H. M. S. Cockerel (32 page)

“Nineteen . . . twenty . . . twenty-one . . .” Midshipman Spend-love tolled off, counting on his fingers, for his watch only had a minute hand.

Brum!
Umumm. Came from the hills.

“Struck, sir. Twenty-two seconds,” he announced, and looked up to see a darker gout of smoke rise, almost mingling with the forest-fire pall that hovered continually over the Republican mortar battery. “Oh, well. Closer, I
think,
though, sir,” he sighed disappointedly.

Suddenly, there was a massive eruption of smoke yonder, rising as silent as a squall cloud might on the sea's horizon, as if the French had reinforced the masked battery, and had just let fly half a dozen shells.

Brummmbrummmm-Bummm!
spoke the masking hill, later than the gunpowder pall. And the pall swelled upward, outward, turned darker, shot through with dark flecks, with black writhing licorice sticks of smoke—tinged at the bottom, just atop the hill, with dying embers, with a ruddy orange loomlike flickering, like a lighthouse's loom just over the horizon's knife edge.

“Hola!”
Don Luis shouted, raspily enthused, and his bombardiers began to cheer and dance, to caper round the deck and in the wells in triumph.

“We did it!” Lewrie cried, ready to dance himself. “We hit 'em! Blew 'em to hell, by Jesus!”

Bumm
-
bumm
-
brubrumbumm
, more secondary explosions thundered, and the hills quaked to the destruction, and they could feel it in their bones and on their faces, a tremendous distant blast that rattled the earth, the shoals, and transmitted itself through the waters. They'd holed out, not on the mortars themselves, but in their magazine, where fixed and kited shells had been stored. Too many of them, fixed ready to fire, kited too close together, and even being sunk into the earth, protected by wet hides and haircloth, hadn't saved them.

Lewrie dashed down to the gun deck where Spanish, French and English sailors cavorted and clapped, tossing their caps or hats into the air and huzzah-ing.

“Marvelous!” Lewrie told Esquevarre when he reached him. “
Magnífico! Marveloso!
Genius!”

Esquevarre was thumping Crillart on the back, Crillart was bestowing Gallic kisses on those lean aristocratic cheeks, and Don Luis tweaked Charles's nose playfully as he stepped back to clasp Lewrie to him and dance him around the deck in a stumbling bear hug.

Must be something in the water, Lewrie thought, not exactly that pleased to be bussed and hugged by a man; bloody foreigners!

“Charles, tell him we'll celebrate,” Lewrie called over Comandante Esquevarre's shoulder as they tripped past him in a shuffling circle. “
Vino!
Plus vin?
My treat! We'll splice the main-brace . . . uh, splice-o las main-brace-o?
Sí, amigo, sí, Don Luis? Bueno!
”

By sundown, they heaved to short stays on the kedge and broke it free of the rocky bottom, heaved then to short stays forrud on the bower and sailed back to the fortified jetties. The larger three-gun masked-battery's fire had sputtered out by then, daunted perhaps by the sudden destruction of its fellow, and the Little Road became peaceful. Sweeps had to be used as the wind faded to puzzling little zephyrs across the lake-smooth waters. Once tied up, instead of boiling salt rations in steep tubs, appropriated charcoal braziers were lit atop the jetty and fresh meat was roasted. Wine and beer were doled out, the rum ration was issued, and fresh bread and butter appeared from the town for all hands.

Crillart, Scott, Esquevarre and Lewrie left the ship, repaired to a restaurant and celebrated—rather heavily, in point of fact, in all respects—wine, cuisine, music—and ended up being run out after they called for dancing girls. Esquevarre couldn't quite understand a restaurant that didn't have people who could play the guitar or do the flamenco—nor “do” the appreciative patrons who flung coins to them.

“France,” Crillart translated haltingly on their way back aboard. “'E say,
mon ami
. . . ve are
la nation du
. . . ‘tight-arses'?
Comment?
”

The next morning, with a monumental head, Lewrie arose to the soft
fumphing
of thunder. He flung off his blanket and staggered to a water butt, his mouth as sour and dry as dessicated ordure. There was a knock on the door to his tiny cabin.

“What?” he croaked.

“Sir? Midshipman Spendlove, sir.”

“Enter.”

Spendlove came inside, dry as a bone; Lewrie expected rain, with that far-off thunder. He was too bleary to puzzle it out.

“Excuse me, sir, but . . . the Frogs are at it again. There's a midshipman aboard from Admiral Goodall, sir. He says we're to stand out into the Little Road, with all dispatch.”

“Uhuh,” Lewrie nodded heavily. “Very well, Mister Spendlove. Do you wake the others, and I'll be on deck directly. Warn Porter to have the hands roused and at stations for shoving off.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Already at it again, he wondered as Spendlove departed; don't the Frogs ever learn their lessons? Wondering, too, if, after the celebrations of the past evening, they could hit a bull in the arse with a bass viol this day.

C H A P T E R 8

F
he
Colossus
74 came in from Cagliani with 350 Sardinian soldiers. On the 28th,
Bedford
and a Sardinian ship fetched 800 more. A convoy arrived from Spain with 4,000 foot, horse and artillery, and on the same day, two Neapolitan liners brought in 2,000 reinforcements, and a Marshal Forteguerri to command them. There was some problem with Forteguerri—he would not subordinate his men to the Spanish military commander, Rear Admiral Gravina, insisting that Naples's treaty was with Great Britain only, and he would only take orders from British officers.

Fortunately, Brigadier General Lord Mulgrave had come to Toulon with a detachment of British troops, a single battalion of one regiment, which raised British troop strength to about 1,500. Forteguerri considered himself under Mulgrave's command. There was talk that one more British general was coming, Major General O'Hara, with another regiment. There was also talk that a Spanish general had been appointed, and would be arriving soon; someone senior to O'Hara.

There was a tremendous scare on the night of 30 September. It was a night of thick fog and swirling mist. So far, the only action had been skirmishes between cavalry vedettes to east and west, some desultory artillery duels between light field guns outside the perimeters of Toulon. The skirmishes had become a little fiercer, as more Republican troops from Marseilles and the Army of Italy arrived; and troops in the heights behind Toulon had reported the presence of French units at Jourris near Fort Valette, patrols probing in the valley of the Faviere River, down toward the nor'east pass at Argeliers toward open ground. Yet the artillery duels in the Little Road were the constant, the only serious action so far.

Suddenly, though, there were French regiments in the hills the night of the 30th, popping up from God knew where, scaling goat tracks thought unscalable, carrying light field guns up the steep, crumbling mountain paths. They erupted, without a shred of warning, upon Spanish troops on the Heights of Pharon, the eastern half of the northern massif above Toulon! In the confusion, the Spanish were routed from their positions, run pell-mell down from the Heights of Pharon in the dark and the fog, abandoning all but their personal weapons, leaving the Republicans with fortifications and heavy guns, which looked down upon the very heart of the enclave and the Great Road.

It looked very much like a disaster that night to Lewrie and his men, taking a much-needed rest from bombarding hidden batteries by dint of a fog so thick they could not spot the fall of shot. Spatters of gunfire could be heard far off above the basin where
Zélé
was tied to the jetty. Spatters turned to ripping volleys of musketry, punctuated with tiny flat bangs of “grasshopper” guns and lightweight mountain howitzers, and dread rumours passed up and down the jetty were two-a-penny.

Yet in the morning, Brigadier General Mulgrave, Spanish Rear Admiral Gravina and the game Captain Elphinstone led a hastily mustered force back up to the Heights of Pharon—Spanish troops eager for the restoration of their honour, grim British veterans experienced in the bayonet and drilled to professional perfection, the newly arrived Sardinians and Neapolitans, and sailors and Marines from the fleet with boarding pikes, pistols and their fearsome cutlasses.

They scaled the heights on tracks no less steep than the French had managed, slipped and slid on the dry, gravelly, crumbling soil and suffered miniature avalanches. And after forming quickly upon narrow level places, rushed the trenches and redoubts. Nearly 2,000 Frenchmen had taken the Heights of Pharon, but only 500 were in any condition to flee after they were overwhelmed and broken. The Coalition lost eight killed, seventy-two wounded (one of them Rear Admiral Gravina, shot in the knee) and two missing, with forty-eight Spanish hauled off as prisoners earlier.

A little scare after all, the matter was quickly handled, and any dread of Republican rabble was blown to the four winds, if they were
that
easy to rout! The enclave breathed easier for a time, chuckling over their silly foreboding—yet looking more to the hills, and wondering . . .

And through all those weeks, Lewrie was busy with
Zélé.
Daily they sailed out to do battle, carefully selecting a new anchorage each dawning, which would take the French gunners hours to pinpoint. But the French shifted their batteries each night, returning the favour to make themselves equally elusive.

Down to the far south, behind La Seyne, there were several new batteries to deal with, on the Heights des Moulins and Reinier, above the civilian port, the next hill back from the Hauteur de Grasse, upon which stood Forts de Balaguer and L'Eguillette. The forts were manned by Coalition troops, as was Fort Mandrier and the lesser batteries on Cape Sepet's peninsula. The French had no hope of rushing across the narrow tongue of land which connected Sepet to the mainland. That thin land bridge, called Les Sablettes, which formed the bottom of the Golfe de la Veche, was bare as a baby's bottom, and two field guns could do terrible slaughter to troops attempting to rush across it, packed into a killing ground along the road, which bridged a salt marsh.

Yet the batteries atop the heights, twenty-four-pounder siege guns and howitzers, could scald the Little Road, deny any use of the Golfe de la Veche, and torment the defenders of Fort Balaguer. From anchorages at the south end of the Little Road, using Crillart's thirty-two-pounders and his experienced gunners, Lewrie engaged those guns on the heights. Or hid in the shallows near the north shore of Hauteur de Grasse, and let Don Luis de Esquevarre pound them with his mortars. Some nights, they did not return to port, but hid in the Little Road under cover of darkness, all lights extinguished and under oars, to sneak out through the Gullet and anchor round Fort Balaguer. There they mortared French gun batteries from shorter range, letting the Army at the fort report their fall-of-shot with wigwag signals. Or dared the shoals of the Golfe de la Veche, off the Infirmarie, to hammer the batteries on the heights at an oblique angle with thirty-two-pounders, somewhat safely out of French arcs of fire through narrow openings in their breastworks.

It became quite a game, an exciting though rather noisy sport, to match wits with the Republican gunners. But no matter how many times a breastwork was pounded into gravel, no matter how many earth-and-wicker gabions were burst, or guns dismounted, and no matter how many French artillerists they slew, the French guns were always back in action in a day or two, in a new position, and no amount of mortaring or cannonading seemed to deter them.

On 8 October, Lieutenant Colonel Nugent led a night storming raid on the southern batteries: Spaniards, Piedmontese, British troops, with sailors and Marines under Lt. Walter Serecold. Once more, pluck and daring paid for all. There'd been 300 French in the batteries, with another 1,200 to 1,300 infantry in their rear for support. The Heights des Moulins and Reinier were no less steep or treacherous than those of Pharon. Yet they annihilated the French gunners and routed the rest. Under field-artillery fire, they could not haul away their prizes, so they spiked or destroyed the guns, burning the carriages and mounts, blowing off the trunnions, effectually making scrap metal of a four-pounder, a six-pounder, two sixteens, three twenty-four-pounder siege guns, and two huge thirteen-inch brass mortars. Then returned to their quarters in the forts without harm!

But the French came back, hauled new pieces uphill to replace the old, rebuilt their breastworks and gabions, dug a little deeper in the hills, like soldier ants rebuilding their hive after children had kicked it over. Like the tide, they came back. And got just a touch closer to Toulon.

Lieutenant General Valdez had come into port on 18 October to replace Rear Admiral Gravina. And the senior Spanish navy officer, Adm. Don Juan de Langara, went with Valdez to Admiral Lord Hood to insist that Valdez be given complete command of all troops in the enclave. (His Most Catholic Majesty had given him that grandiloquent appointment.) Hood demurred, pointing out that Toulon had surrendered to Britain alone, that allied troops supplied men on the stipulation that the British command. And that Major General O'Hara already had been given that command by His Brittanic Majesty, King George III.

Hood had sent so many ships away on various missions that there were scarcely ten sail of the line in harbour, while Langara still had his original seventeen. Langara put his three-decker flag-ship alongside
Victory,
placed two other 1st Rates at bow and stern, hinting more than strongly that he'd open fire if Valdez wasn't proclaimed as supreme commander of the allied forces at Toulon. To his credit, Admiral Hood would not be bullied, and
Victory
beat to Quarters. Valdez and Langara backed down, and returned their ships to their berths.

And Major General O'Hara did arrive a few days later, as did a Major General Dundas, with a commission to replace Admiral Goodall as military governor of Toulon. Unfortunately, O'Hara did not bring the troops expected; a mere 750 men from the garrison of Gibraltar came to Toulon with him, half of the number ordered to be transferred.

More Sardinians dribbled in, the last promised draft of Neapolitans came, a few Piedmontese, a few more trickles of able-bodied French Royalists—civilians for the most part—driven in by the advancing Republican columns, with their guns and their guillotines.

By the beginning of November, 1793, they had on hand:

Of the 16,912 men total, no more than 12,000 were fit for duty, the rest off in hospital sick or wounded, and of those fit, 9,000 were tied to the perimeter, scattered all across the many posts, with only a meagre 3,000 available to respond to a French thrust.