Bougainville’s apologists stress that it was Vaudreuil who was liaising with Bougainville and that he did not send a clear order to march towards Quebec when he wrote to Bougainville at 6.45 a.m that morning, nearly three hours after the British landing. While not necessarily as fresh as paint, his men should have been ready for a forced march on the morning of the 13th. But the last movement of the British fleet in Bougainville’s sector had been the abandoned upriver landings on 9 September. The traditional explanation is that he could not reinforce Montcalm as soon as news of the landing at l’Anse au Foulon came in, because his men were worn out by the constant marching and counter-marching involved in the surveillance of the British fleet. Yet since it is inconceivable that he did not know the sailing of this convoy had been cancelled, his failure to act seems incredible. He must have seen the British flotilla going downriver but too glibly assumed that it was the French supply convoy. Bougainville was a great man, as his later career would prove, but the night of the 12th–13th was not his finest hour. Most likely he simply remained inactive and supine at Cap Rouge. According to one version, Bougainville went upriver from Cap Rouge to Pointe-aux-Trembles.
The sober answer is that Bougainville’s movements on the night of 12–13 September are hidden from documented history the scope for the historical novelist and the conspiracy theorist is clear, especially as educated speculation can really shed no light on the matter. What was he doing while all these dramatic developments were unfolding? So it is a fair judgement to say that the outcome of the battle hinged on Bougainville. Montcalm should have corralled his impatience and waited for Bougainville to arrive, however agonising the wait. It would be a desperate, bloody affair of musketry and bayonets, where Wolfe’s redcoats were bound to win. Since the British line extended virtually from the St Charles’s escarpment on Montcalm’s right to the St Lawrence cliffs on his left, there was no room to maneouvre and no prospect of encircling or outflanking the enemy. Nothing better exposes Montcalm’s limitations as a commander, for the order to an army largely composed of irregulars to charge a disciplined red line could have only one outcome. But fatalistically he gave the order to his men to advance. If we give him time to establish himself, we shall never be able to attack him with the sort of troops we have.’ He then added with a grimace: ‘Is it possible that Bougainville doesn’t hear all that noise?’ Had Montcalm known that Wolfe was not entrenching, he would have taken heart. Montcalm gloomily told his chief of artillery: ‘We cannot avoid action the enemy is entrenching, he already has two pieces of cannon. After asking exas-peratedly where Bougainville was, at 9.30 a.m. But his impatience with that officer was like that of Napoleon with Marshal Grouchy at Waterloo fifty-six years later. Since time was on his side, Montcalm should at all cost have waited for Bougainville. Time was against him, for if Bougainville arrived soon, Wolfe might be caught in an almost perfect three-way trap, between snipers, Montcalm and Bougainville, with no escape route except the perilous descent to l’Anse au Foulon.
But he would remain a worried man until Montcalm ordered a charge. Wolfe ostentatiously walked up and down the lines, as if tempting the snipers and artillerymen to take him out. When Montcalm’s five fieldpieces began lobbing cannonballs towards the British lines and the redcoats could see the lethal projectiles often skipping over the grass towards them like bouncing bombs, it was the merest common sense to fall prone and present the smallest possible target. Howe’s Light Infantry made some early sorties to try to drive the snipers from their positions, but they in turn were driven back at around eight o’clock when the French artillery opened up. Wolfe feared the winnowing effect on his men if they remained upright, for in his mind he had to wait for Montcalm to make the first move so that he could deliver a close-quarter musketry broadside and end the battle within minutes. On both sides – in the woods to the British left and in the cornfields between the British right and the cliff edge – the Canadian and Indian sharpshooters had been eerily accurate and effective since first light. Once the last units had joined his line at about 8 a.m., Wolfe ordered his men to lie down so that they would not present easy targets for the snipers.