ose who were nowhere near it could possibly have. The fearful soldier who survived the battle on the Heights of Abraham recalls with some authority his fear at having to mount an attack up a sheer cliff. He also recalls having heard Wolfe say, "I don't think we can by any possible means get up here . . . but we must use our best endeavour" (4). The soldier never actually sees Wolfe during but only after the battle. He only remembers his ludicrous, peculiar, gangly appearance and carriage, and he remembers the squalid scene of the death, "lying on a mound beside a sorry little bush attended by just two men . . . his face . . . stiff and greenish and his read hair glistened with sun and sweat. Blood had matted his belly where another ball had struck him and now more was oozing through-his shirt" (69).
In the fog of war the details of Wolfe's fate are as muddy as the dirty, slippery climb of the soldiers up the cliff. The soldier on the line betrays a fairly certain knowledge of just how confusing and filthy the conditions of battle were.
After the death itself has faded from memory, the fog of war becomes the memory of war. What is abundantly clear is that the description of the battle given by the soldier has nothing in common with either Benjamin West's grandly heroic painting or the penny prints that characterized Wolfe as a classical Roman. West's retelling of Wolfe's death is filtered through Romantic-heroic idealism and nationalistic mythmaking, so that the experience of the battle is really the experience of what the memory would like the battle to have achieved.
The success of the painting, in all its fanciful inventions and excesses of poetic licence, had been such that when British children of future generations grew up drilled in the pieties of imperial history, it was West's scene they imagined rather than any more literal account. Art had entirely blotted out mere recall, let alone evidence (37).
Thus...