The Winning of Canada: a Chronicle of WolfeWood, William
History
The Winning of Canada: a Chronicle of Wolfe
Wood, William
United States -- History -- French and Indian War, 1754-1763; Wolfe, James, 1727-1759
On the 13th Saunders sailed for Louisbourg, where the whole expedition
was to meet and get ready. Here Wolfe spent the rest of Map, working
every day and all day. His army, with the exception of nine hundred
American rangers, consisted of seasoned British regulars, with all the
weaklings left behind; and it did his heart good to see them on parade.
There was the 15th, whose officers still wear a line of black braid
on their uniforms in mourning for his death. The 15th and five other
regiments--the 28th, 43rd, 47th, 48th, and 58th--were English. But the
35th had been forty years in Ireland, and was Irish to a man. The whole
seven regiments were dressed very much alike: three-cornered, stiff
black hats with black cockades, white wigs, long-tailed red coats turned
back with blue or white in front, where they were fastened only at the
neck, white breeches, and long white gaiters coming over the knee. A
very different corps was the 78th, or 'Fraser's,' Highlanders, one
of the regiments Wolfe first recommended and Pitt first raised. Only
fourteen years before the Quebec campaign these same Highlanders had
joined Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, in the famous ''45.'
They were mostly Roman Catholics, which accounts for the way they
intermarried with the French Canadians after the conquest. They had
been fighting for the Stuarts against King George, and Wolfe, as we have
seen, had himself fought against them at Culloden. Yet here they were
now, under Wolfe, serving King George. They knew that the Stuart cause
was lost for ever; and all of them, chiefs and followers alike, loved
the noble profession of arms. The Highlanders then wore 'bonnets' like
a high tam-o'-shanter, with one white curly feather on the left side.
Their red coats were faced with yellow, and they wore the Fraser plaid
hung from the shoulders and caught up, loopwise, on both hips. Their
kilts were very short and not pleated. Badger sporrans, showing the head
in the middle, red-and-white-diced hose, and buckled brogues completed
their wild but martial dress, which was well set off by the dirks and
claymores that swung to the stride of the mountaineer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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