Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #15

Tuesday, July 17, 1759: Hopes and dreams of the besieged. The diarist Foligné reports what he’s heard of news brought in by three English prisoners captured during skirmishing around the Montmorency River lines.

They report that General Wolfe and nine or ten thousand men will soon try to seize the quays where the artillery is currently being mounted, that they have withdraw all their regular troops from Pointe Levy except four or five hundred to cover the gun battery there, that they have cut back the rations and sent three ships to Louisbourg for resupply, and that they are waiting day by day for General Amherst to join them.

Pretty much none of this is true, though any common soldier in the British forces might have believed most of it, except about the rations, which seems to be pure wish-fulfillment on the French side.