CHAPTER V

BELEAGUERMENT
1775-1776

When Carleton finally turned at bay within the walls of
Quebec the British flag waved over less than a single
one out of the more than a million square miles that had
so recently been included within the boundaries of Canada.
The landward walls cut off the last half-mile of the
tilted promontory which rises three hundred feet above
the St Lawrence but only one hundred above the valley of
the St Charles. This promontory is just a thousand yards
wide where the landward walls run across it, and not much
wider across the world-famous Heights and Plains of
Abraham, which then covered the first two miles beyond.
The whole position makes one of Nature's strongholds when
the enemy can be kept at arm's length. But Carleton had
no men to spare for more than the actual walls and the
narrow little strip of the Lower Town between the base
of the cliff and the St Lawrence. So the enemy closed in
along the Heights' and among the suburbs, besides occupying
any point of vantage they chose across the St Lawrence
or St Charles.

The walls were by no means fit to stand a siege, a fact