most methodical of men, was less ready with the pen and appears to have made no chronicle of those slow but momentous days.  The bitter weather was the dread enemy.  Fraser tells how men on duty lost fingers and toes and some were even deprived of speech and sensation in a few minutes through “the incredible severity of the frost....  Our regiment in particular is in a pitiful situation having no breeches.  Nothing but the last necessity obliged any man to go out of doors.”  Colonel Simon Fraser is, he adds, doing his best to provide trousers.  Pitying nuns observed the need and soon busied themselves knitting long hose for the poor strangers.  The scurvy carried off a good many.  In April, 1760, of 894 men in Fraser’s Highlanders not fewer than 580 were on the sick list and it was a wan and woe-begone host that set itself grimly to the task of meeting the assault on Quebec for which the French under Levis had been preparing throughout the winter.

When it came on April 28th, 1760, the Highlanders were not wanting.  Instead of fighting behind Quebec’s crazy walls Murray marched his men out to the Plains of Abraham to meet the enemy in the open.  On ground half covered by snow, with here and there deep pools of water from the heavy rain of the previous day, the two armies grappled in what was sometimes a hand to hand conflict.  Of the British one-third had come from the hospital to take their places in the ranks.  The proportion of the Highlanders who did this was even greater; half of them rose on that day from sick beds.  It proved a dark day for Britain.  Murray was defeated, losing about one-third of his army on the field.  Four of the Highland officers were killed, twenty-three were wounded, among them Colonel Simon Fraser himself.  Malcolm Fraser was dangerously wounded; but he tells us gleefully that within twenty days he was entirely cured.  Nairne seems to have gone through the fight without a hurt.  It was surely by a strange turn of fortune that men, some of whom fought against George II in ’45 and had been condemned as traitors, should fifteen years later shed their blood like water for the same sovereign.  Malcolm Fraser was disposed to be critical of Murray’s tactics.  He ought to have stood like a wall on the rising ground near Quebec, says Fraser; but “his passion for glory getting the better of his reason he ordered the army to march out and attack the enemy ... in a situation the most desired by them and [that] ought to be avoided by us as the Canadians and Savages could be used against us to the greatest advantage in their beloved ... element, woods.”  Nearly half a century later when Malcolm Fraser was giving advice to a young officer, Nairne’s son, he advised him not to be too critical of the actions of his superiors.  The confident young diarist of 1760 had meanwhile learned reserve.  But he was not alone among the Highlanders in his criticism of Murray.  A Murray led at Culloden in April, 1746, as at Quebec in April, 1760.  Lieutenant Charles Stewart was wounded in both battles; as he lay in Quebec surrounded by brother officers he said, “From April battles and Murray generals, Good Lord deliver me.”  It is to General Murray’s credit that, when the remark was repeated to him, he called on his subordinate to express the hope for better luck next time.