The Years of Endurance (56 page)

Yet the logic of events was too strong for such cross-currents of selfishness to do more than check the tide which had set in against France with Nelson's victory. Pitt's purpose was delayed but not prevented. Throughout the winter—the coldest in human memqry —the armies of Europe were rumbling towards the coming battle line. Even the Tsar Paul of Russia—a petulant maniac—scouted the French suggestion that he should be allowed to partition Turkey as his mother had Poland, for his vanity, stronger than his ambition, had been mortally affronted by Bonaparte's seizure of Malta, of which he had had himself declared Protector. The Aulic Council of Austria might refuse to be hustled into war, but it knew that war was its only alternative to extinction at the hands of
the insatiable Jacobins. And th
ough the frosts and snows of that awful winter held up mails for many weeks, keeping Pitt's envoys three months on the road to Berlin, no frost lasts for ever. On January 31st, 1799, the Directory, exalted by its entry into Naples and its easy conquest of yet another European monarchy, informed Vienna that, unless the Russian corps in Galicia was wididrawn within fifteen days, war would immediately follow. No reply was made. Passively rather than actively the Hapsburg State aligned itself with Russia, Britain, Turkey, Portugal and the Two Sicilies in a second Coalition against the overgrown power of France.

Before the Directory's armies poured across the PJiine, their General in Egypt had taken the offensive against Turkey. Undeterred by his isolation, Bonaparte had spent the autumn with his usual indomitable activity. Nor, for all the seas of salt and desert around him, were his plans in the least defensive. In October he was reported to be trying to buy over the wild Abyssinians and obtain a port on the Red Sea eight hundred miles to the south.

When he found this too visionary, he prepared for an advance across the two hundred miles of desert between Egypt and Palestine to seize the Levantine corridor into Asia Minor. From Damascus he reckoned that he would be able either to drive to Constantinople and found a new Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Sultan's crumbling power, or strike eastwards along the caravan routes into Mesopotamia towards the Persian Gulf. For, true to the Revolutionary creed of energy of which he was the embodiment, Bonaparte believed that to men of will all things were possible.

On January 15th, 1799, when his arrangements for a desert march were almost complete, he wrote to Tippoo Sahib announcing his arrival with an invincible army and asking him to send envoys to Suez to concert plans for the overthrow of the British in India. Ten days later he learnt from a long delayed dispatch from France —the first to reach him since September—that Turkey had been at war with the Directory for several months and that the Sultan was concentrating armies in Syria and Rhodes for an invasion of Egypt.

It was never Bonaparte's way to wait to be attacked. Early in February, when the snow in England lay so deep that Parson Woodforde could not reach that place of use at the end of his garden which he called Jericho, the Army of Egypt set out across the eastern desert. On the 20th, after a brief siege, it captured El Arish from the Pasha of Syria who had occupied it a month before with the Turkish advance guard. Thence it drove up the coast through Gaza to Jaffa, which it stormed on March 5th; finding the 3000 Turks of the garrison an embarrassment to his commissariat, Bonaparte had them massacred. It would be a useful Warning, he reflected, to their countrymen of the unwisdom of resisting the French. Then, without wasting time, he resumed his march for Acre—a little town poorly fortified, some sixty miles to the north, barring the coastal road into Syria.

But here his fate was awaiting him in the now familiar shape of the British Navy. On March 3rd, to the disgust of many of his professional superiors, Captain Sidney Smith had taken over the command of the small squadron which had remained after the Nile in Egyptian waters. This erratic and plausible officer had recently escaped from the Temple prison in Paris and, having returned to England with a great deal of information, reliable and otherwise, about French ambitions in the Orient, had prevailed on Lord
Spencer to send him out to the Levant with a roving commission. His command consisted of two battleships and three small frigates. On hearing that Bonaparte had captured Jaffa he sent a brilliant young
emigre
engineer, Colonel Phelypeaux, to assist the Turkish Governor of Acre. A few days later Smith followed in person.

On March 17th, Bonaparte, driving northwards from Haifa, saw in his path the white walls of Acre jutting out into the Mediterranean blue. Beyond them lay Aleppo and Damascus, and, so the young conqueror believed, vast treasure, arms for a quarter of a million men, and the high roads to Constantinople and India. But in the roadstead off the little port lay two British ships of the line, their rigging grimly rising against the spring sky. It was a spectacle with which he was to grow strangely familiar during the next seven weeks.

For, thanks to Phelypeaux's genius for fortification and the naval guns and crews with which Sidney Smith stiffened the Turkish garrison, Acre proved surprisingly formidable. The ubiquitous British warships even captured Bonaparte's siege train as it crept up the coast from Egypt, embarked in gunboats. Its guns were promptly used by the indefatigable Smith against the French. Without them the ridiculous little fort with its 3000 shabby Turks and handful of British tars could not be battered into submission. Frontal assaults, however dashing, produced no results but casualties. There was nothing for it but to sit down and starve the place out. And this, owing to British
sea power, was more easily pro
posed than done.

In Europe and in India other
armies were marching. On March 1
st, 1799, the Directory, having received no answer from Austria to its ulti
matum, launched its attack. The
French crossed the Rhine with the old familiar confidence and, debouching from Switzerland, overran the Grisons. But on March 25 th, advancing through the Black Forest, Jourdan came up against the Archduke Charles at Stockach. He was repulsed with loss and forced to retreat.

The victory of the Imperialists broke the legend of Republican invincibility. During the next few weeks Bernadotte, Soult, Victor and Souham all suffered defeat in southern Germany, while
Mas
sena was forced to fall back in the Grisons. Since its defeat by Bonaparte, two years before,
the Austrian Army had been re-or
ganised: it now numbered a quarter of a million well-equipped men. The French Army, on the other hand, had been neglected and cheated by the politicians in Paris and subjected to the demoralising influence of living without war on a conquered countryside. With nearly
100,000
deserters from its colours and scattered over an immense area, it found itself faced for the first time by superior numbers.

Its weakness was greatest in Italy—the scene of its late glory— where Bonaparte's strategy of concentration had been abandoned for one of dispersal. The Directory's fiscal policy was defined in a memorandum on the occupied Papal States. " The Revolution at Rome has not yet been productive enough. The only course to take, so as to derive from it a more suitable return, is to consider and to treat the finances of the Roman State as the finances of the French Army."
¹
The latter, to enforce this extortion, was dissipated in dozens of little garrisons cut off from one another by mountain ranges and almost impassable tracks. On April
5th
old Scherer, who had taken the offensive with his depleted field army, was defeated by the Hungarian, Kray, at Magnano. Within a week the French had been driven across the Mincio and forced to retire behind the Adda.

Here they were assailed by a more formidable enemy. On March 3 rd the Russo-Turkish Fleet had taken Corfu. Six weeks later the advance guard of the Russian Army reached the Italian front under the command of the world-famous Marshal Suvorof. This barbaric genius—a Muscovite Elizabethan of sixty-nine strayed into the eighteenth century, hardy, valiant, eccentric almost at times to madness, who had never known defeat and lived only for war and the adoration of his rough soldiers—at once attacked with a fierceness and speed hitherto only equalled by Bonaparte. Forcing the line of the Adda on the
27th
,
he entered Milan two days later amid the acclamations of the populace. The entire French Army in Italy was in deadly danger.

Already in the south the French Parthenopean Republic was crumbling. At first the wise and conciliatory policy of the soldier, Championet, had partially won over the fickle
lazzaroni
of the capital. But the intrigues of thwarted contractors and venal agents had soon brought about his recall in favour of a more complacent

¹
Cambridge
Modern
History,
VIII,
638
.

commander. Immediately a swarm of harpies had settled on the hapless Republic, robbing the inhabitants of houses, lands and churches, cash, treasure and livestock. Incited by a warlike Cardinal named Ruffo and supplied by British cruisers, the peasants took up arms. When the news of the Allied successes in the north reached the French General Macdonald, his hold on the country became precarious. To save himself from encirclement he abandoned Naples on May 7th and, leaving small delaying garrisons behind him in the principal fortresses, retreated northwards.

Three days earlier, more than four thousand miles to the east, a British-Sepoy army stormed Seringapatam, capital of the great Mahommedan Power of Mysore. Ever since the French had begun to talk of an eastern expedition Tippoo Sahib, its ruler, had been scheming to drive the British from the Orient. A premature and boastful proclamation by the French Governor of Mauritius, with whom he had been corresponding, gave warning to the British authorities and led, in the summer of 1798, to the dispatch by Dundas of military reinforcements to the East. The alarm coincided with the arrival in Calcutta of a new Governor-General. An Irishman with an imperial vision rare among the English, the thirty-seven-year-old Earl of Mornington had at once resolved to abandon his predecessor's humdrum policy of non-intervention in Indian affairs and strike a resounding blow at Tippoo's French-trained army, before a Mahratta confederacy and the arrival of Bonaparte should bring the structure of Clive and Warren Hastings crashing to the ground. He therefore ordered General Harris to concentrate all available troops in Madras and prevailed on the Nizam of Hyderabad to join in alliance against Mysore.

By the end of 1798 Mornington had prepared a powerful and well-equipped army. He was fortunate in having the aid of his brother, Arthur Wellesley, who had been sent with his regiment to India a year earlier. This able and painstaking young man of twenty-nine possessed an unsuspected genius for planning war, perfectly adapted to a country without roads and normal means of supply. Too unassuming and well bred to arouse envy, the unknown Lieutenant-Colonel of the 33 rd Foot was the brain behind the preparations for the long march through the jungle to Tippoo's capital. His methods were epitomised in a sentence from his official

correspondence: " It is better to see and communicate the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise and to endeavour to overcome them than to be blind to everything but success till the moment of difficulty comes and then to despond."
¹
He had learnt his lesson since his campaign with the British Army in Holland.

As soon as Mornington heard from Nelson's overland courier of the Nile victory, he abandoned his waiting game and insisted that Tippoo should receive a British envoy. But that subtle Oriental, playing for time until Bonaparte should come, put off the peremptory Governor-General with excuses. Accordingly on February nth, 1799, Harris—a veteran of Bunker's Hill—crossed the Madras border into Mysore with 5,000 British troops and 16,000 Sepoys. He was joined by an army of 16,000 natives from Hyderabad, which Colonel Wellesley, in recognition of "judicious and masterly arrangements in respect of supplies," was seconded to command. A third army of 6,000 under James Stuart started from Bombay.

Tippoo Sahib had 50,000 men and the advantage of interior lines. By forced marches he surprised and almost overwhelmed Stuart at Periapatam on March 6th. But the unexpectedly rapid advance of the main British force from the west compelled him to face about. On the 22nd, engaged by the combined armies of Britain and Hyderabad at Malavelly, he broke off the fight rather than risk the loss of his guns, and retired behind the formidable fortifications of Seringapatam. He knew that no army could long maintain itself hundreds of miles from its base in the heart of southern India.

By the beginning of May the British-Sepoy forces had no other choice but starvation or retreat. Fording a swift river 300 yards wide—one of the most remarkable feats in the annals of war—they flung themselves at the breaches. By nightfall on the 4th the British flag was flying over
the
town. Little quarter was given, for by Tippoo's orders all the prisoners within the fortress had been massacred. Next morning the body of a corpulent, short-necked man with delicate hands and feet was found under a heap of dead in one of the gateways. It was the end of the robber dynasty of Hyder Ali. His country—almost the size of England—was divided between Hyderabad and the East India Company, while a puppet