The Years of Endurance (55 page)

A great nation had received the first fruits of its own endeavours. That autumn it emerged from a long dark valley of tribulation into the sunshine. Even the weather smiled and gave the country a bumper harvest. Despite the stringencies of prolonged war, trade was reviving and revenue expanding: imports for 1798 showed an

¹
Nicolas,
III,
74.

²
Times,
26th
Nov.,
1798.

increase of nearly seven millions and exports of four millions. It was with a full and proud consciousness of these things that Pitt in his Budget speech of December 3 rd called on the country to bear new burdens that it might help not itself alone but others. Rather than burden posterity with war debts and impair its inheritance, he proposed the unprecedented step of a direct tax on all incomes of more than £60, rising in the case of all those exceeding £200 to two shillings in the pound.

" Let us do justice to ourselves," he declared. " We have been enabled to stand forth the saviours of mankind. . . . We have presented a phenomenon in the character of nations." Already the peoples of Europe were rising in their wrath against the spoiler and oppressor. Turkey had already declared war on France, Russia was marching, Naples and Austria arming. A second Coalition was forming to reduce France within its ancient limits. " A general war," wrote Farington in his diary on November 13th, " is looked upon as certain."

CHAPTER
TWELVE

The
Lost
Chance
1798-1800

" Experience shows that nothing is to be reckoned an
obstacle which is not found to be so on trial; that in war
something must be allowed to chance and fortune, seeing
that it is in its nature hazardous and an option of difficul-
ties ; that the greatness of an object should come under
consideration as opposed to the impediments that lie in the
way."

General
Wolfe.

" Failure will always be the lot of maritime expeditions
when, instead of pushing the invasion rapidly, one limits
oneself to acting pusillanimously, leaving time to the
enemy to manoeuvre."
Jomini.

I
t
was the fiery Nelson who began the offensive. Reflecting the new belief of his country that aggression was justified where it anticipated a ruthless foe,
¹
he persuaded the Neapolitan Court to strike at the French in the despoiled territories of the Pope to the north. Thirty thousand troops in their glittering Italian uniforms marched past the saluting base in the camp of St. Germaines and were pronounced by the famous General Mack, lent by Austria to its little ally, as the most beautiful army in Europe. On November 24th, 1798, they crossed the border while Nelson, who now saw himself as the saviour of Italy, landed a force in the enemy's rear at Leghorn.

But the nerve of the Aulic Council failed at the eleventh hour. It was not yet ready for war. As soon as the French realised that Austria was not going to march, they struck back. In the north they forced the hapless King of Piedmont to abdicate. In the Cam-pagna, having withdrawn from Rome, they turned on Mack's

¹
"
To
avert
by
anticipation
a
meditated
blow
where
destruction
would follow
its
infliction
is
surely
justifiable."—
Lloyd’
s Evening Post,
August,
1798.

pedantically scattered forces. The gleaming, scented Italian officers took to their heels at the first shot and their men followed. " The Neapolitans," wrote Nelson, " have not lost much honour, for God knows they have but little to lose; but they lost all they had." A few weeks later, while the King fled in Nelson's flagship to Sicily, the French entered Naples after liquidating a brief resistance by t
he mob. Here they set up a Parth
enopean Republic of middle-class traitors under cover of which they proceeded to plunder the country.

Yet the Neapolitan affair wa
s only an incident. The Mediter
ranean conflagration was spreading. In October the Turkish and Russian fleets, emerging in unwonted amity from the Dardanelles, attacked the French in the Ionian Islands. At Malta a Portuguese squadron took its place beside the British fleet and the insurgent Maltese in a common front against the despoilers of Valetta.

Farther down the Mediterranean Britain had struck at the Balearics. Since Spain's entry into the war Dundas had been waiting the chance to seize Minorca and its great naval base, Port Mahon. Even before the news of the Nile he had ordered British and
emigre
regiments in Portugal to be sent under secret cover of St. Vincent's ships to attack the island. At the Admiral's entreaty the operation was entrusted to their former commander, now Lieutenant-General Charles Stuart. " No one," he wrote to the Secretary of State, " can manage Frenchmen as him, and
the
English will go to hell for him."
¹
It says something for Dundas's magnanimity that he consented, for Stuart—a true son of the proud, erratic House of Bute— was in the habit of treating politicians with contempt. He freque
ntly
disobeyed their orders and never failed to point out their absurdities.
"
I
am determined," he had written to Dundas at the outset of his defensive campaign in Portugal, " to be guided by your instructions so long as they are within the reach of my comprehension."
²
Whenever—as often happened—they were not, he disregarded them.

Stuart's Minorca campaign was as successful as Nelson's Neapolitan essay was inglorious. Unlike his great contemporary, the soldier was operating in his own element, and he was complete master of his business. He was fortunate in having as second-in-

¹
Fortescue,
IV,
606.

2
Ibid.,
IV,
604.

command a fellow Scot who, five years his senior, had until as many years before known nothing of war or soldiering. Thomas Giaham of Balgowan was forty-five when he first served as a volunteer on Lord Mulgrave's staff at the siege of Toulon. But though impelled to arms mainly as a distraction for the loss of a beloved wife and out of a political fury roused by a Jacobin mob's insults to her coffin,
¹
he was as natural a
soldier as Cromwell. After dis
playing the cool courage of his race in mountain fighting round the doomed port, he had returned to England, where having raised a regiment at his own expense—to-day the Second Scottish Rifles— he had been gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. Since then he had served under General Doyle in the expedition to the Isle d'Yeu and later, as British Military Commissioner with the Austrian Army in Italy, had distinguished himself by carrying dispatches for the starving garrison of Mantua through Bonaparte's lines.

On landing in Minorca on November 7th—an operation facilitated by complete British command of the sea—this gallant soldier was sent by Stuart with 600 troops to capture the Meradal Pass in the centre of the island. This he accomplished without loss, cutting all communication between Port Mahon and Ciudadella. The last stronghold
with
3,600 defenders surrendered a week later to a British force of 3,000 which, owing to a blunder in the Ordnance Department, had been sent without field guns. But Stuart, by exquisite economy of means and a mixture of shrewdness and bluff, conquered the entire island in just over a week without losing a man. It is hard to escape Sir John Fortescue's conclusion that, had he lived longer or been given a fair field for his gifts, this brilliant soldier might have won as great a name as Marlborough or Wellington. After the capture of Minorca he increased his claim on his country by disregarding all Dundas's entreaties for raids on the Spanish coast and the great fortress of Cartagena. " Let no persuasion of the Navy," he told him, " lead you to conceive its reduction could be accomplished by a handful of men."
²
Instead he husbanded his slender forces and prepared for the day when Minorca might have to defend itself by making

¹
He
was
bringing
her
body
home
in
1792
from
the
Riviera
where
she
had died.
His
bereavement
was
to
make
him,
in
the
fullness
of
time,
perhaps the
greatest
of
Wellington's
Peninsula
commanders.

²
Fortescue,
IV,
620.

every landing place an impregnable maze of earthworks. His power of making British soldiers dig was remarkable.

To Stuart came early in 1799 an urgent summons from Nelson to save Sicily from invasion. In the midst of a craven, panic-stricken Court and a wild, barbarous peasantry, the great sailor wrote on February 16th to beg for a thousand British infantry from Minorca to hold Messina against the rising Jacobin tide. He did not appeal in vain. For the clear-headed soldier was profoundly aware of the strategic importance of Sicily and its possibilities as a base for those amphibious operations against the southern flank of the French armies which he was at that very moment urging on the British Government. Though short of troops, he at once sailed with the 30th and 89th Regiments of Foot, arriving at Palermo on March 10th. Within five hours of landing he was on the road to Messina, where his fiery energy and magnetism and astonishing understanding of peasant mentality turned the resentful suspicions of the native husbandmen into an enthusiastic patriotism. During his brief stay he drafted a masterly plan for the defence of the island in which he anticipated the events of the next decade by showing how a brave peasantry might be armed and used to break the heart of disciplined armies. " Essential military operations," he wrote, with a genius that still burns through his stilted eighteenth-century phrases, " are too often avoided, neglected and misarranged from the false idea that they can only be effected by disciplined troops, whereas in many cases, in many countries and particularly in Sicily, the joint efforts and exertions of armed pleasants are more likely to prove effectual."
¹
Then, his work done and leaving Colonel Graham behind him, he hurried back to Minorca. A few weeks later, worn out by his own resdess energy, he was forced to return, a sick man, to England.

While these events were taking place in the Mediterranean, Pitt was putting forth all his powers to align Europe against the aggressor. On November 16th, 1798, in a dispatch to the Russian, Austrian and Prussian Governments, he defined his aim as a grand alliance " to reduce France within her ancient limits
...
to which every other Power should be ready to accede." It was to them as much as to his countrymen that he addressed his Budget Speech of

1
Fortescue,
IV, 625.

December 3 rd, which Mallet du Pan thought the greatest survey of a nation's financial strength ever made.

For the Income Tax was imposed not so much to save Britain as to free Europe by putting the armies of the Continent once more into the field. In the closing days of 1798 a formal alliance was signed with Russia by the British Ambassador in St. Petersbur
g: in return for an advance of
£225,000 for Ru
ssia and monthly subsidies of £
75,000, the Tsar promised 45,000 men for action with British and, it was hoped, Prussian and Swedish troops against the French invaders of Holland. Already he had sent to Galicia 20,000 of the 60,000 soldiers guaranteed to Austria by the military convention of the summer. A French declaration of war on Russia followed immediately.

For these reasons, Nelson, despite his Neapolitan disappointment, wrote on New Year's Day that he hoped before the year's end to see the French crushed and peace restored to the world. The inherent weakness of the dreaded Republic had suddenly become apparent. Corruption and materialism had rotted France's giant strength. The country swarmed with deserters and robbers, the bridges, roads and canals were perishing from neglect, the public finances were in indescribable confusion. In a land in which morals and religion had long been discarded as antiquated superstitions, every man thought only of himself and how to defraud the commonwealth. France was racked by senseless feuds: in Brittany the ministers of religion were hunted down like wild beasts. The only people who seemed happy were government contractors.

Tlie extent of the Republic's conquests increased its danger. For throughout Germany, Italy, Holland and Switzerland the greed of the Directory's agents aroused the common people against the French and the rootless bourgeois who collaborated with them. Their anger kept the Republican armies scattered in a thousand garrisons. Nobody trusted France: every one loathed and feared her. Even the infant American Republic, bound to her by old ties of gratitude, broke off relations with her in the summer of 1798, George Washington in a Presidential message to the Senate voicing his countrymen's abhorr
ence of the French Directory's
disregard of solemn Treaties and the Laws of Nations."

Yet the shortcomings of Revolutionary France were once more matched by those of the legitimist rulers of Europe. Austria, though she had reorganised her armies, had failed to cast off the petty selfishness of her Court and Council. The Emperor and his Minister, Thugut, nursed not only ancient jealousies of Prussia and Russia, but more recent grudges against Britain. For it is the nature of defaulting allies to feel resentment towards those they have injured. Austrian statesmen could not readily overlook the loans which Britain had advanced to them and which they were unwilling to repay, or their own betrayal of her at the Peace of Campo Formio.