{259} Moreover, the achievement differed in kind from the ordinary Canadian raid. Troops had been moved, artillery brought up, transport organized in rapid, skilful fashion, which betokened leadership of no ordinary kind; the new General from France had at once made himself felt, and friend and foe alike recognized that Canada was being defended and the English colonies attacked by a soldier of high order in the Marquis de Montcalm. [Sidenote: _Montcalm._] Few characters in colonial history are so interesting and attractive as that of Montcalm. Interest attaches to him not only on account of his own personality, but also because he illustrates the better side of the soldier-aristocrats of France. Born in 1712, near Nîmes in the south of France, he came out in middle life to North America, having seen hard fighting in various parts of the continent, and owing the Canadian command to his own merits, not to Court influence. He was the head of his family, owner of the ancestral estate, straitened in means, and with ten children to provide for; loving his home, loving his mother, his wife and children, following arms as his profession for honour and for a livelihood. He was well educated, and in every sense a gentleman of France, with a quick, impetuous Southern spirit, but the heart of an affectionate and chivalrous man. His coming lifted the war on the Canadian side to a higher plane; he used the savage tools which he found to hand, but he did not love them,[10] nor did he love the corruption and chicanery which made the Government of New France a squalid {260} reproduction of the Government at home. A great man--Champlain--brought New France to birth; her end was ennobled by the death of Montcalm. Of his military talent it would be difficult even for an expert to judge, for it must always be a matter of doubt how far Montcalm, like Wolfe, may have been 'felix opportunitate mortis.' Neither the one nor the other was tried in the command of big battalions on European battlefields; but in quick aggressive movement, such as resulted in the capture of Oswego, as well as in the patient defensive tactics which he displayed at Quebec, Montcalm proved himself to be a skilful commander. [Footnote 10: This is contrary to what Wolfe wrote, when before Louisbourg, to Amherst. 'Montcalm has changed the very nature of war, and has forced us, in some measure, to a deterring and dreadful vengeance' (Wright's _Life of Wolfe_, pp. 440, 441). But none the less it was the case that, with Montcalm's arrival, war on the French side became what it never had been before, something more than a series of semi-savage raids.] [Sidenote: _Levis, Bourlamaque, and Bougainville._]