The Years of Endurance (57 page)

¹
Supplementary
Despatches
and
Memoranda
of
the
Duke
of
Wellington,
1,
196.

representative of the old Hindu royal line was set to rule over the remainder. Arthur Wellesley stayed as Civil Administrator and Commander-in-Chief. His four years of rule—the beginning of British hegemony in southern India—was distinguished by an almost pedantic respect for native rights and customs and a welcome absence of plunder and exaction.

While the British storming parties were fighting their way into Seringapatam the man who had sailed a year before to conquer an Indian empire was still sulkily surveying the ramparts of Acre. " The who
le fate of the East," he said, ‘
hangs
from this little corner." Phely
peaux had been killed, a Turkish relief force routed at Mount Tabor
and the handful of defenders th
inned by casualties. But the flags of Turkey and England continued to fly over the fort and English warships to ride in the roadstead. In the first week of May the French made sixteen attempts to storm the place. On the 8th, spurred by the approach of a fleet of Turkish transports from Rhodes, they captured one of the towers. But Sidney Smith, throwing every seaman into the fight, saved the day. Two weeks later Bonaparte, having lost more than a quarter of his force in the sixty-two days' siege, made a final assault on the stinking, corpse-strewn ditches and, failing, threw his guns into the sea and retreated. The plague was in his camp and his men were mutinous. On May 25th he abandoned Jaffa, on the 29th Gaza, on June 2nd El Arish. At each place a trail of plague-stricken, dying Frenchmen testified to Smith's achievement. So did Bonaparte's angry gibes at the rash buffoon of a sea captain who had made him miss his destiny. " If it had not been for you English," he declared afterwards, " I should have been Emperor of the East. But wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in the way."

With the Russians and Austrians overrunning Bonaparte's conquests in Lombardy and Piedmont and French armies outnumbered on every front from the Rhine to the Campagna, the Republic was in greater danger than at any time since the dark days of 1793. The country was in the utmost confusion. In March, 1799, the flame of civil war had broken out again in the west and the Chouans had taken the field. The Directory were universally detested. In a despairing attempt to retrieve their fortunes, they sent Admiral Bruix, the brilliant young Minister of Marine, to Brest,
where a fleet had long been preparing, with orders to put to sea at any cost and, entering the Mediterranean, to shatter the British supremacy that had brought all these disasters on the Republic and rescue from Egypt Bonaparte—the one man who could save it.

Had the British intelligence system been better or had the Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet understood the full meaning of blockade, such orders would have been useless. But instead of keeping close to Ushant, Bridport, nursing his ships, kept station too far out. On April 25 th he was driven a dozen miles west of the island by a north-easter. That evening Bruix with twenty-five battleships and ten frigates escaped in the haze and, taking the Passage du Raz, steered for the south.

Bruix's escape imperilled the whole structure of British sea power in the Mediterranean. On it depended Allied military operations from Syria to Genoa and the cohesion of the Coalition. While Bridport mobilised every ship in home waters to defend the Irish coast, the French Fleet appeared off Cadiz where Lord Keith, with fifteen sail of the line, was blockading a superior Spanish force. Fortunately Bruix, doubting his unpractised crews' ability to cope with a westerly gale on a lee-shore, ran for the Straits. Here, on May 5th, St. Vincent, watching from Gibraltar, saw his ships gliding by like ghosts through the mist.

At that moment half the British Mediterranean Fleet was at the French Admiral's mercy. Duckworth with four battleships was off Minorca, Ball with three blockading Valetta, Sidney Smith with two opposing Bonaparte at Acre, Troubridge with four watching Naples, and Nelson with a solitary ship guarding the Neapolitan Royalties at Palermo. But Bruix after a fortnight at sea had had enough. With the reverberation of the guns at Aboukir haunting him, he saw himself not as a hunter but as the hunted. Instead of sweeping eastwards with the wind to overwhelm St. Vincent's scattered squadrons, he made for Toulon.

When he arrived on May 14th he found the Republic's danger slightly lessened. For Russian temperament and Austrian greed had given the army of Italy a breathing space. Suvorof after taking Milan had unaccountably paused for a week of junketing. The Aulic Council, intent on acquiring Italian territory, had insisted that the reduction of Lombard fortresses should precede pursuit of the enemy. Conseque
ntly
Moreau, superseding the defeated

Scherer, had been able to withdraw to the Genoese hills to cover Macdonald's retreat from the south. Here at the beginning of June Bruix sailed to join him at Vado Bay.

But though he brought urgently-needed supplies to Moreau's hungry troops, the French Admiral achieved nothing else. By his flight to Toulon and his prolonged stay there he had given the British Fleet time to mobilise. Nelson, on receipt of St. Vincent's warning, had given immediate orders to his scattered ships to assemble in the channel between Sicily and Africa, barring the way to Egypt. " I consider the best defence for his Sicilian Majesty's dominions," he wrote, " is to place myself alongside the French." St. Vincent, with Spanish connivance—for the wise old Admiral had been showing every courtesy to the weaker of his two enemies and intriguing with them against their bullying ally—managed, despite the easterly gale, to get an overland message to Keith to join him at Gibraltar. He was thus able to sail on May 25th with sixteen ships of the line to retrieve Duckworth from Minorca. Thence cruising midway between that island and the Catalan coast, he waited for the attempted junction of the French and Spanish Fleets.

Having failed to strike the blow which could alone have turned the tide of defeat in Italy, Bruix on June 6th sailed for Cartagena to join the Spaniards who had entered that port after Keith's withdrawal from Cadiz. But for St. Vincent's illness he would have encountered that which, when divided, he might have destroyed but which now, united, would undoubtedly have destroyed him— the British Fleet off Cape San Sebastian. Fortunately for Bruix, the old Admiral's health, long ailing, at that moment failed him. On June 2nd he handed over his command to Keith and teturned to Gibraltar. Keith, a good sailor and a brave fighter, lacked St. Vincent's moral stature. Haunted by fears for Minorca, he abandoned his cruising station to protect his base. When, three days later, after being reinforced from England, he returned, the French had passed. On the 22nd
they
entered Cartagena, sailing again on the 29th with sixteen Spanish battleships which they bore off as hostages for Spain's good behaviour. A week later, St. Vincent, waiting at Gibraltar for a ship to take him to England, saw Bruix's fleet for the second time passing the Straits.

Even before Bruix left the Mediterranean further disasters befell the French armies. On May 27
th Suvorof surprised Turin, cap
turing more than 250 guns, 80 mortars and 60,000 muskets. By the end of the first week of June the Russian outposts had reached the head of the Alpine passes looking into France. A week later the Calabrian patriots, supported by a British fleet, captured Naples. Then on June 17th Suvorof, ma
rching at high speed to cut Macdonal
d's fine of retreat on the Trebbia, defeated him in one of the hardest-fought and bloodiest battles of the war. During the pursuit over the mountains the Russians took 13,000 prisoners, including four Generals.

In Germany and Switzerland also the fortunes of France were crumbling. Here, as in Italy, the Aulic Council had forbidden a vigorous pursuit in order to secure fortresses. For Thugut and his Emperor had learnt nothing from the defeats of four years. They had still to grasp that the first fruits of victory depended on destroying the enemy's army. Yet despite these handicaps the patient Archduke was ready by the beginning of June to attack the lines of Zurich. Though his first assault was repelled, he forced Massena by the 7th to fall back, leaving the city and immense stores of arms in his hands. As the French withdrew and the puppet Government of Swiss traitors fled in their wake, the peasantry rose in the hills.

Such was the position at midsummer, 1799, less than eleven months after the deliverance of the Nile. Now 200,000 tired Frenchmen, dangerously spread out on a failing front from the Texel to Genoa, faced half again as many assailants commanded by two great masters of war. The Republic's attempt to restore the naval balance in the Mediterranean had failed, and beyond the narrow seas on her northern flank the untried Army of England was waiting its chance to attack.

For the conviction was growing that the hour for England's return to the Continent had come. Four years had passed since a British soldier had set foot on the European mainland save as a fugitive raider. During that time much had been done to make the Army a more effective force. By 1799 the folly of mortgaging the flower of the nation's manhood for sugar islands had at last dawned on the authorities. In five years 100,000 young Britons had been killed or permanently disabled by the Caribbean climate.

But in 1797 General Abercromby had laid the foundation of a less wasteful policy by raising a dozen negro regiments to garrison the islands. When the planters threatened to flog all who joined, the shrewd old Scot succeeded in obtaining Dundas's authority to enfranchise negro recruits—an important step in human betterment achieved, not for the last time in British colonial administration, through the exigencies of war and the courage of a liberal-minded soldier.

The Government, taught by bitter experience, endorsed the new system in defiance of vested interests. In the following year a thirty-eight-year-old Brigadier, Thomas Maitland, having taken over command at Mole St. Nicolas, entered into negotiations with the negro chieftain, Toussaint l'Ouverture, for a British evacuation of Santo Domingo. He had the sense to recognise that Toussaint and his dusky followers were as little friendly to the Republican authorities as they had been to the Royalist planters. By ceasing to make war on them and extending a hand of friendship, he won their gratitude and separated them from the French and Spaniards. His withdrawal from the island in October, 1798, was fiercely criticised by the West Indian slaveowners. But it saved the country thousands of precious lives.

Cornwallis's conciliatory Irish policy also lessened the strain on British man power. For the first time since the war began the Government was able to use its forces where it wanted instead of being compelled to hurry them where they were needed. In December, 1798, General Stuart, after his conquest of Minorca, had proposed the formation of a Mediterranean force to operate against the enemy's southern flank. Striking at French communications on the Genoese Riviera in the summer of 1799, it might have engulfed the armies of Moreau and Macdonald in irretrievable disaster.

But the Government, having other plans, ignored Stuart. Political and naval considerations demanded the employment of the Army nearer home. Russia and Prussia, whose active co-operation was the major concern of British diplomacy in the winter of 1798-9, were both traditionally interested in the former United Netherlands. To win over Prussia Britain had offered its Sovereign a preponderant influence in Dutch affairs and, in the last resort, even annexation. And when Prussian cowardice and jealousy of

Austria could not be overcome, Britain, with her eye on Russia, continued to make the expulsion of the French from Holland her first objective. For not only was it a natural meeting ground for British and Russian troops, but the menace of the Dutch coast still haunted the Admiralty.

On June 22nd, 1799, a treaty was signed by Britain and Russia for an immediate Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland. Britain was to provide 30,000 troops and find the money for 18,000 Russians. The hereditary Stadtholder of Holland and his son, the Prince of Orange, both exiles on English soil, assured the Cabinet that their countrymen would rise as one man against the French.

The project was linked up with a wider one for regrouping the Allied armies for a major offensive in the autumn. In Italy and Switzerland co-operation between Russia and Austria had been proving increasingly difficult. The half-crazed dictator of Russia, now in one of his recurrent moods of universal benevolence, was haunted by grandiloquent visions: of a holy league of all sovereign States to liquidate the Revolution, restore the pre-war international
status quo
(except in partitioned Poland) and re-unite Christendom. Alarmed by these, the
realpolitik
rulers of Austria, who neither wished to restore Piedmont to its Royal House nor exchange Venetia for Belgium, had forbidden the indignant Suvorof to press down the Alpine valleys into Savoy until he had reduced Mantua and the other Italian fortresses they coveted. In retaliation the Marshal had threatened to resign his command.

To resolve these discords it was decided to transfer Suvorof and his Russians to Switzerland, where they were to join a second Russian army, subsidised by England, which was due there in August under Korsakof. The Italian theatre was to be left to the Austrians, while the Archduke Charles was to march north to the defence of the Lower Rhine and so draw off French forces from Holland before the Anglo-Russian invasion.

This general post of commanders and armies in the middle of a campaign—bitterly opposed by the Archduke—was adopted at the moment that the French, rendered desperate by peril, were beginning to recover something of their old spirit. The murder of two of the, French delegates to the dissolving Congress of Rastadt in the spring by a troop of drunken Austrian hussars had roused a frenzy of hatred against Germany. During the summer the French