HERO OF QUEBEC.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 673, 30 May 1914, Page 6

HERO OF QUEBEC.

Field-Marshal Sir John French, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was the principal guest at the annual Wolfe birthday dinner held under the auspices of the Weeterham Society at the George and Dragon Hotel, Westerham, where the hero of Quebec stayed on his laßt visit to Westerham in 1758. Colonel C. E. Warde, M.P., presided. Dinner was served in the coffee room, the walla of which are rich with interesting paintings and prints of General Wolfe and hia contemporaries. In front of the chairman was the claret jug which formed part of Wolfe's cabin furniture on the occasion of his last voyage to Canada. Another interesting relic produced was a mutilated volume of historic importance, it being no less than a journal written by Wolfe of proceeding during some portion of the three months before the taking of Quebec. It was discovered amongst some old books after a fire at a West of England mansion recently. "I believe I am right in thinking," General French said in the courße of his tribute, "that not a few of the greatest military commanders the world has known have been distinguished by a certain grand simplicity of character. Indeed this quality deems, if not essential, at any rate of very great value to a military commander, because it is most likely to mean fixity and singleness of purpose, power of concentration, and a wise direction of thought. Wolfe possessed it in a very remarkable degree. "Another marked characteristic of this very .remarkable man was his indomitable courage. Nor was his physical courage one whit less than his moral courage during the severe strokes of illness which laid him low in the very middle of the field of his operations around Quebec,and perhaps more than all when he was struck down again just three days before the final assault, when he beseeched a doctor just to patch him up regardless of the consequences in order that he might finish his task with success. Indeed, his wretched physical ailments would bavs broken down the courage of any ordinary man, but it made no difference to him. Readers of his history will also remember the time when he landed in England after nis successful campaign at Louisburg, utterly broken down in health, and he had hardly settled down at Bath to recruit when the order reached him to go out again and undertake the capture of Quebec. "His correspondence with Pitt a-

this time well demonstrates tbe na ture of the man. Hia life presents indeed one of the finest examples we could have of the triumph of soul and spirit over bod?. But what has struck me more than anything in reading Wolfe's history has been in the extraordinay fertility of brain in the ingenious and varied forms of stratagem which'he conceived to deceive his enemy and effect surprise. "His military genius came out very strongly in this way in his exploits at Louisville, but the consummate skill and daring of his surprise of the morning of September 13th, 1759, is unsurpassed in th 9 annals of military history."