my, as
it attacked Montcalm, with more than twenty-three hundred tolerable
troops.

He was but six miles off, and it was now almost as many hours since the
British scaled the cliff. Pickets and a small battery or two between
himself and Wolfe had been early in the morning actually engaged. The
simple answer is that Bougainville remained ignorant of what was
happening. Nothing but an actual messenger coming through with the news
would have enlightened him, and in the confusion none came till eight
o'clock. The sound of desultory firing borne faintly against the wind
from the neighborhood of the city had little significance for him. It
was a chronic condition of affairs, and Bougainville's business was to
watch the upper river, where an attack was really expected. It was a
rare piece of good-fortune for Wolfe that the confusion among the French
was so great as to cause this strange omission. But then it was Wolfe's
daring that had thus robbed a brave enemy of their presence of mind and
created so pardonable a confusion.

The constituents of that ever-memorable line of battle which Wolfe drew
up on the Plains of Abraham must of a surety not be grudged space in
this account. On the right toward the cliffs of the St. Lawrence were
the Twenty-eighth, the Thirty-fifth, the Forty-third, and the Louisburg
Grenadiers under Monckton; in the centre, under Murray, were the
Forty-seventh, Fifty-eighth, and the Seventy-eighth Highlanders; with
Townshend on the left were the Fifteenth (_en potence_) and the Second
battalion of the Sixtieth or Royal Americans--in all somewhat over three
thousand men. In reserve, as already stated, was Burton with the
Forty-eighth, while Howe with some light infantry occupied the woods
still farther back, and the Third battalion of the Sixtieth guarded the
landing-place. None of these last corps joined in the actual attack.

When Montcalm, toward ten o'clock, under a cloudy but fast-clearing sky,
gave the order to advance, he had, at the lowest estimate from French
sources, about thirty-five hundred men, exclusive of Indians and
flanking skirmishers, who may be rated at a further fifteen hundred. The
armies were but half a mile apart, and the French regulars and militia,
being carefully but perhaps injudiciously blended along their whole
line, went forward with loud shouts to the attack.

The British, formed in a triple line, now sprang to their feet and moved
steadily forward to receive the onset of