13 September: Boreham on James Wolfe

A World Transformed
It was in 1759, that James Wolfe, the anniversary of whose death this is, secured his immortal victory on the heights of Abraham, and sacrificed his life upon the well-fought field. "When we first heard," says Thackeray, "of Wolfe's glorious deed; of that army marshalled in darkness and carried silently up the midnight river; of the scaling of those precipitous rocks by the intrepid leader and his troops; and of the defeat of Montcalm on the open plain by the sheer valour of his conqueror; we in England were all intoxicated by the incredible news." The struggle lasted only a quarter of an hour but on those fateful fifteen minutes centuries hung trembling. Seldom, if ever, has so much history been made in so short a space of time.

In those few moments the face of the world was changed; the interests of Russia, of Germany, of Spain, and of all the other European Powers, were directly and vitally affected and both hemispheres assumed an entirely new complexion. In that microscopic fragment of time, a momentous and decisive battle was fought, in the course of which both the opposing commanders were killed; France was driven out of the western world; Canada passed into the hands of Great Britain; and the people of the United States were no longer free to shape their future according to their own design. John Richard Green, the most sagacious and discerning of all our historians thought that its effect on the destinies of the American nation was one of the most interesting and remarkable issues of the fight. "With the triumph of Wolfe at Quebec," he says, "the history of the United States began. By removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the Mother Country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the great republic of the West." A hurricane of history was that day made in the tick of a clock.

An Inspiring Philosophy Of Handicaps
On its purely personal side, the career of Wolfe has many points of striking interest. It may almost be said to amount to a philosophy of life. As a child he was sickly. The doctors shook their heads over him and said that his days must certainly be few. Many men, so circumstanced, would have felt that there was nothing for it but to sit and mope away their narrow span of time in melancholy indolence. Wolfe, however, was built on a very different plan. He argued in a diametrically opposite way. If, he reasoned, he had not long to live, it behoved him to make the most of such years as were destined to be his. Like most frail children, he was singularly sensitive to passing impressions; and he was profoundly stirred by the passing events of his time. He saw the country making the most astonishing progress. In the days of his childhood and early youth the nation was advancing as she had never advanced before. It was a period of the most phenomenal prosperity.

Britain felt its strength; a new spirit swept over the people; the nation stretched its limbs and prepared for action. Men realised that the time had come to put affairs abroad on as satisfactory a footing as affairs at home. It was under the spell of this new passion that young Wolfe laid out the programme of his life. Though only a small boy, he enlisted. He threw himself with such ardour into his military duties that he became an adjutant at sixteen and a general before he was thirty. Realising that the consuming malady that had alarmed his doctors was making rapid headway, he was eager to accomplish something really splendid whilst his strength held out. There is still in existence a letter that he penned in 1758. "I have this day suggested to Mr. Pitt," he says, "that he may dispose of my slight carcase as he pleases, and that I am ready of any undertaking within the reach and compass of my skill and cunning. I am in a shocking condition, but I would much rather die in action than decline any kind of sevice that offers." By this time the horizon was lighting up everywhere. Things were moving as rapidly and sensationally abroad as they had for some years been doing at home.

History's Most Sensational Transformation Scene
As a matter of fact the British Empire was built in a hurry; and it was built in those notable and eventful years in which Wolfe figures so conspicuously. Sir J. R. Seeley declares that the Empire was fashioned in an extraordinary spasm of absent-mindedness. However that may be, it all happened with lightning swiftness, no man realising that the events in which he was playing his part were but one segment of a stupendous mosaic. A very ancient prophet once foretold that a nation should be born in a day and the prediction was certainly fulfilled to the letter in the middle of the eighteenth century. Two years before Wolfe's dramatic adventure in the West, Clive, in the East, had no less dramatically won the battle of Plassey and given us India. A year or two after Wolfe's triumphant death, Captain Cook, who had already participated in the hazards of the expedition to Quebec, set out on those historic voyages that added Australia and New Zealand to the geography alike of the Empire and of the world.

Midway between these two, epoch-making events, Wolfe, by an exhibition of patience, restraint and daring quite unsurpassed in history, conquered Quebec and gave us Canada. This most amazing combination of historic developments of the greatest possible magnitude has always impressed reverent minds as being more than mere coincidence. It made men feel that God was abroad. The hammers of eternity were chiming on the anvils of history. Earth was crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God. The monument that marks the spot on which the young general fell, bears that simple inscription: "Here Wolfe died victorious!" There is really no more to be said; and yet posterity, for centuries to come, will delight in weaving eloquent tributes to twine about his deathless name.

F W Boreham

Image: James Wolfe