At first the British had some success, but the advance masked their artillery, while the infantry became bogged down in the mud and melting snowdrifts of the late spring.

Meanwhile, the British army, left behind in Quebec after the fleet sailed at the end of October 1759, suffered from hunger, scurvy and the difficulties of living in a city that they had largely destroyed in the siege.

In April 1760, Lévis returned to Quebec with an army of over 7,000 men, including Canadien militia and First Nations warriors.

He therefore moved some 3,800 men into the field, all he could muster, along with over twenty cannon, to the same position that Montcalm had occupied for the 1759 battle.

In order to cover the entire plateau, the battalions were each drawn up in two ranks with three-foot gaps between files, instead of the normal elbow-to-elbow formation.

[5] One sergeant recorded that the British army was "a poor pitiful handful of half starved scorbutic skeletons.

As the British advanced, Lévis pulled his three formed right wing brigades back into the Sillery Woods.

[7] The British left flank troops captured some redoubts, but then Lévis launched a powerful counterattack with his right wing.

The British retreated behind the city's walls, and withstood Lévis' feeble siege until the arrival of naval reinforcements in May.

He quickly raised the siege and retreated to Montreal, where he surrendered in September to overwhelming British forces that approached the city from three directions.

They were designed to create positive memories, leave out the harshness of the British conquest, and bring Anglophones and Francophones closer together.

[11] The battle and its aftermath, with the fruits of the French victory snatched by the arrival of British warships, was dramatized by modernist poet F. R. Scott in, "On the Terrace, Quebec": I think of the English troops imprisoned in the broken city in the spring of 1760 waiting the first ship.