l Saunders and General
Townshend sailing away on the 22nd of October, followed four days
later by the wounded Brigadier Monckton with the remaining ships. All
available stores had been landed, but General Murray was compelled to
limit the number of his garrison owing to the scarcity of supplies;
and now, with about seven thousand men on short rations, he must hold
Quebec until English ships could return to his relief in spring. Such
was the doubtful situation in which Murray stood in November; and to
add to his danger, De Levis and Bougainville lay encamped only a few
leagues away, with a force far more numerous than his own, and
untroubled by anxiety as to supplies.

The hardships of that winter are detailed in the journals of General
Murray and Captain Knox. The first distress was a famine of firewood,
to meet which detachments of soldiers were detailed to fell trees in
the woods of Ste. Foye. They harnessed themselves to the timber like
horses, and dragged it thence over the snow to the city. The storms
and keen frosts of a Canadian winter were a painful experience for the
ill-clothed soldiery, who adopted the most eccentric devices to keep
themselves from freezing. "Our guards at the grand parade," writes
Knox, "make a most grotesque appearance in their different dresses;
and our inventions to guard us against the extreme rigours of this
climate are various beyond imagination. The uniformity, as well as
the nicety, of the clean, methodical soldiers is buried in the rough,
fur-wrought garb of the frozen Laplander; and we rather resemble a
masquerade than a body of regular troops, insomuch that I have
frequently been accosted by my acquaintances, whom, though their
voices were familiar to me, I could not discover, or conceive who they
were." So long as the troops relied upon their regimental uniforms,
the Highlanders necessarily suffered most of all from cold, until the
nuns of the Hospital took pity upon them and fell to knitting long
woollen hose.

By the first week in December it became necessary to relieve the guard
every hour instead of every two hours; but even then frozen ears and
fingers and toes were common casualties. Discipline relaxed, and the
soldiers began to solace themselves by debauch. Drunkenness became so
frequent that Murray cancelled the tavern licenses; and any man
convicted of that offence received twenty lashes every morning until
he divulged the name of the liquor-seller. Theft and pillage w