The Years of Endurance (31 page)

Seeking the establishment in France of a stable government with which an honourable peace could be made, Pitt could scarcely refuse the entreaties of Puisaye and his parliamentary backers. In May an official invitation was sent out to all the
emigres
in Europe. An army of invasion was formed in Hampshire under the Bourbon flag. The Government provided money, arms and uniforms. It even—very unwisely—released a number of French prisoners who, wishing to return home, affected a Royalist conversion. It still hesitated to provide troops of its own. But it undertook to escort the expedition across the Channel and land it on the Quiberon peninsula.

On June 17th an advance guard of 4,000 with arms for 20,000 more sailed from Southampton. A British squadron under Commodore Sir John Borlase Warren accompanied it, while the Channel Fleet made a sweep under Hood's brother, Admiral Lord Bridport. On the 20th the latter encountered the French Fleet off
Lorient and chased it back to port, taking three capital ships. A few days later the
emigres
disembarked. They were greeted as saviours by thousands of Breton peasants. On July 3rd they captured the fort of Quiberon and some 600 Republican prisoners.

On hearing this the Government sent a fast frigate to Bremen for the Comte d'Artois who, through the death of his nephew in a Paris prison, had become Bourbon heir presumptive. It also decided to send a British force under Lord Moira to support Puisaye, who was now boasting that in a few weeks he would have 80,000 men in arms. Yet these hopes were offset by news of heavy Republican , troop concentrations in the west. The liquidation of the Spanish war had released large new forces, and Hoche, the hero of France, was appointed to their command. The young giant's resolution contrasted ominously with the jealousies and delays in the Royalist camp. The aristocrats sneered at the clownish " Chouan " peasants and their fanatic, ignorant priests. The " converted " prisoners from England revealed their real sympathies, 'the Royalist commanders quarrelled among themselves, for the British Government with characteristic vagueness had failed to define their responsibilities.

The result was disaster. On the night of July 19th the Republicans entered the fort by treachery and destroyed or ca
ptured the entire
Royalist force. Only Puisaye and a handful of fugitives escaped to the fleet. The prisoners, including the flower of the French aristocracy, were massacred, in spite of Hoche's safe conduct, by the orders of the Convention leaders, who hoped in this way to cover their own treasonable correspondence.

This bloody fiasco, for which it was severely taken to task by the Opposition, placed the Government in a dilemma. It had committed itself to a campaign in support of the French Royalists and had invited Artois to England. But the Royalists had been defeated and their foothold in France lost. To make matters worse, the terms of the Peace of Basle on July 22nd revealed the treacherous cession of the Spanish half of Santo Domingo, taming what had hitherto been an Allied base into hostile territory. This, combined with bad news from the Windward Isles, made the dispatch of reinforcements to the West Indies essential. Of the 20,000 British troops intended for Brittany, not more than 5000 could now be spared. Nor was Moira's comment on those that reached him at Southampton encouraging. " The foot want arms, the cavalry saddles; I hear that the 40th are a serviceable body of men, but they have never fired powder yet."

The proper course would have been to apologise to the French Princes and call off the expedition. But this would have injured the prestige of the Portland Whigs in the Cabinet. Sooner than endanger the coalition the Government decided to carry out its plan without either a landing-place on the mainland or an effective force to land. As Moira refused to undertake this, 4000 troops were sent off under General Doyle to occupy the island of Noirmoutier, off the mouth of the Loire, and use it as a base for renewed operations in La Vendee. The Comte d'Artois accompanied them with the ostensible hope of joining the heroic Charette. No one apparently asked how the expedition was to be maintained in the hurricane season on the most dangerous coast in Europe.

As a landing even on Noirmoutier proved impracticable, Doyle occupied his secondary objective, the small, barren island of Yeu. The hungry soldiers quickly ate the inhabitants out of hut and home. On the mainland the Vendeans, hearing that their prince was off the coast, rose in their thousands and acclaimed his coming. After some weeks of nervous hesitation, Artois declared his inability to land in person and sent Charette a sword of honour.

The rebellion fizzled out, and a few months later its betrayed leader died on the scaffold. A rising in Paris in October—the Thirteenth Vendemiaire—was suppressed by a timely " whiff of grapeshot." It marked a decisive step in the rise to fame of Brigadier Bonaparte, whom Barras had resurrected for the occasion, shabby and almost starving, from the discarded followers of Robespierre. Meanwhile, after several hundred men and horses had died from famine and exposure, Doyle's expedition was recalled to England. The evacuation evoked a superb piece of rescue work by the Navy in the Atlantic gales.

For the second time in six months Britain had been reminded that the gates of western Europe were shut to her inadequate armies. The invasion of the Continent was beyond her powers: she had too many responsibilities elsewhere. All through the summer of 1795 Dundas was on tenterhooks for news of the race to the Cape which he had set in motion in the spring. Not till November 23 rd did the Park and Tower guns proclaim that the gateway to India was safely in British hands. Major-General Craig had reached False Bay with the first contingent early in June, only to find that the Dutch Governor refused him leave to land. He had had to wait a month until reinforcements from home and St. Helena enabled him to gain a foothold at Simon's Town. Thence with 4000 troops and too little artillery he had fought his way through the pass of Muizenberg to Cape Town, which he had entered on September 16th. A Dutch naval expedition to regain the colony in the following year was destroyed by British warships in Saldanha Bay before it could land.

Elsewhere, too, Dundas's bold initiative against the Dutch colonies was rewarded. The bread he had cast upon the waters returned to him. Malacca, with its command of the vital highway to the Spice Islands and China seas, was captured on August 18th by a force from India. A week later Trincomalee, in the north of Ceylon, surrendered to Colonel James Stuart of the 72nd and 1100 Europeans and two Indian battalions. Colombo and the rest of the island were taken early in the following year, together with Dutch Amboina and Banka. The wealth of these places, thus denied to France, was deflected to swell the rising customs of Britain.

The new expedition to the West Indies was delayed by lack of men and equipment till the autumn. It sailed on November 16th under Sir Ralph Abercromby and Admiral Christian, and was at once overwhelmed by a terrific storm off the Chesil Beach. It sailed again early in December, only to be dispersed by a second storm.
¹
Not till March 17th, 1796, did Abercromby reach Barbados, and not till the end of April could he assemble sufficient force to begin his work of putting down rebellion in the British islands. With only half the troops originally intended he succeeded in capturing St. Lucia, where he left the able John Moore—now a brigadier—in command and sent a detachment to seize Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo, the Dutch colonies on the South American mainland. These last brought Britain a rich return: during the next three years their exports to her of cotton, sugar and coffee multiplied tenfold. The story of these successes and the pains endured by Englishmen to achieve them—prickly heat, yellow fever, loathsome reptiles, salt pork and dry biscuits, no medicines or comforts and a barbarous " enemy determined to dispute every inch "—are epitomised in a survivor's proud if characteristically complacent phrase: " It was sometimes dubious how the affair would end;
but
British valour, perseverance and
resolution
,
as it does on all occasions, triumphed at last."
²

The price was far too high. During the autumn disease reduced the British force in Santo Domingo from 9000 to 1600, and the garrisons of the other islands proportionately. Abercromby—a veteran of 61 with a love for his men—did his best by abolisning drills and parades in the heat, adapting stiff, stuffy uniforms to the tropics and improving camp sanitation. But nothing could have halted the wastage of the climate but the one measure which deference to vested interests forbade: the enrolment of a native West Indian army. Between 1794 and 1796, 40,000 British troops perished in these fatal islands.

The drain on the country's man-power had serious repercussions on the continental campaigns of 1795 and 1796. After the defection of Prussia and the fall of Holland the Austrians had concentrated their forces against France's southern frontier. On June 13 th, 1795,

¹
Among those who suffered in the two storms was the future victor of Waterloo, who but for them might have perished of yellow fever in a West Indian swamp.

²
Dyott,
I, 103.

after the usual delays, they took the offensive, driving the French army of
Italy southwards from the Apenn
ines to the Genoese riviera. The capture of Vado with its fine anchorage opened a door to British amphibious operations on the enemy's flank.

The opportunity could not be taken because the reinforcements originally intended for Corsica had been deflected to La Vendee and the West Indies. Even without them the Navy might have seriously interfered with
the
French army's communications along the vulnerable Corniche Road. But Lord Hotham was incapable of initiative. In June he failed for the second time to destroy the Toulon fleet in a " miserable action " off the isles of Hyeres. It is true that he sent Captain Nelson to Vado Bay to co-operate with Devins, the aged Austrian commander. But the force detached for the purpose was so weak that even Nelson's restless zeal could not make it effective. The latter at first was full of hope, expecting to see the Austrians in Nice by the autumn. But by September he was convinced that the only object of his allies was to touch another four millions of English money.

The opportunity of destroying the French army of Italy passed. Ragged and ill-disciplined though it was, it was not of the stuff that yields to a supine foe. In the autumn it received strong reinforcements from
the
Spanish frontier. Before the winter a plan of General Bonaparte's, now working in the Topographical Bureau of the Committee of Public Safety, was applied with startling results. On November 23rd General Scherer surprised the Imperial troops at Loano and drove them back beyond the Apennines.

But by a strange irony the failure of the campaign on which Austria had built her hopes for 1795 was offset by success in a theatre where she looked for none and had done her best to avoid fighting at all. On September 7th Jourdan and Pichegru with two French armies had crossed the Rhine to carry the war into Germany. The Jacobins anticipated that their offensive would complete the break-up of the ramshackle Reich, begun by the defection of Prussia in the spring. By an advance on Vienna down the Danube the French hegemony of Europe, so nearly achieved in 1704 under the Lilies, would be completed under the Tricolour in 1796. And this time, since the British had been driven from the Continent, there could be no Blenheim to save the Hapsburgs at the eleventh hour.

But though Pichegru seized Mannheim and every petty court in Germany echoed with the cry " the French are coming," the campaign did not go as the politicians in Paris planned. For they had not reckoned with the consequences of their own corruption. Under the cynical rule of profiteers, contractors and speculators the diaphanous robe of the
demi-monde
was now substituted for the bloodstained cap of liberty. The citoyenne Therezia, the wife of Tallien and mistress of Barras, drove in her scarlet coach through the unswept streets where half-naked wretches picked rubbish heaps for sustenance, her hair bright with jewels and her thighs encircled with diamonds. " The reign of the
san-culottes
was followed by that of the
sans-chemises"
¹

The eternal laws which govern the operations of war are just. Men will not
the
for those whom they know to be unworthy of their sacrifice. Hungry and ragged, the armies of the Rhine lost heart, for they knew why supplies were failing and their families starving. When the Austrian generals, noting the change in Republican morale, counter-attacked, the invaders crumbled. On November 22nd the Imperialists recaptured Mannheim, and a few days later Mainz and Frankfurt. By Christmas they had regained the greater part of the Palatinate. The French, driven back across
the
Rliine, were reduced to pillaging their own countryside.

Thus as 1795 drew to a close the war seemed to be approaching a stalemate. In France galloping inflation had set in. The value of the paper
assignat
fell to almost nothing: a bushel, of haricot beans that had fetched 120 livres in the spring sold for twelve times as much by the autumn. Every one except the high livers in Paris was sad, disillusioned and hungry. The roads were breaking up, the hearths desolate, the hospitals deserted.