to be found
among the British, the Americans in general were not so
well off for bayonets and not so well able to use those
they had; while the artillery odds were still more against
them. Carleton's artillery was not of the best. But it
was better than that of the Americans. He decidedly
overmatched them in the combined strength of all kinds
of ordnance--cannons, carronades, howitzers, mortars,
and swivels. Cannons and howitzers fired shot and shell
at any range up to the limit then reached, between two
and three miles. Carronades were on the principle of a
gigantic shotgun, firing masses of bullets with great
effect at very short ranges--less than that of a long
musket-shot, then reckoned at two hundred yards. The
biggest mortars threw 13-inch 224-lb shells to a great
distance. But their main use was for high-angle fire,
such as that from the suburb of St Roch under the walls
of Quebec. Swivels were the smallest kind of ordnance,
firing one-, two-, or three-pound balls at short or medium
ranges. They were used at convenient points to stop
rushes, much like modern machine-guns.

Thanks chiefly to Cramahe, the defences were not nearly
so 'ruinous' as Arnold at first had thought them. The
walls, however useless against the best