the French. Wolfe had been hit
on the wrist, but hastily binding up the shattered limb with his
handkerchief, he now placed himself at the head of the Louisburg
Grenadiers, whose temerity against the heights of Beauport, in July, he
had soundly rated. He had issued strict orders that his troops were to
load with two bullets, and to reserve their fire till the enemy were at
close quarters. He was nobly obeyed, though the French columns came on
firing wildly and rapidly at long range, the militia throwing themselves
down, after their backwoods custom, to reload, to the disadvantage of
the regular regiments among whom they were mixed. The British fire, in
spite of considerable punishment, was admirably restrained, and when
delivered it was terrible.

Knox tells us that the French received it at forty paces, that the
volleys sounded like single cannon-shots, so great was the precision,
and French officers subsequently declared they had never known anything
like it. Whole gaps were rent in the French ranks, and in the confusion
which followed the British reloaded with deliberation, poured in yet
another deadly volley, and with a wild cheer rushed upon the foe. They
were the pick of a picked army, and the shattered French, inured to arms
in various ways though every man of them was, had not a chance.
Montcalm's two thousand regulars were ill-supported by the still larger
number of their comrades, who, unsurpassed behind breastworks or in
forest warfare, were of little use before such an onslaught. The rush of
steel, of bayonet on the right and centre, of broadsword on the left,
swept everything before it and soon broke the French into a flying mob,
checked here and there by brave bands of white-coated regulars, who
offered a brief but futile resistance.

Wolfe, in the mean time, was eagerly pressing forward at the head of his
Grenadiers, while behind him were the Twenty-eighth and the
Thirty-fifth, of Lake George renown. One may not pause here to speculate
on the triumph that must at such a moment have fired the bright eyes
that redeemed his homely face and galvanized the sickly frame into a
very Paladin of old, as sword in hand he led his charging troops. Such
inevitable reflections belong rather to his own story than to that of
the long war which he so signally influenced, and it was now, in the
very moment of victory, as all the world well knows, that he fell.

He was hit twice in rapid succession--a ball in the groin w