Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec+250 #69

Sunday, September 9, 1759. Weather stops the course of history for another day. Captain Knox quotes the British order of the day:
As the weather is so bad that no military operations can take place, and as the men are so excessively crowded in the transports and in the men of war, so as to endanger their health, it is ordered that the under-mentioned troops be landed at the mill upon the south shore, and that they may be cantoned in the village and church of St. Nicholas, in readiness to embark at the first slgnal.

The signal to march and embark by day will be two guns fired fast and two slow from the Sutherland. The signal by night will be three lights at the main-top-gallant masthead of the same ship, and two guns.
On the other side of the barricades, the supply clerk has been putting little more than the ‘headlines” into his journal in the last several days. But an aside today describes in one sentence what the town and its people continue to experience every day, whatever the weather, whatever the grand strategy. “The enemy always maintains a heavy fire from Point LĂ©vis.”
 
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