Inside Montreal, the men who had to make the decision were two: Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil (French), the Governor-General of New France and its highest civil authority, and François-Gaston de Lévis (French), the Chevalier de Lévis, the general who had won at Sainte-Foy and was the best soldier the French had left in Canada. Between them they had to face a fact that had been getting worse all summer. There was no relief coming. France had its own war to fight in Europe, the British navy controlled the sea lanes, and no fleet, no fresh regiments, no rescue of any kind was going to come up the St. Lawrence. Whatever they had on the island was all they would ever have.

And what they had was draining away by the day. The French army in Canada was built on two kinds of men: the regulars, the king’s professional full-time soldiers shipped over from France, and far more numerous, the Canadian militia, ordinary settlers called up to fight. As the three British armies closed in, the militia did the human thing. These were men whose own farms and families lay in the path of the converging columns, and rather than die behind Montreal’s walls for a cause already lost, they slipped away home in droves. Then the rot reached the regulars too. Soldiers deserted, and by the accounts that came down, even the elite grenadiers (the biggest, steadiest assault troops) began to melt away. An army that had numbered in the thousands was coming apart in the hand.

The other pillar of French power in Canada had already gone. For generations the French had fought their North American wars alongside Native allies, and those alliances had been the difference in battle after battle. Now the Native nations of the St. Lawrence valley, seeing which way the war had turned, had made their own peace and stepped aside (the next section follows that thread to its end). The warriors who might have harried the British on the rapids and in the woods around Montreal stayed out of it. The French were, for the first time, truly alone.

So Vaudreuil called a council of war, the formal meeting where a commander gathers his officers to decide. The arithmetic was merciless. The militia had abandoned the army, many of the regulars had abandoned the army, the Native allies had gone over to neutrality and the British, three enemy armies stood on the island, and the town’s walls were never meant to stop siege cannon. Montreal’s hospitals were already full of the sick and the wounded, and a real siege would only fill the streets with more. Further resistance was not brave; it was just throwing away lives. The decision, when it came, was to surrender not just the city but all of Canada.

Lévis would not swallow it quietly. He was a fighting soldier to the bone, and he had said all along that it would be better to die with weapons in hand than to give up. When the British terms came back, he found them not just a defeat but an insult (the reason is the next section), and he begged Vaudreuil for one last gesture: let him pull the regiments onto a small island in the river, Île Sainte-Hélène, and make a final stand there to save the honor of the army even if it could not save the colony. Vaudreuil, who as Governor-General held the higher authority and had a whole population’s safety to weigh against one general’s pride, refused. He ordered Lévis to accept the terms and have the troops lay down their arms.