The Years of Endurance (22 page)

By mid-December Carnot was ready for Toulon. Here he had gathered 35,000 men and had given command of the siege guns to a youthful Corsican artillery captain named Bonaparte. The defending force of Italians, Spaniards and French royalists with its sprinkling of British regulars and marines was weakened by international dissension and sickness. When the French attacked on the stormy night of December 17th a few t
housand British and Piedmontese
alone made any resistance: the rest became a rabble. By the morning the sulky Bonaparte, all unwonted fire, was running up batteries in the captured Fort Aiguillette to rake the harbour and roadsteads.

There was nothing for it but immediate evacuation. On the night of the 18th, with every gun firing on the blazing city from the surrounding heights and the criminals, released from the jails, putting man, woman and child to the sword, a young British captain, Sidney Smith, endeavoured to destroy the French fleet which it was now too late to remove. The Spanish sailors who shared his task were lacking in professional skill, or, as one disgusted naval officer put it, " the vilest set of lubbers that ever was seen." In the resulting confusion only thirteen of the battleships were accounted for. Eighteen others survived to fight another day.

A week later the British fleet, crowded with nearly 15,000 refugees—" fathers without families and families without fathers, the picture of horror and despair "—was joined in Hyeres Bay by troops from Gibraltar intended for the defence of Toulon. Others lay idle in Moira's transports off the Isle of Wight while more were in mid-Atlantic, tossing up and down on their way to West Indian graveyards. And for a whole fortnight after its fall Downing
Street,.
relying on its mathematical calculations, continued to imagine that Toulon was defended by an ample army. " I think," wrote Pitt on Christmas Day, " there is still a very good chance of all proving right in that quarter."
¹

The year, which had begun in cloud and storm and promised so brilliantly in the early summer, had ended again in cloud. In December the French had resumed the offensive in the east. Three days before Christmas Lazare Hoc
he stormed the lines of Froesch
weiler. The Austrians and Prussians fell back towards the Rhine, abandoning the Palatinate and Al
sace, while in the south Keller
mann drove the Piedmontese once more beyond the Alps.

The British Government, however, remained soberly cheerful. '* It is true," wrote the Foreign Secretary, " that the campaign has not answered all that one's wishes suggested nor even all that at one period of the year it seemed reasonable to hope. But surely to have begun by the defence of the Neerdyke and of Maestricht and to end

¹
Rose,
I, 32.

with the establishment of our winter quarters close to the French frontier, and in some parts, well within their territories, would in January last have seemed worth compounding for." No enemy had set foot on British soil anywhere in the world. Pondicherry and Chandernagore had been captured in the East Indies and Tobago in the West. In Santo Domingo a British force from Jamaica had occupied several coastal points, including Mole St. Nicolas—the Gibraltar of the Caribbean. The enemy's flag had been swept from the seas and several of his finest frigates captured in engagements in which all the glory had rested with England.

Yet both in Parliament and the country there was a sense of frustration. Hopes had been pitched too high and too often had been dashed. There was criticism of the Government and even of the war. The campaign in Flanders had never been popular: the nation still retained its traditional horror of Continental commitments born of older " cruel wars in High Ge
rmany." Britons felt little enth
usiasm for their Prussian and Austrian allies. Nor, much as they hated Jacobins, did they share Burke's sympathy for the French exiles. The more they saw of them, the less they liked them. When in December the guns in St. James's Park and the Tower fired salvos, public joy turned to dismay when it became known that they were celebrating no naval victory in the Channel but a landing in aid of Royalist planters in Santo Domingo.

What the country had wanted was a quick and glorious war at sea with plenty of prizes and few casualties: the kind of war that Chatham had given it. Instead there had been an uninspiring dribble of maimed and half-starved soldiers returning from Flanders, crowded between icy decks without even straw to sleep on and turned adrift in Kentish ports whose supine authorities had not even anticipated their reception. For this much blame was unfairly cast on the Duke of York, whose undisciplined officers, pining for the fleshpots of London, poured a stream of complaints into influential ears. Now in January came news of the loss of Toulon. The Government's attempt to dwell on the destruction done to the French fleet and arsenal was not a success. For the public felt that neither should have been lost.

The causes of failure were unperceived. They were partly the nation's reluctance to prepare for war, partly the Government's characteristic inability to follow any s
ystematic plan. There had
been no concentration of force: no persistence in policy. Instead Pitt and Dundas had improvised according to the needs of the hour, living from hand to mouth and allowing the enemy the initiative. Flabbiness of decision inevitably degenerated into a futile scramble to rush insufficient forces to whatever point of the Allied circumference the French chose to attack. " The misfortunes of our situation," wrote the shrewd old King, " is that we have too many objects to attend to, and our force consequently must be too weak at each place."
¹

But the Government seemed incapable of learning. It could not see that military operations were not static: that, once initiated, they grew of their own, making ever fresh demands on the nation's strength and manpower. Territorial magnates and lawyers had still to realise that the direction of a world-wide campaign called for at least as much forethought and precision as laying out a plantation or drafting a legal instrument. They let the war run itself—into tangles.

¹
When Fox argued in the House that, if the object of the campaign was to put an end to French tyranny, Toulon was the most important objective: if it was conquest, the West Indies, young Mr. Jenkinson of the India Board, replying for the Government, revealed the confusion in Pitt's mind : the country's war aim was to destroy the Jacobin menace to Europe but the defence of Toulon could obviously not be allowed to outweigh the importance of strengthening the Empire.

CHAPTER
FIVE

The Enemy Strikes

1794
-5

" We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an
ordinary community. . . . We are at war with a system
which by its essence is inimical to all other governments ;
and which makes peace or war as peace and war may best
contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine
that we are at war."
Burke.

" I learnt what one ought not to do and that is always
something."
Wellington.

That
winter the fever of mass murder, atheism and reckless spending in Paris seemed to be approaching its climax. At Christmas the obscene and diseased journalist, Hebert, presided over the Feast of Reason in Notre Dame, where a whore was elevated at the high altar amid Rabelaisian rites. In the prisons thousands of innocent men and women, flung there by some Party sadist's whim, fed out of troughs on offal or were driven in droves chained like cattle through the streets.
¹
To decent English minds it seemed unthinkable that men could survive who broke every law of God and man, who robbed and murdered and blasphemed, who denied justice, pity and humanity itself in their ruthless search for power. " From the nature of the mind of man and the necessary progress of human affairs," Pitt declared in Parliament, "it is impossible that such a system can be of long duration." " Surely," cried
the
high-minded Windham, " Heaven will presently put a whip into every honest hand to lash these villains naked through the world."
²

The need to destroy the menace quickly before it could spread further was plain. " We are called in the present age," Pitt told the

¹
See the remarkable account of the sufferings of General O'Hara after his capture at Toulon described in
Farington,
I, m
-12.

²
Windham Papers,
I,
162.

House, " to witness the political and moral phenomenon of a mighty and civilised people, formed into an artificial horde of banditti, throwing off all the restraints which have influenced men in social life. . . . We behold them uniting the utmost savageness and ferocity of design with consummate contrivance and skill in execution, and seemingly engaged in no less than a conspiracy to exterminate from
the
face of the earth all honour, justice and religion." Because of the inequalities and corruptions of the past, they could count on allies in every country. They had the advantage of waging an ideological offensive. Already Revolutionary agents, with long purses and beguiling tongues, were undermining the resistance of Britain's allies. At Turin, Naples, Florence and Genoa even high officials had been involved in treasonable conspiracies. Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark were seething with subterranean Jacobinism.

It seemed vital to Pitt to keep the Grand Alliance in being. He was under no illusions about his allies and their selfish, divided aims. But so long as they could be induced to fight against the common enemy of mankind it was best to turn a blind eye to their faults. The human future depended on keeping a
cordon sanitaire
round France till the Jacobin fever had spent itself.

Pitt therefore welcomed a visit from Mack, the rising strategist of the Austrian Staff, and promised him additional troops for a renewed offensive in the spring. The army estimates presented to Parliament in February, 1794, after Mack's departure provided for 175,000 Regulars, 34,000 German Auxiliaries and 52,000 embodied Militia. But the bulk of the trained and mobile troops at the Government's disposal had already been committed far beyond recall through its failure to follow out a co-ordinated war plan. Tied to a major campaign on France's northern frontier, it had simultaneously encouraged its naval and military commanders to take the offensive in the Mediterranean and West Indies without a thought of how they could be reinforced and supplied. There were inducements for Britain in both these theatres of war. But in neither could operations be sustained from existing resources.

It was Lord Hood and his political adviser, Sir Gilbert Elliot— the former Civil Commissioner for Toulon—who committed Britain to a war in Corsica. Sold t
o France a quarter of a century
before by the banking Republic of Genoa, the turbulent island had only submitted to its new rulers after a desperate resistance led by Pascal Paoli. In the spring of 1793 a rebellion had broken out which drove the Republican garrisons into the coastal fortresses and sent Captain Bonaparte's " traitor " family flying to Marseilles for refuge. Though the Cabinet had toyed in the summer with the idea of a landing in the island, Paoli's appeals for British help had remained unanswered.

But in the New Year, with 1,400 troops crowded on board his transports, Hood saw Corsica as a heaven-sent opportunity. Having lost Toulon he needed a naval base from which to maintain its blockade. With a splendid anchorage the island was several hundred miles nearer the port than Gibraltar. Its forests supplied the masts and timber for the French Mediterranean Fleet. In February, therefore, Hood landed Major-General Dundas's troops and a contingent of sailors in San Fiorenzo Bay.

But neither the impetuous old seaman nor his adviser had considered the difficulties of conquering and garrisoning an
island with four hundred miles of
coastline. Though the brigands of the interior acclaimed the English, the strongholds of Bastia and Calvi were defended by 3,500 French regulars—more than double the original invading force. Their investment occupied a growing proportion of Britain's slender military resources for many months. Owing to the peremptory and sometimes almost contemptuous attitude of Lord Hood and his officers towards the Army, the operations led to a lamentable deterioration in relations between the Services. The general, who seemed " an old woman in a red ribbon " to impatient politicians and seamen, not without reason regarded the task demanded of him as beyond his professional powers. The admiral thereupon announced his intention of attacking without him.

" While General Dundas And his eighteen manoeuvres all sat on the grass," Nelson and the crew of the
Agammemnon
proceeded to invest Bastia on their own. The siege which followed, though successful, was conducted with grossly inadequate resources. Later,
the
army, reinforced from England, resumed its rightful place under the command of Major-General James Stuart, a younger son of Lord Bute, on whom the brilliant m
antle of Peterborough seemed to
have fallen. Largely owing to his and Nelson's efforts Calvi fell on August 10th, though it cost the eager little captain his right eye and all but his life. " Never," wrote Stuart's second-in-command, a still greater soldier named John Moore, " was so much work done by so few men."