For more than a month the town had borne the enemy's fire. The churches and convents were in ruins, and the French had not stirred from their camp of _l'Ange-Gardien._ Skirmishes were frequent. "Old men of seventy and children of fifteen years fire on our detachments," wrote Wolfe. "Our men are wounded at every border of the forest." The anger of the English soldiers had little by little reduced to a desert both banks of the St. Lawrence. In every direction villages and scattered dwellings were given to the flames.
Generals Amherst and Johnson, who had been charged with distant expeditions against Niagara and Ticonderoga, had succeeded in their enterprises, but had not rejoined Wolfe according to Pitt's plan. The latter bore on his shoulders all the responsibility of final success. Being repulsed before the French camp on the 31st of July, Wolfe fell sick from vexation and spite. "There only remains to me the choice of difficulties," he wrote to the English cabinet. "I have regained sufficient health to do my work, but my constitution is destroyed without my having the consolation of having rendered, or being able to render, considerable service to the state." Three days after the date of this letter. General Wolfe suddenly advanced on the banks of the St. Lawrence. On the night of the 12th of September he landed on the creek of the Foulon. The officers had responded in French to the "_Qui vive?_" of the sentinels, who believed that they beheld a long expected convoy of provisions passing. Twice did the boats, which were insufficient in number, silently cross the stream. Wolfe alone repeated in an undertone the poet Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." He was touching land, when he turned to say to his lieutenants, "I would prefer to be the author of that poem than to take Quebec."
Day was scarcely breaking when the English army occupied the Heights of Abraham. A skirmish had sufficed to put to flight the French detachment charged with guarding them. The Marquis de Montcalm viewed his enemies from afar. "I see them plainly where they ought not to be," said he, "but if we fight with them I shall crush them." The English were already on the march; before the break of day the French were routed, Montcalm was dying, and Quebec was lost.