At half-past five o’clock the tide was out, and the crisis came.  The batteries across the Montmorenci, the distant batteries of Point Levi, the cannon of the “Centurion,” and those of the two stranded ships, all opened together with redoubled fury.  The French batteries replied; and, amid this deafening roar of artillery, the English boats set their troops ashore at the edge of the broad tract of sedgy mud that the receding river had left bare.  At the same time a column of two thousand men was seen, a mile away, moving in perfect order across the Montmorenci ford.  The first troops that landed from the boats were thirteen companies of grenadiers and a detachment of Royal Americans.  They dashed swiftly forward; while at some distance behind came Monckton’s brigade, composed of the fifteenth, or Amherst’s regiment, and the seventy-eighth, or Fraser’s Highlanders.  The day had been fair and warm; but the sky was now thick with clouds, and large rain-drops began to fall, the precursors of a summer storm.

With the utmost precipitation, without orders, and without waiting for Monckton’s brigade to come up, the grenadiers in front made a rush for the redoubt near the foot of the hill.  The French abandoned it; but the assailants had no sooner gained their prize than the thronged heights above blazed with musketry, and a tempest of bullets fell among them.  Nothing daunted, they dashed forward again, reserving their fire, and struggling to climb the steep ascent; while, with yells and shouts of Vive le Roi! the troops and Canadians at the top poured upon them a hailstorm of musket-balls and buckshot, and dead and wounded in numbers rolled together down the slope.  At that instant the clouds burst, and the rain fell in torrents.  “We could not see half way down the hill,” says the Chevalier Johnstone, who was at this part of the line.  Ammunition was wet on both sides, and the grassy steeps became so slippery that was impossible to climb them.  The English say that the storm saved the French; the French, with as much reason, that it saved the English.

The baffled grenadiers drew back into the redoubt.  Wolfe saw the madness of persisting, and ordered a retreat.  The rain ceased, and troops of Indians came down the heights to scalp the fallen.  Some of them ran towards Lieutenant Peyton, of the Royal Americans, as he lay disabled by a musket-shot.  With his double-barrelled gun he brought down two of his assailants, when a Highland sergeant snatched him in his arms, dragged him half a mile over the mud-flats, and placed him in one of the boats.  A friend of Peyton, Captain Ochterlony, had received a mortal wound, and an Indian would have scalped him but for the generous intrepidity of a soldier of the battalion of Guienne; who, seizing the enraged savage, held him back till several French officers interposed, and had the dying man carried to a place of safety.