James Johnstone

A Dialogue in Hades James Johnstone

Publisher Marketing: A DIALOGUE IN HADES. A PARALLEL OF MILITARY ERRORS, OF WHICH THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH ARMIES WERE GUILTY, DURING THE CAMPAIGN OF 1759, IN CANADA. ATTRIBUTED TO JAMES JOHNSTONE THEOPHANIA PUBLISHING The original of this manuscript is deposited in the French war archives, in Paris; a copy was, with the permission of the French Government, taken in 1855, and deposited in the Library of the Legislative Assembly of Canada. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, through the kindness of Mr. Todd, the Librarian, was permitted to have communication thereof. This document is supposed to have been written about the year 1765, that is five years after the return to France from Canada of the writer, the Chevalier Johnstone, a Scottish Jacobite, who had fled to France after the defeat at Culloden, and obtained from the French monarch, with several other Scotchmen, commissions in the French armies. In 1748, says Francisque Michel, "he sailed from Rochefort as an Ensign with troops going to Cape Breton; he continued to serve in America until he returned to France, in December, 1760, having acted during the campaign of 1759, in Canada, as aide-de-camp to Chevalier de Levis. On Levis being ordered to Montreal, Johnstone was detached and retained by General Montcalm on his staff, on account of his thorough knowledge of the environs of Quebec, and particularly of Beauport, where the principal works of defence stood, and where the whole army, some 11,000 men, were entrenched, leaving in Quebec merely a garrison of 1500. The journal is written in English, and is not remarkable for orthography or purity of diction; either Johnstone had forgotten or had never thoroughly known the language.