Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 326 - The Battle of The Plains Of Abraham

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

GET LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://www.universe.com/events/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-belfast-tickets-belfast-83V5QD SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys If you want to support the show via a one time donation without using Patreon, you can PayPal us at [e-mail] Check out Failure to Launch: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/failure-to-launch/id1585592962 Quinn, one of the hosts of Failure to Launch, takes us on a journey to one of the most important battles in Canadian history.

Hey everybody, if you ever wanted to see us live but you missed the other shows, well, you have another chance. Me and the boys are hitting the road once again and the Lines Led by Dunkies podcast is coming live to Belfast at the OYE Music Center Saturday, October 26th. So get your tickets while they last. You can find the link in our show notes. So get them now. Do it. Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. In the driver's seat for the first time, I am Quinn, and I am joined by your normal hosts,

don't worry, Joe and Tom. How's everyone doing? Hey hey. Who led this contest to the show? Wasn't me. For fuck's sake. Before we started recording, Tom opened a Red Bull with his mouth. With my teeth.

With your succulent mouth. Joe was wearing a Napoleon hat. It's one I got on that was at Aliexpress and I've realized that the buttons on it are from a US military jacket. And the only thing Napoleonic about it at all is that it is blue. If you were at the live show

a month ago now from when you are hearing this right now you will have seen this hat temporarily back then. And I will have thrown it to someone because it is gonna hit my head. Yes. Yeah, if you are the person who received this hat, you had better be wearing it right the fuck now. Yeah, yeah, you have to wear that Napoleon hat every time you listen to the show. Otherwise, I'll be very mad. I'll settle for it when you take a shit. Like whenever you take a shit, you get a Napoleon hat. Absolute growler. Wearing a Napoleon hat. I have my best thoughts on the toilet.

Just like, smash cut to military strategy playing through my mind with the Napoleon hat. That's what I do. Yeah. You might be wondering why I'm not hosting. That's because Quinn is being given the driver's wheel here. The steering wheel to talk about Canadian history. Yeah, it's a real trial by fire. It's our local Canadian expert coming in.

My qualifications, I'm Canadian. If you need anything more, I don't know what to tell you. There were a bunch of Canadian history topics, but I wanted to start off with a fun one and like one of the most contentious stories in Canadian history, or military history at least. So we are going to be talking about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. C.A.C.K. Canadians are contentious people. C.A.C.K. Contentious Canadians all around me. C.A.C.K. Or the moment that fully solidified Canada as a British colony and kicked out France, French.

C.A.C.K. I mean like, look, you know, the French have brought very few good things into the world. They are, in an unfortunate circumstance, responsible for Bon Mise, which are great, but they are also responsible for the Quebecois. Mm. The yin and the yang of the French culture. Yeah. See, I'm gonna have to defend that, just for the sake of like, we're in the Netherlands right now, I was chatting with a friend about like, oh yeah, Dutch cuisine, Canadian cuisine, and I realised midway through I was just like oh all of this is Quebec cuisine

there is no such thing as like non-Quebec Canadian Nanaimo bars I guess but like- What is that? It's- can't remember exactly where it's from- I know literally nothing about Quebec. I don't think Nanaimo bars are from Quebec but they're like kind of like dessert bar thing. It's like a granola underneath, like a custard filling in the middle and then like a layer of chocolate fudge on top. They

are very good. I'm getting off track here and I'm hungry. See, to be fair though, it made me think of there's a chocolate bar in Ireland called an animal bar. It's just like, it's wrapped in tin foil and then there's like paper around it. It's like a square piece of chocolate and there's like pictures of animals. So you can get an animal bar that has like a chocolate lion on it or whatever. But they had to stop selling them in loads of shops because they're super cheap. You go and buy them for like 30 cent and people were buying them and using the tin foil to smoke heroin. That's literally why if you go into so many, I'm a champion of Irish culture.

If you go into so many shops in Dublin city centre you literally can't even buy a roll of tinfoil. I didn't know Ireland was part of the midwest, I learned something new today. What the fuck is this? Is this cheetah paper? I wanted elephant. I'm smoking my heroin out of this rhino right now. Now anything involving French vs English Canadian history is going to be full of bias and conflicting narratives.

For example, I went to an English school in Ontario, so I learned a lot of pro-Anglo history. My buddies who went to French school also in Ontario in the same city, they learned a lot of pro-French history. And I know I'm not going to be able to actually avoid any people getting mad or reviews or comment sections becoming an absolute shitshow, I am going to attempt, for the sake of being as honest as possible, I'm trying to use sources that are both kind of pro French and pro Anglo and just sticking to as much as possible, no speculation, the things that have happened. This is just like watching two people you hate fight, it's like, I don't think anyone should win. And then occasionally you can kind of pick out the actual truth from all of their different

dumb lies, sometimes there will occasionally be a little nugget you can pick out of there. So with that in mind, my sources for this episode are Elaine Quimper's book The Planes of Abraham, Battlefield 1759 and 1760, as well as Peter McLeod's book, Northern Armageddon. As always, links will be down in the show notes. Now, our story starts off with the Seven Years War, a global clusterfuck running from 1756 to 1763 that would see Britain, Portugal, and Prussia duke it out with France, Russia, Sweden, Austria, and Spain. Because literally every one of those countries was some kind of colonial power, even back then, the fighting spiralled out into a proto-world war, spanning Europe, India, North and South America, and pretty

much every international sea lane. I'm just now realising we're not actually gonna be talking about aeroplanes, cause it's the 1700s. Dragons. Yeah! We did review- Quepecuar Dragon! it's the 1700s. DRAGONS. Yeah! Quebecois dragon! Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo stab a French Canadian dragon just bleeds gravy. My dragon he has eaten mon frais pierre.

A dragon just eating a French soldier but it's making like the squeaky cheese curd sound. This might be like an old stab at the dart because we did review a book years ago about what if Napoleon had dragons was like the whole. Like only him or was it something that like a force capability that everyone had? There was a core of dragons, like a dragon air force. Okay, alright. The book wasn't good. Sorry, it wasn't dragons.

I'm stupid. It was dinosaurs. Napoleon had dinosaurs. Okay, alright. Again, book was very bad. That seems significantly less likely to change the tides of battle, you know? Like if you're talking Napoleon era, I don't know, like I'm imagining a dinosaur is basically being the equivalent of like an elephant and I don't think that's going to change the tides too much.

Like I don't feel like if Napoleon had a whole bunch of T-Rex's at Waterloo, which is what the book was about, that it really would have helped any. I don't think that would have, I don't think that's what he was missing. Although watching a T-Rex just get its entire head vaporized by like, grapeshot would be certainly interesting. They all looked down on Napoleon's dinosaurs because they were of course Corsican. No. Guilty of the highest crime.

So this war was so confused and convoluted that it's maybe more accurate to call it a collection of wars that kind of fit within a seven year period. So it's also worth mentioning that some of them did start before 1756, and some of them lasted longer than the official end of the war in 1763. So this war is known in India, for example, as the Third Carnatic War. It's the Pomeranian War fought between Sweden and Prussia. It's the Third Silesian War between Prussia and Austria. I just can't help but think of tiny little Pomeranians fighting over that.

Riding into battle. My tiniest most loyal steed. I mean if you have to kind of capture the royalty of Russia and Sweden in the 1700s it is two Pomeranians. Two very inbred Pomeranians who drool too much. It's a combination of being attacked by a wolf pack and piranhas. Brought down and torn to shreds. Yeah, because of the fucking Habsburgs we now have Crufts dog competition.

If Habsburgs were a dog they would just be pugs. No, we should breed royalty like we breed XL bullies. Like four times jumbo. So it's like, you just have this like, you have compressed Habsburg that's really wide. I'm hearing that and my brain is immediately going to like, what's the bourgeois of royal nobility? How fucked up can we make the skull? The bourgeois were specifically bred for the Russians. The long haired bourgeois was like, why didn't the Tsar, if people are supposed to look like their dogs-

Such a pointy face. Yeah. Very pointy face. Yeah, the bourgeois doesn't have a point their dogs. Such a pointy face. Yeah. Very pointy face. Yeah, the Borzo doesn't have a pointy face, he has a pointy chin. Well then I have no choice but to defend this dog. Yeah, there you go. So this war was also known as the War of the Conquest in French Canada, and in America it's nowadays known as the French and Indian War.

To make things even dumber, the sides in this war were not monolithic blocks. Countries and city-states often switched sides, or they only chose to fight their rivals. So like, it'd be like if the Axis and Allies, it'd be like if Britain only decided to fight Italy. And then they were just allied with everyone else, which I guess is kind of like the Soviet-Japan relationship right up to the end? Oh well. Well, I mean, Italy deserved it, it's fine. Oh yeah, if it was just everybody saying like, we will attack Germany and Japan later, everybody fuck Italy right now. JUSTIN Just the Russian weebs.

They were just really disappointed by that war. ALICE Betrayed. Where am I going to buy my manga now? SEAN Reminds me of this very online account who was like complete defender of the Chinese Communist Party all the way up until he passed the bill limiting how long you could play video games online. Damn it! This is why we need to return to Dengism.

Like we didn't have this problem, I could play StarCraft as long as I want. Deng was actually a gamer, I don't think a lot of people know that. Deng Xiaoping, incredible kill death ratio. First guy to have a gold farm in World of Warcraft. I mean to be fair, being the Premier of the CCP is just like playing Farmville. So what we are going to be focusing on today is the fighting in North America, and specifically the siege of Quebec City. So in the mid 1700s, the situation in North America was a little fluid.

You had the British 13 colonies, New France, and pancaked between their territories were a load of First Nations alliances like the Iroquois Confederacy, the Wabanaki Confederacy, and the Algonquin. When the fighting did start in 1754, it was started for a reason and by a man I would never have guessed. The tension was a land dispute over who would own Ohio, and the spark was George Washington and his men ambushing and massacring a French patrol. Look, George Washington, founding father of my home country.

British general, accomplished British general who invaded Canada, I'm pretty sure he invaded Canada both as a British and later American general. Everyone's just like super desperate to have control of the fentanyl supply. There's nothing else in Ohio that you want. I mean Michigan invaded Ohio once and should I take over Toledo which is probably the dumbest decision we've ever made. I mean like to be fair. Because even if you win you have a Toledo. Dying for a hundred bucks a year and the honor of owning Toledo. On my soul as a Michigander, I will spill blood for the return of our ancestral territory of fucking Toledo. But like what is the 1700s equivalent of like ripping copper out of the wall and stealing

carburetors? Uh, whor- wagon wheels? Sorry, not carburetor, catalytic converter, stealing the middle peg for your wheel. You're sticking the horses up on blocks because the whole bunch of dudes from Michigan store. Stealing the guts out of a horse and just putting it in your horse. It makes it go faster. It's got 12 stomachs. What about stealing horseshoes?

I feel like you put your horse up on blocks. Yeah. It's just got concrete blocks tied to its hooves. Damn they stole my horseshoes. Fucking Washington's at it again, that bitch. He's just there doing the fence, Dan. He has a chain that loads of horseshoes are hanging from it. Also, for the sake of clarity, because I'm going to be talking about a bunch of groups,

when I say British, I mean people from Great Britain. So these are normally like the professional troops. Americans, in this case, are any colonists living in British colonies, so that's whether it's like the modern US, the 13 colonies, or like Nova Scotia, those other parts of Canada. The French here are mostly soldiers coming from mainland France, and Canadians are any colonists living in New France. So basically on both sides we have the professional army from Europe, and then we have local militias. Now because this would turn into a series otherwise, I'll keep the rundown of the war up to this point brief.

Basically, from 1754 all the way to 1759, the main British plan was to invade inland from their coastal colonies, and it never went well. Quote, During those five years, British goals in North America had changed from the occupation of the Ohio Valley to the conquest of Canada. Yet although the British enjoyed comfortable margins of naval and military superiority in the region, they had spent most of those years reeling from defeat after defeat at

the hand of Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Governor General of New France. What a fucking name. I had to shorten his name, it's longer than that. What's the full name? I need to point out, this is the only time in the history of this podcast that someone hosted this show and pronounced the French name correctly. Yeah, I can this is the only time in the history of this podcast that someone hosted this show and Pronounced the French name correctly. Yeah, I can I don't think I pronounced it correctly Okay, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnel Marquis de Vaudreuil. You are so Quebec. I'm not I'm on Terry

I'm fucking letter Kenny worst case on Terry. Oh fuck if someone who's coming to the live show in Belfast October 26 I should mention. Tickets available now in the show notes. Someone please make a shirt and wear it that says I survived Agencourt and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Make sure that it's spelled phonetically. Agencourt. That's the correct pronunciation.

Every time you pronounce something in French correctly the world loses. I stand by that. As you should. And you were right to say it. Some people call me brave. Speak on a king, speaker truth. Some people call me brave and I say, you know what, I'm just a man. Something about hearing that from the man in the Napoleon hat across the table from

me is just like- He's still wearing the Napoleon hat. I'm a man of layers. Like an ogre. So, this trend of the British losing, it changed in late 1758 when they switched tactics and basically just started doing naval raids of any part of New France that touched the sea. So they start invading French Louisiana, all kinds of places. They take the French fort of Louisbourg in modern Nova Scotia, and because of that, that's like right at the entrance of the St. Lawrence River,

which feeds all of like Quebec City, Montreal, all of these. They effectively blockade New France. This is important because while the British colonies at the time had a population of something like 2 million people, New France peaked at around 60,000, and it was not self-reliant. They were very reliant on shipments from France proper for troops, supplies, all of that. Squeaky cheese. Crowbar open a shipping container and just the nastiest smelling cheese imaginable. Thank god our vittles have arrived.

Like just some French chef just like on the verge of suicide because the Canadians have adulterated the five mother sauces to create gravy for poutine. Getting occupied by the British army and the Americans come in and you're just having to make poutine with like, the processed cheese slices. Oh, that... oh. I will defend processed cheese. It's good, it has its place. It is one of, I think it's like five cheese, but the only cheese

you can get reliably where when you heat it up the fat in it doesn't separate. So that's why she was on burgers. I mean, I grew up eating government cheese, which is the most processed cheese imaginable. I'm pretty sure it's orange plastic, but is it good? No. Should you eat it? No. Can you eat it? Yes. The real sticking issue if you ever get in an argument with a libertarian is like, hate taxes, hate, you know, critical race theory in schools, bring up government cheese, see where they stand on that. See, they should like government cheese because it's under the age of 16. Yeah.

I don't want my cheese aged. I want it immature. So taking Louisbourg basically gave the British control of both ends of the St. Lawrence River and a clear shot at New France's capital, the fortress of Quebec, what is now Quebec City. Now the man the British chose to lead this invasion was General James Wool, age 32. He was the son of a famous British general, and while that did definitely get him some nepotism and perks, it also meant that he was involved in of a famous British general and while that did definitely get him some nepotism and perks it also meant that He was involved in military campaigns basically from birth

He was commissioned as an officer at age 14 and came out of his first set of wars a few years later as a lieutenant Colonel at basically the age of like 20 He's Nate Everybody get the what's it called the high chair for the officer? He He's going to address them in the officer just putting on his baby babe. The sergeant major carrying the officer in front of formation in a baby. You're just like, you're being called in to be reprimanded. He's throwing peas on you. We're going to talk about someone worse in just a second.

When the seven years war broke out, Wolf was eventually shipped to the 13 colonies, where he was one of the generals to take Louisbourg. So like he was in the area, he had proven himself, he earned, he was known as like a taskmaster, he was known as a good general, and he earned the right to be the guy to take on Quebec. Meanwhile, his opposite was Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, the leader of the French defense of Canada. So he's a military brat like Wolf, he served in a load of European wars after joining the French Navy, and he joined as an officer at age nine. Fuck yes. Fuck, you know, when you have child soldiers, you require child officers and NCOs to lead them?

Yes. Instead of being sent to the brig, you're sent for nap time? Sir, you are grounded. You are grounded, sir. My set of being sent to the brig you're sent for nap time Sir you are grounded you're grounded sir You have to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap a dunce cap on top of your full dress Uniform and hat yeah, I would go and see to the min But my commanding officer have seen fit to take my xbox away because my grades were bad seen fit to take my Xbox away because my grades were bad. So, despite the nepotism, Mon Calme also is effectively a child soldier officer from birth. He becomes an officer at age nine, and then he spends the next forty years non-stop at

war. So he's probably a well adjusted individual. Yeah. Oh, like, you know, being a soldier at age nine is great for child development. He was in the French version of the Lord's Resistance Army. Oh jeez. We're gonna get to this, but he does kind of keep the childish tantrum. He's French. Well that, yeah, and then like amplify that.

Take it to eleven. Oh god. He's like, he is a French child at age like, fifty. Oh my god, so he never matured in any other way other than how to kill people. Yeah. He's Lenny. This is the second time this weekend Lenny has come on. Actually that's unfair to Lenny. Lenny never meant to kill anyone. He's chaos Lenny. Yeah. The chaotic Lenny. There are Lenny's everywhere for those. He doesn't care who he kills, his own men, the enemies. But despite all of that, he was actually a talented

general, so all through those first five years of the war in North America, where all of these British attacks are failing, it is Montcalm who is the general, who is constantly pushing them back. So it's 1759, the British want to invade Quebec City. They have control of both ends of the St. Lawrence River, and Quebec is pretty much right in the middle, controlling the bottleneck where the river opens up. Based on their success at Louisbourg, it should be just as simple as sailing some ships up there, landing on the beaches and storming the fort. But there's problems, the first of which being the river itself.

Quote, In the absence of a strong French naval presence in Canadian waters, Canada's first line of defense against attack from the sea was the intricate, dangerous navigation of the lower St. Lawrence River. The last British invasion of Canada had come to grief on the 23rd of August 1711, when seven troop ships and a store ship ran aground near Ilo-Euf, which by the way means Egg Island. Oh hell yeah! 740 soldiers and about 150 sailors drowned in the wrecks, again brackets on Egg Island. Dying on Egg Island.

Dying on Egg Island. They've been consumed by the inglorious egg. You're just being eaten, like ripped apart like a vulture, but by loads of Yoshi's. Thankfully for the British, one of their ships, the HMS Pembroke, was able to get accurate charts of the river with the help of some captured French maps and what the British, one of their ships, the HMS Pembroke, was able to get accurate charts of the river with the help of some captured French maps, and what the British called the Enforced Assistance of Captured Canadian Pilots. So they just found some guys in canoes and were just like, where the fuck are we going? Oh, eh bud, you go up the river there.

Oh yeah, just take a left and then a right. Um, yeah no, yeah, that's about where you're going. And you turn left at the maple tree and then when you see the big bucket of cheese you turn right name What is one thing that the British Navy loves more than impressing people into the British Navy? It's like their favorite pastime other than rum sodomy in the lash Yeah Also for the record the navigator of the HMS Pembroke was James Cook the guy who would later become an explorer and get Fucker and get killed for trying to kidnap

the leading chief of Hawaii. Like someone asked, it all comes back to Cook baby. We have a Q and a episode coming out on the page. I'm probably around the time when this episode comes out. And one of the questions was who is our historical arch nemesis? Like for each of us, I know who yours is. I mean, that I mean that's a gimme, I gotta think of something different. AARON And mine is Captain James Cook. Captain Cook did absolutely fuck all on those voyages as well. LLOYD I mean, he- nothing of substance, sure. AARON We're also going to be talking in a bit, like there's so many famous historical characters that are somewhat involved with the story

but not like, known for it. Like a famous French explorer like the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe, Bougainville. He's also a major part of this story for some reason. Yeah, because they told him there was a 14 year old girl on the other side. He just kept going. I'll find her eventually winding back up at the French port like fucking lied to me. He had to circumnavigate the world because in the middle of the ocean was the only place he could be that was far enough away from the nearest school. No, they just told him that Atlantis was full of Jews. Mon Dieu, I read in the magazine Le Racisme Antisemitism that the low city of Atlantis,

it is in the middle of the Atlantic and it is full of Les Semites? I'm now just seeing the bit of the French newspaper Le Pédophile Raciste, except now it has the established 1740 underneath it. So armed with these charts, Captain Cook was able to guide the British fleet up the St. Lawrence to the Isle d'Orléans, the island of Orleans. This is basically an island just opposite from Quebec, and when they land there, and when they get there, they start to land troops immediately.

And then they are greeted by a wall of flames. Wait, the British find a firebender or something? No, this is better. A British pyromancer. As the British troopships were sitting at anchor, unloading all their soldiers and supplies, the French took a bunch of supply ships that happened to be docked in Quebec, loaded them with explosives and grenades and anything flammable, lit them on fire, and just sent them, pushed them out down the river.

Fuck yeah. I mean, it's pretty smart. So this tactic is what is called a fire ship and in history there's a bunch of times it's really effective like if you're if the enemy's ships aren't doing anything that it can even like they're all lashed together the fire can spread like wildfire. Especially navies back then they couldn't exactly like oh turn the engines on and move slightly to the left No, you're just fucked. Yeah, not to mention every ship back then was waterproofed by rubbing tar on the outside

It was just a floating fire bomb at all times. We just paved this thing In all seven French ships were launched like giant wooden torpedoes at the British fleet and then none of them hit Oh The boats were released too late and lit too early So the British had plenty of time to just like row out there with row boats Just grab every one of the boats and just drag it off to the side of the river They have the revolutionary tactic of nudging it slightly to the right Fire ships one of those things that you can't exactly practice it. Yeah, you know, it's like you there's no dry run here

There's no there's no tech demo. You can't really like make shipbuilding machine go burr Yeah It is one of those situations where like it would probably have been more effective if it was a kamikaze strategy, cause what they did is they put a skeleton crew on the boat, they line it up with the target, and then those guys hop out. And like, no, if you were actually guiding it the whole way, you probably could have done this better. If they had the dedication of a British samurai sworn to his feudal master.

No, all he was going the opposite way is like the the ships on fire are Quebecois kamikazes, so it's like you have the fucking Quebecois Ronin. Yeah, well he couldn't have been a Ronin. He'd have to be sworn to his Quebecois feudal lord, his Le Damio. My land, my ancestral land I will protect is just my sugar bush near Montreal and I will defend it with my life till the last drop of blood is a baguette sheathed Wearing a Paris Saint-Germain like Jersey as his armor a beret tilted slightly to the right He has like a Louis Vuitton side bag. It's a ceremonial vestments preparing for death. But instead of like, you know, cutting his hair like a top knot, he is just bald like

Napoleon. Yeah, anytime I see like hockey fans riot or like flip something, I'm instantly, I think back to their ancestors and whatever war they fought. Like I wish the Nordiques were still around so we could get some of this like fire ships, but it's them. It's like Quebec fans lighting a car on fire and just pushing it down a hill. Well, for talking the Nordiques, the fire ship being sent off into the river and exploding into nothingness is literally just the Nordiques. Oh.

So, the British were now landed and established on the Île d'Orléans, right across from Quebec. And the way Wolfe imagined things, this was like step one of a quick one-two punch to take the city. But there are more problems, because Quebec is, I need to make this clear, an incredibly difficult place to siege. Right on the edge of the river, you have the fortress on a huge hill with all of its walls and guns pointed out at sea. No landing place there. To the north, you have the town of Beauxal that the French had like heavily fortified. It's described as like every window has a sniper

in it. They have something like 50 cannons around this thing just pointed at the beach. Fuck yes. And to the south, you have the promontory of Quebec or Quebec Hill. So this is a huge plateau. It runs for like several kilometers all the way along the river. It is about a hundred meter cliff face. Like, if you look at pictures... So is that a hill? No. It's a cliff. I think it's more of a hill on the other side.

Like, if you're on the Quebec City side, you can kind of walk up it. But if you're on the river side, it's a tiny little beach, and then just a hundred meters straight up. Perfect. Send infantry up it. Yeah. Oh, hold that thought. Oh, you fucking kidding me?

Oh, he flipped it on you, Joe. Doesn't feel good, does it? Honestly, I mean, I'm not I'm not a French infantryman or a British infantryman in this situation I don't know. I'm feeling fine. Charge that way. I'm not catching a musket ball into my kneecap or whatever Oh god, so and on top of this plateau are the plains of Abraham so naturally General Wolfe looked at all of these landing spots and he picked the town of Bhopal, and this immediately turned into like a proto-DF raid or like D-Day, where these guys just get shot to shit. And they even had little flat-bottom landing ships like the World War II kind, except they were

rowed instead of motorized, which also gave me this very fun tidbit from the records. Quote, the sailors lined the outer sides of the boat, working the oars and incidentally providing human shields for their passengers. And this happened repeatedly. There's a dude that's behind the sailor. Your boat is just getting slower and slower as the sailors are dying. There's a dude who's the fucking size of Dorian Yates or Ronnie Coleman rowing the boat taking bullets to the back.

And sailors are the last people you want to hide behind, they're the smallest most malnourished people in the military at the time. They're constantly full of dysentery. Shooting exclusively one side of the boat so it's just spinning in circles in the middle of the river. You're just giving the rower extra rations of gruel to bulk him up so he's wider so he can protect more people from bullets. Give us the widest rowers.

Now this attack on Bhopal does not work. Like I said, the French have put snipers in every single window and they don't have 50, but they do have 39 cannons aimed at chest level right down this beach. That's the last place you want to get hit with a cannon. I like my chest. And they're just unloading with grapeshot. So like 3,500 elite British soldiers, so I need to be clear here. We'll talk about this in a bit, but the French mostly like most of their force they outnumber the British, but it's Canadian militia.

They are not well trained. The British force going against them is smaller, but it is almost exclusively European trained elite infantry. Mhmm. Rather than like, Steve with a gun. They send 3500 of these guys out, 400 do not make it back. Because they are just completely destroyed on Cannon Beach. I just put on the Napoleon hat and I hate to say how fucking warm it is. That's right. It's like getting into someone's bed after they got home. I'm also noticing that the front flap of it is not connected, it's falling forward

over your brow. It's more of a pseudo sombrero at this point. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to put the ice cubes to cool yourself down. Ooh, that's a long, long idea. This attack does not work. Wolf responded to this setback about the same way a lot of spoiled commanders have throughout history. He lashed out and started shelling Quebec City with his cannons, vowing that if he could not take the city, he would, quote,

set the town on fire with shells. So this is by the way the dude that like whenever I was in school, we were always taught that like Jamesfe is this incredible heroic noble hero. There is a statue of him on the plains of Abraham for some reason. Why? That seems to be the last place you'd want to have a statue. I would like to have a bust of myself to set my greatest failure. What, starting this podcast?

So with the failed attack on Bauxpah, any hopes of taking Quebec quickly, those died. Both sides settled in for a long siege, with the British hopes of taking Quebec quickly, those died. Both sides settled in for a long siege, with the British trying to shell Quebec flat, and the French turning the ruins into like a defender's paradise. Over the next few months, Wolff also sent out raiding ships up and down the St. Lawrence, burning and massacring every Canadian and First Nations settlement he could find. This kept bored soldiers occupied, but it also cut off Quebec from more and more sources of supplies, and it her cut off Quebec from more and more sources

of supplies and it herded scared refugees into the city to like eat their remaining stocks faster. Oh god. I like, I don't like, but it's interesting that this guy that's like, yeah he's a hero, he's this noble person, well we have to keep all of our soldiers occupied, idle hands are the devil's plaything. What can we do in the meantime to keep them busy? Genocide perhaps? Yeah, god damn, I was hoping at least First Nations people would escape this one. Do they ever, unfortunately. So I also want to take a second here to talk about the breakdown of the troops both generals commanded because this battle is often depicted as just being British redcoats against French

soldiers and that's just not the case. So Wolf had hoped for 12,000 soldiers to take Quebec, but he was only given 9,000 of them. Of those, quote, fully 33% of Wolf's soldiers were Americans. The surprisingly high percentage reflects both the years that many British units had spent in the colonies during the war and the rising population of British America. Of the remainder, 25% were Irish, 23% were English, 15% were Scots, and 4% Swiss and Germans. Everybody in this situation is lost as fuck. Yeah. I'm more wondering about like the Swiss and German dudes who have just signed up for the

British military, and are now fighting in French Canada. I shouldn't have smoked that shit, now I'm Cigin Couper. The French army was also a little bit of like a rainbow alliance. The professional French army was split into two branches, each answering to a different ministry. The ground forces were led by the Ministry of War, while the French marines, or as they were called back then the colonial regulars, worked for the Ministry of Marine and Colonies. These were backed up by local Canadian militias and First Nation troops.

And as you can probably expect, these people were very pissed at the British burning their towns and villages. When the French mobilized the Canadian militias, they only expected those obligated to show up so people between the ages of 16 and 60. Instead, according to one French officer, such a competitive spirit prevailed among the people that you could see old men of 80 and children of 12 or 13 coming to the camp, refusing to take advantage to the exemption granted to people of their age. ["Why should I get an exemption? Our commander's nine!" ["Look here, sonny, I might be 80, but I can still fight!"

Well, hold that thought, because the same was also true of the native volunteers, of the people like, hunters. Dudes who had been hunting with like, ancient muskets, like the indigenous equivalent of like Afghan Gisels that had just been passed down. Dudes in their 80s who were like, the best snipers in the world at the time. Just deciding like, well yeah, they burned my town, so I guess I'm gonna shoot some British guys. ALICE I'm gonna ventilate Nigel's skull with this

antique. SEAN Yes. on critical support. Also the French did have more troops than the British, they had about 13,000 against 9,000, but Montcalm only had about 2,000 like professional troops from the army and marines, and these guys were kind of spread very thin, they had to defend the city, they had to defend Beaupol, they had to put some guys up like, they had to send people out to counter the raiding party, so they were spread pretty thin. Mm-hmm.

So after the failed British landing at Beaupol, both sides had set themselves up for long siege. The British shelled the city and raided the coastline, while the French fortified the city and repelled the raiders as best they could. For most of the troops and their commanders, though, it was static, tense, and boring. This was also true for Montcalm and Wolff, which we know because of their letters. Mon Calme wrote that his troops slept in their boots so they could always be ready for attack, and he himself always kept his saddle on his horse for the same reason. He also complained repeatedly that none of the local Canadian women wanted to sleep with him, and he wrote this in his letters and journals. Who is he writing a letter to complain that he can't get laid?

This is like yeah like middle of Stalingrad like no one has showered like they don't shower at the best of times in like 1760 all that often, but like this guy's been living in rubble for months. It's like why does no one want to fuck me? Like the high command back in France is like opening the letter like he's talking about no one will touch his dick We don't really know why this is important on his fucking situation report it's a pretty natural state for a French soldier to feel like that it's a pretty natural state for soldiers in general yeah you just get your ration of you know baguettes cheese and pussy and he wasn't getting any of it we have our fresh shipment of a military-grade pocket pussy being shipped

to the front line it's just a baguette that they've bought a whole in. A whole pocket pussy to share. How else do you keep it warm? It's just a baguette filled with camembert. Oh. Meanwhile, Wolf was not much better. When he wasn't vowing to turn Quebec to ash, he wrote home to his mom and complained that Mon Calme wasn't leaving his incredibly well defended city to fight wolf in the open like

a gentleman. Mom! Mom! Mon Calme is being a pussy! It's my turn at war! He's just shit talking me from the walls. It's not nice. He's doing the Monty Python Fritzchman bitch.

He's just like the dude, 130 pound skinny white guy who tries to square up a people outside every bar. He's like, come at me bro, come at me, why would you come out and fight me? He's like, dude shut the fuck up. It's honorable to fight on the sidewalk shirtless. Let me take off my ceremonial monster hat. Yeah, exactly that, except one of these guys is 9 and the other is 14. Watching this, all the soldiers watching the commanders slap fight, one of them falls over and just starts crying a little.

We gotta take a boo boo break, you know. Someone get the aid to camp, the general has shat his pantaloons. And the fight has to happen before 2 p.m Because 2 p.m. Is now 2 I see get in here. We need you get the doctor in here. We need this boo boo kissed immediately Surrendering by waving your blankie on a stick surgeon general I'm afraid to announce that none of the local women will kiss the generals boo boo They the general will not go near the women. He says they have cooties.

I'm just imagining, yeah, like this had to extend to like the medical supplies. Some guy gets hit with like 60 bits of grape shot and just has like a hundred SpongeBob band-aids on his- on the entry wounds and the exit wounds on his back. Give me the Hello Kitty band-aids, we're out of SpongeBob. We need the… Hold that wound! Oh. And since this was war with a lot of people crammed together in horrible conditions, disease

also spread through both camps like wildfire. Hell yes. By August 1759, British numbers were being bled away by these constant failed attacks on Beaupas. Also, the French launch another fire ship raid and it also doesn't work. Like both sides are just bleeding men at this point. The British are bleeding them faster, Wolf was also hospitalized with disease, and morale is at rock bottom. Everyone's got trench foot and mega gonorrhea. Cause they're all fucking the same cheese baguette.

The General's been hospitalized due to his bonitis acting up. God damn you would be so mad if you made a very tactical error at like, meal time and picked up the wrong cheese baguette. Yo, what the fuck dude, I was gonna use that. Spit it out. Why are you eating my fuck baguette? So basically, Wolf knows that his time is running out. Like if they don't attack Quebec soon, they are losing men, morale is horrible, they need

to do this soon or they are never going to be able to. And he has tried running Cannon Beach too many times, and he has always viewed, there's always been this idea of like, hey, what if we go up the cliff? And everyone has always considered this as like the last possible option, the worst idea, this is either going to get all of us killed or it's going to get most of us killed in kind of work. And he is desperate enough at this point to pick the climbing the sheer face of the promontory of Quebec.

I assume there's plenty of training going around to suddenly turn all these poor fuckers into Mountaineers, certainly. The French are just looking across at the British camp and they just see a load of rock climbing walls going up and they're like, what the fuck? JUSTIN They're installing the holes as they're going up. Just like a French guy, you're sitting there like, having your lunch, and all you hear

is just the Wilhelm scream over and over again. In all kinds of different accents, like an entire accent tour of every British colony is just flinging themselves off of this. I enjoy most sports, but I think we should establish anti-rock climbing action. Look if we were supposed to climb the rocks, nature would form stairs. Yes, exactly. No thank you. Now an attack on the plains of Abraham was not something that the French hadn't thought

of. Like everybody is looking at this and saying like, hey, this is a possibility. While most of the promontory was a cliff, there were small paths here and there, and a person could climb up if they wanted to. So because of this, the French had a small garrison between 40 and 100 men placed up there mostly to act as watches. They could watch the British camp, they could watch boats going back and forth, and also just as like a tripwire force, hey let us know if the British show up. And this was yeah, like a tiny little token force. When his subordinates asked him to send more men, Molkelem refused, saying, we don't have to believe that the enemy has wings that allow him to cross the river, disembark, ascend the pathway, and climb over the city walls.

So he just thought it was impossible. I could kind of see why. Yeah, especially because like you can climb up it, but the idea of getting an army up it quickly in time that the French can't respond was wild to him. Yeah, they're doing like ye olde pointe de hoc shit. Yeah. The British also knew about this token force on the ridge. So Wolf's plan was to sneak a tiny like commando group of elite soldiers just wearing the sweatiest great coats imaginable. And he was going to send them up the cliff. So there is a road, there's a kind of path. I've walked it, it is still hellish. It's like winding back and forth all over the place and it has guards on it. So the commando force, they're just

going to go up the cliff. Sure, why not? And then the idea is they're going to ambush, they're going to take out the trigger force, and then the British will be able to send their troops up in safety Silently shoot them with muskets exactly That's just a bayonet for these guys putting the baguette on the end Moscow now if you're wondering how the British plan to secretly redeploy Thousands of troops across the river on dozens of boats, don't worry, they couldn't. As soon as the elite troops of the British raiding party that had taken the garrison got near the shore, they were spotted and interrogated by French troops. Quote, Captain Simon Fraser of Fraser's Highlanders, who had learned to speak fluent French while serving in the Dutch army,

responded to challenges by declaring that the flat-bottom boats were in fact a French provision convoy There's like two of these boats. They look like landing ships. Everyone inside is wearing a British uniform. This is like no no We're here to wear your reinforcements, bro. Yeah, we're totally on your side. Don't worry about it Don't worry about it. Would I lie to you? Come on, and they didn't yeah, so they landed They killed those guys and climbed up the plateau. This French officer's like, "'Men, they seem trustworthy. Wait a minute." To be clear, this is not the main garrison. These are just guys who are like down on the beach, and they're just like, "'Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, come on, come on, land over here' like shakes hands,

instantly just pulls out a flintlock pistol and shoots him in the head. Those might be the enemy's uniforms. But I like the cut of this guy's jib. Yeah, he's got a friendly face. Yeah. I got lost in his eyes. He's speaking French with a Dutch accent. How could he possibly be English? Yeah, thank you, the baguette is very good.

What would I lie to you? I'm here bearing gifts. How they like test the allegiance. They just hold out a baguette. Like, what do you want to do to this? Fuck it. Let him in. Let him in. SEAN Let him in.

ALICE I come bearing gifts of gravy and cheese, and these potatoes that are cut into strings. SEAN It's just like a hundred meters off, like, eat the cheese, listen for the squeak. ALICE When you hear the squeak, you know that's the code word. SEAN Hearing the crinkle of the American plastic cheese being unwrapped, and just like, shoot them, kill them now. ALICE Infiltrators.

SEAN So these commandosos they start going up the cliff and they get ready to ambush the French garrison from behind and if this sounds Like the plan is going perfectly for the British it wasn't so the second wave the main army They start showing up way too early They start showing up before the garrison on the cliffs has actually been gotten rid of so these guys spot the main army Coming in and they they let Quebec City know. They start firing their guns, they start firing cannons into this full on D-Day invasion force. And it is as they start firing that the commandos just run up behind them and just start stabbing them to death.

And just going up with a blackjack and hitting them on the back of the head. I got this from a Boston cop. The guys on the walls are just pouring like giant parts of boiling gravy All the way down the cliff. I just like guys trying to climb the cliff face like I Can't believe they saw through our plan and deployed their cannons on us at cannon Beach Yeah, I stay I knew I was fucked because he asked me to name my top three favorite cannon Beach is coming back They asked me to name my three favorite tragically hip songs and I didn't know which ones to say.

They made me choose between a Rolling Stone album and an Avril Lavigne album and I picked the Rolling Stones and now all of my men are dead. Yeah I didn't have my copy of Alanis Morchett's Jagged Little Pill on me. Isn't that ironic? Yeah. Every soldier, every Quebecois soldier carries that over their heart and it will occasionally a copy of Alanis Morchette's jacket little pill on me. Isn't that ironic? Yep. Every soldier, every Quebecois soldier carries that over their heart and it will occasionally catch a bullet for them.

Yeah. Jacket little wound. So a few sources like to pretend that this was some kind of like Spec Ops perfect silent mission and it wasn't. Though outnumbered, the French garrison fought basically to the last man. They're led by a man named, uh, Verger. I'm not going to say his full name, though I think I can pull that up. I'm gonna pull it up.

Louis Dupont du Chambot de Verger. Nailed it. Perfect. I'll get Nate to check that. He can dub that in. And now he's dead. Heh. No. He was wounded twice. So his leg got blown off by a musket ball, and then his hand got blown off by a musket ball. Fucking Christ.

And he survived. Take a hint, die. He gets captured by the British. Like all of his men are just, yeah, basically fighting to the last. Most of them get captured, a few of them run away. Two of them make it all the way, like they, for some reason they run past Quebec City. They run to the opposite side of Quebec City, they reach Beauport, like they go to Cannon Beach and then they tell them that the British are here. They run to the opposite side of Quebec City. They reach Beauport like they go to Cannon Beach

And then they tell them that the British are here. Why are they running past the city like y'all are fucked Turn the cannons around So surprise is pretty much gone at this point and it is just a race to see who can get their army like set up In the plains of Abraham first because if the British can do it first then they are able to like defend if the French can Do it first they can like just shove the British back down the cliff. Fortunately, James Wolfe had planned for this. To keep the French off balance, he timed a diversionary attack on Bhopal. While artillery pounded the city in French defenses, any British troops lying sick or wounded in the field hospitals were dragged out of bed, crammed

onto boats, and told to row back and forth in front of the French guns to like give the impression that they were about to try a landing. And they get shot to shit. Imagine getting that, Judy, you get woken up and it's like, oh yeah, you just have to row in front of- Don't worry, you don't have to land. Oh, thank god, so what do we have to do? You're, I don't want to say human shield, but uh. You're more fodder than shield.

Don't worry about it. Also don't drop character, you have to pretend like you're going to land than shield. Don't worry about it. Also don't drop character. You have to pretend like you're going to land at all times or they'll know. So in the end the British were able to deploy on the plateau first, getting more than 3,000 men up there and even dragging two cannons up this cliff face. What? That f- how? I think they used the road, but again even that like I have walked to this road, it would

not be easy. Like it's not easy to walk at the best of times, and I wasn't hauling a fucking field piece. Yeah, through the effort of a questionable amount of enlisted men tied to something by rope, you can move it. Yeah, and while people often credit the diversion with letting a bunch of sick guys get turned to Swiss cheese, the reason the British were able to deploy first mostly comes down to the disorganized French response. First off, General Monchelm was not in command of his army when the landing started. He had delegated command to his subordinates, and by the time he even knew what was happening, about 2,000 French troops were marching or skirmishing with the British,

and it's worth mentioning that they were marching in like different directions because no one knew what the fuck was going on. When Mon Calme did take charge, he didn't send messengers to other commanders, so he assumed that they would just hear the gunfire and bring their troops to him. And this is very important because the guy we talked about, future explorer Bougainville, he is actually stationed with a couple thousand troops behind the British. So if they can coordinate Montcalm in this dude, they can like, pincer the British and just force them back into the sea. He doesn't do that.

He just kind of assumes everyone would do like, just march towards the noise. Yeah. I strongly agree with the concept of forcing the British back to the sea. That's the only good things can come from forcing the British back into the embrace of Poseidon. STORMTROOPER So this did not work, and this is proven by a letter written by Félixien Bernatze, a garrison commander in the Quebec fort. Context here, the beach that they land on is called Foulon, so a messenger from the

Foulon just warned me that the enemy has landed at the Foulon. It is essential to send troops there immediately. Vergeon's messenger told me that there had been a great deal of firing. I think that the enemy has nonetheless departed, since the sound of muskets has stopped." No need for intelligence, no need for messengers, just kind of earfuck it. This is why despite commanding more than 13,000 troops and having a numerical advantage over the British while defending, Molkheim fought the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with fewer total troops than Wolff and less than half as many professional soldiers. So back on the British side, General Wolff was picking his ground.

His plan was to line his troops up in a favourable position and basically dare the French to attack him. Because he had a beachhead and a way to get his troops basically right up to Quebec's walls, Molcaum thought that the best option was to defeat the British as soon as possible and just throw them back into the river. Both generals, as veterans of decades of war in Europe, wanted to fight a proper European battle, with both sides lined up in ranks firing volleys of musket shot. But critically, those battles need wide open spaces where troops can maneuver, because it's actually very difficult to do that stuff. And that's not

the Plains of Abraham. It's hilly, it's rocky, it's like, nowadays it's like, mowed, but back then it's like chest high grass and brush all over the place. ALICE Take your ass back to field battles and you're a bitch. This is hilly warfare, we clowning here. ZAC Everyone just waiting on either side of the field for the gardener to get it go through and it has to be like perfect golf grass anyone is going to die on it this is perfect you know going back to the French having dinosaurs if you've seen the documentary dress and

parked this tall grass it's perfect for velociraptors because they are in fact clever girls Mm-hmm. I also know from video games that if you just kind of like crouch down a little bit you're invisible Yeah, the the big X red exclamation point over the enemy's head will disappear exactly Everyone in the well. I mean that is exactly what that guy in the Quebec garrison thought is just like must have been the wind Yeah, he's just a character in a Ubisoft game fucking NPC with 1995 era first-person shooter AI

fucking commander you get more from fucking Ubisoft is like it They are not in the grass. I cannot see them Did the British have gone back to the sea you bring up a good point there because the French do the exact same thing As like if you aggro the NPCs in an early the British have gone back to the sea. You bring up a good point there, because the French do the exact same thing as, like, if you aggro the NPCs in an early FPS game, they will all just run at you one by one, and they will just kinda like, bit by bit feed themselves to your guns. Yeah. When we spot the enemy we must release our most secret and destructive weapon, we must

release Rayman. There's just two fucking gloves gliding across the field. See I thought you were going to say the Pomeranians from the Pomeranian War, because they could be perfectly camouflaged within the grass. You wouldn't even see it rustling. People would just get dragged under all of a sudden. The barking gets just closer and closer. Instead they've deployed Rayman.

And while the French army was slow to respond, the First Nations and Canadian skirmishers were not. So the British get set up at 6am on the 13th of September, until 10am, so four full hours, they are just standing in neat ranks waiting for the French to show up. And meanwhile, they're in this field kind of in the middle, all this chest high grass, on either side is forests, like long long horizontal forests and those are just full of Native snipers who are just shooting the shit out of them for four hours Those guys are just standing there taking it

Yeah, like they're like the guys on the edge are occasionally going in they're having like skirmish battles and whatnot But like the trees are speaking fucking Mic Mac right now Don't worry boys we got them exactly where we want him as another guy who just gets domed next to you. You can just see the fucking Lorax loading up a fucking ball skin. So another interesting point that I found was that native troops were often used as skirmishers and this was not just like the best use of their talents, it was, at least in the case of Montcalm, a condition to like, if you are gonna command my troops, you need

to let them fight the way they fight best. You need to let them be skirmishers. If you attempt to put them out in the field, I am giving them orders to just leave you. Yeah, makes sense. It's a good call. This is how they fight, they fight best, and the Brits don't know how to fight back. It's called playing to your strengths. They're AI and pathfinding breaks.

They stand in place, they T-pose and you shoot them. It's easy. ALICE The British soldiers just T-posing. ALICE Now, the battle did eventually happen. While the British set themselves in ranks and ran skirmishing battles with the Canadians and First Nations troops, Montcalme spent four hours trying to weld a counterattack together as fast as possible. This is despite his boss, Inbopart, the governor of New France, Vaudreuil, explicitly

ordering him to wait and trap the British once Bougainville arrived. Montcalm did not listen, and he did not consult with any of his commanders before deciding to attack. Failing that, doing nothing is a better option. Just stay in the city. Cause the British are like, they have a better advantage now, but they're not dug in. Like, they cannot do anything to take the city you still outnumber them And they're effectively surrounded by skirmishers

And now they have to launch an attack against a fortified position like doing nothing is a better choice Than doing anything at this point and among other things the plains of Abraham is very high up It's on this huge plateau the fort of Quebec is higher So the French still have a height advantage Mulcaum is going to charge downhill at the British also all the cannons No, let's eliminate all of our strengths. They won't see it like they won't Possibly imagine we'll do everything they hope that we do fuck's sake So he only waited long enough for all of his professional soldiers So less than two thousand men arrive, and then he just

brought along whatever militia troops happened to be around, which is another 1,500 guys. Meanwhile, the British force lined up has 4,400 troops, almost all of them professionals, so he has less troops, he has far less professionals, and he's just gonna try to, like, his commander-in-chief has ordered him, given him a legal order, don't do this. All of his subcommanders are like, yo, if you just wait 15 minutes, we can literally crush them with like four to one numbers. And he's, no, I'm going to do this. Mm. He has decided to fight the skinny white guy in the monster energy hat outside the bar. Honorably. Yeah. James Wolf's mom has finally gotten her wish because Mon Calum is going to, despite having every tool possible to make this a victory, he is going to come out and slap fight his son, her son, just in the middle of a field because honor.

Mhmm. Come at me, bro. At ten in the morning, Mon Calme ordered his smaller force to advance on the British. And like I said, they advanced downhill, giving up the height advantage for this. The British held their fire, and then as they they advanced the French army sort of disintegrated For how dumb it seems a way to fight now soldiers fighting and moving in ranks is incredibly difficult It took a huge amount of training to like get ranks of dudes to move together shoot together fight together The NCOs and the officers in place to make them move keep them in line

Yeah them in step So while Mon Calms professional troops did their jobs and they marched forward as ordered, the militia troops, like, they sometimes just start charging at the British out of nowhere. They occasionally will just stop like a kilometer away and start shooting, and whenever they reload, they immediately stop, they lie down, they kind of like take cover, and that means that the professional troops are just kind of like stomping over them. Yo, what the fuck are you doing? Get up!

Fucking incredible. Just getting waffle stomped by the soldiers behind you. Why are they all stepping on me? I feel like we're doing something incorrect. And all of that meant that by the time the French army reached the British lines, it was in uneven shambles. Firing sporadically as they went, the French Army stopped about 120 meters from the British, and then quote,

"...in the Bayeune regiment, according to Melartique, who was an officer there, the Canadians of the second rank and the soldiers of the third fired without any orders. Propelled by rapidly expanding gasses, thousands of.69 caliber musket balls blasted out of the muzzles, flew across the plains of Abraham, and fell harmlessly to the ground. Because a musket, if you don't know, has an effective range of about 40 meters. British soldiers describe at the time, like, these musket balls just kind of like hitting them and just kind of like bouncing off. There's guys who describe, like, there are guys who are listed wounded in this battle

who have like paintball tier bruises from just getting hit in a musket ball. It's like, ow! Imagine how lucky that guy must feel. He just like feels something. He's like, oh, this is when I look down and see that my arm is missing. It's like, oh, they tore my jacket. Just imagining having like a little inch across bruise like right over your heart and just like, oh, God.

Thank God. Thank God these guys are dumb as hell. I got to get a new job. I can't be this lucky twice. So the French then advanced again, so they came to about 25 meters from the British and they stopped. And then both sides waited for three minutes. And this was kind of a strategy back then because reloading a musket takes so long, when enemies are close together like that, whoever shoots first is basically opening

themselves up for the enemy to march closer and either like blast them at point-blank range or just Charge them with bayonets like if you fire your gun You've got nothing make a trained soldier back then is be it was supposed to be able to fire three shots in a minute Yeah, and like at 25 meters you can just run up and stab a guy Yeah time so the way to beat the motherfucker a whole bunch of hammers is what I do So they wait for three minutes then again someone on the French side just starts shooting without orders, and it spreads all the way down the lines and they do like two really disorganized volleys, they kill some British troops, but it's like, it's not unified,

it's just kind of like firing all over the place. Traditional contagious shooting as we call it. Then as the French were reloading, the British marched a few steps forward and fired two perfectly organized volleys back into them. And this is also described as like Wolf orders his troops to load two musket balls in. So kind of like an early shotgun kind of deal. Yeah, they're so close. It'll work.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Like it limits the short range of a musket, but like you're basically just planting it a guy against a guy's chest and pulling the trigger at this point. Making unblinking eye contact as you bring your weapon to present arms is like, aw fuck, he's not gonna miss, it's touching me! Just halfway through reloading he's just like, yeah, fuck. Honor demands that I stand here and take it like a man.

Now, while the regular French troops stood their ground and started a vicious back and forth firefight with the British that went on for a few more minutes. The Canadian militia was shot to pieces and immediately started retreating. Yeah, they're just normal dudes. Yes, and they don't have a uniform or anything. They're just showing up in whatever. Yeah, like some of these guys- In their maple leafs, jerseys, and cargo shorts. Some of these guys are 12, some of them are 80.

Yeah, 13 year olds and 80 year olds decked out in their finest Canadian wear. Yeah, and again, like, the British are good at shooting these guys to pieces. This is described, like, French officers describe that the first ranks of people hit are almost all hit with like three or four musket balls apiece. No one gets hit once and dies. Everyone is getting like shattered. I mean, at least you don't have to worry about being wounded. Yeah.

You're just dead. Well, actually. Oh, really? So, there was one French soldier who somehow got wrapped up in this whole, like, I'm marching with a musket now. He survives the battle and he described his wounds like this. He wrote a kind of humorous epitaph. He doesn't die, but still, like, lying in bed.

My epitaph, if I die from my wounds, here lies La Chevre-Tiere, who, for a hundred crowns a year Received one shot in the teeth and another in the rear Spitting bars on his deathbed. I'm also like, how do you survive getting shot in the teeth with a fucking musket? Take his jaw off like maybe if it went sideways, but like he had veneers just ping The fucking like Tony Robbins ass looking smile as militia units broken ran professional troops had to scramble to fill the gaps so they they're filling all these spaces but that's time that they are not reloading and shooting and just by nature of like this turns into a

numbers game a lot of sources will describe this as like no all of the French just broken ran at the same time but as soon as the militia runs suddenly the French forces are outnumbered, like more than two to one. Yeah, they're absolutely fucked at that moment. Oh yeah. Yeah, so they trade fire for a few more minutes, and then they also, they are ordered to retreat by Montcalm, they start running back towards Quebec City. And this is where the British army also disintegrates, because some of the units stayed in line,

and like the cannons keep shooting, and some of them just like start sprinting after the French trying to get to Quebec first. Right into their own cannon fire? Yeah. Hell yes. We have to make this fair boys let's march out there and get obliterated by our own cannons. So the reason they didn't have orders to either attack or stay was because General Wolfe had been killed in the first French volley and his army for the next 20 minutes was pretty much just acting on autopilot. According to the legends, Wolf took two musket rounds in the chest and lived just long enough to hear his soldiers cheering the French retreat, and then he died.

Montcalme meanwhile, as he was retreating with his soldiers, it's likely he took a good dose of grapeshot to the back, and it pretty much just shredded his guts. Also he is the only guy on the battlefield with a horse, so he is like standing above everybody. Don't worry men, if you're worried about being shot, I will make myself the biggest, most obvious target for all of the fire. When his troops guided him back to the city, he asks the surgeon, like, how much time do I have? And the guy's like, yeah, you know, you've got a few hours. Well, we found your liver and kidneys on a tree, so probably not that fun. Probably not that long, homie. For what it's worth, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham lasted about 20 minutes,

and it involved less than 200 dead total on both sides. The vast majority of Monkhelm's- The both generals? Hehehehehehe Both generals were 1% of the deaths in this battle. As an enlisted man, we call that a good start. Yes. The vast majority of Monkhelm's army escaped the field and made it back to Quebec in Bopal. Molkelem's reinforcements under Bougainville, they did show up. They were on

the march. They were on the way. If he had waited like 15 minutes, they would have just been able to crush the British army from two sides. And he probably wouldn't have been eviscerated by a handful of grapeshot. Yeah. And then Bopal is arriving, finding only the Brits on the plains of Abraham. They outnumber him. He has like a small reinforcement force. It would have made a difference in the battle, but doesn't right now. So he just decides to leave. He is not doing this. Yeah, what's the point?

Now as for Montcalm, I'm going to quote from Northern Armageddon. Drawing on his last reserves of strength, he dictated and signed a letter to James Wolfe. Disregarding Vaudreuil's authority as governor general, the escape of most of his army in the absence of anything resembling an immediate threat to Quebec City, Montcalm attempted to hand over the city. On his deathbed, he wrote a letter of surrender to a dead man. To another dead man. And again, like, the British, they don't have a leader at this point.

Like, they are also confused and disorganized. They are not in a position. They have two cannons at best. They are not taking and disorganized. They are not in a position. They have two cannons at best. They are not taking Quebec anytime soon. So if anything this is a feric victory at best. This is like it is Monkhelm's defeat in like every possible way. He had every tool possible to make this a victory and he just refused to use them. It takes a different level of skill to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Especially whenever you are not the total leader like the governor general is actually is also a military commander and he is giving him orders like I am giving you a legal command and it would have won them the battle and Monk Hound's like no I need to do this. I have to die. Did you see what James Wolfe sent his mom and said about me? The dude's talking mad shit. So yeah obviously this ploy didn't work because James Wolfe was also dead and Wolf sent his mom and said about me. My honour. The dude's talking mad shit. So yeah, obviously this ploy didn't work because James Wolf was also dead, and the British forces, like they're confused and shattered, no one is in any position to do

anything. Mon Calme spent his last night chatting with his officers, and he died on the morning after the battle. Now, in the days after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, there was no glorious follow up battle or huge siege. Governor General Vaudreuil decided to take Mon Calme's surviving force and abandon Quebec to set up defense lines elsewhere, leaving a small garrison in the city that surrendered to the British a few days later. With that, the British took the capital of New France. Though the fighting in North America would

go on for another year or so, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was the decisive battle of the Seven Years' War in Canada. In April 1760, the French would try to recapture Quebec and like they do this huge siege and it fails. And then in September, the British take Montreal and that's the end of fighting in North America. What the fuck is up with these French commanders so dead set on not using their giant fortified city as a defense? Like, no, we have to go stand out in a field. Yeah, we just lost that.

But like, let's abandon the fortress again and stand out in a different field And then coming back a couple of months later and just like yo this sucks Why are they like come outside we did it for you? Yeah You owe us one, bro So when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763 France was forced to give up most of its North American territory 1763, France was forced to give up most of its North American territory, including all of Canada, marking the point from which Canada was only a British colony. And that, guys, is the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the 20 minute battle with less than 200 people dead that decided the fate of a country forever.

Man. The French really didn't want it, did they? No, they ain't got that dog in them. Yeah, they don't have, you know, is it they don't they don't have the fundamentals. No The worst part is that drive I feel most bad for the guys in the treeline who had been fighting like four hours before the Battle starts and I've just been all through this battle even while the British are like sitting there after victorious like you know Hey, we won with James wolf is dead these snipers are just continuing to pick guys off They had been so confused out there watching the French come out of the city like what are they doing?

Fuck shit. Oh god the general just got hit by a whole bunch of cannons The the general like watching him waving his sword trying to rally his troops and just like disappearing from the waist up all of a sudden sword trying to rally his troops and just like disappearing from the waist up all of a sudden. That scene from was it not another teen movie where the guy gets tackled in half? Yeah. Do it for the general's upper half! Fucking Christ. Fun times. Yep. I had heard of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham but only in the context of when the United States would eventually invade Canada during the War of 1812 and of course during the Revolution. I always assumed there was a lot more to it other than the French effectively

gifting a victory to the British. It's yeah and that's another thing like whenever this comes back to like in a lot of French education in Canada, Mon Calme is also like everyone gets it wrong for like kind of propaganda reasons. Mon Calme is depicted, like everyone gets it wrong for like kind of propaganda reasons. Mon Calme is depicted as like he had to go out there and fight. He had to. The British would have dug in and then they would have surrounded, like no, they had no capacity to do that. But at the same time English education is like, Wolf was this noble hero. He absolutely did not say I'm going to shell Quebec into ashes. And he died in the first five minutes of the fucking battle.

Yes. Quebec into ashes. And he died in the first five minutes of the fucking battle. Yes! Like, I'm trying to understand, I'm sure this, the French had a story that was very very big in like the Québécois nationalists milieu, and I'm trying to imagine how they gloss over the fact that they effectively just gave it to them. Yeah. It was like, no, that didn't happen. The Québécois, like the militia, they don't perform that well, but they don't, they're not expected to. No, they do what militia, they don't perform that well, but they're not expected to. They're just a bunch of dudes. No, they do what militia are supposed to do.

You can still take pride in the fact that like 80 year olds signed up because they wanted to fight, and it's like the French, like Mon Calme's not Quebecois in any way, like the French gave this up. They gave up Quebec to the British. It's the Quebecois version of Lines Led by Donkeys. You had like literal children and old men like, no, fuck this, we ball. And the general's like, let's wrap this up. In the worst way possible. And well, that's a Quinn podcast.

That is a podcast. That is a me podcast. Quinn, how are you feeling after your first ever hosting, Judy? I'm feeling nervous. I'm feeling excited, like you I am also sweating for non-heat related reasons. We have a thermometer that is not only checking the external temperature of this building, the internal temperature, but also the internal temperature of our bodies and it is through

the roof. I feel like a kebab on a slowly rotating at like 1am. I've been slowly shaved off over the course. I've lost pounds. So fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can donate to the show. You can ask us on Patreon, you can ask us in our Discord, which you'll also have access to. You can attach it to a cannonball and fire it directly into the back of a general and we will read it on air. And someone's question today is, what's your biggest mistake at work and how does it compare

to the recent CrowdStrike shit show? I mean, I have nothing that compares to that. I have not, no, nothing. I've never been in a position where anything that I fucked up would be felt at a global capacity. Yeah. God. I mean, I have fucked up at work. Of course. Oh yeah.

Um, oh, the one that like the one that just comes to mind is like, I sliced open my hand in when I was working in a bar just by accident. Just, and it wasn't because I was like, I fuck something up. It was literally someone knocked the glass off the counter and it like hit the counter shattered and then I went to catch it and just like caught shards of glass in my hands. But you did catch it. Yeah. It made it super awkward to try and wipe my ass for like two weeks. Don't eat it.

Crusts. Exactly. Forming the ass carapace. Yeah. I don't think I've had like a go fuck up for the whole work or company or thing that's gotten me in really big trouble, but I have fucked up. I worked at a place, this Canadian brand called Princess Auto. I worked hydraulics there.

Thankfully I never crushed my fingers or anything. But they did wind up calling them coincident reports whenever I was inevitably like- That's good. And I was a first aid instructor, I should have known better. I knew how to like, patch myself up after, but I was just like, constantly getting various like nicks and gashes and like bumps and whatnot. I'm trying to think of what I've done, because obviously being in the army I fucked up all the time.

I'm trying to think of what the most- okay I can think of one one. I almost killed a guy once on accident and he was my boss. I originally enlisted as a tank crewman, right? Even though I very rarely use the tank. And when you're parking a tank in the driver's position, you can't see fucking anything. So you have to be ground guided, like with hand and arm signals into the parking space. And this is my fuck up, because I was driving, but it's also his fuck up for ground guiding me. So to transport tanks over long distances, you have to load them onto a truck. And you have to be very, very, very carefully ground guided onto said truck. Oh, is this a fucking rollover?

Almost. Oh God. He was a ground guy. And again, like I'm driving a tank very slowly. I'm crawling up this thing because a Loading tanks under the trucks fucking terrify me and they always did from the first time I did it to the last time I did it it never got normal for me And he was a sergeant at the times and he'd done this a million times but that sergeant knows what he's doing and I'm driving him driving him driving and then

the right side of the tank just shoots to the earth. And cause one track went over the side of the truck, the truck bed, and the whole tank almost flipped. Like somehow we managed to stop before I possibly died. Yeah, see now we know why they didn't let you in a tank. Well it wasn't, it was my fault, but it was also his fault. But I was driving so I consider it my fuck up. And of course he starts yelling at me. Like bro you act like I can see anything right now.

I'm literally just using the accelerator and making unbroken eye contact with your hands. So of course it ends up being my fault because I was like a private one or two and he was an e5 sergeant so I get yelled at it's all my fault And then this tank is stuck in place For hours because you have to get it off you have to bring in like a wrecker like a big tow truck Effectively for tanks to lift it up and while they're doing that the wrecker crew almost crushes a guy So like my fuck up almost inadvertently murdered a mechanic. Yeah, it was great. I was 18. Maybe don't let 18 year olds do that.

That's a podcast. Fellas, thank you so much for joining me here. Quinn, thanks a lot for hosting. You guys both have other podcasts, so plug your other podcasts. Yeah, thank you for having me on, letting me host. I am one of the hosts of the Failure Launch Podcast, where we talk about dumb space history, rockets exploding, missions going wrong, all kinds of fun stuff like that.

Beneath Skin, Glue Factory, two podcasts, all I do, one's about tattoos and one's about absolutely nothing at all, it's what if Seinfeld was a podcast? This is the only podcast that I do, so thank you for listening. If you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon, you get years of bonus content, every episode early, discord access, first dibs, on merch, and live show tickets. And speaking of live show tickets, you can still get tickets to our biggest show ever so far in Belfast. You can find the link for the tickets in the show notes. Please grab them so we don't feel embarrassed for booking such a large venue and not selling it out. Is that a deep-seated fear of mine or anything?

It'll be fine. Yeah, it'll be fun. Come join us. And until next time, hide behind sailors. Storm the beaches.