But it charged without Wolfe. He had been mortally wounded just after giving the signal for those famous volleys. Two officers sprang to his side. 'Hold me up!' he implored them, 'don't let my gallant fellows see me fall!' With the help of a couple of men he was carried back to the far side of a little knoll and seated on a grenadier's folded coat, while the grenadier who had taken it off ran over to a spring to get some water. Wolfe knew at once that he was dying. But he did not yet know how the battle had gone. His head had sunk on his breast, and his eyes were already glazing, when an officer on the knoll called out, 'They run! They run! 'Egad, they give way everywhere!' Rousing himself, as if from sleep, Wolfe asked, 'Who run?'--'The French, sir!'--'Then I die content!'--and, almost as he said it, he breathed his last. He was not buried on the field he won, nor even in the country that he conquered. All that was mortal of him--his poor, sick, wounded body--was borne back across the sea, and carried in mourning triumph through his native land. And there, in the family vault at Greenwich, near the school he had left for his first war, half his short life ago, he was laid to rest on November 20--at the very time when his own great victory before Quebec was being confirmed by Hawke's magnificently daring attack on the French fleet amid all the dangers of that wild night in Quiberon Bay. Canada has none of his mortality. But could she have anything more sacred than the spot from which his soaring spirit took its flight into immortal fame? And could this sacred spot be marked by any words more winged than these: HERE DIED WOLFE VICTORIOUS CHAPTER VIII -- EPILOGUE--THE LAST STAND Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham proved decisive in the end; but it was not the last of the great struggle for the Key of Canada. After Wolfe had died on the field of battle, and Monckton had been disabled by his wounds, Townshend took command, received the surrender of Quebec on the 18th, and waited till the French field army had retired towards Montreal. Then he sailed home with Saunders, leaving Murray to hold what Wolfe had won. Saunders left Lord Colville in charge of a strong squadron, with orders to wait at Halifax till the spring. Both French and British spent a terrible winter. The French had better shelter in Montreal than the British had among the ruins of Quebec; and, being more accustomed to the rigours of the climate, they would have suffered less from cold in any case. But their lot was, on the whole, the harder of the two; for food was particularly bad and scarce in Montreal, where even horseflesh was thought a luxury. Both armies were ravaged by disease to a most alarming extent. Of the eight thousand men with whom Murray began that deadly winter not one-half were able to bear arms in the spring; and not one-half of those who did bear arms then were really fit for duty.