The Winning of Canada | Page 9

excellent chances soldiers have to see the vivid side of
many things: 'That variety incident to a military life gives our
profession some advantages over those of a more even nature. We have
all our passions and affections aroused and exercised, many of which
must have wanted their proper employment had not suitable occasions
obliged us to exert them. Few men know their own courage till danger
proves them, or how far the love of honour or dread of shame are
superior to the love of life. This is a knowledge to be best acquired in
an army; our actions are there in presence of the world, to be fully
censured or approved.'
Great commanders are always keen to learn everything really worth
while. It is only the little men who find it a bore. Of course, there are

plenty of little men in a regiment, as there are everywhere else in the
world; and some of the officers were afraid Wolfe would insist on their
doing as he did. But he never preached. He only set the example, and
those who had the sense could follow it. One of his captains wrote
home: 'Our acting colonel here is a paragon. He neither drinks, curses,
nor gambles. So we make him our pattern.' After a year with him the
officers found him a 'jolly good fellow' as well as a pattern; and when
he became their lieutenant-colonel at twenty-three they gave him a
dinner that showed he was a prime favourite among them. He was
certainly quite as popular with the men. Indeed, he soon became known
by a name which speaks for itself--'the soldier's' friend.'
By and by Wolfe's regiment marched into the Highlands, where he had
fought against Prince Charlie in the '45. But he kept in touch with what
was going on in the world outside. He wrote to Rickson at Halifax, to
find out for him all he could about the French and British colonies in
America. In the same letter, written in 1751, he said he should like to
see some Highland soldiers raised for the king's army and sent out there
to fight. Eight years later he was to have a Highland regiment among
his own army at Quebec. Other themes filled the letters to his mother.
Perhaps he was thinking of Miss Lawson when he wrote: 'I have a
certain turn of mind that favours matrimony prodigiously. I love
children. Two or three manly sons are a present to the world, and the
father that offers them sees with satisfaction that he is to live in his
successors.' He was thinking more gravely of a still higher thing when
he wrote on his twenty-fifth birthday, January 2, 1752, to reassure his
mother about the strength of his religion.
Later on in the year, having secured leave of absence, he wrote to his
mother in the best of spirits. He asked her to look after all the little
things he wished to have done. 'Mr Pattison sends a pointer to
Blackheath; if you will order him to be tied up in your stable, it will
oblige me much. If you hear of a servant who can dress a wig it will be
a favour done me to engage him. I have another favour to beg of you
and you'll think it an odd one: 'tis to order some currant jelly to be
made in a crock for my use. It is the custom in Scotland to eat it in the
morning with bread.' Then he proposed to have a shooting-lodge in the

Highlands, long before any other Englishman seems to have thought of
what is now so common. 'You know what a whimsical sort of person I
am. Nothing pleases me now but hunting, shooting, and fishing. I have
distant notions of taking a very little house, remote upon the edge of the
forest, merely for sport.'
In July he left the Highlands, which were then, in some ways, as wild
as Labrador is now. About this time there was a map made by a
Frenchman in Paris which gave all the chief places in the Lowlands
quite rightly, but left the north of Scotland blank, with the words
'Unknown land here, inhabited by the "Iglandaires"!' When his leave
began Wolfe went first to Dublin--'dear, dirty Dublin,' as it used to be
called--where his uncle, Major Walter Wolfe, was living. He wrote to
his father: 'The streets are crowded with people of a large size and well
limbed, and the women very handsome. They have clearer skins, and
fairer complexions than the women in England or Scotland, and are
exceeding straight and well made'; which shows that he had the proper
soldier's eye for every pretty girl. Then he went to London and visited
his parents