he aimed a death-blow at her very heart by sending
Saunders, with a quarter of the whole British Navy,
against Quebec, the stronghold of New France, where the
land attack was to be made by a little army of 9,000 men
under Wolfe. Even this was not the whole of Pitt's plan
for the conquest of Canada. A smaller army was to be sent
against the French on the Great Lakes, and a larger one,
under Amherst, along the line of Lake Champlain, towards
Montreal.

Pitt did a very bold thing when he took a young colonel
and asked the king to make him a general and allow him
to choose his own brigadiers and staff officers. It was
a bold thing, because, whenever there is a position of
honour to be given, the older men do not like being passed
over and all the politicians who think of themselves
first and their country afterwards wish to put in their
own favourites. Wolfe, of course, had enemies. Dullards
often think that men of genius are crazy, and some one
had told the king that Wolfe was mad. 'Mad, is he?' said
the king, remembering all the recent British defeats on
land 'then I hope he'll bite some of my other generals!'
Wolfe was not able to give any of his seniors his own
and Lord Howe's kind of divine 'madness' during that war.
But he did give a touch of it to many of his juniors;
with the result that his Quebec army was better officered
than any other British land force of the time.

The three brigadiers next in command to Wolfe--Monckton,
Townshend, and Murray--were not chosen simply because