Chapter IV (1)

1793-1817.

THE WAR WITH THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: TOULON--CORSICA--EGYPT. THE NAPOLEONIC WAR: THE WEST INDIES.

During the early phases of the French Revolution the British Government assumed an attitude of strict neutrality in the internal affairs of France, and to this policy it adhered until January, 1793, when the excesses of the Jacobins, culminating in the judicial murder of Louis XVI., compelled England to join the coalition of Continental Powers which had taken up arms to restore order in France, and to safeguard their own dominions, threatened, and in some cases actually invaded by the troops of the Republic. The outbreak of war found the British army in a deplorable condition; it had in no way recovered from its disasters in America, and was “lax in its discipline, entirely without system and very weak in numbers. Each colonel of a regiment managed it according to his notions or neglected it altogether. There was no uniformity of drill or movement; professional pride was rare, professional knowledge still more so.... Every department was more or less inefficient. The regimental officers, as well as their men, were hard drinkers, the latter, under a loose discipline were addicted to marauding and to acts of licentious violence.”[84] The _physique_ was often as defective as the _morale_; some regiments were composed of lads too young to march, while in others the majority of the rank and file were old and worn-out men. A few thousand troops were hurried off to join the forces of the Allies who faced the French in Holland, and a fleet was sent to the Mediterranean under Lord Hood, with orders to co-operate with the adherents of the Monarchy, who were still numerous in the south of France. After Hood passed Gibraltar he bore up for Toulon, then as now one of the principal French naval ports.[85] In its harbour and dockyard lay many warships, commanded by Royalists who hated the Revolution and all its works, and manned by sailors many of whom agreed with the political opinions of their officers. As large numbers of the civilian population in the town shared his views, the Royalist admiral, in the hope of rescuing his country from the anarchy into which it was plunged, took the extreme step of entering into negotiations with Hood for the occupation of the port by the British. The horror inspired by the Revolution must have been deep indeed to induce an officer of high rank and unblemished reputation to think of such an arrangement with a nation regarded by every Frenchman as the hereditary enemy of his race. Since the Normans after conquering France had overrun and subdued England, hostilities between the two countries had been frequent, almost incessant; we had often raided the French coasts, and for a long time our kings held as their own the western half of France. In the hundred years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolution the divergent policy of their rulers had plunged the two countries into a series of five wars: their armies had encountered each other on innumerable battlefields in Germany and the Low Countries, in Spain, Canada and the West Indies: their fleets had met not only in the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, and the Channel, but in parts of the ocean as remote as the Gulf of Bengal and the Caribbean Sea; and bands of French adventurers in the service of the native princes of India had fought with the troops of the East India Company on the plains of Hindustan. Very bitter must have been the feelings of the Royalist officers when they agreed to make over to Hood the forts, the arsenal, the shipping, the docks, and the town of Toulon itself, on the understanding that this national property was to be held in trust for the son of Louis XVI., to whom it was duly to be restored when he ascended the throne. The French men-of-war were to be dismantled, but as a concession to sentiment, and to show that Toulon was not a conquered town but still formed part of the Kingdom of France, the white flag of the Bourbons was to float over its walls.

On August 27, 1793, Hood, who had been joined by a Spanish squadron, took possession of the forts. The landing party consisted of from twelve to fifteen hundred marines and soldiers who were serving on board the ships. There was no officer among them of rank higher than a captain; they had no tents, or stores, or field-guns, and even had they possessed the latter, there were no engineers or artillerymen to plan a battery or to lay a gun. Though the troops met with no active opposition, the attitude of many of the French sailors was so threatening that Hood decided to get rid of as many of them as he could, and selecting four of the least serviceable French vessels, he unshipped their guns and ammunition, and packed into them five thousand of the most troublesome republican seamen, with “safe conducts” for the French ports on the Atlantic seaboard. Having thus disposed of these “undesirables,” Hood applied to those of the Allied Powers whose territories lay in the basin of the Mediterranean for help to hold Toulon against the Republicans who were gathering against him, and by the beginning of November he had collected a very heterogeneous force of about 16,000 men. When our Ministers learned that Toulon was in the hands of the Allies they promised to send Hood large reinforcements; but neither the importance of the place as a base of operations against the Republicans, nor the difficulty of holding its land-locked harbour were adequately appreciated at home; and when more troops were required for our contingent in the Low Countries, for an expedition against the coast of Brittany, and for a raid upon the French islands in the West Indies, the expected reinforcements dwindled to seven hundred and fifty men from Gibraltar, who reached Toulon on the 27th of October. At the beginning of the war the regiments were so weak that this handful of troops included the XVIIIth Royal Irish,[86] the second battalion of the Royals, and detachments of Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery. The exact strength of the XVIIIth is not known, but as on the 25th of June, 1793, there were only two hundred and eighty-three officers and men at the Rock, and as a certain number of sick were left in hospital when the Royal Irish went on active service, the captains must have commanded companies no larger than the sections of the present day. The reinforcements from Gibraltar raised the strength of the British to about 2000 of all ranks; their allies consisted of 6500 Spaniards, 4700 Neapolitans, 1500 Piedmontese, and about the same number of French Royalists.

An army made up of contingents from several nations is necessarily less effective than one formed of soldiers of the same race. Hereditary ill-feeling, professional jealousy, and the want of a common language combine to lessen its value as a fighting machine, unless the General-in-Chief possesses a personality as commanding as that of Marlborough or Wellington. At Toulon none of the senior officers of the Allies were men of genius, and it is doubtful whether even a great soldier, with so curiously composed a force, could have withstood the savage energy that Napoleon, then a young officer of artillery on his first campaign, infused into the Generals commanding the besieging troops. The contingents of the Allies were of very uneven value. The British were excellent, though their courage was not yet thoroughly disciplined; the Piedmontese were very good; the French Royalists, though brave, naturally disliked to fight their republican fellow-countrymen, much as they loathed their political principles; the Spaniards frequently deserted their posts when threatened by a vigorous attack, and the Neapolitans were cowards of the deepest dye. Sir Gilbert Elliot, the diplomatic representative of Britain in the Mediterranean expedition, describes how a party of Neapolitans behaved on outpost. After four of them had been killed in a skirmish, the remainder sent to the officer in charge of the section “to beg to be relieved as they were all _sick_!” With such allies it is not surprising to learn that “no post was considered safe without a proportion of British troops, and they were obliged to be divided and thin-sowed accordingly.”[87] Whether from genuine illness, from unfitness for the hardships of active service, or from overwork, the sick list was enormous, and the Generals could never count on more than 11,000 or 12,000 effectives--far too few for the heavy duty they had to perform. To prevent the enemy from planting batteries on the hills commanding the harbour, the Allies were forced to hold a perimeter of fifteen miles, guarded by eight main works with a number of subsidiary connecting posts; and nine thousand men were constantly employed at the outposts, with a reserve of three thousand in the town, to overawe the disaffected part of the population and to reinforce any threatened point.

Up to the time of the arrival of the XVIIIth there had not been much fighting, for the French were engaged in mounting guns, and were not yet in strength to attempt a _coup-de-main_. When the Royal Irish landed they were marched up to the front, but were engaged in no affair of importance until the 30th of November, when they took part in a sortie against a large battery placed by Napoleon himself on the Aresnes heights, from which one of our principal works was commanded. The assaulting column, formed of 400 British, 300 Piedmontese, 600 Neapolitans, 600 Spaniards, and 400 French Royalists, was commanded by General O’Hara, one of the staff at Gibraltar, who had landed at Toulon with the XVIIIth. The instructions he issued were explicit. When the troops reached the plain at the foot of the heights, the column was to break into four detachments, the British on the left, and on reaching the summit they were to capture the battery, occupy the heights, and then stand fast; on no account whatever were they to follow the enemy in pursuit. After making their way, first through a belt of olive-trees intersected by stone walls, and then up a steep mountain cut into terraces of vineyards, the Allies gained the crest, surprised the French, and drove them headlong out of the battery. Had they remembered their orders the success would have been complete, for the guns could have been rolled down the height and carried back to Toulon; but unfortunately the men got out of hand, and dashed madly after the retreating French down a valley and up a hill on the other side, scattering in all directions as they pursued their flying foes. They had lost all vestige of cohesion when they were charged by formed bodies of the enemy, whose counter-stroke changed our victory into a defeat. General O’Hara was wounded and captured; and of the four hundred British engaged, twelve officers and about two hundred other ranks were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The survivors fell back to the battery and attempted to hold it, but being unsupported by their Continental comrades had finally to retreat into Toulon, though not before they had spiked six guns.

During the next fortnight the volume of the enemy’s fire increased daily; fresh batteries were unmasked in various directions, and everything tended to confirm the reports of spies and deserters that the French, now about 40,000 strong, were preparing for an attack in force. The preliminary bombardment began at 2 A.M. on the 16th of December, when Napoleon concentrated the fire of five batteries upon Fort Mulgrave, one of the most important of the western series of redoubts. It was held by a mixed force: a body of Spaniards occupied the northern half of the work; the southern was in charge of a detachment of British, under Captain W. Conolly, Royal Irish Regiment. By the end of the day the redoubt was in ruins, with half its garrison of seven hundred men disabled; at two o’clock in the morning of the 17th the French advanced against it, but though in overpowering force, for half an hour they made no progress till the Spaniards were seized with panic and left the British in the lurch. The enemy had begun to occupy the northern end of the work, when Conolly, though himself hard pressed, sent a subaltern and thirty-six men to retake it. With splendid courage this handful of soldiers drove back the Republicans, and for a time kept them at bay; but soon the weight of numbers began to tell, the survivors of the detachment were forced backwards, and at four o’clock the “remnants of the XVIIIth” were ousted from Fort Mulgrave. An hour or two later the French, breaking through the line of fortifications at a second point, carried Mont Faron, a hill 1800 feet high, which from the north partly commands the harbour and the town. On the enemy’s side of this mountain the slopes are steep and rocky; and as much labour had been expended in increasing their natural difficulties, Faron was considered so impregnable that only four hundred and fifty men were employed to guard its two miles of frontage. At daylight every work upon this hill was attacked and, though none of the British posts were driven in, the French poured through the gaps left by the Spaniards and Neapolitans, and established themselves upon the shoulder of Mont Faron from which Toulon is overlooked.

A disaster such as this had long been foreseen by the senior officers of the British land forces. General O’Hara, and his successor General David Dundas, had frequently represented to Lord Hood the impossibility of making a prolonged defence with so inadequate and so inefficient a garrison as that at his disposal; they had pointed out that if one of the main works should be lost there were no fresh troops with which to recapture it, and that once any part of the line was pierced the harbour and the fleet would be exposed to the enemy’s artillery; and they therefore urged that arrangements should be made beforehand for the orderly and systematic evacuation of the place when it became untenable. But Lord Hood was strongly prejudiced against soldiers: throughout his career he had slighted their advice, and he took no steps to prepare for the retreat which the Generals warned him was inevitable, with the result that when all hope of holding the place was gone nothing was in readiness for the retirement, and nearly the whole of the 17th was spent in settling details with the naval and military officers of the different nations. To organise the evacuation was no easy task; not only were there four thousand sick and wounded to be embarked, but room had to be found on the transports or the men-of-war for thousands of Royalists whom it was impossible to abandon to the vengeance of their republican fellow-countrymen; the French ships had to be burned or towed out of harbour, and the arsenal and dockyard to be destroyed. After many hours of weary discussion it was agreed that the embarkation of the troops should begin at 11 P.M. on the 18th; the least important posts were to be withdrawn early, others were to be held to the last moment. The scheme, which required absolute obedience to orders, was nearly wrecked by the Neapolitans, whose misconduct Elliot thus described in a despatch to Government--

“ ... These arrangements were made on the 17th before dinner.
Without notice to any person concerned the Neapolitan officers
packed up their baggage, and crowded the streets and quays with
their preparations for departing on the evening of the 17th.
Their baggage was actually sent on board, their general actually
embarked that evening, and the troops, quitting every post where
they were stationed, continued their embarcation publicly from
the quays of the town, from the evening of the 17th to the middle
of the next day. Their eagerness, impatience and panic were so
great on the 18th, in the forenoon, that the embarcation of the
inhabitants was rendered not only difficult but dangerous, the
Neapolitan soldiers firing on those boats which they could not
get admission to. Many of themselves were drowned in attempting
to crowd into the boats, and there was a temporary appearance of
confusion and insurrection in the town. The Neapolitan Admiral
seems to have been in as great haste as the military. He sailed
long before either the British or Spanish squadrons and, without
waiting to make any arrangement about either troops or refugees,
pushed off for Naples, leaving a good number of Neapolitan
troops on board our fleet to find their way home as well as they
can.”[88]

Until nearly all the allied troops were embarked the British and Piedmontese remained resolutely at their posts, which they did not quit until recalled into the town to cover the operations of the sailors, who were burning the arsenal and setting fire to the French ships. When the outposts were withdrawn the French crowded into Toulon, and by the light of the flames shot heavily at the blue-jackets, busy at the work of devastation, in which they were helped by a party of the XVIIIth, commanded by Ensign W. Iremonger, one of the two land officers employed on this dangerous duty. For a time a musketry fight raged; then at the appointed hour the soldiers gradually withdrew to their boats, gained their ships, and in two or three hours the whole of the allied fleet was safely out to sea. Though Hood’s operations on land utterly failed to advance the cause of the Royalists, and though he did not succeed in destroying the arsenal completely, or in burning all the enemy’s ships, he undoubtedly inflicted a serious, though not a crushing blow to the naval power of France in the Mediterranean by his operations at Toulon. When he took possession of the town he found floating in its harbour or building in its dockyard fifty-eight men-of-war of various sizes: thirty-three he annexed or burned to the water’s edge, the remaining twenty-five he was obliged to leave behind him, to become the nucleus of a new fleet. The price paid in human flesh and blood for this success cannot be stated, for the losses of the Allies are not to be traced, and the British returns, as far as they were published in despatches, are incomplete, and in the case of the Royal Irish do not agree with the muster-roll made a week after the evacuation. In it appear the names of three sergeants, one corporal, and thirty-four privates who were killed or died during the siege; and one officer, Lieutenant George Minchin, two sergeants, two drummers, one corporal, and thirty-two privates missing.[89] In the unsuccessful sortie of the 30th of November twenty-four rank and file of the regiment were wounded; how many were injured in the daily fighting at the outposts and in the defence of Fort Mulgrave and Mont Faron cannot be ascertained, but it is clear that the Royal Irish played a distinguished part in the operations, and in proportion to their numbers lost very heavily.

As soon as the allied fleet was clear of the harbour of Toulon it dispersed: the Spaniards and the Neapolitans made sail respectively for the Balearic Isles and Naples, while Hood put into the bay of Hyères, a few miles east of Toulon, where he tried to evolve order out of the chaos produced by the hurried embarkation of the troops, and to obtain fresh provisions of which he was in great need. Unwilling to weaken himself by sending British vessels to buy food in the ports of Italy and Spain, he employed upon this service several of the French ships, which, in theory at least, were still under the orders of the Royalist admiral. British infantry were sent on board them as marines, the XVIIIth furnishing a strong detachment under Lieutenant Mawby, who on going on board the _Pompée_ found that she was still flying the Royalist flag, and was commanded by French naval officers. The duty was heavy, and the cruise must have been a very unpleasant one, for guards had to be mounted in every part of the vessel to keep her crew from breaking into open mutiny. In one respect, however, Mawby and his companions were better off than their comrades at headquarters, for they escaped the overcrowding caused by the presence of thousands of Royalists in the ships at Hyères. Sir Gilbert Elliot mentions that in the cabin he shared with several naval officers, twenty luckless French refugees, men, women, and children slept huddled together on the floor; and if no better quarters could be provided for the diplomatic representative of England, it is easy to imagine that regimental officers must have been hideously uncomfortable.

At this time England had no possessions in the Mediterranean east of Gibraltar, for Minorca, lost to her in 1782, was not recovered till some years later. Yet to watch Toulon and the southern coast of France, and to encourage the various Italian States to fight for their independence which was already threatened by the armies of the Republic, it was essential that England should possess an advanced naval and military base in the Mediterranean. Such a post awaited us in Corsica, where the inhabitants had profited by the turmoil of the Revolution to rise against their French masters, whom they had driven into the north of the island. The garrison had flung themselves into the fortified coast towns of Bastia and Calvi, and the works fringing the bay of S. Fiorenzo, and the Corsicans soon realised that without professional soldiers, cannon, and munitions of war, they could not hope to take these places, while without a fleet it was impossible to prevent reinforcements from the mainland reaching their enemy. When both parties to a bargain are eager to come to terms negotiations are easy, and the islanders willingly agreed to become subjects of George III., provided that a constitution framed on that of England was granted to them. As soon as the arrangements for the annexation of the island were completed Hood left his anchorage at Hyères, where for five weeks the French had allowed him to remain unmolested, and made for the bay of S. Fiorenzo, at the western base of the great northern promontory of Corsica.[90] Driving the French from their defences, he forced them to fall back on Bastia, their foothold on the eastern coast; then leaving some of the troops at S. Fiorenzo, he sailed for Bastia, already closely blockaded by Nelson’s frigates and cut off from communication with the interior by the Corsicans, who excelled in all kinds of partisan warfare. Neither Hood’s ships nor the troops accompanying them were at this time in a satisfactory condition: his crews were so weak that he had tried to borrow sailors from the Neapolitan fleet, but without success; and the soldiers numbered little more than two thousand men, who were very ill provided for a campaign, as most of their camp equipage, baggage, and knapsacks had been left behind at Toulon. A board sat in Corsica to investigate the circumstances in which this loss--a very heavy one to the men--had been incurred, and recommended that £2 should be paid to each sergeant and £1 to each private soldier, adding that though this would not compensate the men for their kit, it was as much as Government could be reasonably expected to give.

Though Hood, as a sailor, was unversed in the military branches of the art of war, he decided after a reconnaissance of Bastia that it would be possible for the troops to carry the defences by a sudden assault from the land side of the town. Dundas, who though cautious by temperament was an educated soldier of much experience, condemned the project as beyond the powers of his small and ill-equipped force, and this difference of opinion at once intensified the friction already existing between the Admiral and the General. Unable to agree on a plan of operations, Hood and Dundas summoned conferences and councils of war, at which no decision was reached; and their relations became so strained that they ceased to meet, transacting business by means of formal and acrimonious correspondence. Throughout the army the question was hotly debated, and Bastia was reconnoitred by many officers, the large majority of whom became converts to Dundas’s opinions. Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, who commanded the XVIIIth, was one of the few in favour of an attack, but his views do not appear to have been supported by convincing arguments, for Sir John Moore (then Lieutenant-Colonel Moore, 51st regiment) recorded in his diary that “Wemyss conceives it would be mighty easy to take them” (_i.e._, the heights commanding the land fortifications), “but cannot explain how, and talks so like a boy that little weight can be given to his opinion.”[91] Hood’s conduct towards the General and the troops became so intolerable that Dundas took the unjustifiable step of resigning his command and returning to England. Not long after his departure reinforcements reached the officer in temporary command of the army, whose offer to co-operate in the operations was contemptuously rejected by Lord Hood; and thus, when on May 24th the garrison of 4500 men surrendered, the success was due to the Navy, whose blockading vessels had fairly starved the French into submission, while, with the exception of some artillerymen and the troops serving on the warships as marines, the land forces were hardly employed in the reduction of Bastia.

The only place in Corsica now remaining in the occupation of the French was Calvi, a well-fortified town on the western coast. Lieutenant-General the Hon. Charles Stuart, who on the day of the surrender of Bastia had arrived from England to replace Dundas, lost no time in reorganising his command, and then reconnoitred Calvi, where he was followed by Moore, who had been placed in command of a corps termed “the reserve,” and formed of the flank companies of the Royal Irish, the 50th, 51st, and the remains of the 2nd battalion of the Royals. Calvi was by no means an easy place to besiege, for it was surrounded on three sides by the sea and had good interior fortifications, with outer works of considerable strength. About eight hundred yards west of the town stood the Mozello, a bomb-proof, star-shaped fort, built of solid masonry and mounting ten guns; north of this fort was a smaller battery, flanked by an entrenchment, and to the east rose another battery of three guns. Two thousand yards south-west of the town the fort of Monteciesco commanded the approaches from the southward, which were also swept by the guns of two French frigates anchored in the bay. But though these works were formidable, Stuart considered that the “real strength of the defence lay in the height of the mountains and the rugged, rocky country over which it was necessary to penetrate. It was necessary to abandon regular approaches and to adopt rapid and forward movements.” He accordingly decided to bombard Fort Monteciesco with three 26-prs., and under cover of their fire to throw up a heavier battery at night within seven hundred and fifty yards of the Mozello. The labour of moving the guns, ammunition, and stores was immense, for roads had to be cut up the sides of steep hills nine hundred feet in height, and the cannon to be dragged by hand over the cliffs that overhang the landing-place. At the end of June more troops were brought round from Bastia; among them were the Royal Irish, recently reinforced by the return of the _Pompée_ detachment, which rejoined in time to share in the fatigues and dangers of the siege.

On the evening of the 6th of July,[92] the Royal Irish were ordered to make a feigned attack on Monteciesco to draw the attention of the enemy from Moore’s column, which was preparing to throw up the battery against the Mozello. The ruse was successful; the XVIIIth showed themselves so ostentatiously that the French not only turned all their fire upon them, but reinforced Monteciesco with a body of men who had been posted on the very spot where Moore proposed to place his guns. By dint of great efforts the last of Moore’s 26-prs. was dragged into position just before daybreak, thus raising the number of ordnance playing upon Calvi to eleven guns and three mortars, whose fire forced the French to evacuate Monteciesco and move their warships out of range. Stuart then bombarded Mozello assiduously; the French replied with equal vigour; for some days our shot appeared to make little impression on the fort, but on the 18th of July the breach was reported to be practicable, and orders were issued for its assault that night. To conceal the real object of his movements, he arranged that an advance battery should be built in the night in order that the French might think the concentration of troops was merely for the protection of the working party. The task was entrusted to the 50th, who, undiscovered by the enemy, threw up the battery, and then, to quote the words of the despatch, “the Grenadiers, Light Infantry and 2nd Battalion Royals under Lieutenant-Colonel Moore of the 51st Regiment and Major Brereton of the 30th Regiment proceeded with a cool steady confidence and unloaded arms towards the enemy, forced their way through a smart fire of musketry, and regardless of live shells flung from the breach or the additional defence of pikes, stormed the Mozello” ... while “Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, equally regardless of opposition carried the enemy’s battery on the left without firing a shot.” In Sir John Moore’s diary fuller details of this spirited affair are to be found. The various corps assembled at their rendezvous at 1 A.M. on the 19th: the Royal Irish were to attack the half moon (or Fountain) battery on the left, while “the reserve” stormed the Mozello. In ground dead to the fort, though only two or three hundred yards distant from it, Moore formed the grenadiers and light infantry (among whom, it will be remembered, were the flank companies of the XVIIIth) into a column of companies.

“Each grenadier carried a sandbag, and we had a sufficient number
of ladders (about fourteen in all). Here we waited for the signal
which was to be a gun from the new battery. The General came to
me about half-past three. About this time some of the enemy’s
sentries or piquets fired upon the XVIIIth upon our left, and
soon after the signal to advance was given. The General kept for
some time at the head of the Grenadiers. A party of artificers a
little in our front began to cut the palisades, but we were upon
them before they could effect it. Captain McDonald, who commanded
the Royal Grenadiers,[93] and I got through the palisades first
at an opening made by our shot. The men instantly followed, and
giving a cheer, ran up to the bottom of the breach. We were
annoyed both by shot, hand-grenades, and live shells, which the
enemy had placed on the parapet and rolled over upon us. Luckily
neither sand-bags nor ladders were necessary. The Grenadiers
advanced with their bayonets with such intrepidity that the
French gave way and ran out of the fort--and in a moment the
place was filled with the five companies of Grenadiers. Two
companies of Light Infantry had been ordered to move quickly
round the foot of the fort and get between the enemy and the
town, but the Grenadiers stormed so briskly that the Light
Infantry could not arrive in time: by this means most of them
escaped.”

The Royal Irish lost no time in entrenching themselves in the Fountain battery, and worked so well that when at daybreak the enemy opened with grape and round shot the cannonade did them little harm.

Stuart had every reason for wishing to bring the operations to a close, for though his casualties were small, bad food, excessive fatigue, and a pestilential climate had so devastated the camp that by the middle of July two-thirds of his men were in hospital, and the remainder were breaking down at an alarming rate. The large number of sailors who were serving on shore under Nelson were in equally bad case, and the necessity of watching the French at Toulon made it impossible to replace them from the fleet. In the hope that the loss of their principal outworks had shaken the spirit of the French, General Stuart sent word to the garrison that he was prepared to offer them favourable terms; but when Casabianca, their commander, refused to negotiate, he pressed forward his siege-works so fast that on July 31, thirteen heavy guns, four mortars, and three howitzers were in position within six hundred yards of the walls of the town. So effective was their fire that on the 1st of August Casabianca asked for a suspension of hostilities, undertaking to yield in nine days if during that time he was not relieved from France, and as no help arrived the nine hundred men of the garrison surrendered on the 10th. In recognition of their spirited defence of Calvi, which had lasted for fifty-one days, they were granted excellent terms; they marched out with all the honours of war; they retained their side-arms; and they were sent back to France, free to serve against us again as soon as they pleased. The capture of Calvi only cost the British ninety killed and wounded, and the losses of the XVIIIth were proportionately small. Lieutenant W. Byron, whose death assured to his young relative, the future poet, the succession to the peerage, was killed; Lieutenant-Colonel D. D. Wemyss and Lieutenant W. Johnston were wounded; five rank and file were killed, one sergeant and seven rank and file wounded.[94] Yet so greatly had the regiment suffered during the siege from exposure and malarial fever, that when it marched into Calvi its effectives consisted of two officers, four sergeants, and seventy-one rank and file, and though the capitulation brought active operations to an end the losses by disease did not cease. Malaria had taken so firm a hold of the Royal Irish that including those who were killed or died of wounds or sickness during the siege, four officers, nine sergeants, six corporals, and a hundred and fifty-five private soldiers perished during the first nine months the regiment was in Corsica.[95] The mortality was at its height during the month of August, when seventy non-commissioned officers and men died.

Nothing is known of the doings of the XVIIIth during the remainder of our short occupation of Corsica, except that several of the officers were employed on the staff: one of them, Major (afterwards Lieutenant-General Sir H. T.) Montresor, after acting as Governor of Calvi, was placed in command of a battalion of islanders, one of the corps raised for local defence by Sir Gilbert Elliot, who had been appointed Viceroy of Corsica by the Government at home. The lives of the officers left at regimental duty must have been singularly dull, as there was so little communication with England that letters or papers rarely reached the island, and even the Ministry, apparently forgetful of the existence of their new possession, often allowed months to pass without communicating with Elliot. Some amount of cynical amusement, however, was to be derived from studying the mental attitude of the population, who, at first delighted to find themselves British subjects, soon grew weary of the restraints of law and order enforced upon them by their new rulers. The Corsicans watched with ever increasing pride the victories in Italy of their young compatriot, Napoleon Bonaparte; they realised that the English and their Allies made no headway against France on land, and they appreciated the importance of Spain’s change of policy, when after deserting the coalition against the Republic she placed her Mediterranean fleet at the disposal of our enemy. They gradually came to the conclusion that in annexing themselves to the British they had joined the losing side, and when the French troops overran Tuscany and seized upon Leghorn, the Corsicans began to give Elliot broad hints that they wished to see the last of him and his garrison of red-coats. The presence of the French in Leghorn, the principal port of Tuscany, was a direct menace to us in Corsica; and as a counterstroke Elliot threw troops into Porto Ferraio, the capital of the little island of Elba, half way between Bastia and Leghorn. To the Duke of Tuscany, part of whose dominions Elliot had thus occupied, the Viceroy justified himself by pointing out that as Tuscany had been unable to defend her territory on the mainland she would have been equally impotent to keep the French out of Elba.

In the autumn of 1796, the British Government, alarmed at the combination of the French and Spanish fleets, determined to recall their forces from the Mediterranean, and the order for the evacuation of Corsica was conveyed to Elliot by a despatch, wherein the abandonment of the island was described in the stilted language of the period as “the withdrawal of the blessing of the British Constitution from the people of Corsica.” As a preliminary to the general retirement the troops had to be concentrated at Elba; and the embarkation of the garrison of Bastia, which included some, if not all, of the Royal Irish, was effected in very dramatic circumstances. When Nelson arrived off the port on October 14, he found the town in wild confusion: a committee of virulent Anglophobists had seized the reins of power, and their adherents were virtually masters of the place; British property had been confiscated; British merchant ships were forcibly detained in harbour; a plot was on foot to make the Viceroy a prisoner, and the General, de Burgh, had withdrawn the garrison into the citadel, where they had been followed by large numbers of armed men who insisted on falling in with the guards and sentries at every post. By threatening to blow the town to pieces, Nelson succeeded in releasing the captured shipping and in saving public and private property valued at two hundred thousand pounds; but though the soldiers and sailors slaved night and day their work was by no means finished when, on the night of the 18th, news arrived that French troops had landed and were marching rapidly on Bastia, while the Spanish fleet was reported to be only sixty miles distant. Even Nelson realised that nothing more could be done: the troops began to move down to the boats, while the guns were spiked by Mawby, an officer of the XVIIIth, who with the grenadier company of the regiment had just been brought back from detachment on the neighbouring islet of Capreja. Though a heavy gale of wind was blowing and the sea was very high every soldier was safely embarked; and not too soon, for as the last boat pushed off from the shore the French advance-guard began to enter the citadel.

The resources of Elba were insufficient to meet the requirements of her suddenly increased population, and at first she drew largely from Piombino, the port of the district known as the Maremma of Tuscany. By garrisoning the town of Piombino and the villages in its neighbourhood, the French so effectually cut off this source of supply that at the beginning of November Elliot and de Burgh determined to make an effort to reopen communication with the mainland of Italy, and sent a column, chiefly composed of the Royal Irish, to drive the enemy from Piombino and the surrounding country.[96] The expedition is briefly mentioned by the Viceroy in a letter of November 6, 1796, where he says, “We take Piombino this evening. This will be the last act of my reign, and in truth the measure of Porto Ferraio was not complete without it. I shall then feel very happy about our supplies.”[97] No account of the operations is to be found in the printed bulletins or among the documents at the Record Office; but fortunately some details have been preserved in the Royal Military Calendar, in a précis of the services of General Montresor. Brevet-Colonel D. D. Wemyss, XVIIIth, was in command of the column which was composed of the Royal Irish,[98] under Montresor, then a lieutenant-colonel; two companies of de Roll’s Swiss regiment, one of the many corps of continental mercenaries raised at that time by Great Britain, and a detachment of artillery. These troops were embarked on three frigates, which anchored off Piombino early on November 7; Montresor was at once sent on shore to summon the Governor, who after some hesitation agreed to surrender, and without loss of time the soldiers landed. While Wemyss was taking measures to secure Piombino and to improvise transport for his men his heart must have sunk within him. Outside the walls of the town there were hardly any signs of life; autumnal rains had flooded the country in every direction; a few stone buildings, half farm, half fortress, rose like islands out of the water; thick woods concealed the villages on the neighbouring hills, whither for centuries the inhabitants of the Maremma have betaken themselves at night to avoid sleeping on the fever-stricken plain. After a few hours’ hard work Montresor, with a detachment of five hundred men and three field-guns, marched to attack the garrison of Campiglia, a village ten miles off. The country was inundated for three miles, but

“the hedges and trees on either side of the road being their
guide the British waded through, though the buffalos attached
to their guns had twice knocked up. On approaching the town the
Lieutenant-Colonel sent his light company under Captain Dunlop
by another road to cut off the enemy’s picquets from the town,
and to enter it by the Leghorn road, both of which were executed;
after exchanging a few shots with the enemy’s outposts, finding
the British in their rear, they were compelled to disperse
in the woods, which left the town open to complete surprise,
inasmuch, that in front of his advance guard, at one o’clock
after midnight, Lieut.-Colonel Montresor got into the town with
a confidential servant unperceived, and personally seized an
orderly French dragoon going with despatches to the garrison of
Castiglione from the Commandant of Campiglia to announce the
British having landed at Piombino: the entrance to the town was
conducted with so much silence and arrangement that the Royal
Irish Grenadiers reached the French main guard just as the enemy
were turning out under arms, and rushing on them compelled them
to lay down their arms, while the Commandant, (whose quarters
were over the main guard), escaped by dropping out of his window
over the town walls, leaving his supper, (which he had deferred
to this late hour) on the table, and which was finished by the
British officers when the prisoners were secured and the British
patrols and picquets had been placed.

“Colonel Wemyss having proceeded to attack Castiglione,
Lieut.-Colonel Montresor secured his post so effectually that
during three months the strong garrison of Leghorn never molested
them. This little expedition being effectually accomplished, and
the troops of Elba having formed their depôts, the British force
was ordered back to Elba.”

Much had happened while the Royal Irish were on the mainland of Italy. In November the fleet had been obliged to go to Gibraltar for stores, and at the end of the year Nelson had reappeared at Elba with orders from the Admiral, Sir John Jervis (afterwards Lord St Vincent), to embark the naval establishment and rejoin him in the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson, however, brought no instructions for de Burgh, and when he suggested that as the Navy had abandoned the Mediterranean it was useless for the troops to remain in Elba, the brave old general, though much perplexed at the situation, decided not to quit his post without orders from his military superiors. Nelson therefore had no option but to abandon de Burgh and his three thousand troops to their fate, and leaving transports enough for the whole of the garrison, and a few vessels with which to keep up communication with the mainland, he rejoined Jervis early in February, 1797. But neither Jervis nor Nelson forgot that a detachment of the British army was marooned in a little island off the coast of Tuscany in imminent danger of capture by the French, and soon after the great naval victory of Cape St Vincent, Nelson dashed back into the Mediterranean, ascertained that de Burgh and his troops were safe, and convoyed them safely to Gibraltar. The Royal Irish landed at the end of April or the beginning of May,[99] and formed part of the garrison of the Rock until, two years later, they again were embarked for active service.

Though the failure of the expedition to Holland in the winter of 1799 had added one more to the list of our unsuccessful enterprises against the French on the continent of Europe, the spring of 1800 found preparations on foot in England for another effort on land against the Republic. Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby, with twenty thousand men, was to disembark on the coast of Italy near Genoa, occupy the maritime Alps, and by cutting the lines of communication between Italy and France relieve the pressure on the Austrians, who faced the French on the plains of Lombardy. Owing, however, to the fear of a Franco-Spanish invasion of Portugal and the consequent loss of the Tagus as a friendly port, a large proportion of Abercromby’s force was kept back to defend Lisbon in case of need, and when Sir Ralph reached Port Mahon, the capital of Minorca, which since its recapture in 1798 had become our advanced post in the Mediterranean, he had only six thousand men available for active operations. He found despatches awaiting him from General Melas, the Austrian Commander-in-Chief in Italy, begging that British troops might be sent to Genoa, which, after a heroic defence by the French under Massena, had recently surrendered to the Austrians. Melas himself was unable to garrison it adequately: would Abercromby therefore do so? Ordering four thousand men, among whom were the XVIIIth Royal Irish, 571 strong, to follow him, Abercromby sailed at once, but on the voyage learned that at Marengo Napoleon had defeated the Austrians, who were retreating all along their line, and had evacuated Genoa. After definitely ascertaining that co-operation with Melas had become impossible, he returned to Minorca, where for many weeks the expedition awaited fresh orders from home. During the halt Abercromby, with the help of Moore who commanded one of his brigades, devoted himself to the improvement of the troops. He strengthened their discipline, made their equipment suitable for active service, and cut down the personal baggage of officers and men to the articles absolutely necessary for a campaign. While he was at Minorca reinforcements gradually reached him, including a body of three thousand eight hundred men who had been on the point of attacking Belle Isle, off the western coast of France, when they were hurriedly diverted to the Mediterranean. Thus, when at the end of August instructions reached him to make a raid against the Spanish port of Cadiz, Abercromby, after providing an adequate garrison for Minorca, was able to embark between ten and eleven thousand men.

A fortnight was spent on the voyage to Gibraltar, where on September 19, he was joined by a large number of troops under Lieutenant-General Sir James Pulteney, the Colonel of the Royal Irish regiment.[100] Pulteney had been sent from England to destroy Ferrol, a naval station on the north-west coast of Spain. He had landed, driven the Spaniards back to the shelter of their works, and then discovered that the Government had sent him on a fool’s errand. Ferrol was well armed and fortified, and as he was not nearly strong enough to attack it, he wisely abandoned the enterprise, re-embarked his men, and made sail for the Rock of Gibraltar.[101] Thanks to Pulteney’s arrival, Abercromby’s command now consisted of about twenty thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry and artillerymen, and in a few days a fleet of a hundred and thirty British men-of-war and troop-ships appeared before Cadiz, the most important naval harbour in the south of Spain. In the conduct of this expedition the General had by no means a free hand, for the Ministry, while ordering him to attack Cadiz, seize the arsenal, and destroy its docks and shipping, emphatically enjoined upon him not to run much risk, and not to land his troops unless he was confident that he could re-embark them safely. Operations conducted on such lines were doomed to failure. After much discussion with the naval authorities, a few thousand troops, including the XVIIIth, were crowded into boats and started for the shore, only to be recalled in a few minutes to their respective vessels, for the Admiral finally declined to guarantee their safe return to the ships if once they landed. After a fruitless paper war between Abercromby and his naval colleague the whole fleet made sail, successful only in having covered itself with ridicule. In a few hours a great storm arose: the ships were driven in every direction along the coast of Morocco, where for many days they tossed and rolled in a tempestuous sea until the weather moderated and they reached Gibraltar.

During this storm, and indeed during the whole of the many months that Abercromby’s command spent on board ship, the sufferings of the troops were great. The transports were so leaky that when it rained the men were constantly wet; so crowded that there was often not room on the decks for all to lie down at the same time; so ill-provided that the soldiers had no bedding, no covering other than their regimental blankets if, indeed, they were lucky enough to possess such articles. The food was not only indifferent, but inadequate, for an idea prevailed that the ration issued on shore was enough for a man who was taking hard exercise, and therefore on board ship, where the soldier theoretically was a passenger with nothing to do, he required less to eat than on land. In practice the soldier on board a transport had to work as hard as a sailor, and consequently was underfed. His diet of salt pork and biscuit, his ration of water, often scanty and generally tasting strongly of the barrels in which it was stored, and the absence of vegetables all combined to reduce his strength, and he often fell a prey to the scurvy which in those days devastated the fleet.

While the soldiers were still in the Straits of Gibraltar, where, as a sea-sick officer wrote, “the tossing of the ship rendered our situation as landsmen at once inconvenient and ridiculous,” Abercromby received despatches of great importance. Dundas, the War Minister of England, had become inspired with a great idea--to abandon the “policy of pin-pricks” by which the conduct of our campaigns in Europe had been hitherto regulated, and strike a blow in defence of the Empire as a whole. The year after we had abandoned Elba Napoleon had embarked in the south of France with forty thousand men, and after seizing Malta made himself master of Egypt and sent emissaries to India, whose intrigues among the native princes complicated our situation in the East.[102] When he returned to France in 1799 he left behind him an army of occupation, whose presence was a continual danger to our power in Hindustan. This army Dundas determined to drive out, and with the reluctant assent of the other members of the Cabinet he now ordered Abercromby to prepare for a campaign in Lower Egypt, while a column, formed of a regiment from Cape Colony[103] and of British and native troops from India, was to land at Kosseir on the Red Sea, strike across the desert to Upper Egypt, descend the Nile, and fall upon the enemy from the rear.[104]