Deeds that Won the Empire
by W. H. Fitchett · English · Gutenberg #19255 · 526,481 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Deeds that Won the Empire
Author: W. H. Fitchett
Release date: September 12, 2006 [eBook #19255]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19255
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
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Produced by Al Haines
DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE
HISTORIC BATTLE SCENES
BY W. H. FITCHETT, LL. D.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
FIRST EDITION (Smith, Elder & Co.) . . . November 1897
Twenty-ninth Impression . . . . . . . . October 1914
Reprinted (John Murray) . . . . . . . . September 1917
Reprinted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 1921
PREFACE
The tales here told are written, not to glorify war, but to nourish
patriotism. They represent an effort to renew in popular memory the
great traditions of the Imperial race to which we belong.
The history of the Empire of which we are subjects--the story of the
struggles and sufferings by which it has been built up--is the best
legacy which the past has bequeathed to us. But it is a treasure
strangely neglected. The State makes primary education its anxious
care, yet it does not make its own history a vital part of that
education. There is real danger that for the average youth the great
names of British story may become meaningless sounds, that his
imagination will take no colour from the rich and deep tints of
history. And what a pallid, cold-blooded citizenship this must produce!
War belongs, no doubt, to an imperfect stage of society; it has a side
of pure brutality. But it is not all brutal. Wordsworth's daring line
about "God's most perfect instrument" has a great truth behind it.
What examples are to be found in the tales here retold, not merely of
heroic daring, but of even finer qualities--of heroic fortitude; of
loyalty to duty stronger than the love of life; of the temper which
dreads dishonour more than it fears death; of the patriotism which
makes love of the Fatherland a passion. These are the elements of
robust citizenship. They represent some, at least, of the qualities by
which the Empire, in a sterner time than ours, was won, and by which,
in even these ease-loving days, it must be maintained.
These sketches appeared originally in the _Melbourne Argus_, and are
republished by the kind consent of its proprietors. Each sketch is
complete in itself; and though no formal quotation of authorities is
given, yet all the available literature on each event described has
been laid under contribution. The sketches will be found to be
historically accurate.
CONTENTS
THE FIGHT OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT
THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM
THE GREAT LORD HAWKE
THE NIGHT ATTACK ON BADAJOS
THE FIRE-SHIPS IN THE BASQUE ROADS
THE MAN WHO SPOILED NAPOLEON'S "DESTINY"
GREAT SEA-DUELS
THE BLOOD-STAINED HILL OF BUSACO
OF NELSON AND THE NILE
THE FUSILEERS AT ALBUERA
THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE"
THE GREAT BREACH OF CIUDAD RODRIGO
HOW THE "HERMIONE" WAS RECAPTURED
FRENCH AND ENGLISH IN THE PASSES
FAMOUS CUTTING-OUT EXPEDITIONS
MOUNTAIN COMBATS
THE BLOODIEST FIGHT IN THE PENINSULA
THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC
KING-MAKING WATERLOO--
I. The Rival Hosts
II. Hougoumont
III. Picton and D'Erlon
IV. "Scotland for Ever!"
V. Horsemen and Squares
VI. The Fight of the Gunners
VII. The Old Guard
VIII. The Great Defeat
THE NIGHT ATTACK OFF CADIZ
TRAFALGAR--
I. The Strategy
II. How the Fleets Met
III. How the Victory was Won
LIST OF PLANS
THE BATTLE OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT
THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC
THE SIEGE OF BADAJOS
THE BATTLE OF THE NILE
THE BATTLE OF ALBUERA
THE SIEGE OF CIUDAD RODRIGO
THE COMBAT OF RONCESVALLES
THE BATTLE OF ST. PIERRE
THE BATTLE OF THE BALTIC
THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO
THE ATTACK OF TRAFALGAR
THE FIGHT OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT
THE SCEPTRE OF THE SEA.
"Old England's sons are English yet,
Old England's hearts are strong;
And still she wears her coronet
Aflame with sword and song.
As in their pride our fathers died,
If need be, so die we;
So wield we still, gainsay who will,
The sceptre of the sea.
We've Raleighs still for Raleigh's part,
We've Nelsons yet unknown;
The pulses of the Lion-Heart
Beat on through Wellington.
Hold, Britain, hold thy creed of old,
Strong foe and steadfast friend,
And still unto thy motto true,
'Defy not, but defend.'
Men whisper that our arm is weak,
Men say our blood is cold,
And that our hearts no longer speak
That clarion note of old;
But let the spear and sword draw near
The sleeping lion's den,
Our island shore shall start once more
To life, with armèd men."
--HERMAN CHARLES MERIVALE.
On the night of February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships of
the line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was under
easy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black with
haze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres over
the sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-east
the dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain,
consisting of twenty-seven ships of line, under Admiral Don Josef de
Cordova; one great ship calling to another through the night, little
dreaming that the sound of their guns was so keenly noted by the eager
but silent fleet of their enemies to leeward. The morning of the
14th--a day famous in the naval history of the empire--broke dim and
hazy; grey sea, grey fog, grey dawn, making all things strangely
obscure. At half-past six, however, the keen-sighted British outlooks
caught a glimpse of the huge straggling line of Spaniards, stretching
apparently through miles of sea haze. "They are thumpers!" as the
signal lieutenant of the _Barfleur_ reported with emphasis to his
captain; "they loom like Beachy Head in a fog!" The Spanish fleet was,
indeed, the mightiest ever sent from Spanish ports since "that great
fleet invincible" of 1588 carried into the English waters--but not out
of them!--
"The richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain."
The Admiral's flag was borne by the _Santissima Trinidad_, a floating
mountain, the largest ship at that time on the sea, and carrying on her
four decks 130 guns. Next came six three-deckers carrying 112 guns
each, two ships of the line of 80 guns each, and seventeen carrying 74
guns, with no less than twelve 34-gun frigates to act as a flying
cordon of skirmishers. Spain had joined France against England on
September 12, 1796, and Don Cordova, at the head of this immense fleet,
had sailed from Cadiz to execute a daring and splendid strategy. He
was to pick up the Toulon fleet, brush away the English squadron
blockading Brest, add the great French fleet lying imprisoned there to
his forces, and enter the British Channel with above a hundred sail of
the line under his flag, and sweep in triumph to the mouth of the
Thames! If the plan succeeded, Portugal would fall, a descent was to
be made on Ireland; the British flag, it was reckoned, would be swept
from the seas.
Sir John Jervis was lying in the track of the Spaniards to defeat this
ingenious plan. Five ships of the line had been withdrawn from the
squadron blockading Brest to strengthen him; still he had only fifteen
ships against the twenty-seven huge Spaniards in front of him; whilst,
if the French Toulon fleet behind him broke out, he ran the risk of
being crushed, so to speak, betwixt the upper and the nether millstone.
Never, perhaps, was the naval supremacy of England challenged so boldly
and with such a prospect of success as at this moment. The northern
powers had coalesced under Russia, and only a few weeks later the
English guns were thundering over the roofs of Copenhagen, while the
united flags of France and Spain were preparing to sweep through the
narrow seas. The "splendid isolation" of to-day is no novelty. In
1796, as it threatened to be in 1896, Great Britain stood singly
against a world in arms, and it is scarcely too much to say that her
fate hung on the fortunes of the fleet that, in the grey dawn of St.
Valentine's Day, a hundred years ago, was searching the skyline for the
topmasts of Don Cordova's huge three-deckers.
Fifteen to twenty-seven is enormous odds, but, on the testimony of
Nelson himself, a better fleet never carried the fortunes of a great
country than that under Sir John Jervis. The mere names of the ships
or of their commanders awaken more sonorous echoes than the famous
catalogue of the ships in the "Iliad." Trowbridge, in the _Culloden_,
led the van; the line was formed of such ships as the _Victory_, the
flagship, the _Barfleur_, the _Blenheim_, the _Captain_, with Nelson as
commodore, the _Excellent_, under Collingwood, the _Colossus_, under
Murray, the _Orion_, under Sir James Saumarez, &c. Finer sailors and
more daring leaders never bore down upon an enemy's fleet. The picture
offered by the two fleets in the cold haze of that fateful morning, as
a matter of fact, reflected the difference in their fighting and
sea-going qualities. The Spanish fleet, a line of monsters, straggled,
formless and shapeless, over miles of sea space, distracted with
signals, fluttering with many-coloured flags. The English fleet, grim
and silent, bore down upon the enemy in two compact and firm-drawn
columns, ship following ship so closely and so exactly that bowsprit
and stern almost touched, while an air-line drawn from the foremast of
the leading ship to the mizzenmast of the last ship in each column
would have touched almost every mast betwixt. Stately, measured,
threatening, in perfect fighting order, the compact line of the British
bore down on the Spaniards.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OFF CAPE ST. VINCENT. Cutting the Spanish
Line. From Allen's "Battles of the British Navy."]
Nothing is more striking in the battle of St. Vincent than the swift
and resolute fashion in which Sir John Jervis leaped, so to speak, at
his enemy's throat, with the silent but deadly leap of a bulldog. As
the fog lifted, about nine o'clock, with the suddenness and dramatic
effect of the lifting of a curtain in a great theatre, it revealed to
the British admiral a great opportunity. The weather division of the
Spanish fleet, twenty-one gigantic ships, resembled nothing so much as
a confused and swaying forest of masts; the leeward division--six ships
in a cluster, almost as confused--was parted by an interval of nearly
three miles from the main body of the fleet, and into that fatal gap,
as with the swift and deadly thrust of a rapier, Jervis drove his fleet
in one unswerving line, the two columns melting into one, ship
following hard on ship. The Spaniards strove furiously to close their
line, the twenty-one huge ships bearing down from the windward, the
smaller squadron clawing desperately up from the leeward. But the
British fleet--a long line of gliding pyramids of sails, leaning over
to the pressure of the wind, with "the meteor flag" flying from the
peak of each vessel, and the curving lines of guns awaiting grim and
silent beneath--was too swift. As it swept through the gap, the
Spanish vice-admiral, in the _Principe de Asturias_, a great
three-decker of 112 guns, tried the daring feat of breaking through the
British line to join the severed squadron. He struck the English fleet
almost exactly at the flagship, the _Victory_. The _Victory_ was
thrown into stays to meet her, the Spaniard swung round in response,
and, exactly as her quarter was exposed to the broadside of the
_Victory_, the thunder of a tremendous broadside rolled from that ship.
The unfortunate Spaniard was smitten as with a tempest of iron, and the
next moment, with sails torn, topmasts hanging to leeward, ropes
hanging loose in every direction, and her decks splashed red with the
blood of her slaughtered crew, she broke off to windward. The iron
line of the British was unpierceable! The leading three-decker of the
Spanish lee division in like manner bore up, as though to break through
the British line to join her admiral; but the grim succession of
three-deckers, following swift on each other like the links of a moving
iron chain, was too disquieting a prospect to be faced. It was not in
Spanish seamanship, or, for the matter of that, in Spanish flesh and
blood, to beat up in the teeth of such threatening lines of iron lips.
The Spanish ships swung sullenly back to leeward, and the fleet of Don
Cordova was cloven in twain, as though by the stroke of some gigantic
sword-blade.
As soon as Sir John Jervis saw the steady line of his fleet drawn fair
across the gap in the Spanish line, he flung his leading ships up to
windward on the mass of the Spanish fleet, by this time beating up to
windward. The _Culloden_ led, thrust itself betwixt the hindmost
Spanish three-deckers, and broke into flame and thunder on either side.
Six minutes after her came the _Blenheim_; then, in quick succession,
the _Prince George_, the _Orion_, the _Colossus_. It was a crash of
swaying masts and bellying sails, while below rose the shouting of the
crews, and, like the thrusts of fiery swords, the flames shot out from
the sides of the great three-deckers against each other, and over all
rolled the thunder and the smoke of a Titanic sea-fight. Nothing more
murderous than close fighting betwixt the huge wooden ships of those
days can well be imagined. The _Victory_, the largest British ship
present in the action, was only 186 feet long and 52 feet broad; yet in
that little area 1000 men fought, 100 great guns thundered. A Spanish
ship like the _San Josef_ was 194 feet in length and 54 feet in
breadth; but in that area 112 guns were mounted, while the three decks
were thronged with some 1300 men. When floating batteries like these
swept each other with the flame of swiftly repeated broadsides at a
distance of a few score yards, the destruction may be better imagined
than described. The Spanish had an advantage in the number of guns and
men, but the British established an instant mastery by their silent
discipline, their perfect seamanship, and the speed with which their
guns were worked. They fired at least three broadsides to every two
the Spaniards discharged, and their fire had a deadly precision
compared with which that of the Spaniards was mere distracted
spluttering.
Meanwhile the dramatic crisis of the battle came swiftly on. The
Spanish admiral was resolute to join the severed fragments of his
fleet. The _Culloden_, the _Blenheim_, the _Prince George_, and the
_Orion_ were thundering amongst his rearmost ships, and as the British
line swept up, each ship tacked as it crossed the gap in the Spanish
line, bore up to windward and added the thunder of its guns to the
storm of battle raging amongst the hindmost Spaniards. But naturally
the section of the British line that had not yet passed the gap
shortened with every minute, and the leading Spanish ships at last saw
the sea to their leeward clear of the enemy, and the track open to
their own lee squadron. Instantly they swung round to leeward, the
great four-decker, the flagship, with a company of sister giants, the
_San Josef_ and the _Salvador del Mundo_, of 112 guns each, the _San
Nicolas_, and three other great ships of 80 guns. It was a bold and
clever stroke. This great squadron, with the breeze behind it, had but
to sweep past the rear of the British line, join the lee squadron, and
bear up, and the Spanish fleet in one unbroken mass would confront the
enemy. The rear of the British line was held by Collingwood in the
_Excellent_; next to him came the _Diadem_; the third ship was the
_Captain_, under Nelson. We may imagine how Nelson's solitary eye was
fixed on the great Spanish three-deckers that formed the Spanish van as
they suddenly swung round and came sweeping down to cross his stern.
Not Napoleon himself had a vision more swift and keen for the changing
physiognomy of a great battle than Nelson, and he met the Spanish
admiral with a counter-stroke as brilliant and daring as can be found
in the whole history of naval warfare. The British fleet saw the
_Captain_ suddenly swing out of line to leeward--in the direction from
the Spanish line, that is--but with swift curve the _Captain_ doubled
back, shot between the two English ships that formed the rear of the
line, and bore up straight in the path of the Spanish flagship, with
its four decks, and the huge battleships on either side of it.
The _Captain_, it should be remembered, was the smallest 74 in the
British fleet, and as the great Spanish ships closed round her and
broke into flame it seemed as if each one of them was big enough to
hoist the _Captain_ on board like a jolly-boat. Nelson's act was like
that of a single stockman who undertakes to "head off" a drove of angry
bulls as they break away from the herd; but the "bulls" in this case
were a group of the mightiest battleships then afloat. Nelson's sudden
movement was a breach of orders; it left a gap in the British line; to
dash unsupported into the Spanish van seemed mere madness, and the
spectacle, as the Captain opened fire on the huge _Santissima
Trinidad_, was simply amazing. Nelson was in action at once with the
flagship of 130 guns, two ships of 112 guns, one of 80 guns, and two of
74 guns! To the spectators who watched the sight the sides of the
_Captain_ seemed to throb with quick-following pulses of flame as its
crew poured their shot into the huge hulks on every side of them. The
Spaniards formed a mass so tangled that they could scarcely fire at the
little _Captain_ without injuring each other; yet the English ship
seemed to shrivel beneath even the imperfect fire that did reach her.
Her foremast was shot away, her wheel-post shattered, her rigging torn,
some of her guns dismantled, and the ship was practically incapable of
further service either in the line or in chase. But Nelson had
accomplished his purpose: he had stopped the rush of the Spanish van.
At this moment the _Excellent_, under Collingwood, swept into the storm
of battle that raged round the _Captain_, and poured three tremendous
broadsides into the Spanish three-decker the _Salvador del Mundo_ that
practically disabled her. "We were not further from her," the domestic
but hard-fighting Collingwood wrote to his wife, "than the length of
our garden." Then, with a fine feat of seamanship, the _Excellent_
passed between the _Captain_ and the _San Nicolas_, scourging that
unfortunate ship with flame at a distance of ten yards, and then passed
on to bestow its favours on the _Santissima Trinidad_--"such a ship,"
Collingwood afterwards confided to his wife, "as I never saw before!"
Collingwood tormented that monster with his fire so vehemently that she
actually struck, though possession of her was not taken before the
other Spanish ships, coming up, rescued her, and she survived to carry
the Spanish flag in the great fight of Trafalgar.
Meanwhile the crippled _Captain_, though actually disabled, had
performed one of the most dramatic and brilliant feats in the history
of naval warfare. Nelson put his helm to starboard, and ran, or rather
drifted, on the quarter-gallery of the _San Nicolas_, and at once
boarded that leviathan. Nelson himself crept through the
quarter-gallery window in the stern of the Spaniard, and found himself
in the officers' cabins. The officers tried to show fight, but there
was no denying the boarders who followed Nelson, and with shout and
oath, with flash of pistol and ring of steel, the party swept through
on to the main deck. But the _San Nicolas_ had been boarded also at
other points. "The first man who jumped into the enemy's
mizzen-chains," says Nelson, "was the first lieutenant of the ship,
afterwards Captain Berry." The English sailors dropped from their
spritsail yard on to the Spaniard's deck, and by the time Nelson
reached the poop of the _San Nicolas_ he found his lieutenant in the
act of hauling down the Spanish flag. Nelson proceeded to collect the
swords of the Spanish officers, when a fire was opened upon them from
the stern gallery of the admiral's ship, the _San Josef_, of 112 guns,
whose sides were grinding against those of the _San Nicolas_. What
could Nelson do? To keep his prize he must assault a still bigger
ship. Of course he never hesitated! He flung his boarders up the side
of the huge _San Josef_, but he himself had to be assisted to climb the
main chains of that vessel, his lieutenant this time dutifully
assisting his commodore up instead of indecorously going ahead of him.
"At this moment," as Nelson records the incident, "a Spanish officer
looked over the quarterdeck rail and said they surrendered. It was not
long before I was on the quarter-deck, where the Spanish captain, with
a bow, presented me his sword, and said the admiral was dying of his
wounds. I asked him, on his honour, if the ship was surrendered. He
declared she was; on which I gave him my hand, and desired him to call
on his officers and ship's company and tell them of it, which he did;
and on the quarterdeck of a Spanish first-rate--extravagant as the
story may seem--did I receive the swords of vanquished Spaniards,
which, as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen,
who put them with the greatest _sang-froid_ under his arm," a circle of
"old Agamemnons," with smoke-blackened faces, looking on in grim
approval.
This is the story of how a British fleet of fifteen vessels defeated a
Spanish fleet of twenty-seven, and captured four of their finest ships.
It is the story, too, of how a single English ship, the smallest 74 in
the fleet--but made unconquerable by the presence of Nelson--stayed the
advance of a whole squadron of Spanish three-deckers, and took two
ships, each bigger than itself, by boarding. Was there ever a finer
deed wrought under "the meteor flag"! Nelson disobeyed orders by
leaving the English line and flinging himself on the van of the
Spaniards, but he saved the battle. Calder, Jervis's captain,
complained to the admiral that Nelson had "disobeyed orders." "He
certainly did," answered Jervis; "and if ever you commit such a breach
of your orders I will forgive you also."
THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM
"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
--SIR WALTER SCOTT.
The year 1759 is a golden one in British history. A great French army
that threatened Hanover was overthrown at Minden, chiefly by the heroic
stupidity of six British regiments, who, mistaking their orders, charged
the entire French cavalry in line, and destroyed them. "I have seen,"
said the astonished French general, "what I never thought to be
possible--a single line of infantry break through three lines of cavalry
ranked in order of battle, and tumble them into ruin!" Contades omitted
to add that this astonishing infantry, charging cavalry in open
formation, was scourged during their entire advance by powerful batteries
on their flank. At Quiberon, in the same year, Hawke, amid a tempest,
destroyed a mighty fleet that threatened England with invasion; and on
the heights of Abraham, Wolfe broke the French power in America. "We are
forced," said Horace Walpole, the wit of his day, "to ask every morning
what new victory there is, for fear of missing one." Yet, of all the
great deeds of that _annus mirabilis_, the victory which overthrew
Montcalm and gave Quebec to England--a victory achieved by the genius of
Pitt and the daring of Wolfe--was, if not the most shining in quality,
the most far-reaching in its results. "With the triumph of Wolfe on the
heights of Abraham," says Green, "began the history of the United States."
The hero of that historic fight wore a singularly unheroic aspect.
Wolfe's face, in the famous picture by West, resembles that of a nervous
and sentimental boy--he was an adjutant at sixteen, and only thirty-three
when he fell, mortally wounded, under the walls of Quebec. His forehead
and chin receded; his nose, tip-tilted heavenwards, formed with his other
features the point of an obtuse triangle. His hair was fiery red, his
shoulders narrow, his legs a pair of attenuated spindle-shanks; he was a
chronic invalid. But between his fiery poll and his plebeian and
upturned nose flashed a pair of eyes--keen, piercing, and steady--worthy
of Caesar or of Napoleon. In warlike genius he was on land as Nelson was
on sea, chivalrous, fiery, intense. A "magnetic" man, with a strange
gift of impressing himself on the imagination of his soldiers, and of so
penetrating the whole force he commanded with his own spirit that in his
hands it became a terrible and almost resistless instrument of war. The
gift for choosing fit agents is one of the highest qualities of genius;
and it is a sign of Pitt's piercing insight into character that, for the
great task of overthrowing the French power in Canada, he chose what
seemed to commonplace vision a rickety, hypochondriacal, and very
youthful colonel like Wolfe.
Pitt's strategy for the American campaign was spacious, not to say
grandiose. A line of strong French posts, ranging from Duquesne, on the
Ohio, to Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, held the English settlements on
the coast girdled, as in an iron band, from all extension westward; while
Quebec, perched in almost impregnable strength on the frowning cliffs
which look down on the St. Lawrence, was the centre of the French power
in Canada. Pitt's plan was that Amherst, with 12,000 men, should capture
Ticonderoga; Prideaux, with another powerful force, should carry
Montreal; and Wolfe, with 7000 men, should invest Quebec, where Amherst
and Prideaux were to join him. Two-thirds of this great plan broke down.
Amherst and Prideaux, indeed, succeeded in their local operations, but
neither was able to join Wolfe, who had to carry out with one army the
task for which three were designed.
On June 21, 1759, the advanced squadron of the fleet conveying Wolfe came
working up the St. Lawrence. To deceive the enemy they flew the white
flag, and, as the eight great ships came abreast of the Island of
Orleans, the good people of Quebec persuaded themselves it was a French
fleet bringing supplies and reinforcements. The bells rang a welcome;
flags waved. Boats put eagerly off to greet the approaching ships. But
as these swung round at their anchorage the white flag of France
disappeared, and the red ensign of Great Britain flew in its place. The
crowds, struck suddenly dumb, watched the gleam of the hostile flag with
chap-fallen faces. A priest, who was staring at the ships through a
telescope, actually dropped dead with the excitement and passion created
by the sight of the British fleet. On June 26 the main body of the fleet
bringing Wolfe himself with 7000 troops, was in sight of the lofty cliffs
on which Quebec stands; Cook, afterwards the famous navigator, master of
the _Mercury_, sounding ahead of the fleet. Wolfe at once seized the
Isle of Orleans, which shelters the basin of Quebec to the east, and
divides the St. Lawrence into two branches, and, with a few officers,
quickly stood on the western point of the isle. At a glance the
desperate nature of the task committed to him was apparent.
[Illustration: Siege of Quebec, 1759. From Parkman's "Montcalm & Wolfe."]
Quebec stands on the rocky nose of a promontory, shaped roughly like a
bull's-head, looking eastward. The St. Lawrence flows eastward under the
chin of the head; the St. Charles runs, so to speak, down its nose from
the north to meet the St. Lawrence. The city itself stands on lofty
cliffs, and as Wolfe looked upon it on that June evening far away, it was
girt and crowned with batteries. The banks of the St. Lawrence, that
define what we have called the throat of the bull, are precipitous and
lofty, and seem by mere natural strength to defy attack, though it was
just here, by an ant-like track up 250 feet of almost perpendicular
cliff, Wolfe actually climbed to the plains of Abraham. To the east of
Quebec is a curve of lofty shore, seven miles long, between the St.
Charles and the Montmorenci. When Wolfe's eye followed those seven miles
of curving shore, he saw the tents of a French army double his own in
strength, and commanded by the most brilliant French soldier of his
generation, Montcalm. Quebec, in a word, was a great natural fortress,
attacked by 9000 troops and defended by 16,000; and if a daring military
genius urged the English attack, a soldier as daring and well-nigh as
able as Wolfe directed the French defence.
Montcalm gave a proof of his fine quality as a soldier within twenty-four
hours of the appearance of the British fleet. The very afternoon the
British ships dropped anchor a terrific tempest swept over the harbour,
drove the transports from their moorings, dashed the great ships of war
against each other, and wrought immense mischief. The tempest dropped as
quickly as it had arisen. The night fell black and moonless. Towards
midnight the British sentinels on the point of the Isle of Orleans saw
drifting silently through the gloom the outlines of a cluster of ships.
They were eight huge fire-ships, floating mines packed with explosives.
The nerve of the French sailors, fortunately for the British, failed
them, and they fired the ships too soon. But the spectacle of these
flaming monsters as they drifted towards the British fleet was appalling.
The river showed ebony-black under the white flames. The glare lit up
the river cliffs, the roofs of the city, the tents of Montcalm, the
slopes of the distant hills, the black hulls of the British ships. It
was one of the most stupendous exhibitions of fireworks ever witnessed!
But it was almost as harmless as a display of fireworks. The boats from
the British fleet were by this time in the water, and pulling with steady
daring to meet these drifting volcanoes. They were grappled, towed to
the banks, and stranded, and there they spluttered and smoked and flamed
till the white light of the dawn broke over them. The only mischief
achieved by these fire-ships was to burn alive one of their own captains
and five or six of his men, who failed to escape in their boats.
Wolfe, in addition to the Isle of Orleans, seized Point Levi, opposite
the city, and this gave him complete command of the basin of Quebec; from
his batteries on Point Levi, too, he could fire directly on the city, and
destroy it if he could not capture it. He himself landed the main body
of his troops on the east bank of the Montmorenci, Montcalm's position,
strongly entrenched, being between him and the city. Between the two
armies, however, ran the deep gorge through which the swift current of
the Montmorenci rushes down to join the St. Lawrence. The gorge is
barely a gunshot in width, but of stupendous depth. The Montmorenci
tumbles over its rocky bed with a speed that turns the flashing waters
almost to the whiteness of snow. Was there ever a more curious military
position adopted by a great general in the face of superior forces!
Wolfe's tiny army was distributed into three camps: his right wing on the
Montmorenci was six miles distant from his left wing at Point Levi, and
between the centre, on the Isle of Orleans, and the two wings, ran the
two branches of the St. Lawrence. That Wolfe deliberately made such a
distribution of his forces under the very eyes of Montcalm showed his
amazing daring. And yet beyond firing across the Montmorenci on
Montcalm's left wing, and bombarding the city from Point Levi, the
British general could accomplish nothing. Montcalm knew that winter must
compel Wolfe to retreat, and he remained stubbornly but warily on the
defensive.
On July 18 the British performed a daring feat. In the darkness of the
night two of the men-of-war and several sloops ran past the Quebec
batteries and reached the river above the town; they destroyed some
fireships they found there, and cut off Montcalm's communication by water
with Montreal. This rendered it necessary for the French to establish
guards on the line of precipices between Quebec and Cap-Rouge. On July
28 the French repeated the experiment of fire-ships on a still more
gigantic scale. A vast fire-raft was constructed, composed of some
seventy schooners, boats, and rafts, chained together, and loaded with
combustibles and explosives. The fire-raft is described as being 100
fathoms in length, and its appearance, as it came drifting on the
current, a mass of roaring fire, discharging every instant a shower of
missiles, was terrifying. But the British sailors dashed down upon it,
broke the huge raft into fragments, and towed them easily ashore. "Hang
it, Jack," one sailor was heard to say to his mate as he tugged at the
oar, "didst thee ever take hell in tow before?"
Time was on Montcalm's side, and unless Wolfe could draw him from his
impregnable entrenchments and compel him to fight, the game was lost.
When the tide fell, a stretch of shoal a few score yards wide was left
bare on the French side of the Montmorenci. The slope that covered this
was steep, slippery with grass, crowned by a great battery, and swept by
the cross-fire of entrenchments on either flank. Montcalm, too, holding
the interior lines, could bring to the defence of this point twice the
force with which Wolfe could attack it. Yet to Wolfe's keen eyes this
seemed the one vulnerable point in Montcalm's front, and on July 31 he
made a desperate leap upon it.
The attack was planned with great art. The British batteries thundered
across the Montmorenci, and a feint was made of fording that river higher
up, so as to distract the attention of the French, whilst the boats of
the fleet threatened a landing near Quebec itself. At half-past five the
tide was at its lowest, and the boat-flotilla, swinging round at a
signal, pulled at speed for the patch of muddy foreshore already
selected. The Grenadiers and Royal Americans leaped ashore in the mud,
and--waiting neither for orders, nor leaders, nor supports--dashed up the
hill to storm the redoubt. They reached the first redoubt, tumbled over
it and through it, only to find themselves breathless in a semi-circle of
fire. The men fell fast, but yet struggled fiercely upwards. A furious
storm of rain broke over the combatants at that moment, and made the
steep grass-covered slope as slippery as mere glass. "We could not see
half-way down the hill," writes the French officer in command of the
battery on the summit. But through the smoke and the driving rain they
could still see the Grenadiers and Royal Americans in ragged clusters,
scarce able to stand, yet striving desperately to climb upwards. The
reckless ardour of the Grenadiers had spoiled Wolfe's attack, the sudden
storm helped to save the French, and Wolfe withdrew his broken but
furious battalions, having lost some 500 of his best men and officers.
The exultant French regarded the siege as practically over; but Wolfe was
a man of heroic and quenchless tenacity, and never so dangerous as when
he seemed to be in the last straits. He held doggedly on, in spite of
cold and tempest and disease. His own frail body broke down, and for the
first time the shadow of depression fell on the British camps when they
no longer saw the red head and lean and scraggy body of their general
moving amongst them. For a week, between August 22 and August 29, he lay
apparently a dying man, his face, with its curious angles, white with
pain and haggard with disease. But he struggled out again, and framed
yet new plans of attack. On September 10 the captains of the men-of-war
held a council on board the flagship, and resolved that the approach of
winter required the fleet to leave Quebec without delay. By this time,
too, Wolfe's scanty force was diminished one-seventh by disease or losses
in battle. Wolfe, however had now formed the plan which ultimately gave
him success, though at the cost of his own life.
From a tiny little cove, now known as Wolfe's Cove, five miles to the
west of Quebec, a path, scarcely accessible to a goat, climbs up the face
of the great cliff, nearly 250 feet high. The place was so inaccessible
that only a post of 100 men kept guard over it. Up that track, in the
blackness of the night, Wolfe resolved to lead his army to the attack on
Quebec! It needed the most exquisite combinations to bring the attacking
force to that point from three separate quarters, in the gloom of night,
at a given moment, and without a sound that could alarm the enemy. Wolfe
withdrew his force from the Montmorenci, embarked them on board his
ships, and made every sign of departure. Montcalm mistrusted these
signs, and suspected Wolfe would make at least one more leap on Quebec
before withdrawing. Yet he did not in the least suspect Wolfe's real
designs. He discussed, in fact, the very plan Wolfe adopted, but
dismissed it by saying, "We need not suppose that the enemy have wings."
The British ships were kept moving up and down the river front for
several days, so as to distract and perplex the enemy. On September 12
Wolfe's plans were complete, and he issued his final orders. One
sentence in them curiously anticipates Nelson's famous signal at
Trafalgar. "Officers and men," wrote Wolfe, "_will remember what their
country expects of them_." A feint on Beauport, five miles to the east
of Quebec, as evening fell, made Montcalm mass his troops there; but it
was at a point five miles west of Quebec the real attack was directed.
At two o'clock at night two lanterns appeared for a minute in the maintop
shrouds of the _Sunderland_. It was the signal, and from the fleet, from
the Isle of Orleans, and from Point Levi, the English boats stole
silently out, freighted with some 1700 troops, and converged towards the
point in the black wall of cliffs agreed upon. Wolfe himself was in the
leading boat of the flotilla. As the boats drifted silently through the
darkness on that desperate adventure, Wolfe, to the officers about him,
commenced to recite Gray's "Elegy":--
"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
"Now, gentlemen," he added, "I would rather have written that poem than
take Quebec." Wolfe, in fact, was half poet, half soldier. Suddenly
from the great wall of rock and forest to their left broke the challenge
of a French sentinel--"_Qui vive_?" A Highland officer of Fraser's
regiment, who spoke French fluently, answered the challenge. "_France_."
"_A quel regiment_?" "_De la Reine_," answered the Highlander. As it
happened the French expected a flotilla of provision boats, and after a
little further dialogue, in which the cool Highlander completely deceived
the French sentries, the British were allowed to slip past in the
darkness. The tiny cove was safely reached, the boats stole silently up
without a blunder, twenty-four volunteers from the Light Infantry leaped
from their boat and led the way in single file up the path, that ran like
a thread along the face of the cliff. Wolfe sat eagerly listening in his
boat below. Suddenly from the summit he saw the flash of the muskets and
heard the stern shout which told him his men were up. A clear, firm
order, and the troops sitting silent in the boats leaped ashore, and the
long file of soldiers, like a chain of ants, went up the face of the
cliff, Wolfe amongst the foremost, and formed in order on the plateau,
the boats meanwhile rowing back at speed to bring up the remainder of the
troops. Wolfe was at last within Montcalm's guard!
When the morning of the 13th dawned, the British army, in line of battle,
stood looking down on Quebec. Montcalm quickly heard the news, and came
riding furiously across the St. Charles and past the city to the scene of
danger. He rode, as those who saw him tell, with a fixed look, and
uttering not a word. The vigilance of months was rendered worthless by
that amazing night escalade. When he reached the slopes Montcalm saw
before him the silent red wall of British infantry, the Highlanders with
waving tartans and wind-blown plumes--all in battle array. It was not a
detachment, but an army!
The fight lasted fifteen minutes, and might be told in almost as many
words. Montcalm brought on his men in three powerful columns, in number
double that of Wolfe's force. The British troops stood grimly silent,
though they were tormented by the fire of Indians and Canadians lying in
the grass. The French advanced eagerly, with a tumult of shouts and a
confused fire; the British moved forward a few rods, halted, dressed
their lines, and when the French were within forty paces threw in one
fierce volley, so sharply timed that the explosion of 4000 muskets
sounded like the sudden blast of a cannon. Again, again, and yet again,
the flame ran from end to end of the steadfast hue. When the smoke
lifted, the French column were wrecked. The British instantly charged.
The spirit of the clan awoke in Fraser's Highlanders: they flung aside
their muskets, drew their broadswords, and with a fierce Celtic slogan
rushed on the enemy. Never was a charge pressed more ruthlessly home.
After the fight one of the British officers wrote: "There was not a
bayonet in the three leading British regiments, nor a broadsword amongst
the Highlanders, that was not crimson with the blood of a foeman." Wolfe
himself charged at the head of the Grenadiers, his bright uniform making
him conspicuous. He was shot in the wrist, wrapped a handkerchief round
the wound, and still ran forward. Two other bullets struck him--one, it
is said, fired by a British deserter, a sergeant broken by Wolfe for
brutality to a private. "Don't let the soldiers see me drop," said
Wolfe, as he fell, to an officer running beside him. An officer of the
Grenadiers, a gentleman volunteer, and a private carried Wolfe to a
redoubt near. He refused to allow a surgeon to be called. "There is no
need," he said, "it is all over with me." Then one of the little group,
casting a look at the smoke-covered battlefield, cried, "They run! See
how they run!" "Who run?" said the dying Wolfe, like a man roused from
sleep. "The enemy, sir," was the answer. A flash of life came back to
Wolfe; the eager spirit thrust from it the swoon of death; he gave a
clear, emphatic order for cutting off the enemy's retreat; then, turning
on his side, he added, "Now God be praised; I die in peace."
That fight determined that the North American continent should be the
heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race. And, somehow, the popular instinct,
when the news reached England, realised the historic significance of the
event. "When we first heard of Wolfe's glorious deed," writes Thackeray
in "The Virginians"--"of that army marshalled in darkness and carried
silently up the midnight river--of those rocks scaled by the intrepid
leader and his troops--of the defeat of Montcalm on the open plain by the
sheer valour of his conqueror--we were all intoxicated in England by the
news." Not merely all London but half England flamed into illuminations.
One spot alone was dark--Blackheath, where, solitary amidst a rejoicing
nation, Wolfe's mother mourned for her heroic son--like Milton's
Lycidas--"dead ere his prime."
THE GREAT LORD HAWKE
THE ENGLISH FLAG
"What is the flag of England? Winds of the world, declare!
* * * * * * * * *
The lean white bear hath seen it in the long, long
Arctic night,
The musk-ox knows the standard that flouts the Northern light.
* * * * * * * * *
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag
has flown.
I have wrenched it free from the halliard to hang
for a wisp on the Horn;
I have chased it north to the Lizard--ribboned and rolled
and torn;
I have spread its folds o'er the dying, adrift
in a hopeless sea;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave
set free.
* * * * * * * * *
Never the lotos closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind, that died
for England's sake--
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid--
Because on the bones of the English, the English flag
is stayed.
* * * * * * * * *
The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it--the frozen dews have kissed--
The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist.
What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare;
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!"
--KIPLING.
"The great Lord Hawke" is Burke's phrase, and is one of the best-earned
epithets in literature. Yet what does the average Englishman to-day
remember of the great sailor who, through the bitter November gales of
1759, kept dogged and tireless watch over the French fleet in Brest,
destroyed that fleet with heroic daring amongst the sands of Quiberon,
while the fury of a Bay of Biscay tempest almost drowned the roar of
his guns, and so crushed a threatened invasion of England?
Hawke has been thrown by all-devouring Time into his wallet as mere
"alms for oblivion"; yet amongst all the sea-dogs who ever sailed
beneath "the blood-red flag" no one ever less deserved that fate.
Campbell, in "Ye Mariners of England," groups "Blake and mighty Nelson"
together as the two great typical English sailors. Hawke stands midway
betwixt them, in point both of time and of achievements, though he had
more in him of Blake than of Nelson. He lacked, no doubt, the dazzling
electric strain that ran through the war-like genius of Nelson.
Hawke's fighting quality was of the grim, dour home-spun character; but
it was a true genius for battle, and as long as Great Britain is a
sea-power the memory of the great sailor who crushed Gentians off
Quiberon deserves to live.
Hawke, too, was a great man in the age of little men. The fame of the
English navy had sunk to the lowest point. Its ships were rotten; its
captains had lost the fighting tradition; its fleets were paralysed by
a childish system of tactics which made a decisive battle almost
impossible. Hawke describes the _Portland_, a ship of which he was in
command, as "iron-sick"; the wood was too rotten, that is, to hold the
iron bolts, so that "not a man in the ship had a dry place to sleep
in." His men were "tumbling down with scurvy"; his mainmast was so
pulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Of
another ship, the _Ramilies_--his favourite ship, too--he says, "It
became water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grew
a rank crop of grass, slime, shells, barnacles, &c., till the sluggish
vessels needed almost a gale to move them. Marines were not yet
invented; the navy had no uniform. The French ships of that day were
better built, better armed, and sometimes better fought than British
ships. A British 70-gun ship in armament and weight of fire was only
equal to a French ship of 52 guns. Every considerable fight was
promptly followed by a crop of court-martials, in which captains were
tried for misconduct before the enemy, such as to-day is unthinkable.
Admiral Matthews was broken by court-martial for having, with an excess
of daring, pierced the French line off Toulon, and thus sacrificed
pedantic tactics to victory. But the list of court-martials held
during the second quarter of the eighteenth century on British captains
for beginning to fight too late, or for leaving off too soon, would, if
published, astonish this generation. After the fight off Toulon in
1744, two admirals and six post-captains were court-martialled.
Admiral Byng was shot on his own deck, not exactly as Voltaire's _mot_
describes it, _pour encourager les autres_, and not quite for
cowardice, for Byng was no coward. But he had no gleam of unselfish
patriotic fire, and nothing of the gallant fighting impulse we have
learned to believe is characteristic of the British sailor. He lost
Minorca, and disgraced the British flag because he was too dainty to
face the stern discomforts of a fight. The corrupt and ignoble temper
of English politics--the legacy of Walpole's evil régime--poisoned the
blood of the navy. No one can have forgotten Macaulay's picture of
Newcastle, at that moment Prime Minister of England; the sly, greedy,
fawning politician, as corrupt as Walpole, without his genius; without
honour, without truth, who loved office only less than he loved his own
neck. A Prime Minister like Newcastle made possible an admiral like
Byng. Horace Walpole tells the story of how, when the much-enduring
British public broke into one of its rare but terrible fits of passion
after the disgrace of Minorca, and Newcastle was trembling for his own
head, a deputation from the city of London waited upon him, demanding
that Byng should be put upon his trial. "Oh, indeed," replied
Newcastle, with fawning gestures, "he shall be tried immediately. He
shall be hanged directly!" It was an age of base men, and the
navy--neglected, starved, dishonoured--had lost the great traditions of
the past, and did not yet feel the thrill of the nobler spirit soon to
sweep over it.
But in 1759 the dazzling intellect and masterful will of the first Pitt
controlled the fortunes of England, and the spirit of the nation was
beginning to awake. Burns and Wilberforce and the younger Pitt were
born that year; Minden was fought; Wolfe saw with dying eyes the French
battalions broken on the plains of Abraham and Canada won. But the
great event of the year is Hawke's defeat of Conflans off Quiberon.
Hawke was the son of a barrister; he entered the navy at fourteen years
of age as a volunteer, obtained the rating of an able seaman at
nineteen years of age, was a third lieutenant at twenty-four, and
became captain at thirty. He knew the details of his profession as
well as any sea-dog of the forecastle, was quite modern in the keen and
humane interest he took in his men, had something of Wellington's
high-minded allegiance to duty, while his fighting had a stern but
sober thoroughness worthy of Cromwell's Ironsides. The British people
came to realise that he was a sailor with the strain of a bulldog in
him; an indomitable fighter, who, ordered to blockade a hostile port,
would hang on, in spite of storms and scurvy, while he had a man left
who could pull a rope or fire a gun; a fighter, too, of the type dear
to the British imagination, who took the shortest course to the enemy's
line, and would exchange broadsides at pistol-shot distance while his
ship floated.
In 1759 a great French army threatened the shores of England. At Havre
and Dunkirk huge flotillas of flat-bottomed boats lay at their
moorings; 18,000 French veterans were ready to embark. A great fleet
under the command of Conflans--one of the ablest seamen France has ever
produced--was gathered at Brest. A French squadron was to break out of
Toulon, join Conflans, sweep the narrow seas, and convoy the French
expedition to English shores. The strategy, if it had succeeded, might
have changed the fate of the world.
To Hawke was entrusted the task of blockading Conflans in Brest, and a
greater feat of seamanship is not to be found in British records. The
French fleet consisted of 25 ships, manned by 15,200 men, and carrying
1598 guns. The British fleet numbered 23 ships, with 13,295 men, and
carrying 1596 guns. The two fleets, that is, were nearly equal, the
advantage, on the whole, being on the side of the French. Hawke
therefore had to blockade a fleet equal to his own, the French ships
lying snugly in harbour, the English ships scourged by November gales
and rolling in the huge seas of the Bay of Biscay. Sir Cloudesley
Shovel, himself a seaman of the highest quality, said that "an admiral
would deserve to be broke who kept great ships out after the end of
September, and to be shot if after October." Hawke maintained his
blockade of Brest for six months. His captains broke down in health,
his men were dying from scurvy, the bottoms of his ships grew foul; it
was a stormy season in the stormiest of seas. Again and again the wild
north-west gales blew the British admiral off his cruising ground. But
he fought his way back, sent his ships, singly or in couples, to Torbay
or Plymouth for a moment's breathing space, but himself held on, with a
grim courage and an unslumbering vigilance which have never been
surpassed. On November 6, a tremendous westerly gale swept over the
English cruising-ground. Hawke battled with it for three days, and
then ran, storm-driven and half-dismantled, to Torbay for shelter on
the 10th. He put to sea again on the 12th. The gale had veered round
to the south-west, but blew as furiously as ever, and Hawke was once
more driven back on the 13th to Torbay. He struggled out again on the
14th, to find that the French had escaped! The gale that blew Hawke
from his post brought a French squadron down the Channel, which ran
into Brest and joined Conflans there; and on the 14th, when Hawke was
desperately fighting his way back to his post, Conflans put to sea,
and, with the gale behind him, ran on his course to Quiberon. There he
hoped to brush aside the squadron keeping guard over the French
transports, embark the powerful French force assembled there, and swoop
down on the English coast. The wild weather, Conflans reckoned, would
keep Hawke storm-bound in Torbay till this scheme was carried out.
But Hawke with his whole fleet, fighting his way in the teeth of the
gale, reached Ushant on the very day Conflans broke out of Brest, and,
fast as the French fleet ran before the gale, the white sails of
Hawke's ships, showing over the stormy rim of the horizon, came on the
Frenchman's track. Hawke's frigates, outrunning those heavy
sea-waggons, his line-of-battle ships, hung on Conflans' rear. The
main body of the British fleet followed, staggering under their
pyramids of sails, with wet decks and the wild north-west gale on their
quarter. Hawke's best sailers gained steadily on the laggards of
Conflans' fleet. Had Hawke obeyed the puerile tactics of his day he
would have dressed his line and refused to attack at all unless he
could bring his entire fleet into action. But, as Hawke himself said
afterwards, he "had determined to attack them in the old way and make
downright work of them," and he signalled his leading ships to attack
the moment they brought an enemy's ship within fire. Conflans could
not abandon his slower ships, and he reluctantly swung round his van
and formed line to meet the attack.
As the main body of the English came up, the French admiral suddenly
adopted a strategy which might well have baffled a less daring
adversary than Hawke. He ran boldly in shore towards the mouth of the
Vilaine. It was a wild stretch of most dangerous coast; the granite
Breton hills above; splinters of rocky islets, on which the huge sea
rollers tore themselves into white foam, below; and more dangerous
still, and stretching far out to sea, wide reaches of shoal and
quicksand. From the north-west the gale blew more wildly than ever;
the sky was black with flying clouds; on the Breton hills the
spectators clustered in thousands. The roar of the furious breakers
and the shrill note of the gale filled the very air with tumult.
Conflans had pilots familiar with the coast, yet it was bold seamanship
on his part to run down to a lee shore on such a day of tempest. Hawke
had no pilots and no charts; but he saw before him, half hidden in mist
and spray, the great hulls of the ships over which he had kept watch so
long in Brest harbour, and he anticipated Nelson's strategy forty years
afterwards. "Where there is room for the enemy to swing," said Nelson,
"there is room for me to anchor." "Where there's a passage for the
enemy," argued Hawke, "there is a passage for me! Where a Frenchman
can sail, an Englishman can follow! Their pilots shall be ours. If
they go to pieces in the shoals, they will serve as beacons for us."
And so, on the wild November afternoon, with the great billows that the
Bay of Biscay hurls on that stretch of iron-bound coast riding
shoreward in league-long rollers, Hawke flung himself into the boiling
caldron of rocks and shoals and quicksands. No more daring deed was
ever done at sea. Measured by mere fighting courage, there were
thousands of men in the British fleet as brave as Hawke. But the iron
nerve that, without an instant's pause, in a scene so wild, on a shore
so perilous, and a sea sown so thick with unknown dangers, flung a
whole fleet into battle, was probably possessed by no other man than
Hawke amongst the 30,000 gallant sailors who fought at Quiberon.
The fight, taking all its incidents into account, is perhaps as
dramatic as anything known in the history of war. The British ships
came rolling on, grim and silent, throwing huge sheets of spray from
their bluff bows. An 80-gun French ship, _Le Formidable_, lay in their
track, and each huge British liner, as it swept past to attack the main
body of the French, vomited on the unfortunate _Le Formidable_ a
dreadful broadside. And upon each British ship, in turn, as it rolled
past in spray and flame, the gallant Frenchman flung an answering
broadside. Soon the thunder of the guns deepened as ship after ship
found its antagonist. The short November day was already darkening;
the thunder of surf and of tempest answered in yet wilder notes the
deep-throated guns; the wildly rolling fleets offered one of the
strangest sights the sea has ever witnessed.
Soon Hawke himself, in the _Royal George_, of 100 guns, came on, stern
and majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship
that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice
four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous
in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle
the _Royal George_ seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down
on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot
lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, _Le Soleil Royal_. Shoals were
foaming on every side, and the pilot warned Hawke he could not carry
the _Royal George_ farther in without risking the ship. "You have done
your duty," said Hawke, "in pointing out the risk; and now lay me
alongside of _Le Soleil Royal_."
A French 70-gun ship, _La Superbe_, threw itself betwixt Hawke and
Conflans. Slowly the huge mass of the _Royal George_ bore up, so as to
bring its broadside to bear on _La Superbe_, and then the English guns
broke into a tempest of flame. Through spray and mist the masts of the
unfortunate Frenchman seemed to tumble; a tempest of cries was heard;
the British sailors ran back their guns to reload. A sudden gust
cleared the atmosphere, and _La Superbe_ had vanished. Her top-masts
gleamed wet, for a moment, through the green seas, but with her crew of
650 men she had sunk, as though crushed by a thunderbolt, beneath a
single broadside from the _Royal George_. Then from the nearer hills
the crowds of French spectators saw Hawke's blue flag and Conflans'
white pennon approach each other, and the two great ships, with
slanting decks and fluttering canvas, and rigging blown to leeward,
began their fierce duel. Other French ships crowded to their admiral's
aid, and at one time no less than seven French line-of-battle ships
were pouring their fire into the mighty and shot-torn bulk of the
_Royal George_.
Howe, in the _Magnanime_, was engaged in fierce conflict, meanwhile,
with the _Thesée_, when a sister English ship, the _Montague_, was
flung by a huge sea on the quarter of Howe's ship, and practically
disabled it. The _Torbay_, under Captain Keppel, took Howe's place
with the _Thesée_, and both ships had their lower-deck ports open, so
as to fight with their heaviest guns. The unfortunate Frenchman rolled
to a great sea; the wide-open ports dipped, the green water rushed
through, quenched the fire of the guns, and swept the sailors from
their quarters. The great ship shivered, rolled over still more
wildly, and then, with 700 men, went down like a stone. The British
ship, with better luck and better seamanship, got its ports closed and
was saved. Several French ships by this time had struck, but the sea
was too wild to allow them to be taken possession of. Night was
falling fast, the roar of the tempest still deepened, and no less than
seven huge French liners, throwing their guns overboard, ran for
shelter across the bar of the Vilaine, the pursuing English following
them almost within reach of the spray flung from the rocks. Hawke
then, by signals, brought his fleet to anchor for the night under the
lee of the island of Dumet.
It was a wild night, filled with the thunder of the surf and the shriek
of the gale, and all through it, as the English ships rode, madly
straining at their anchors, they could hear the sounds of distress
guns. One of the ships that perished that night was a fine English
seventy-four, the _Resolution_. The morning broke as wild as the
night. To leeward two great line-of-battle ships could be seen on the
rocks; but in the very middle of the English fleet, its masts gone, its
hull battered with shot, was the flagship of Conflans, _Le Soleil
Royal_. In the darkness and tempest of the night the unfortunate
Frenchman, all unwitting, had anchored in the very midst of his foes.
As soon as, through the grey and misty light of the November dawn, the
English ships were discovered, Conflans cut his cables and drifted
ashore. The _Essex_, 64 guns, was ordered to pursue her, and her
captain, an impetuous Irishman, obeyed his orders so literally that he
too ran ashore, and the _Essex_ became a total wreck.
"When I consider," Hawke wrote to the Admiralty, "the season of the
year, the hard gales on the day of action, a flying enemy, the
shortness of the day, and the coast they were on, I can boldly affirm
that all that could possibly be done has been done." History confirms
that judgment. There is no other record of a great sea-fight fought
under conditions so wild, and scarcely any other sea-battle has
achieved results more decisive. Trafalgar itself scarcely exceeds it
in the quality of effectiveness. Quiberon saved England from invasion.
It destroyed for the moment the naval power of France. Its political
results in France cannot be described here, but they were of the first
importance. The victory gave a new complexion to English naval
warfare. Rodney and Howe were Hawke's pupils, Nelson himself, who was
a post-captain when Hawke died, learned his tactics in Hawke's school.
No sailor ever served England better than Hawke. And yet, such is the
irony of human affairs, that on the very day when Hawke was adding the
thunder of his guns to the diapason of surf and tempest off Quiberon,
and crushing the fleet that threatened England with invasion, a London
mob was burning his effigy for having allowed the French to escape his
blockade.
THE NIGHT ATTACK ON BADAJOS
"Hand to hand, and foot to foot;
Nothing there, save death, was mute:
Stroke, and thrust, and flash, and cry
For quarter or for victory,
Mingle there with the volleying thunder,
Which makes the distant cities wonder
How the sounding battle goes,
If with them, or for their foes;
If they must mourn, or must rejoice
In that annihilating voice,
Which pierces the deep hills through and through
With an echo dread and new.
* * * * * * *
From the point of encountering blades to the hilt,
Sabres and swords with blood were gilt;
But the rampart is won, and the spoil begun,
And all but the after carnage done."
--BYRON.
It would be difficult to find in the whole history of war a more
thrilling and heroic chapter than that which tells the story of the six
great campaigns of the Peninsular war. This was, perhaps, the least
selfish war of which history tells. It was not a war of aggrandisement
or of conquest: it was waged to deliver not merely Spain, but the whole
of Europe, from that military despotism with which the genius and
ambition of Napoleon threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. And
on what a scale Great Britain, when aroused, can fight, let the
Peninsular war tell. At its close the fleets of Great Britain rode
triumphant on every sea; and in the Peninsula between 1808-14 her land
forces fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten
fierce and bloody sieges, took four great fortresses, twice expelled
the French from Portugal and once from Spain. Great Britain expended
in these campaigns more than 100,000,000 pounds sterling on her own
troops, besides subsidising the forces of Spain and Portugal. This
"nation of shopkeepers" proved that when kindled to action it could
wage war on a scale and in a fashion that might have moved the wonder
of Alexander or of Caesar, and from motives, it may be added, too lofty
for either Caesar or Alexander so much as to comprehend. It is worth
while to tell afresh the story of some of the more picturesque
incidents in that great strife.
[Illustration: Siege of Badajos, 1812. From Napier's "Peninsular War."]
On April 6, 1812, Badajos was stormed by Wellington; and the story
forms one of the most tragical and splendid incidents in the military
history of the world. Of "the night of horrors at Badajos," Napier
says, "posterity can scarcely be expected to credit the tale." No
tale, however, is better authenticated, or, as an example of what
disciplined human valour is capable of achieving, better deserves to be
told. Wellington was preparing for his great forward movement into
Spain, the campaign which led to Salamanca, the battle in which "40,000
Frenchmen were beaten in forty minutes." As a preliminary he had to
capture, under the vigilant eyes of Soult and Marmont, the two great
border fortresses, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos. He had, to use Napier's
phrase, "jumped with both feet" on the first-named fortress, and
captured it in twelve days with a loss of 1200 men and 90 officers.
But Badajos was a still harder task. The city stands on a rocky ridge
which forms the last spur of the Toledo range, and is of extraordinary
strength. The river Rivillas falls almost at right angles into the
Guadiana, and in the angle formed by their junction stands Badajos,
oval in shape, girdled with elaborate defences, with the Guadiana 500
yards wide as its defence to the north, the Rivillas serving as a wet
ditch to the east, and no less than five great fortified
outposts--Saint Roque, Christoval, Picurina, Pardaleras, and a
fortified bridge-head across the Guadiana--as the outer zone of its
defences. Twice the English had already assailed Badajos, but assailed
it in vain. It was now held by a garrison 5000 strong, under a
soldier, General Phillipson, with a real genius for defence, and the
utmost art had been employed in adding to its defences. On the other
hand Wellington had no means of transport and no battery train, and had
to make all his preparations under the keen-eyed vigilance of the
French. Perhaps the strangest collection of artillery ever employed in
a great siege was that which Wellington collected from every available
quarter and used at Badajos. Of the fifty-two pieces, some dated from
the days of Philip II. and the Spanish Armada, some were cast in the
reign of Philip III., others in that of John IV. of Portugal, who
reigned in 1640; there were 24-pounders of George II.'s day, and
Russian naval guns; the bulk of the extraordinary medley being obsolete
brass engines which required from seven to ten minutes to cool between
each discharge.
Wellington, however, was strong in his own warlike genius and in the
quality of the troops he commanded. He employed 18,000 men in the
siege, and it may well be doubted whether--if we put the question of
equipment aside--a more perfect fighting instrument than the force
under his orders ever existed. The men were veterans, but the officers
on the whole were young, so there was steadiness in the ranks and fire
in the leading. Hill and Graham covered the siege, Picton and Barnard,
Kempt and Colville led the assaults. The trenches were held by the
third, fourth, and fifth divisions, and by the famous light division.
Of the latter it has been said that the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander
the Great, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the famous Spanish infantry of
Alva, or the iron soldiers who followed Cortes to Mexico, did not
exceed it in warlike quality. Wellington's troops, too, had a personal
grudge against Badajos, and had two defeats to avenge. Perhaps no
siege in history, as a matter of fact, ever witnessed either more
furious valour in the assault, or more of cool and skilled courage in
the defence. The siege lasted exactly twenty days, and cost the
besiegers 5000 men, or an average loss of 250 per day. It was waged
throughout in stormy weather, with the rivers steadily rising, and the
tempests perpetually blowing; yet the thunder of the attack never
paused for an instant.
Wellington's engineers attacked the city at the eastern end of the
oval, where the Rivillas served it as a gigantic wet ditch; and the
Picurina, a fortified hill, ringed by a ditch fourteen feet deep, a
rampart sixteen feet high, and a zone of mines, acted as an outwork.
Wellington, curiously enough, believed in night attacks, a sure proof
of his faith in the quality of the men he commanded; and on the eighth
night of the siege, at nine o'clock, 500 men of the third division were
suddenly flung on the Picurina. The fort broke into a ring of flame,
by the light of which the dark figures of the stormers were seen
leaping with fierce hardihood into the ditch and struggling madly up
the ramparts, or tearing furiously at the palisades. But the defences
were strong, and the assailants fell literally in scores. Napier tells
how "the axemen of the light division, compassing the fort like
prowling wolves," discovered the gate at the rear, and so broke into
the fort. The engineer officer who led the attack declares that "the
place would never have been taken had it not been for the coolness of
these men" in absolutely walking round the fort to its rear,
discovering the gate, and hewing it down under a tempest of bullets.
The assault lasted an hour, and in that period, out of the 500 men who
attacked, no less than 300, with 19 officers, were killed or wounded!
Three men out of every five in the attacking force, that is, were
disabled, and yet they won!
There followed twelve days of furious industry, of trenches pushed
tirelessly forward through mud and wet, and of cannonading that only
ceased when the guns grew too hot to be used. Captain MacCarthy, of
the 50th Regiment, has left a curious little monograph on the siege,
full of incidents, half tragic and half amusing, but which show the
temper of Wellington's troops. Thus he tells how an engineer officer,
when marking out the ground for a breaching-battery very near the wall,
which was always lined with French soldiers in eager search of human
targets, "used to challenge them to prove the perfection of their
shooting by lifting up the skirts of his coat in defiance several times
in the course of his survey; driving in his stakes and measuring his
distances with great deliberation, and concluding by an extra shake of
his coat-tails and an ironical bow before he stepped under shelter!"
On the night of April 6, Wellington determined to assault. No less
than seven attacks were to be delivered. Two of them--on the
bridge-head across the Guadiana and on the Pardaleras--were mere
feints. But on the extreme right Picton with the third division was to
cross the Rivillas and escalade the castle, whose walls rose
time-stained and grim, from eighteen to twenty-four feet high. Leith
with the fifth division was to attack the opposite or western extremity
of the town, the bastion of St. Vincente, where the glacis was mined,
the ditch deep, and the scarp thirty feet high. Against the actual
breaches Colville and Andrew Barnard were to lead the light division
and the fourth division, the former attacking the bastion of Santa
Maria and the latter the Trinidad. The hour was fixed for ten o'clock,
and the story of that night attack, as told in Napier's immortal prose,
is one of the great battle-pictures of literature; and any one who
tries to tell the tale will find himself slipping insensibly into
Napier's cadences.
The night was black; a strange silence lay on rampart and trench,
broken from time to time by the deep voices of the sentinels that
proclaimed all was well in Badajos. "_Sentinelle garde à vous_," the
cry of the sentinels, was translated by the British private as "All's
well in Badahoo!" A lighted carcass thrown from the castle discovered
Picton's men standing in ordered array, and compelled them to attack at
once. MacCarthy, who acted as guide across the tangle of wet trenches
and the narrow bridge that spanned the Rivillas, has left an amusing
account of the scene. At one time Picton declared MacCarthy was
leading them wrong, and, drawing his sword, swore he would cut him
down. The column reached the trench, however, at the foot of the
castle walls, and was instantly overwhelmed with the fire of the
besieged. MacCarthy says we can only picture the scene by "supposing
that all the stars, planets, and meteors of the firmament, with
innumerable moons emitting smaller ones in their course, were
descending on the heads of the besiegers." MacCarthy himself, a
typical and gallant Irishman, addressed his general with the exultant
remark, "Tis a glorious night, sir--a glorious night!" and, rushing
forward to the head of the stormers, shouted, "Up with the ladders!"
The five ladders were raised, the troops swarmed up, an officer
leading, but the first files were at once crushed by cannon fire, and
the ladders slipped into the angle of the abutments. "Dreadful their
fall," records MacCarthy of the slaughtered stormers, "and appalling
their appearance at daylight." One ladder remained, and, a private
soldier leading, the eager red-coated crowd swarmed up it. The brave
fellow leading was shot as soon as his head appeared above the parapet;
but the next man to him--again a private--leaped over the parapet, and
was followed quickly by others, and this thin stream of desperate men
climbed singly, and in the teeth of the flashing musketry, up that
solitary ladder, and carried the castle.
In the meanwhile the fourth and light divisions had flung themselves
with cool and silent speed on the breaches. The storming party of each
division leaped into the ditch. It was mined, the fuse was kindled,
and the ditch, crowded with eager soldiery, became in a moment a sort
of flaming crater, and the storming parties, 500 strong, were in one
fierce explosion dashed to pieces. In the light of that dreadful flame
the whole scene became visible--the black ramparts, crowded with dark
figures and glittering arms, on the one side; on the other the red
columns of the British, broad and deep, moving steadily forward like a
stream of human lava. The light division stood at the brink of the
smoking ditch for an instant, amazed at the sight. "Then," says
Napier, "with a shout that matched even the sound of the explosion,"
they leaped into it and swarmed up to the breach. The fourth division
came running up and descended with equal fury, but the ditch opposite
the Trinidad was filled with water; the head of the division leaped
into it, and, as Napier puts it, "about 100 of the fusiliers, the men
of Albuera, perished there." The breaches were impassable. Across the
top of the great slope of broken wall glittered a fringe of
sword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged on both sides, fixed in
ponderous beams chained together and set deep in the ruins. For ten
feet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks, studded with
sharp iron points. Behind the glittering edge of sword-blades stood
the solid ranks of the French, each man supplied with three muskets,
and their fire scourged the British ranks like a tempest.
Hundreds had fallen, hundreds were still falling; but the British clung
doggedly to the lower slopes, and every few minutes an officer would
leap forward with a shout, a swarm of men would instantly follow him,
and, like leaves blown by a whirlwind, they swept up the ascent. But
under the incessant fire of the French the assailants melted away. One
private reached the sword-blades, and actually thrust his head beneath
them till his brains were beaten out, so desperate was his resolve to
get into Badajos. The breach, as Napier describes it, "yawning and
glittering with steel, resembled the mouth of a huge dragon belching
forth smoke and flame." But for two hours, and until 2000 men had
fallen, the stubborn British persisted in their attacks. Currie, of
the 52nd, a cool and most daring soldier, found a narrow ramp beyond
the Santa Maria breach only half-ruined; he forced his way back through
the tumult and carnage to where Wellington stood watching the scene,
obtained an unbroken battalion from the reserve, and led it towards the
broken ramp. But his men were caught in the whirling madness of the
ditch and swallowed up in the tumult. Nicholas, of the engineers, and
Shaw, of the 43rd, with some fifty soldiers, actually climbed into the
Santa Maria bastion, and from thence tried to force their way into the
breach. Every man was shot down except Shaw, who stood alone on the
bastion. "With inexpressible coolness he looked at his watch, said it
was too late to carry the breaches," and then leaped down! The British
could not penetrate the breach; but they would not retreat. They could
only die where they stood. The buglers of the reserve were sent to the
crest of the glacis to sound the retreat; the troops in the ditch would
not believe the signal to be genuine, and struck their own buglers who
attempted to repeat it. "Gathering in dark groups, and leaning on
their muskets," says Napier, "they looked up in sullen desperation at
Trinidad, while the enemy, stepping out on the ramparts, and aiming
their shots by the light of fireballs, which they threw over, asked as
their victims fell, 'Why they did not come into Badajos.'"
All this while, curiously enough, Picton was actually in Badajos, and
held the castle securely, but made no attempt to clear the breach. On
the extreme west of the town, however, at the bastion of San Vincente,
the fifth division made an attack as desperate as that which was
failing at the breaches. When the stormers actually reached the
bastion, the Portuguese battalions, who formed part of the attack,
dismayed by the tremendous fire which broke out on them, flung down
their ladders and fled. The British, however, snatched the ladders up,
forced the barrier, jumped into the ditch, and tried to climb the
walls. These were thirty feet high, and the ladders were too short. A
mine was sprung in the ditch under the soldiers' feet; beams of wood,
stones, broken waggons, and live shells were poured upon their heads
from above. Showers of grape from the flank swept the ditch.
The stubborn soldiers, however, discovered a low spot in the rampart,
placed three ladders against it, and climbed with reckless valour. The
first man was pushed up by his comrades; he, in turn, dragged others
up, and the unconquerable British at length broke through and swept the
bastion. The tumult still stormed and raged at the eastern breaches,
where the men of the light and fourth division were dying sullenly, and
the men of the fifth division marched at speed across the town to take
the great eastern breach in the rear. The streets were empty, but the
silent houses were bright with lamps. The men of the fifth pressed on;
they captured mules carrying ammunition to the breaches, and the
French, startled by the tramp of the fast-approaching column, and
finding themselves taken in the rear, fled. The light and fourth
divisions broke through the gap hitherto barred by flame and steel, and
Badajos was won!
In that dreadful night assault the English lost 3500 men. "Let it be
considered," says Napier, "that this frightful carnage took place in
the space of less than a hundred yards square--that the slain died not
all suddenly, nor by one manner of death--that some perished by steel,
some by shot, some by water; that some were crushed and mangled by
heavy weights, some trampled upon, some dashed to atoms by the fiery
explosions--that for hours this destruction was endured without
shrinking, and the town was won at last. Let these things be
considered, and it must be admitted a British army bears with it an
awful power. And false would it be to say the French were feeble men.
The garrison stood and fought manfully and with good discipline,
behaving worthily. Shame there was none on any side. Yet who shall do
justice to the bravery of the British soldiers or the noble emulation
of the officers? . . . No age, no nation, ever sent forth braver
troops to battle than those who stormed Badajos."
THE FIRE-SHIPS IN THE BASQUE ROADS
"Ship after ship, the whole night long,
their high-built galleons came;
Ship after ship, the whole night long,
with her battle-thunder and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long,
drew back with her dead and her shame.
For some were sunk and many were shattered,
and so could fight us no more--
God of battles, was ever a battle like this
in the world before?"
--TENNYSON.
On the night of April 11, 1809, Lord Cochrane steered his floating mine
against the gigantic boom that covered the French fleet lying in Aix
Roads. The story is one of the most picturesque and exciting in the
naval annals of Great Britain. Marryat has embalmed the great
adventure and its chief actor in the pages of "Frank Mildmay," and Lord
Cochrane himself--like the Earl of Peterborough in the seventeenth
century, who captured Barcelona with a handful of men, and Gordon in
the nineteenth century, who won great battles in China walking-stick in
hand--was a man who stamped himself, as with characters of fire, upon
the popular imagination.
To the courage of a knight-errant Cochrane added the shrewd and
humorous sagacity of a Scotchman. If he had commanded fleets he would
have rivalled the victories of Nelson, and perhaps even have outshone
the Nile and Trafalgar. And to warlike genius of the first order
Cochrane added a certain weird and impish ingenuity which his enemies
found simply resistless. Was there ever a cruise in naval history like
that of Cochrane in his brig misnamed the _Speedy_, a mere coasting tub
that would neither steer nor tack, and whose entire broadside Cochrane
himself could carry in his pockets! But in this wretched little brig,
with its four-pounders, Cochrane captured in one brief year more than
50 vessels carrying an aggregate of 122 guns, took 500 prisoners, kept
the whole Spanish coast, off which he cruised, in perpetual alarm, and
finished by attacking and capturing a Spanish frigate, the _Gamo_, of
32 heavy guns and 319 men. What we have called the impish daring and
resource of Cochrane is shown in this strange fight. He ran the little
_Speedy_ close under the guns of the huge _Gamo_, and the Spanish ship
was actually unable to depress its guns sufficiently to harm its tiny
antagonist. When the Spaniards tried to board, Cochrane simply shoved
his pigmy craft a few yards away from the side of his foe, and this
curious fight went on for an hour. Then, in his turn, Cochrane
boarded, leaving nobody but the doctor on board the Speedy. But he
played the Spaniards a characteristic trick. One half his men boarded
the Gamo by the head, with their faces elaborately blackened; and when,
out of the white smoke forward, some forty demons with black faces
broke upon the astonished Spaniards, they naturally regarded the whole
business as partaking of the black art, and incontinently fled below!
The number of Spaniards killed and wounded in this fight by the little
_Speedy_ exceeded the number of its own entire crew; and when the fight
was over, 45 British sailors had to keep guard over 263 Spanish
prisoners.
Afterwards, in command of the _Impérieuse_, a fine frigate, Cochrane
played a still more dashing part on the Spanish coast, destroying
batteries, cutting off supplies from the French ports, blowing up coast
roads, and keeping perspiring battalions of the enemy marching to and
fro to meet his descents. On the French coast, again, Cochrane held
large bodies of French troops paralysed by his single frigate. He
proposed to the English Government to take possession of the French
islands in the Bay of Biscay, and to allow him, with a small squadron
of frigates, to operate against the French seaboard. Had this request
been granted, he says, "neither the Peninsular war nor its enormous
cost to the nation from 1809 onwards would ever have been heard of!"
"It would have been easy," he adds, "as it always will be easy in case
of future wars, so to harass the French coasts as to find full
employment for their troops at home, and so to render operations in
foreign countries impossible." If England and France were once more
engaged in war--_absit omen_!--the story of Cochrane's exploits on the
Spanish and French coasts might prove a very valuable inspiration and
object-lesson. Cochrane's professional reward for his great services
in the _Impérieuse_ was an official rebuke for expending more sails,
stores, gunpowder and shot than any other captain afloat in the same
time!
The fight in the Basque Roads, however--or rather in the Aix Roads--has
great historical importance. It crowned the work of Trafalgar. It
finally destroyed French power on the sea, and gave England an absolute
supremacy. No fleet actions took place after its date between "the
meteor flag" and the tricolour, for the simple reason that no French
fleet remained in existence. Cochrane's fire-ships completed the work
of the Nile and Trafalgar.
Early in 1809 the French fleet in Brest, long blockaded by Lord
Gambier, caught the British napping, slipped out unobserved, raised the
blockades at L'Orient and Rochefort, added the squadrons lying in these
two places to its own strength, and, anchoring in the Aix Roads,
prepared for a dash on the West Indies. The success with which the
blockade at Brest had been evaded, and the menace offered to the West
Indian trade, alarmed the British Admiralty. Lord Gambier, with a
powerful fleet, kept guard outside the Aix Roads; but if the blockade
failed once, it might fail again. Eager to destroy the last fleet
France possessed, the Admiralty strongly urged Lord Gambier to attack
the enemy with fire-ships; but Gambier, grown old, had visibly lost
nerve, and he pronounced the use of fire-ships a "horrible and
unchristian mode of warfare." Lord Mulgrave, the first Lord of the
Admiralty, knowing Cochrane's ingenuity and daring, sent for him, and
proposed to send him to the Basque Roads to invent and execute some
plan for destroying the French fleet. The Scotchman was uppermost in
Cochrane in this interview, and he declined the adventure on the ground
that to send a young post-captain to execute such an enterprise would
be regarded as an insult by the whole fleet, and he would have every
man's hand against him. Lord Mulgrave, however, was peremptory, and
Cochrane yielded, but on reaching the blockading fleet was met by a
tempest of wrath from all his seniors. "Why," they asked, "was
Cochrane sent out? We could have done the business as well as he. Why
did not Lord Gambier let us do it?" Lord Gambier, who had fallen into
a sort of gentle and pious melancholy, was really more occupied in
distributing tracts among his crews than in trying to reach his
enemies; and Harvey, his second in command, an old Trafalgar sea-dog,
when Cochrane arrived with his commission, interviewed his admiral,
denounced him in a white-heat on his own quarter-deck, and ended by
telling him that "if Nelson had been there he would not have anchored
in the Basque Roads at all, but would have dashed at the enemy at
once." This outburst, no doubt, relieved Admiral Harvey's feelings,
but it cost him his flag, and he was court-martialled, and dismissed
from the service for the performance.
Cochrane, however, set himself with characteristic daring and coolness
to carry out his task. The French fleet consisted of one huge ship of
120 guns, two of 80 guns, eight seventy-fours, a 50-gun ship, and two
40-gun frigates--fourteen ships in all. It was drawn up in two lines
under the shelter of powerful shore batteries, with the frigates as
out-guards. As a protection against fire-ships, a gigantic boom had
been constructed half a mile in length, forming two sides of a
triangle, with the apex towards the British fleet. Over this huge
floating barrier powerful boat squadrons kept watch every night.
Cochrane's plan of attack was marked by real genius. He constructed
three explosion vessels, floating mines on the largest scale. Each of
these terrific vessels contained no less than _fifteen hundred_ barrels
of gunpowder, bound together with cables, with wedges and moistened
sand rammed down betwixt them; forming, in brief, one gigantic bomb,
with 1500 barrels of gunpowder for its charge. On the top of this huge
powder magazine was piled, as a sort of agreeable condiment, hundreds
of live shells and thousands of hand grenades; the whole, by every form
of marine ingenuity, compacted into a solid mass which, at the touch of
a fuse, could be turned into a sort of floating Vesuvius. These were
to be followed by a squadron of fire-ships. Cochrane who, better,
perhaps, than any soldier or sailor that ever lived, knew how to strike
at his foes through their own imagination, calculated that when these
three huge explosion vessels, with twenty fire-ships behind them, went
off in a sort of saltpetre earthquake, the astonished Frenchmen would
imagine _every_ fire-ship to be a floating mine, and, instead of trying
to board them and divert them from their fleet, would be simply anxious
to get out of their way with the utmost possible despatch. The French,
meanwhile, having watched their enemy lying inert for weeks, and
confident in the gigantic boom which acted as their shield to the
front, and the show of batteries which kept guard over them on either
flank and to the rear, awaited the coming attack in a spirit of
half-contemptuous gaiety. They had struck their topmasts and unbent
their sails, and by way of challenge dressed their fleet with flags.
One ship, the _Calcutta_, had been captured from the English, and by
way of special insult they hung out the British ensign under that
ship's quarter-gallery, an affront whose deadly quality only a sailor
can understand.
The night of the 9th set in stormily. The tide ran fast, and the skies
were black and the sea heavy--so heavy, indeed, that the boats of the
English fleet which were intended to follow and cover the fire-ships
never left the side of the flagship. Cochrane, however, had called the
officers commanding the fire-ships on board his frigate, given them
their last instructions, and at half-past eight P.M. he himself,
accompanied only by a lieutenant and four sailors, cut the moorings of
the chief explosion vessel, and drifted off towards the French fleet.
Seated, that is, on top of 1500 barrels of gunpowder and a sort of
haystack of grenades, he calmly floated off, with a squadron of
fire-ships behind him, towards the French fleet, backed by great shore
batteries, with seventy-three armed boats as a line of skirmishers.
"It seemed to me," says Marryat, who was an actor in the scene, "like
entering the gates of hell!"
The great floating mine drifted on through blackness and storm till,
just as it struck the boom, Cochrane, who previously made his five
assistants get into the boat, with his own hand lit the fuse and in
turn jumped into the boat. How frantically the little crew pulled to
get clear of the ignited mine may be imagined; but wind and sea were
against them. The fuse, which was calculated to burn for twelve
minutes, lasted for only five. Then the 1500 barrels of gunpowder went
simultaneously off, peopling the black sky with a flaming torrent of
shells, grenades, and rockets, and raising a mountainous wave that
nearly swamped the unfortunate boat and its crew. The fault of the
fuse, however, saved the lives of the daring six, as the missiles from
the exploding vessel fell far _outside_ them. "The effect," says
Cochrane, who, like Caesar, could write history as well as make it,
"constituted one of the grandest artificial spectacles imaginable. For
a moment the sky was red with the lurid glare arising from the
simultaneous ignition of 1500 barrels of powder. On this gigantic
flash subsiding the air seemed alive with shells, grenades, rockets,
and masses of timber, the wreck of the shattered vessel." Then came
blackness, punctuated in flame by the explosion of the next floating
mine. Then, through sea-wrack and night, came the squadron of
fire-ships, each one a pyramid of kindling flame. But the first
explosion had achieved all that Cochrane expected. It dismissed the
huge boom into chips, and the French fleet lay open to attack. The
captain of the second explosion vessel was so determined to do his work
effectually that the entire crew was actually blown out of the vessel
and one member of the party killed, while the toil of the boats in
which, after the fire-ships had been abandoned, they and their crews
had to fight their way back in the teeth of the gale, was so severe
that several men died of mere fatigue. The physical effects of the
floating mines and the drifting fire-ships, as a matter of fact, were
not very great. The boom, indeed, was destroyed, but out of twenty
fire-ships only four actually reached the enemy's position, and not one
did any damage. Cochrane's explosion vessels, however, were addressed
not so much to the French ships as to the alarmed imagination of French
sailors, and the effect achieved was overwhelming. All the French
ships save one cut or slipped their cables, and ran ashore in wild
confusion. Cochrane cut the moorings of his explosion vessel at
half-past eight o'clock; by midnight, or in less than four hours, the
boom had been destroyed, and thirteen French ships--the solitary fleet
that remained to France--were lying helplessly ashore. Never, perhaps,
was a result so great achieved in a time so brief, in a fashion so
dramatic, or with a loss so trifling.
When the grey morning broke, with the exception of two vessels, the
whole French fleet was lying helplessly aground on the Palles shoal.
Some were lying on their bilge with the keel exposed, others were
frantically casting their guns overboard and trying to get afloat
again. Meanwhile Gambier and the British fleet were lying fourteen
miles distant in the Basque Roads, and Cochrane in the _Impérieuse_ was
watching, with powder-blackened face, the curious spectacle of the
entire fleet he had driven ashore, and the yet more amazing spectacle
of a British fleet declining to come in and finally destroy its enemy.
For here comes a chapter in the story on which Englishmen do not love
to dwell. Cochrane tried to whip the muddy-spirited Gambier into
enterprise by emphatic and quick-following signal. At six A.M. he
signalled, "_All the enemy's ships except two are on shore_," but this
extracted from drowsy Gambier no other response than the answering
pennant. Cochrane repeated his impatient signals at half-hour
intervals, and with emphasis ever more shrill--"_The enemy's ships can
be destroyed_"; "_Half the fleet can destroy the enemy_"; "_The
frigates alone can destroy the enemy_"; but still no response save the
indifferent pennant. As the tide flowed in, the French ships showed
signs of getting afloat, and Cochrane signalled, "_The enemy is
preparing to heave off_", even this brought no response from the
pensive Gambier. At eleven o'clock the British fleet weighed and stood
in, but then, to Cochrane's speechless wrath, re-anchored at a distance
of three and a half miles, and by this time two of the French
three-deckers were afloat.
Gambier finally despatched a single mortar-vessel in to bombard the
stranded ships, but by this time Cochrane had become desperate. He
adopted a device which recalls Nelson's use of his blind eye at
Copenhagen. At one o'clock he hove his anchor atrip and drifted, stern
foremost, towards the enemy. He dare not make sail lest his trick
should be detected and a signal of recall hoisted on the flagship.
Cochrane coolly determined, in a word, to force the hand of his
sluggish admiral. He drifted with his solitary frigate down to the
hostile fleet and batteries, which Gambier thought it scarcely safe to
attack with eleven ships of the line. When near the enemy's position
he suddenly made sail and ran up the signal, "_In want of assistance_";
next followed a yet more peremptory message, "_In distress_." Even
Gambier could not see an English frigate destroyed under the very guns
of an English fleet without moving to its help, and he sent some of his
ships in. But meanwhile, Cochrane, though technically "in distress,"
was enjoying what he must have felt to be a singularly good time. He
calmly took up a position which enabled him to engage an 80-gun ship,
one of 74 guns, and, in particular, that French ship which, on the
previous day, had hung the British flag under her quarter-gallery. For
half-an-hour he fought these three ships single-handed, and the
Calcutta actually struck to him, its captain afterwards being
court-martialled and shot by the French themselves for surrendering to
a frigate. Then the other British ships came up, and ship after ship
of the French fleet struck or was destroyed. Night fell before the
work was completed, and during the night Gambier, for some mysterious
reason, recalled his ships; but Cochrane, in the _Impérieuse_, clung to
his post. He persuaded Captain Seymour, in the _Pallas_, to remain
with him, with four brigs, and with this tiny force he proposed to
attack _L'Ocean_, the French flagship of 120 guns, which had just got
afloat; but Gambier peremptorily recalled him at dawn, before the fight
was renewed. Never before or since was a victory so complete and so
nearly bloodless. Five seamen were killed in the fire-ships, and five
in the attack on the French fleet and about twenty wounded; and with
this microscopic "butcher's bill" a great fleet, the last naval hope of
France, was practically destroyed. For so much does the genius and
daring of a single man count!
That the French fleet was not utterly destroyed was due solely to
Gambier's want of resolution. And yet, such is the irony of history,
that of the two chief actors in this drama, Gambier, who marred it, was
rewarded with the thanks of Parliament; Cochrane, who gave to it all
its unique splendour, had his professional career abruptly terminated!
That wild night in the Aix Roads, and the solitary and daring attack on
the French fleet which followed next day, were practically Cochrane's
last acts as a British sailor. He achieved dazzling exploits under the
flag of Chili [Transcriber's note: Chile?] and Brazil; but the most
original warlike genius the English navy has ever known, fought no more
battles for England.
THE MAN WHO SPOILED NAPOLEON'S "DESTINY"!
"Oh, who shall lightly say that Fame
Is nothing but an empty name!
Whilst in that sound there is a charm
The nerves to brace, the heart to warm.
As, thinking of the mighty dead,
The young from slothful couch will start,
And vow, with lifted hands outspread,
Like them to act a noble part?"
--JOANNA BAILLIE.
From March 18 to May 20, 1799--for more than sixty days and nights,
that is--a little, half-forgotten, and more than half-ruined Syrian
town was the scene of one of the fiercest and most dramatic sieges
recorded in military history. And rarely has there been a struggle so
apparently one-sided. A handful of British sailors and Turkish
irregulars were holding Acre, a town without regular defences, against
Napoleon, the most brilliant military genius of his generation, with an
army of 10,000 war-hardened veterans, the "Army of Italy"--soldiers who
had dared the snows of the Alps and conquered Italy, and to whom
victory was a familiar experience. In their ranks military daring had
reached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors inside
that ring of crumbling wall won! At the blood-stained trenches of Acre
Napoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena,
he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "That
man made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishman
thwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career in
the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated
most--Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney
Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny,"
and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in
the Atlantic.
Sidney Smith was a sailor of the school of Nelson and of Dundonald--a
man, that is, with a spark of that warlike genius which begins where
mechanical rules end. He was a man of singular physical beauty, with a
certain magnetism and fire about him which made men willing to die for
him, and women who had never spoken to him fall headlong in love with
him. His whole career is curiously picturesque. He became a middy at
the tender age of eleven years; went through fierce sea-fights, and was
actually mate of the watch when fourteen years old. He was a
fellow-middy with William IV. in the fight off Cape St. Vincent, became
commander when he was eighteen years of age, and captain before he was
quite nineteen. But the British marine, even in those tumultuous days,
scarcely yielded enough of the rapture of fighting to this post-captain
in his teens. He took service under the Swedish flag, saw hard
fighting against the Russians, became the close personal friend of the
King, and was knighted by him. One of the feats at this period of his
life with which tradition, with more or less of plausibility, credits
Sidney Smith, is that of swimming by night through the Russian fleet, a
distance of two miles, carrying a letter enclosed in a bladder to the
Swedish admiral.
Sidney Smith afterwards entered the Turkish service. When war broke
out betwixt France and England in 1790, he purchased a tiny craft at
Smyrna, picked up in that port a hybrid crew, and hurried to join Lord
Hood, who was then holding Toulon. When the British abandoned the
port--and it is curious to recollect that the duel between Sidney Smith
and Napoleon, which reached its climax at Acre, began here--Sidney
Smith volunteered to burn the French fleet, a task which he performed
with an audacity and skill worthy of Dundonald or Nelson, and for which
the French never forgave him.
Sidney Smith was given the command of an English frigate, and fought a
dozen brilliant fights in the Channel. He carried with his boats a
famous French privateer off Havre de Grace; but during the fight on the
deck of the captured ship it drifted into the mouth of the Seine above
the forts. The wind dropped, the tide was too strong to be stemmed,
and Sidney Smith himself was captured. He had so harried the French
coast that the French refused to treat him as an ordinary prisoner of
war, and threw him into that ill-omened prison, the Temple, from whose
iron-barred windows the unfortunate sailor watched for two years the
horrors of the Reign of Terror in its last stages, the tossing crowds,
the tumbrils rolling past, crowded with victims for the guillotine.
Sidney Smith escaped at last by a singularly audacious trick. Two
confederates, dressed in dashing uniform, one wearing the dress of an
adjutant, and the other that of an officer of still higher rank,
presented themselves at the Temple with forged orders for the transfer
of Sidney Smith.
The governor surrendered his prisoner, but insisted on sending a guard
of six men with him. The sham adjutant cheerfully acquiesced, but,
after a moment's pause, turned to Sidney Smith, and said, if he would
give his parole as an officer not to attempt to escape, they would
dispense with the escort. Sidney Smith, with due gravity, replied to
his confederate, "Sir, I swear on the faith of an officer to accompany
you wherever you choose to conduct me." The governor was satisfied,
and the two sham officers proceeded to "conduct" their friend with the
utmost possible despatch to the French coast. Another English officer
who had escaped--Captain Wright--joined Sidney Smith outside Rouen, and
the problem was how to get through the barriers without a passport.
Smith sent Wright on first, and he was duly challenged for his passport
by the sentinel; whereupon Sidney Smith, with a majestic air of
official authority, marched up and said in faultless Parisian French,
"I answer for this citizen, I know him;" whereupon the deluded sentinel
saluted and allowed them both to pass!
Sidney Smith's escape from the Temple made him a popular hero in
England. He was known to have great influence with the Turkish
authorities, and he was sent to the East in the double office of
envoy-extraordinary to the Porte, and commander of the squadron at
Alexandria. By one of the curious coincidences which marked Sidney
Smith's career, he became acquainted while in the Temple with a French
Royalist officer named Philippeaux, an engineer of signal ability, and
who had been a schoolfellow and a close chum of Napoleon himself at
Brienne. Smith took his French friend with him to the East, and he
played a great part in the defence of Acre. Napoleon had swept north
through the desert to Syria, had captured Gaza and Jaffa, and was about
to attack Acre, which lay between him and his ultimate goal,
Constantinople. Here Sidney Smith resolved to bar his way, and in his
flagship the _Tigre_, with the _Theseus_, under Captain Miller, and two
gunboats, he sailed to Acre to assist in its defence. Philippeaux took
charge of the fortifications, and thus, in the breaches of a remote
Syrian town, the quondam prisoner of the Temple and the ancient school
friend of Napoleon joined hands to wreck that dream of a great Eastern
empire which lurked in the cells of Napoleon's masterful intellect.
Acre represents a blunted arrow-head jutting out from a point in the
Syrian coast. Napoleon could only attack, so to speak, the neck of the
arrow, which was protected by a ditch and a weak wall, and flanked by
towers; but Sidney Smith, having command of the sea, could sweep the
four faces of the town with the fire of his guns, as well as command
all the sea-roads in its vicinity. He guessed, from the delay of the
French in opening fire, that they were waiting for their siege-train to
arrive by sea. He kept vigilant watch, pounced on the French flotilla
as it rounded the promontory of Mount Carmel, captured nine of the
vessels, carried them with their guns and warlike material to Acre, and
mounted his thirty-four captured pieces on the batteries of the town.
Thus the disgusted French saw the very guns which were intended to
batter down the defences of Acre--and which were glorious with the
memories of a dozen victories in Italy--frowning at them, loaded with
English powder and shot, and manned by English sailors.
It is needless to say that a siege directed by Napoleon--the siege of
what he looked upon as a contemptible and almost defenceless town, the
single barrier betwixt his ambition and its goal--was urged with
amazing fire and vehemence. The wall was battered day and night, a
breach fifty feet wide made, and more than twelve assaults delivered,
with all the fire and daring of which French soldiers, gallantly led,
are capable. So sustained was the fighting, that on one occasion the
combat raged in the ditch and on the breach for _twenty-five_
successive hours. So close and fierce was it that one half-ruined
tower was held by _both_ besiegers and besieged for twelve hours in
succession, and neither would yield. At the breach, again, the two
lines of desperately fighting men on repeated occasions clashed
bayonets together, and wrestled and stabbed and died, till the
survivors were parted by the barrier of the dead which grew beneath
their feet.
Sidney Smith, however, fought like a sailor, and with all the cool
ingenuity and resourcefulness of a sailor. His ships, drawn up on two
faces of the town, smote the French stormers on either flank till they
learned to build up a dreadful screen, made up partly of stones plucked
from the breach, and partly of the dead bodies of their comrades.
Smith, too, perched guns in all sorts of unexpected positions--a
24-pounder in the lighthouse, under the command of an exultant middy;
two 68-pounders under the charge of "old Bray," the carpenter of the
_Tigre_, and, as Sidney Smith himself reports, "one of the bravest and
most intelligent men I ever served with"; and yet a third gun, a French
brass 18-pounder, in one of the ravelins, under a master's mate. Bray
dropped his shells with the nicest accuracy in the centre of the French
columns as they swept up the breach, and the middy perched aloft, and
the master's mate from the ravelin, smote them on either flank with
case-shot, while the _Theseus_ and the _Tigre_ added to the tumult the
thunder of their broadsides, and the captured French gunboats
contributed the yelp of their lighter pieces.
The great feature of the siege, however, was the fierceness and the
number of the sorties. Sidney Smith's sorties actually exceeded in
number and vehemence Napoleon's assaults. He broke the strength of
Napoleon's attacks, that is, by anticipating them. A crowd of Turkish
irregulars, with a few naval officers leading them, and a solid mass of
Jack-tars in the centre, would break from a sally-port, or rush
vehemently down through the gap in the wall, and scour the French
trenches, overturn the gabions, spike the guns, and slay the guards.
The French reserves hurried fiercely up, always scourged, however, by
the flank fire of the ships, and drove back the sortie. But the
process was renewed the same night or the next day with unlessened fire
and daring. The French engineers, despairing of success on the
surface, betook themselves to mining; whereupon the besieged made a
desperate sortie and reached the mouth of the mine. Lieutenant Wright,
who led them, and who had already received two shots in his sword-arm,
leaped down the mine followed by his sailors, slew the miners,
destroyed their work, and safely regained the town.
The British sustained one startling disaster. Captain Miller of the
_Theseus_, whose ammunition ran short, carefully collected such French
shells as fell into the town without exploding, and duly returned them
alight, and supplied with better fuses, to their original senders. He
had collected some seventy shells on the _Theseus_, and was preparing
them for use against the French. The carpenter of the ship was
endeavouring to get the fuses out of the loaded shells with an auger,
and a middy undertook to assist him, in characteristic middy fashion,
with a mallet and a spike-nail. A huge shell under his treatment
suddenly exploded on the quarter-deck of the _Theseus_, and the other
sixty-nine shells followed suit. The too ingenious middy disappeared
into space; forty seamen, with Captain Miller himself, were killed; and
forty-seven, including the two lieutenants of the ship, the chaplain,
and the surgeon, were seriously wounded. The whole of the poop was
blown to pieces, and the ship was left a wreck with fire breaking out
at half-a-dozen points. The fire was subdued, and the _Theseus_
survived in a half-gutted condition, but the disaster was a severe blow
to Sir Sidney's resources.
As evening fell on May 7, the white sails of a fleet, became visible
over the sea rim, and all firing ceased while besiegers and besieged
watched the approaching ships. Was it a French fleet or a Turkish?
Did it bring succour to the besieged or a triumph to the besiegers?
The approaching ships flew the crescent. It was the Turkish fleet from
Rhodes bringing reinforcements. But the wind was sinking, and
Napoleon, who had watched the approach of the hostile ships with
feelings which may be guessed, calculated that there remained six hours
before they could cast anchor in the bay. Eleven assaults had been
already made, in which eight French generals and the best officers in
every branch of the service had perished. There remained time for a
twelfth assault. He might yet pluck victory from the very edge of
defeat. At ten o'clock that night the French artillery was brought up
close to the counterscarp to batter down the curtain, and a new breach
was made. Lannes led his division against the shot-wrecked tower, and
General Rimbaud took his grenadiers with a resistless rush through the
new breach. All night the combat raged, the men fighting desperately
hand to hand. When the rays of the level morning sun broke through the
pall of smoke which hung sullenly over the combatants, the tricolour
flew on the outer angle of the tower, and still the ships bringing
reinforcements had not reached the harbour! Sidney Smith, at this
crisis, landed every man from the English ships, and led them, pike in
hand, to the breach, and the shouting and madness of the conflict awoke
once more. To use Sidney Smith's own words, "the muzzles of the
muskets touched each other--the spear-heads were locked together." But
Sidney Smith's sailors, with the brave Turks who rallied to their help,
were not to be denied.
Lannes' grenadiers were tumbled headlong from the tower, Lannes himself
being wounded, while Rimbaud's brave men, who were actually past the
breach, were swept into ruin, their general killed, and the French
soldiers within the breach all captured or slain.
One of the dramatic incidents of the siege was the assault made by
Kleber's troops. They had not taken part in the siege hitherto, but
had won a brilliant victory over the Arabs at Mount Tabor. On reaching
the camp, flushed with their triumph, and seeing how slight were the
apparent defences of the town, they demanded clamorously to be led to
the assault. Napoleon consented. Kleber, who was of gigantic stature,
with a head of hair worthy of a German music-master or of a Soudan
dervish, led his grenadiers to the edge of the breach and stood there,
while with gesture and voice--a voice audible even above the fierce and
sustained crackle of the musketry--he urged his men on. Napoleon,
standing on a gun in the nearest French battery, watched the sight with
eager eyes--the French grenadiers running furiously up the breach, the
grim line of levelled muskets that barred it, the sudden roar of the
English guns as from every side they smote the staggering French
column. Vainly single officers struggled out of the torn mass, ran
gesticulating up the breach, and died at the muzzles of the British
muskets. The men could not follow, or only died as they leaped
forward. The French grenadiers, still fighting, swearing, and
screaming, were swept back past the point where Kleber stood, hoarse
with shouting, black with gunpowder, furious with rage. The last
assault on Acre had failed. The French sick, field artillery, and
baggage silently defiled that night to the rear. The heavy guns were
buried in the sand, and after sixty days of open trenches Napoleon, for
the first time in his life, though not for the last, ordered a retreat.
Napoleon buried in the breaches of Acre not merely 3000 of his bravest
troops, but the golden dream of his life. "In that miserable fort," as
he said, "lay the fate of the East." Napoleon expected to find in it
the pasha's treasures, and arms for 300,000 men. "When I have captured
it," he said to Bourrienne, "I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. I
shall arm the tribes; I shall reach Constantinople; I shall overturn
the Turkish Empire; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire.
Perhaps I shall return to Paris by Adrianople and Vienna!" Napoleon
was cheerfully willing to pay the price of what religion he had to
accomplish this dream. He was willing, that is, to turn Turk. Henri
IV. said "Paris was worth a mass," and was not the East, said Napoleon,
"worth a turban and a pair of trousers?" In his conversation at St.
Helena with Las Cases he seriously defended this policy. His army, he
added, would have shared his "conversion," and have taken their new
creed with a Parisian laugh. "Had I but captured Acre," Napoleon
added, "I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I would
have changed the face of the world. But that man made me miss my
destiny."
Las Cases dwells upon the curious correspondence which existed between
Philippeaux, who engineered the defences of Acre, and Napoleon, who
attacked it. "They were," he says, "of the same nation, of the same
age, of the same rank, of the same corps, and of the same school." But
if Philippeaux was in a sense the brains of the defence, Sidney Smith
was the sword. There was, perhaps, it may be regretfully confessed, a
streak of the charlatan in him. He shocked the judgment of more sober
men. Wellington's stern, sober sense was affronted by him, and he
described him as "a mere vaporiser." "Of all the men whom I ever knew
who have any reputation," Wellington told Croker "the man who least
deserved it is Sir Sidney Smith." Wellington's temperament made it
impossible for him to understand Sidney Smith's erratic and dazzling
genius. Napoleon's phrase is the best epitaph of the man who defended
Acre. It is true Napoleon himself describes Sidney Smith afterwards as
"a young fool," who was "capable of invading France with 800 men." But
such "young fools" are often the makers of history.
GREAT SEA-DUELS
"The captain stood on the carronade: 'First Lieutenant,' says he,
'Send all my merry men after here, for they must list to me.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my sons, because I'm bred to the sea.
That ship there is a Frenchman, who means to fight with we.
And odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds--but I've gained the victory!
* * * * * * * *
That ship there is a Frenchman, and if we don't take she,
'Tis a thousand bullets to one, that she will capture we.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my boys; so each man to his gun;
If she's not mine in half-an-hour, I'll flog each mother's son.
For odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds--and I've gained the victory!'"
--MARRYAT.
British naval history is rich in the records of what may be called
great sea-duels--combats, that is, of single ship against single ship,
waged often with extraordinary fierceness and daring. They resemble
the combat of knight against knight, with flash of cannon instead of
thrust of lance, and the floor of the lonely sea for the trampled lists.
He must have a very slow-beating imagination who cannot realise the
picturesqueness of these ancient sea-duels. Two frigates cruising for
prey catch the far-off gleam of each other's topsails over the rim of
the horizon. They approach each other warily, two high-sniffing
sea-mastiffs. A glimpse of fluttering colour--the red flag and the
_drapeau blanc_, or the Union Jack and the tricolour--reveals to each
ship its foe. The men stand grimly at quarters; the captain, with
perhaps a solitary lieutenant, and a middy as aide-de-camp, is on his
quarter-deck. There is the manoeuvring for the weather-gage, the
thunder of the sudden broadside, the hurtle and crash of the shot, the
stern, quick word of command as the clumsy guns are run in to be
reloaded and fired again and again with furious haste. The ships drift
into closer wrestle. Masts and yards come tumbling on to the
blood-splashed decks. There is the grinding shock of the great wooden
hulls as they meet, the wild leap of the boarders, the clash of cutlass
on cutlass, the shout of victory, the sight of the fluttering flag as
it sinks reluctantly from the mizzen of the beaten ship. Then the
smoke drifts away, and on the tossing sea-floor lie, little better than
dismantled wrecks, victor and vanquished.
No great issue, perhaps, ever hung upon these lonely sea-combats; but
as object-lessons in the qualities by which the empire has been won,
and by which it must be maintained, these ancient sea-fights have real
and permanent value. What better examples of cool hardihood, of
chivalrous loyalty to the flag, of self-reliant energy, need be
imagined or desired? The generation that carries the heavy burden of
the empire to-day cannot afford to forget the tale of such exploits.
One of the most famous frigate fights in British history is that
between the _Arethusa_ and _La Belle Poule_, fought off Brest on June
17, 1778. Who is not familiar with the name and fame of "the saucy
_Arethusa_"? Yet there is a curious absence of detail as to the fight.
The combat, indeed, owes its enduring fame to two somewhat irrelevant
circumstances--first, that it was fought when France and England were
not actually at war, but were trembling on the verge of it. The sound
of the _Arethusa's_ guns, indeed, was the signal of war between the two
nations. The other fact is that an ingenious rhymester--scarcely a
poet--crystallised the fight into a set of verses in which there is
something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the
cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the
sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song.
The _Arethusa_ was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in
guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest.
Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to
a British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her American
colonies, and there was every sign that France intended to add herself
to the fight. No fewer than thirty-two sail of the line and twelve
frigates were gathered in Brest roads, and another fleet of almost
equal strength in Toulon. Spain, too, was slowly collecting a mighty
armament. What would happen to England if the Toulon and Brest fleets
united, were joined by a third fleet from Spain, and the mighty array
of ships thus collected swept up the British Channel? On June 13,
1778, Keppel, with twenty-one ships of the line and three frigates, was
despatched to keep watch over the Brest fleet. War had not been
proclaimed, but Keppel was to prevent a junction of the Brest and
Toulon fleets, by persuasion if he could, but by gunpowder in the last
resort.
Keppel's force was much inferior to that of the Brest fleet, and as
soon as the topsails of the British ships were visible from the French
coast, two French frigates, the _Licorne_ and _La Belle Poule_, with
two lighter craft, bore down upon them to reconnoitre. But Keppel
could not afford to let the French admiral know his exact force, and
signalled to his own outlying ships to bring the French frigates under
his lee.
At nine o'clock at night the _Licorne_ was overtaken by the _Milford_,
and with some rough sailorly persuasion, and a hint of broadsides, her
head was turned towards the British fleet. The next morning, in the
grey dawn, the Frenchman, having meditated on affairs during the night,
made a wild dash for freedom. The _America_, an English 64--double,
that is, the _Licorne's_ size--overtook her, and fired a shot across
her bow to bring her to. Longford, the captain of the _America_, stood
on the gunwale of his own ship politely urging the captain of the
_Licorne_ to return with him. With a burst of Celtic passion the
French captain fired his whole broadside into the big Englishman, and
then instantly hauled down his flag so as to escape any answering
broadside!
Meanwhile the _Arethusa_ was in eager pursuit of the _Belle Poule_; a
fox-terrier chasing a mastiff! The _Belle Poule_ was a splendid ship,
with heavy metal, and a crew more than twice as numerous as that of the
tiny _Arethusa_. But Marshall, its captain, was a singularly gallant
sailor, and not the man to count odds. The song tells the story of the
fight in an amusing fashion:--
"Come all ye jolly sailors bold,
Whose hearts are cast in honour's mould,
While England's glory I unfold.
Huzza to the _Arethusa_!
She is a frigate tight and brave
As ever stemmed the dashing wave;
Her men are staunch
To their fav'rite launch,
And when the foe shall meet our fire,
Sooner than strike we'll all expire
On board the _Arethusa_.
On deck five hundred men did dance,
The stoutest they could find in France;
We, with two hundred, did advance
On board the _Arethusa_.
Our captain hailed the Frenchman, 'Ho!'
The Frenchman then cried out, 'Hallo!'
'Bear down, d'ye see,
To our Admiral's lee.'
'No, no,' says the Frenchman, 'that can't be.
'Then I must lug you along with me,'
Says the saucy _Arethusa_!"
As a matter of fact Marshall hung doggedly on the Frenchman's quarter
for two long hours, fighting a ship twice as big as his own. The
_Belle Poule_ was eager to escape; Marshall was resolute that it should
not escape; and, try as he might, the Frenchman, during that fierce two
hours' wrestle, failed to shake off his tiny but dogged antagonist.
The _Arethusa's_ masts were shot away, its jib-boom hung a tangled
wreck over its bows, its bulwarks were shattered, its decks were
splashed red with blood, half its guns were dismounted, and nearly
every third man in its crew struck down. But still it hung, with
quenchless and obstinate courage, on the _Belle Poule's_ quarter, and
by its perfect seamanship and the quickness and the deadly precision
with which its lighter guns worked, reduced its towering foe to a
condition of wreck almost as complete as its own. The terrier, in
fact, was proving too much for the mastiff.
Suddenly the wind fell. With topmasts hanging over the side, and
canvas torn to ribbons, the _Arethusa_ lay shattered and moveless on
the sea. The shot-torn but loftier sails of the _Belle Poule_,
however, yet held wind enough to drift her out of the reach of the
_Arethusa's_ fire. Both ships were close under the French cliffs; but
the _Belle Poule_, like a broken-winged bird, struggled into a tiny
cove in the rocks, and nothing remained for the _Arethusa_ but to cut
away her wreckage, hoist what sail she could, and drag herself sullenly
back under jury-masts to the British fleet. But the story of that two
hours' heroic fight maintained against such odds sent a thrill of grim
exultation through Great Britain. Menaced by the combination of so
many mighty states, while her sea-dogs were of this fighting temper,
what had Great Britain to fear? In the streets of many a British
seaport, and in many a British forecastle, the story of how the
Arethusa fought was sung in deep-throated chorus:--
"The fight was off the Frenchman's land;
We forced them back upon their strand;
For we fought till not a stick would stand
Of the gallant _Arethusa_!"
A fight even more dramatic in its character is that fought on August
10, 1805, between the _Phoenix_ and the _Didon_. The _Didon_ was one
of the finest and fastest French frigates afloat, armed with guns of
special calibre and manned by a crew which formed, perhaps, the very
élite of the French navy. The men had been specially picked to form
the crew of the only French ship which was commanded by a Bonaparte,
the _Pomone_, selected for the command of Captain Jerome Bonaparte.
Captain Jerome Bonaparte, however, was not just now afloat, and the
_Didon_ had been selected, on account of its great speed and heavy
armament, for a service of great importance. She was manned by the
crew chosen for the _Pomone_, placed under an officer of special skill
and daring--Captain Milias--and despatched with orders for carrying out
one more of those naval "combinations" which Napoleon often attempted,
but never quite accomplished. The _Didon_, in a word, was to bring up
the Rochefort squadron to join the Franco-Spanish fleet under
Villeneuve.
On that fatal August 10, however, it seemed to Captain Milias that
fortune had thrust into his hands a golden opportunity of snapping up a
British sloop of war, and carrying her as a trophy into Rochefort. An
American merchantman fell in with him, and its master reported that he
had been brought-to on the previous day by a British man-of-war, and
compelled to produce his papers. The American told the French captain
that he had been allowed to go round the Englishman's decks and count
his guns--omitting, no doubt, to add that he was half-drunk while doing
it. Contemplated through an American's prejudices, inflamed with grog,
the British ship seemed a very poor thing indeed. She carried, the
American told the captain of the _Didon_, only twenty guns of light
calibre, and her captain and officers were "so cocky" that if they had
a chance they would probably lay themselves alongside even the _Didon_
and become an easy prey. The American pointed out to the eagerly
listening Frenchmen the topgallant sails of the ship he was describing
showing above the sky-line to windward. Captain Milias thought he saw
glory and cheap victory beckoning him, and he put his helm down, and
stood under easy sail towards the fast-rising topsails of the
Englishman.
Now, the _Phoenix_ was, perhaps, the smallest frigate in the British
navy; a stocky little craft, scarcely above the rating of a sloop; and
its captain, Baker, a man with something of Dundonald's gift for ruse,
had disguised his ship so as to look as much as possible like a sloop.
Baker, too, who believed that light guns quickly handled were capable
of more effective mischief than the slow fire of heavier guns, had
changed his heavier metal for 18-pounders. The two ships, therefore,
were very unequal in fighting force. The broadside of the _Didon_ was
nearly fifty per cent. heavier than that of the _Phoenix_; her crew was
nearly fifty per cent. more numerous, and she was splendidly equipped
at every point.
The yellow sides and royal yards rigged aloft told the "cocky"
_Phoenix_ that the big ship to leeward was a Frenchman, and, with all
sails spread, she bore down in the chase. Baker was eager to engage
his enemy to leeward, that she might not escape, and he held his fire
till he could reach the desired position. The _Didon_, however, a
quick and weatherly ship, was able to keep ahead of the _Phoenix_, and
thrice poured in a heavy broadside upon the grimly silent British ship
without receiving a shot in reply. Baker's men were falling fast at
their quarters, and, impatient at being both foiled and raked, he at
last ran fiercely at his enemy to windward. The heads of both ships
swung parallel, and at pistol-distance broadside furiously answered
broadside. In order to come up with her opponent, however, the
_Phoenix_ had all sail spread, and she gradually forged ahead. As soon
as the two ships were clear, the _Didon_, by a fine stroke of
seamanship, hauled up, crossed the stern of the _Phoenix_, and raked
her, and then repeated the pleasant operation. The rigging of the
_Phoenix_ was so shattered that for a few minutes she was out of hand.
Baker, however, was a fine seaman, and his crew were in a high state of
discipline; and when the _Didon_ once more bore up to rake her
antagonist, the British ship, with her sails thrown aback, evaded the
Frenchman's fire. But the stern of the _Didon_ smote with a crash on
the starboard quarter of the Phoenix; the ships were lying parallel;
the broadside of neither could be brought to bear. The Frenchmen,
immensely superior in numbers, made an impetuous rush across their
forecastle, and leaped on the quarter-deck of the Phoenix. The marines
of that ship, however, drawn up in a steady line across the deck,
resisted the whole rush of the French boarders; and the British
sailors, tumbling up from their guns, cutlass and boarding-pike in
hand, and wroth with the audacity of the "French lubbers" daring to
board the "cocky little _Phoenix_," with one rush, pushed fiercely
home, swept the Frenchmen back on to their own vessel.
On the French forecastle stood a brass 36-pounder carronade; this
commanded the whole of the British ship, and with it the French opened
a most destructive fire. The British ship, as it happened, could not
bring a single gun to bear in return. Baker, however, had fitted the
cabin window on either quarter of his ship to serve as a port, in
preparation for exactly such a contingency as this; and the aftermost
main-deck gun was dragged into the cabin, the improvised port thrown
open, and Baker himself, with a cluster of officers and men, was
eagerly employed in fitting tackles to enable the gun to be worked. As
the sides of the two ships were actually grinding together the
Frenchmen saw the preparations being made; a double squad of marines
was brought up at a run to the larboard gangway, and opened a swift and
deadly fire into the cabin, crowded with English sailors busy rigging
their gun. The men dropped in clusters; the floor of the cabin was
covered with the slain, its walls were splashed with blood. But Baker
and the few men not yet struck down kept coolly to their task. The gun
was loaded under the actual flash of the French muskets, its muzzle was
thrust through the port, and it was fired! Its charge of langrage
swept the French ship from her larboard bow to her starboard quarter,
and struck down in an instant twenty-four men. The deadly fire was
renewed again and again, the British marines on the quarter-deck
meanwhile keeping down with their musketry the fire of the great French
carronade.
That fierce and bloody wrestle lasted for nearly thirty minutes, then
the _Didon_ began to fore-reach. Her great bowsprit ground slowly
along the side of the _Phoenix_. It crossed the line of the second
aftermost gun on the British main-deck. Its flames on the instant
smote the Frenchman's head-rails to splinters, and destroyed the
gammoning of her bowsprit. Gun after gun of the two ships was brought
in succession to bear; but in this close and deadly contest the
_Phoenix_ had the advantage. Her guns were lighter, her men better
drilled, and their fierce energy overbore the Frenchmen. Presently the
_Didon_, with her foremast tottering, her maintopmast gone, her decks a
blood-stained wreck, passed out of gunshot ahead.
In the tangle between the two ships the fly of the British white ensign
at the gaff end dropped on the _Didon's_ forecastle. The Frenchmen
tore it off, and, as the ships moved apart, they waved it triumphantly
from the _Didon's_ stern. All the colours of the _Phoenix_, indeed, in
one way or another had vanished, and the only response the exasperated
British tars could make to the insult of the _Didon_ was to immediately
lash a boat's ensign to the larboard, and the Union Jack to the
starboard end of their cross jack yard-arm.
The wind had dropped; both ships were now lying a in a semi-wrecked
condition out of gunshot of each other, and it became a question of
which could soonest repair damages and get into fighting condition
again. Both ships, as it happened, had begun the fight with nearly all
canvas spread, and from their splintered masts the sails now hung one
wild network of rags. In each ship a desperate race to effect repairs
began. On the Frenchman's decks arose a babel of sounds, the shouts of
officers, the tumult of the men's voices. The British, on the other
hand, worked in grim and orderly silence, with no sound but the cool,
stern orders of the officers. In such a race the British were sure to
win, and fortune aided them. The two ships were rolling heavily in the
windless swell, and a little before noon the British saw the wounded
foremast of their enemy suddenly snap and tumble, with all its canvas,
upon the unfortunate _Didon's_ decks. This gave new and exultant
vigour to the British. Shot-holes were plugged, dismounted guns
refitted, fresh braces rove, the torn rigging spliced, new canvas
spread. The wind blew softly again, and a little after noon the
_Phoenix_, sorely battered indeed, but in fighting trim, with guns
loaded, and the survivors of her crew at quarters, bore down on the
_Didon_, and took her position on that ship's weather bow. Just when
the word "Fire!" was about to be given, the _Didon's_ flag fluttered
reluctantly down; she had struck!
The toils of the _Phoenix_, however, were not even yet ended. The ship
she had captured was practically a wreck, its mainmast tottering to its
fall, while the prisoners greatly exceeded in numbers their captors.
The little _Phoenix_ courageously took her big prize in tow, and laid
her course for Plymouth. Once the pair of crippled frigates were
chased by the whole of Villeneuve's fleet; once, by a few chance words
overheard, a plot amongst the French prisoners for seizing the
_Phoenix_ and then retaking the _Didon_ was detected--almost too
late--and thwarted. The _Phoenix_, and her prize too, reached
Gibraltar when a thick fog lay on the straits, a fog which, as the
sorely damaged ships crept through it, was full of the sound of signal
guns and the ringing of bells. The Franco-Spanish fleet, in a word, a
procession of giants, went slowly past the crippled ships in the fog,
and never saw them!
On September 3, however, the _Phoenix_ safely brought her hard-won and
stubborn-guarded prize safely into Plymouth Sound.
The fight between the two ships was marked by many heroic incidents.
During the action the very invalids in the sick-bay of the _Phoenix_
crept from their cots and tried to take some feeble part in the fight.
The purser is not usually part of the fighting staff of a ship, but the
acting purser of the _Phoenix_, while her captain was in the
smoke-filled cabin below, trying to rig up a gun to bear on the
_Didon_, took charge of the quarter-deck, kept his post right opposite
the brazen mouth of the great carronade we have described, and, with a
few marines, kept down the fire. A little middy had the distinction of
saving his captain's life. The _Didon's_ bowsprit was thrust, like the
shaft of a gigantic lance, over the quarter of the _Phoenix_, and a
Frenchman, lying along it, levelled his musket at Captain Baker, not
six paces distant, and took deliberate aim. A middy named Phillips,
armed with a musket as big as himself, saw the levelled piece of the
Frenchman; he gave his captain an unceremonious jostle aside just as
the Frenchman's musket flashed, and with almost the same movement
discharged his own piece at the enemy. The French bullet tore off the
rim of Captain Baker's hat, but the body of the man who fired it fell
with a splash betwixt the two ships into the water. Here was a story,
indeed, for a middy to tell, to the admiration of all the gun-rooms in
the fleet.
The middy of the period, however, was half imp, half hero. Another
youthful Nelson, aetat. sixteen, at the hottest stage of the
fight--probably at the moment the acting-purser was in command on the
quarter-deck--found an opportunity of getting at the purser's stores.
With jaws widely distended, he was in the act of sucking--in the
fashion so delightful to boys--a huge orange, when a musket ball, after
passing through the head of a seaman, went clean through both the
youth's distended cheeks, and this without touching a single tooth.
Whether this affected the flavour of the orange is not told, but the
historian gravely records that "when the wound in each cheek healed, a
pair of not unseemly dimples remained." Happy middy! He would
scarcely envy Nelson his peerage.
[Transcriber's note: The word "aetat." in the above paragraph is an
abbreviation of the Latin "aetatis", meaning "aged".]
THE BLOOD-STAINED HILL OF BUSACO
"Who would not fight for England?
Who would not fling a life
I' the ring, to meet a tyrant's gage,
And glory in the strife?
* * * * *
Now, fair befall our England,
On her proud and perilous road;
And woe and wail to those who make
Her footprints red with blood!
Up with our red-cross banner--roll
A thunder-peal of drums!
Fight on there, every valiant soul,
And, courage! England comes!
Now, fair befall our England,
On her proud and perilous road;
And woe and wail to those who make
Her footprints red with blood!
Now, victory to our England!
And where'er she lifts her hand
In Freedom's fight, to rescue Right,
God bless the dear old land!
And when the storm has passed away,
In glory and in calm
May she sit down i' the green o' the day,
And sing her peaceful psalm!
Now, victory to our England!
And where'er she lifts her hand
In Freedom's fight, to rescue Right,
God bless the dear old land!"
--GERALD MASSEY.
Busaco is, perhaps, the most picturesque of Peninsular battles. In the
wild nature of the ground over which it raged, the dramatic incidents
which marked its progress, the furious daring of the assault, and the
stern valour of the defence, it is almost without a rival. The French
had every advantage in the fight, save one. They were 65,000 strong,
an army of veterans, many of them the men of Austerlitz and Marengo.
Massena led; Ney was second in command; both facts being pledges of
daring generalship. The English were falling sullenly back in the long
retreat which ended at Torres Vedras, and the French were in exultant
pursuit. Massena had announced that he was going to "drive the leopard
into the sea"; and French soldiers, it may be added, are never so
dangerous as when on fire with the _élan_ of success.
Wellington's army was inferior to its foe in numbers, and of mixed
nationality, and it is probable that retreat had loosened the fibre of
even British discipline, if not of British courage. Two days before
Busaco, for example, the light division, the very flower of the English
army, was encamped in a pine-wood about which a peasant had warned them
that it was "haunted." During the night, without signal or visible
cause, officers and men, as though suddenly smitten with frenzy,
started from their sleep and dispersed in all directions. Nor could
the mysterious panic be stayed until some officer, shrewder than the
rest, shouted the order, "Prepare to receive cavalry," when the
instinct of discipline asserted itself, the men rushed into rallying
squares, and, with huge shouts of laughter, recovered themselves from
their panic.
But battle is to the British soldier a tonic, and when Wellington drew
up his lines in challenge of battle to his pursuer, on the great hill
of Busaco, his red-coated soldiery were at least full of a grim
satisfaction. One of the combatants has described the diverse aspects
of the two hosts on the night before the fight. "The French were all
bustle and gaiety; but along the whole English line the soldiers, in
stern silence, examined their flints, cleaned their locks and barrels,
and then stretched themselves on the ground to rest, each with his
firelock within his grasp." The single advantage of the British lay in
their position. Busaco is a great hill, one of the loftiest and most
rugged in Portugal, eight miles in breadth, and barring the road by
which Massena was moving on Lisbon. "There are certainly," said
Wellington, "many bad roads in Portugal, but the enemy has taken
decidedly the worst in the whole kingdom."
The great ridge, with its gloomy tree-clad heights and cloven crest,
round which the mists hung in sullen vapour, was an ideal position for
defence. In its front was a valley forming a natural ditch so deep
that the eye could scarcely pierce its depths. The ravine at one point
was so narrow that the English and French guns waged duel across it,
but on the British side the chasm was almost perpendicular.
From their eyrie perch on September 27, 1810, the English watched
Massena's great host coming on. Every eminence sparkled with their
bayonets, every road was crowded with their waggons; it seemed not so
much the march of an army as the movement of a nation. The vision of
"grim Busaco's iron ridge," glittering with bayonets, arrested the
march of the French. But Ney, whose military glance was keen and sure,
saw that the English arrangements were not yet complete; an unfilled
gap, three miles wide, parted the right wing from the left, and he was
eager for an immediate attack. Massena, however, was ten miles in the
rear. According to Marbot, who has left a spirited account of Busaco,
Massena put off the attack till the next day, and thus threw away a
great opportunity. In the gloomy depths of the ravines, however, a war
of skirmishers broke out, and the muskets rang loudly through the
echoing valleys, while the puffs of eddying white smoke rose through
the black pines. But night fell, and the mountain heights above were
crowned with the bivouac fires of 100,000 warriors, over whom the
serene sky glittered. Presently a bitter wind broke on the mountain
summits, and all through the night the soldiers shivered under its keen
blast.
Massena's plan of attack was simple and daring. Ney was to climb the
steep front on the English left, and assail the light division under
Craufurd; Regnier, with a _corps d'élite_, was to attack the English
left, held by Picton's division. Regnier formed his attack into five
columns while the stars were yet glittering coldly in the morning sky.
They had first to plunge into the savage depths of the ravine, and then
climb the steep slope leading to the English position. The vigour of
the attack was magnificent. General Merle, who had won fame at
Austerlitz, personally led the charge. At a run the columns went down
the ravine; at a run, scarcely less swift, they swept up the hostile
slope. The guns smote the columns from end to end, and the attack left
behind it a broad crimson trail of the dead and dying. But it never
paused. A wave of steel and fire and martial tumult, it swept up the
hill, broke over the crest in a spray of flame, brushed aside a
Portuguese regiment in its path like a wisp of straw, and broke on the
lines of the third division.
The pressure was too great for even the solid English line to sustain;
it, too, yielded to the impetuous French, part of whom seized the rocks
at the highest point of the hill, while another part wheeled to the
right, intending to sweep the summit of the sierra. It was an
astonishing feat. Only French soldiers, magnificently led and in a
mood of victory, could have done it; and only British soldiers, it may
be added, whom defeat hardens, could have restored such a reverse.
Picton was in command, and he sent at the French a wing of the 88th,
the famous Connaught Rangers, led by Colonel Wallace, an officer in
whom Wellington reposed great confidence. Wallace's address was brief
and pertinent. "Press them to the muzzle, Connaught Rangers; press on
to the rascals." There is no better fighting material in the world
than an Irish regiment well led and in a high state of discipline, and
this matchless regiment, with levelled bayonets, ran in on the French
with a grim and silent fury there was no denying. Vain was resistance.
Marbot says of the Rangers that "their first volley, delivered at
fifteen paces, stretched more than 500 men on the ground"; and the
threatening gleam of the bayonet followed fiercely on the flame of the
musket.
The French were borne, shouting, struggling, and fighting desperately,
over the crest and down the deep slope to the ravine below. In a
whirlwind of dust and fire and clamour went the whole body of furious
soldiery into the valley, leaving a broad track of broken arms and
dying men. According to the regimental records of the 88th, "Twenty
minutes sufficed to teach the heroes of Marengo and Austerlitz that
they must yield to the Rangers of Connaught!" As the breathless
Rangers re-formed triumphantly on the ridge, Wellington galloped up and
declared he had never witnessed a more gallant charge.
But a wing of Regnier's attack had formed at right angles across the
ridge. It was pressing forward with stern resolution; it swept before
it the light companies of the 74th and 88th regiments, and unless this
attack could be arrested the position and the battle were lost. Picton
rallied his broken lines within _sixty yards_ of the French muskets, a
feat not the least marvellous in a marvellous fight, and then sent them
furiously at the exulting French, who held a strong position amongst
the rocks. It is always difficult to disentangle the confusion which
marks a great fight. Napier says that it was Cameron who formed line
with the 38th under a violent fire, and, without returning a shot, ran
in upon the French grenadiers with the bayonet and hurled them
triumphantly over the crest. Picton, on the other hand, declares that
it was the light companies of the 74th and the 88th, under Major Smith,
an officer of great daring--who fell in the moment of victory--that
flung the last French down over the cliff. Who can decide when such
experts, and actors in the actual scene, differ?
The result, however, as seen from the French side, is clear. The
French, Marbot records, "found themselves driven in a heap down the
deep descent up which they had climbed, and the English lines followed
them half-way down firing murderous volleys. At this point we lost a
general, 2 colonels, 80 officers, and 700 or 800 men." "The English,"
he adds in explanation of this dreadful loss of life, "were the best
marksmen in Europe, the only troops who were perfectly practised in the
use of small arms, whence their firing was far more accurate than that
of any other infantry."
A gleam of humour at this point crosses the grim visage of battle.
Picton, on lying down in his bivouac the night before the battle, had
adorned his head with a picturesque and highly coloured nightcap. The
sudden attack of the French woke him; he clapped on cloak and cocked
hat, and rode to the fighting line, when he personally led the attack
which flung the last of Regnier's troops down the slope. At the moment
of the charge he took off his cocked hat to wave the troops onward;
this revealed the domestic head-dress he unconsciously wore, and the
astonished soldiers beheld their general on flame with warlike fury
gesticulating martially in a nightcap! A great shout of laughter went
up from the men as they stopped for a moment to realise the spectacle;
then with a tempest of mingled laughter and cheers they flung
themselves on the enemy.
Meanwhile Ney had formed his attack on the English left, held by
Craufurd and the famous light division. Marbot praises the
characteristic tactics of the British in such fights. "After having,
as we do," he says, "garnished their front with skirmishers, they post
their principal forces out of sight, holding them all the time
sufficiently near to the key of the position to be able to attack the
enemy the instant they reach it; and this attack, made unexpectedly on
assailants who have lost heavily, and think the victory already theirs,
succeeds almost invariably." "We had," he adds, "a melancholy
experience of this art at Busaco." Craufurd, a soldier of fine skill,
made exactly such a disposition of his men. Some rocks at the edge of
the ravine formed natural embrasures for the English guns under Ross;
below them the Rifles were flung out as skirmishers; behind them the
German infantry were the only visible troops; but in a fold of the
hill, unseen, Craufurd held the 43rd and 52nd regiments drawn up in
line.
Ney's attack, as might be expected, was sudden and furious. The
English, in the grey dawn, looking down the ravine, saw three huge
masses start from the French lines and swarm up the slope. To climb an
ascent so steep, vexed by skirmishers on either flank, and scourged by
the guns which flashed from the summit, was a great and most daring
feat--yet the French did it. Busaco, indeed, is memorable as showing
the French fighting quality at its highest point. General Simon led
Loison's attack right up to the lips of the English guns, and in the
dreadful charge its order was never disturbed nor its speed arrested.
"Ross's guns," says Napier, "were worked with incredible quickness, yet
their range was palpably contracted every round; the enemy's shot came
singing up in a sharper key; the English skirmishers, breathless and
begrimed with powder, rushed over the edge of the ascent; the artillery
drew back"--and over the edge of the hill came the bearskins and the
gleaming bayonets of the French! General Simon led the attack so
fiercely home that he was the first to leap across the English
entrenchments, when an infantry soldier, lingering stubbornly after his
comrades had fallen back, shot him point-blank through the face. The
unfortunate general, when the fight was over, was found lying in the
redoubt amongst the dying and the dead, with scarcely a human feature
left. He recovered, was sent as a prisoner to England, and was
afterwards exchanged, but his horrible wound made it impossible for him
to serve again.
Craufurd had been watching meanwhile with grim coolness the onward rush
of the French. They came storming and exultant, a wave of martial
figures, edged with a spray of fire and a tossing fringe of bayonets,
over the summit of the hill; when suddenly Craufurd, in a shrill tone,
called on his reserves to attack. In an instant there rose, as if out
of the ground, before the eyes of the astonished French, the serried
lines of the 43rd and 52nd, and what a moment before was empty space
was now filled with the frowning visage of battle. The British lines
broke into one stern and deep-toned shout, and 1800 bayonets, in one
long line of gleaming points, came swiftly down upon the French. To
stand against that moving hedge of deadly and level steel was
impossible; yet each man in the leading section of the French raised
his musket and fired, and two officers and ten soldiers fell before
them. Not a Frenchman had missed his mark! They could do no more.
"The head of their column," to quote Napier, "was violently thrown back
upon the rear, both flanks were overlapped at the same moment by the
English wings, and three terrible discharges at five yards' distance
shattered the wavering mass." Before those darting points of flame the
pride of the French shrivelled. Shining victory was converted, in
almost the passage of an instant, into bloody defeat; and a shattered
mass, with ranks broken, and colours abandoned, and discipline
forgotten, the French were swept into the depths of the ravine out of
which they had climbed.
One of the dramatic episodes of the fight at this juncture is that of
Captain Jones--known in his regiment as "Jack Jones" of the 52nd.
Jones was a fiery Welshman, and led his company in the rush on General
Simon's column. The French were desperately trying to deploy, a
_chef-de-bataillon_ giving the necessary orders with great vehemence.
Jones ran ahead of his charging men, outstripping them by speed of
foot, challenged the French officer with a warlike gesture to single
combat, and slew him with one fierce thrust before his own troops, and
the 52nd, as they came on at the run, saw the duel and its result, were
lifted by it to a mood of victory, and raised a sudden shout of
exultation, which broke the French as by a blast of musketry fire.
For hours the battle spluttered and smouldered amongst the skirmishers
in the ravines, and some gallant episodes followed. Towards evening,
for example, a French company, with signal audacity, and apparently on
its own private impulse, seized a cluster of houses only half a musket
shot from the light division, and held it while Craufurd scourged them
with the fire of twelve guns. They were only turned out at the point
of the bayonet by the 43rd. But the battle was practically over, and
the English had beaten, by sheer hard fighting, the best troops and the
best marshals of France.
In the fierceness of actual fighting, Busaco has never been surpassed,
and seldom did the wounded and dying lie thicker on a battlefield than
where the hostile lines struggled together on that fatal September 27.
The _melée_ at some points was too close for even the bayonet to be
used, and the men fought with fists or with the butt-end of their
muskets. From the rush which swept Regnier's men down the slope the
Connaught Rangers came back with faces and hands and weapons literally
splashed red with blood. The firing was so fierce that Wellington,
with his whole staff, dismounted. Napier, however--one of the famous
fighting trio of that name, who afterwards conquered Scinde--fiercely
refused to dismount, or even cover his red uniform with a cloak. "This
is the uniform of my regiment," he said, "and in it I will show, or
fall this day." He had scarcely uttered the words when a bullet
smashed through his face and shattered his jaw to pieces. As he was
carried past Lord Wellington he waved his hand and whispered through
his torn mouth, "I could not die at a better moment!" Of such stuff
were the men who fought under Wellington in the Peninsula.
OF NELSON AND THE NILE
"Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep.
With thunders from her native oak,
She quells the floods below,
As they roar on the shore
When the stormy winds do blow;
When the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.
The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,
Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return.
Then, then, ye ocean warriors,
Our song and feast shall flow
To the fame of your name,
When the storm has ceased to blow;
When the fiery fight is heard no more,
And the storm has ceased to blow."
--CAMPBELL.
Aboukir Bay resembles nothing so much as a piece bitten out of the
Egyptian pancake. A crescent-shaped bay, patchy with shoals,
stretching from the Rosetta mouth of the Nile to Aboukir, or, as it is
now called, Nelson Island, that island being simply the outer point of
a sandbank that projects from the western horn of the bay. Flat
shores, grey-blue Mediterranean waters, two horns of land six miles
apart, that to the north projecting farthest and forming a low
island--this, ninety-eight years ago, was the scene of what might
almost be described as the greatest sea-fight in history.
On the evening of August 1, 1798, thirteen great battleships lay drawn
up in a single line parallel with the shore, and as close to it as the
sandbanks permitted. The head ship was almost stern on to the shoal
which, running out at right angles to the shore, forms Aboukir Island.
The nose of each succeeding ship was exactly 160 yards from the stern
of the ship before it, and, allowing for one or two gaps, each ship was
bound by a great cable to its neighbour. It was a thread of beads,
only each "bead" was a battleship, whose decks swarmed with brave men,
and from whose sides gaped the iron lips of more than a thousand heavy
guns. The line was not exactly straight; it formed a very obtuse
angle, the projecting point at the centre being formed by the _Orient_,
the biggest warship at that moment afloat, a giant of 120 guns.
Next to her came the _Franklin_, of 80 guns, a vessel which, if not the
biggest, was perhaps the finest sample of naval architecture in
existence. The line of ships was more than one mile and a half long,
and consisted of the gigantic flagship, three ships of the line of 80
guns, and nine of 74 guns. In addition, it had a fringe of gunboats
and frigates, while a battery of mortars on the island guarded, as with
a sword of fire, the gap betwixt the headmost ship and the island.
This great fleet had convoyed Napoleon, with 36,000 troops crowded into
400 transports, from France, had captured Malta on the voyage, and
three weeks before had safely landed Napoleon and his soldiers in
Egypt. The French admiral, Bruéys, knew that Nelson was coming
furiously in his track, and after a consultation with all his captains
he had drawn up his ships in the order which we have described, a
position he believed to be unassailable. And at three o'clock on the
afternoon of August 1, 1798, his look-outs were eagerly watching the
white topsails showing above the lee line, the van of Nelson's fleet.
Napoleon had kept the secret of his Egyptian expedition well, and the
great Toulon fleet, with its swarm of transports, had vanished round
the coast of Corsica and gone off into mere space, as far as a
bewildered British Admiralty knew. A fleet of thirteen 74-gun ships
and one of 50 guns was placed under Nelson's flag. He was ordered to
pursue and destroy the vanished French fleet, and with characteristic
energy he set out on one of the most dramatic sea-chases known to
history. With the instinct of genius he guessed that Napoleon's
destination was Egypt; but while the French fleet coasted Sardinia and
went to the west of Sicily, Nelson ran down the Italian coast to
Naples, called there for information, found none, and, carrying all
sail, swept through the straits of Messina.
On the night of June 22 the two fleets actually crossed each other's
tracks. The French fleet, including the transports, numbered 572
vessels, and their lights, it might be imagined, would have lit up many
leagues of sea. Yet, through this forest of hostile masts the English
fleet, with keen eyes watching at every masthead, swept and saw
nothing. Nelson, for one thing, had no frigates to serve as eyes and
ears for him; his fleet in sailor-like fashion formed a compact body,
three parallel lines of phantom-like pyramids of canvas sweeping in the
darkness across the floor of the sea. Above all a haze filled the
night; and it is not too much to say that the drifting grey vapour
which hid the French ships from Nelson's lookout men changed the face
of history.
Nelson used to explain that his ideal of perfect enjoyment would be to
have the chance of "trying Bonaparte on a wind"; and if he had caught
sound of bell or gleam of lantern from the great French fleet, and
brought it to action in the darkness of that foggy night, can any one
doubt what the result would have been? Nelson would have done off the
coast of Sicily on June 22, 1798, what Wellington did on June 18, 1815;
and in that case there would have been no Marengo or Austerlitz, no
retreat from Moscow, no Peninsular war, and no Waterloo. For so much,
in distracted human affairs, may a patch of drifting vapour count!
Nelson, in a word, overran his prey. He reached Alexandria to find the
coast empty; doubled back to Sicily, zigzagging on his way by Cyprus
and Candia; and twelve hours after he had left Alexandria the topsails
of the French fleet hove in sight from that port. Napoleon's troops
were safely landed, and the French admiral had some four weeks in which
to prepare for Nelson's return, and at 3 P.M. on August 1 the gliding
topsails of the _Swiftsure_ above Aboukir Island showed that the
tireless Englishman had, after nearly three months of pursuit,
overtaken his enemy.
The French, if frigates be included, counted seventeen ships to
fourteen, and ship for ship they had the advantage over the British
alike in crew, tonnage, and weight of fire. In size the English ships
scarcely averaged 1500 tons; the French ships exceeded 2000 tons.
Nelson had only seventy-fours, his heaviest gun being a 32-pounder.
The average French 80-gun ship in every detail of fighting strength
exceeded an English ninety-eight, and Bruéys had three such ships in
his fleet; while his own flagship, the _Orient_, was fully equal to two
English seventy-fours. Its weight of ball on the lower deck alone
exceeded that from the whole broadside of the _Bellerophon_, the ship
that engaged it. The French, in brief, had an advantage in guns of
about twenty per cent., and in men of over thirty per cent. Bruéys,
moreover, was lying in a carefully chosen position in a dangerous bay,
of which his enemies possessed no chart, and the head of his line was
protected by a powerful shore battery.
Nothing in this great fight is more dramatic than the swiftness and
vehemence of Nelson's attack. He simply leaped upon his enemy at
sight. Four of his ships were miles off in the offing, but Nelson did
not wait for them. In the long pursuit he had assembled his captains
repeatedly in his cabin, and discussed every possible manner of
attacking the French fleet. If he found the fleet as he guessed, drawn
up in battle-line close in-shore and anchored, his plan was to place
one of his ships on the bows, another on the quarter, of each French
ship in succession.
It has been debated who actually evolved the idea of rounding the head
of the French line and attacking on both faces. One version is that
Foley, in the _Goliath_, who led the British line, owed the suggestion
to a keen-eyed middy who pointed out that the anchor buoy of the
headmost French ship was at such a distance from the ship itself as to
prove there was room to pass. But the weight of evidence seems to
prove that Nelson himself, as he rounded Aboukir Island, and scanned
with fierce and questioning vision Bruéys' formation, with that
swiftness of glance in which he almost rivalled Napoleon, saw his
chance in the gap between the leading French ship and the shore.
"Where a French ship can swing," he held, "an English ship can either
sail or anchor." And he determined to double on the French line and
attack on both faces at once. He explained his plan to Berry, his
captain, who in his delight exclaimed, "If we succeed, what will the
world say?" "There is no 'if' in the case," said Nelson; "that we
shall succeed is certain; who will live to tell the story is a very
different question."
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF THE NILE. Doubling on the French Line.
From Allen's "Battles of the British Navy."]
Bruéys had calculated that the English fleet must come down
perpendicularly to his centre, and each ship in the process be raked by
a line of fire a mile and a half long; but the moment the English ships
rounded the island they tacked, hugged the shore, and swept through the
gap between the leading vessel and the land. The British ships were so
close to each other that Nelson, speaking from his own quarter-deck,
was able to ask Hood in the _Zealous_, if he thought they had water
enough to round the French line. Hood replied that he had no chart,
but would lead and take soundings as he went.
So the British line came on, the men on the yards taking in canvas, the
leadsmen in the chains coolly calling the soundings. The battery
roared from the island, the leading French ships broke into smoke and
flame, but the steady British line glided on. The _Goliath_ by this
time led; and at half-past five the shadow of its tall masts cast by
the westering sun fell over the decks of the _Guerrier_, and as Foley,
its captain, swept past the Frenchman's bows, he poured in a furious
broadside, bore swiftly up, and dropped--as Nelson, with that minute
attention to detail which marks a great commander, had ordered all his
captains--an anchor from the stern, so that, without having to "swing,"
he was instantly in a fighting position on his enemy's quarter. Foley,
however, dropped his anchor a moment too late, and drifted on to the
second ship in the line; but Hood, in the _Zealous_, coming swiftly
after, also raked the _Guerrier_, and, anchoring from the stern at the
exact moment, took the place on its quarter Foley should have taken.
The _Orion_ came into battle next, blasted the unfortunate _Guerrier_,
whose foremast had already gone, with a third broadside, and swept
outside the _Zealous_ and _Goliath_ down to the third ship on the
French line. A French frigate, the _Sérieuse_, of thirty-six guns,
anchored inside the French line, ventured to fire on the _Orion_ as it
swept past, whereupon Saumarez, its commander, discharged his starboard
broadside into that frigate. The _Sérieuse_ reeled under the shock of
the British guns, its masts disappeared like chips, and the unfortunate
Frenchman went down like a stone; while Saumarez, laying himself on the
larboard bow of the _Franklin_ and the quarter of the _Peuple Sovrain_,
broke upon them in thunder. The _Theseus_ followed hard in the track
of the _Orion_, raked the unhappy _Guerrier_ in the familiar fashion
while crossing its bows, then swept through the narrow water-lane
betwixt the _Goliath_ and _Zealous_ and their French antagonists,
poured a smashing broadside into each French ship as it passed, then
shot outside the _Orion_, and anchored with mathematical nicety off the
quarter of the _Spartiate_. The water-lane was not a pistol-shot wide,
and this feat of seamanship was marvellous.
Miller, who commanded the _Theseus_, in a letter to his wife described
the fight. "In running along the enemy's line in the wake of the
_Zealous_ and _Goliath_, I observed," he says, "their shot sweep just
over us, and knowing well that at such a moment Frenchmen would not
have coolness enough to change their elevation, I closed them suddenly,
and, running under the arch of their shot, reserved my fire, every gun
being loaded with two, and some with three round shot, until I had the
_Guerrier's_ masts in a line, and her jib-boom about six feet clear of
our rigging. We then opened with such effect that a second breath
could not be drawn before her main and mizzen-mast were also gone.
This was precisely at sunset, or forty-four minutes past six."
The _Audacious_, meanwhile, was too impatient to tack round the head of
the French line; it broke through the gap betwixt the first and second
ships of the enemy, delivered itself, in a comfortable manner, of a
raking broadside into both as it passed, took its position on the
larboard bow of the _Conquerant_, and gave itself up to the joy of
battle. Within thirty minutes from the beginning of the fight, that
is, five British line-of-battle ships were inside the French line,
comfortably established on the bows or quarters of the leading ships.
Nelson himself, in the _Vanguard_, anchored on the outside of the
French line, within eighty yards of the _Spartiate's_ starboard beam;
the _Minotaur_, the _Bellerophon_, and the _Majestic_, coming up in
swift succession, and at less than five minutes' interval from each
other, flung themselves on the next ships.
How the thunder of the battle deepened, and how the quick flashes of
the guns grew brighter as the night gathered rapidly over sea, must be
imagined. But Nelson's swift and brilliant strategy was triumphant.
Each ship in the French van resembled nothing so much as a walnut in
the jaws of a nut-cracker. They were being "cracked" in succession,
and the rear of the line could only look on with agitated feelings and
watch the operation.
The fire of the British ships for fury and precision was overwhelming.
The head of the _Guerrier_ was simply shot away; the anchors hanging
from her bows were cut in two; her main-deck ports, from the bowsprit
to the gangway, were driven into one; her masts, fallen inboard, lay
with their tangle of rigging on the unhappy crew; while some of her
main-deck beams--all supports being torn away--fell on the guns. Hood,
in the _Zealous_, who was pounding the unfortunate _Guerrier_, says,
"At last, being tired of killing men in that way, I sent a lieutenant
on board, who was allowed, as I had instructed him, to hoist a light,
and haul it down as a sign of submission." But all the damage was not
on the side of the French. The great French flagship, the _Orient_, by
this time had added her mighty voice to the tumult, and the
_Bellerophon_, who was engaged with her, had a bad time of it. It was
the story of Tom Sayers and Heenan over again--a dwarf fighting a
giant. Her mizzen-mast and mainmast were shot away, and after
maintaining the dreadful duel for more than an hour, and having 200 of
her crew struck down, at 8.20 P.M. the _Bellerophon_ cut her cable and
drifted, a disabled wreck, out of the fire.
Meanwhile the four ships Nelson had left in the offing were beating
furiously up to add themselves to the fight. Night had fallen, by the
time Troubridge, in the _Culloden_, came round the island; and then, in
full sight of the great battle, the _Culloden_ ran hopelessly ashore!
She was, perhaps, the finest ship of the British fleet, and the
emotions of its crew and commander as they listened to the tumult, and
watched through the darkness the darting fires of the Titanic combat
they could not share, may be imagined. "Our army," according to
well-known authorities, "swore terribly in Flanders." The expletives
discharged that night along the decks and in the forecastle of the
Culloden would probably have made even a Flanders veteran open his eyes
in astonishment.
The _Swiftsure_ and the _Alexander_, taking warning by the _Culloden's_
fate, swept round her and bore safely up to the fight. The
_Swiftsure_, bearing down through the darkness to the combat, came
across a vessel drifting, dismasted and lightless, a mere wreck.
Holliwell, the captain of the _Swiftsure_, was about to fire, thinking
it was an enemy, but on second thoughts hailed instead, and got for an
answer the words, "_Bellerophon_; going out of action, disabled." The
_Swiftsure_ passed on, and five minutes after the _Bellerophon_ had
drifted from the bows of the _Orient_ the _Swiftsure_, coming
mysteriously up out of the darkness, took her place, and broke into a
tempest of fire.
At nine o'clock the great French flagship burst into flame. The
painters had been at work upon her on the morning of that day, and had
left oil and combustibles about. The nearest English ships
concentrated their fire, both of musketry and of cannon, on the burning
patch, and made the task of extinguishing it hopeless. Bruéys, the
French admiral, had already been cut in two by a cannon shot, and
Casablanca, his commodore, was wounded. The fire spread, the flames
leaped up the masts and crept athwart the decks of the great ship. The
moon had just risen, and the whole scene was perhaps the strangest ever
witnessed--the great burning ship, the white light of the moon above,
the darting points of red flame from the iron lips of hundreds of guns
below, the drifting battle-smoke, the cries of ten thousand
combatants--all crowded into an area of a few hundred square yards!
The British ships, hanging like hounds on the flanks of the Orient,
knew that the explosion might come at any moment, and they made every
preparation for it, closing their hatchways, and gathering their
firemen at quarters. But they would not withdraw their ships a single
yard! At ten o'clock the great French ship blew up with a flame that
for a moment lit shore and sea, and a sound that hushed into stillness
the whole tumult of the battle. Out of a crew of over a thousand men
only seventy were saved! For ten minutes after that dreadful sight the
warring fleets seemed stupefied. Not a shout was heard, not a shot
fired. Then the French ship next the missing flagship broke into
wrathful fire, and the battle awoke in full passion once more.
The fighting raged with partial intermissions all through the night,
and when morning broke Bruéys' curved line of mighty battleships, a
mile and a half long, had vanished. Of the French ships, one had been
blown up, one was sunk, one was ashore, four had fled, the rest were
prizes. It was the most complete and dramatic victory in naval
history. The French fought on the whole with magnificent courage; but,
though stronger in the mass, Nelson's strategy and the seamanship of
his captains made the British stronger at every point of actual battle.
The rear of the French line did not fire a shot or lose a man. The
wonder is that when Nelson's strategy was developed, and its fatal
character understood, Villeneuve, who commanded the French rear, and
was a man of undoubted courage, did not cut his cables, make sail, and
come to the help of his comrades. A few hundred yards would have
carried him to the heart of the fight. Can any one doubt whether, if
the positions had been reversed, Nelson would have watched the
destruction of half his fleet as a mere spectator? If nothing better
had offered, he would have pulled in a wash-tub into the fight!
Villeneuve afterwards offered three explanations of his own
inertness--(1) he "could not spare any of his anchors"; (2) "he had no
instructions"! (3) "on board the ships in the rear the idea of weighing
and going to the help of the ships engaged occurred to no one"! In
justice to the French, however, it may be admitted that nothing could
surpass the fierceness and valour with which, say, the _Tonnant_ was
fought. Its captain, Du Petit-Thouars, fought his ship magnificently,
had first both his arms and then one of his legs shot away, and died
entreating his officers not to strike. Of the ten French ships
engaged, the captains of eight were killed or wounded. Nelson took the
seven wounded captains on board the _Vanguard_, and, as they recovered,
they dined regularly with him. One of the captains had lost his nose,
another an eye, another most of his teeth, with musket-shots, &c.
Nelson, who himself had been wounded, and was still half-blind as a
result, at one of his dinners offered by mischance a case of toothpicks
to the captain on his left, who had lost all his teeth. He discovered
his error, and in his confusion handed his snuff-box to the captain on
his right, who had lost his nose!
What was the secret of the British victory? Nelson's brilliant
strategy was only possible by virtue of the magnificent seamanship of
his captains, and the new fashion of close and desperate fighting,
which Hood and Jarvis and Nelson himself had created. It is a French
writer, Captain Gravière, who says that the French naval habit of
evading battle where they could, and of accepting action from an enemy
rather than forcing it upon him, had ruined the _morale_ of the French
navy. The long blockades had made Nelson's captains perfect seamen,
and he taught them that close fighting at pistol-shot distance was the
secret of victory. "No English captain," he said, "can do wrong who,
in fight, lays a ship alongside an enemy." It was a captain of
Nelson's school--a Scotchman--who at Camperdown, unable, just as the
action began, to read some complicated signal from his chief, flung his
signal-book on the deck, and in broad Scotch exclaimed, "D---- me! up
with the hellem an' gang in the middle o't." That trick of "ganging
into the middle o't" was irresistible.
The battle of the Nile destroyed the naval prestige of France, made
England supreme in the Mediterranean, saved India, left Napoleon and
his army practically prisoners in Egypt, and united Austria, Russia,
and Turkey in league against France. The night battle in Aboukir Bay,
in a word, changed the face of history.
THE FUSILEERS AT ALBUERA
"And nearer, fast and nearer,
Doth the red whirlwind come;
And louder still, and still more loud,
From underneath that rolling cloud,
Is heard the trumpet's war-note proud,
The trampling and the hum.
And plainly, and more plainly,
Now through the gloom appears,
Far to left and far to right,
In broken gleams of dark-blue light,
The long array of helmets bright,
The long array of spears."
--MACAULAY.
Albuera is the fiercest, bloodiest, and most amazing fight in the mighty
drama of the Peninsular war. On May 11, 1811, the English guns were
thundering sullenly over Badajos. Wellington was beyond the Guadiana,
pressing Marmont; and Beresford, with much pluck but little skill, was
besieging the great frontier fortress. Soult, however, a master of war,
was swooping down from Seville to raise the siege. On the 14th he
reached Villafranca, only thirty miles distant, and fired salvos from his
heaviest guns all through the night to warn the garrison of approaching
succour. Beresford could not both maintain the siege and fight Soult;
and on the night of the 13th he abandoned his trenches, burnt his gabions
and fascines, and marched to meet Soult at Albuera, a low ridge, with a
shallow river in front, which barred the road to Badajos. As the morning
of May 16, 1811, broke, heavy with clouds, and wild with gusty
rain-storms, the two armies grimly gazed at each other in stern pause,
ere they joined in the wrestle of actual battle.
All the advantages, save one, were on the side of the French. Soult was
the ablest of the French marshals. If he had not Ney's _élan_ in attack,
or Massena's stubborn resource in retreat, yet he had a military genius,
since Lannes was dead, second only to that of Napoleon himself. He had
under his command 20,000 war-hardened infantry, 40 guns, and 4000
magnificent cavalry, commanded by Latour Maubourg, one of the most
brilliant of French cavalry generals. Beresford, the British commander,
had the dogged fighting courage, half Dutch and half English, of his name
and blood; but as a commander he was scarcely third-rate. Of his army of
30,000, 15,000 were Spanish, half drilled, and more than half
starved--they had lived for days on horse-flesh--under Blake, a general
who had lost all the good qualities of Irish character, and acquired all
the bad ones peculiar to Spanish temper. Of Beresford's remaining troop
8000 were Portuguese; he had only 7000 British soldiers.
Beresford ought not to have fought. He had abandoned the siege at
Badajos, and no reason for giving battle remained. The condition of
Blake's men, no doubt, made retreat difficult. They had reached the
point at which they must either halt or lie down and die. The real force
driving Beresford to battle, however, was the fighting effervescence in
his own blood and the warlike impatience of his English troops. They had
taken no part in the late great battles under Wellington; Busaco had been
fought and Fuentes de Onoro gained without them; and they were in the
mood, both officers and men, of fierce determination to fight _somebody_!
This was intimated somewhat roughly to Beresford, and he had not that
iron ascendency over his troops Wellington possessed. As a matter of
fact, he was himself as stubbornly eager to fight as any private in the
ranks.
The superiority of Soult's warlike genius was shown before a shot was
fired. Beresford regarded the bridge that crossed the Albuera and the
village that clustered at the bridge-head as the key of his position. He
occupied the village with Alten's German brigade, covered the bridge with
the fire of powerful batteries, and held in reserve above it his best
British brigade, the fusileers, under Cole, the very regiments who, four
hours later, on the extreme right of Beresford's position, were actually
to win the battle. Soult's sure vision, however, as he surveyed his
enemies on the evening of the 15th, saw that Beresford's right was his
weak point. It was a rough, broken table-land, curving till it looked
into the rear of Beresford's line. It was weakly held by Blake and his
Spaniards. Immediately in its front was a low wooded hill, behind which,
as a screen, an attacking force could be gathered.
In the night Soult placed behind this hill the fifth corps, under Gerard,
the whole of his cavalry, under Latour Maubourg, and the strength of his
artillery. When the morning broke, Soult had 15,000 men and 30 guns
within ten minutes' march of Beresford's right wing, and nobody suspected
it. No gleam of colour, no murmur of packed battalions, no ring of
steel, no sound of marching feet warned the deluded English general of
the battle-storm about to break on his right wing. A commander with such
an unexpected tempest ready to burst on the weakest point of his line was
by all the rules of war pre-doomed.
At nine o'clock Soult launched an attack at the bridge, the point where
Beresford expected him, but it was only a feint. Beresford, however,
with all his faults, had the soldierly brain to which the actual thunder
of the cannon gave clearness. He noticed that the French battalions
supporting the attack on the bridge did not press on closely. As a
matter of fact, as soon as the smoke of artillery from the battle raging
at the bridge swept over the field, they swung smartly to the left, and
at the double hastened to add themselves to the thunderbolt which Soult
was launching at Beresford's right. But Beresford, meanwhile, had
guessed Soult's secret, and he sent officer after officer ordering and
entreating Blake to change front so as to meet Soult's attack on his
flank, and he finally rode thither himself to enforce his commands.
Blake, however, was immovable through pride, and his men through sheer
physical weakness. They could die, but they could not march or deploy.
Blake at last tried to change front, but as he did so the French attack
smote him. Pressing up the gentle rise, Gerard's men scourged poor
Blake's flank with their fire; the French artillery, coming swiftly on,
halted every fifty yards to thunder on the unhappy Spaniards; while
Latour Maubourg's lancers and hussars, galloping in a wider sweep,
gathered momentum for a wild ride on Blake's actual rear.
[Illustration: Battle of Albuera, 16th May, 1811. From Napier's
"Peninsular War."]
Beresford tried to persuade the Spaniards to charge as the French were
thus circling round them. Shouts and gesticulations were in vain. He
was a man of giant height and strength, and he actually seized a Spanish
ensign in his iron grip, and carried him bodily, flag and all, at a run
for fifty yards towards the moving French lines, and planted him there.
When released, however, the bewildered Spaniard simply took to his heels
and ran back to his friends, as a terrified sheep might run back to the
flock. In half-an-hour Beresford's battle had grown desperate.
Two-thirds of the French, in compact order of battle, were perpendicular
to his right; the Spaniards were falling into disorder. Soult saw the
victory in his grasp, and eagerly pushed forward his reserves. Over the
whole hill, mingled with furious blasts of rain, rolled the tumult of a
disorderly and broken fight. Ten minutes more would have enabled Soult
to fling Beresford's right, a shattered and routed mass, on the only
possible line of retreat, and with the French superiority in cavalry his
army would have been blotted out.
The share of the British in the fight consisted of three great attacks
delivered by way of counter-stroke to Soult's overwhelming rush on the
hill held by Blake. The first attack was delivered by the second
division, under Colborne, led by General Stewart in person. Stewart was
a sort of British version of Ney, a man of vehement spirit, with a daring
that grew even more flame-like in the eddying tumult and tempest of
actual battle. He saw Soult's attack crumpling up Blake's helpless
battalions, while the flash of the French artillery every moment grew
closer. It was the crisis of the fight, and Stewart brought on
Colborne's men at a run. Colborne himself, a fine soldier with cool
judgment, wished to halt and form his men in order of battle before
plunging into the confused vortex of the fight above; but Stewart, full
of breathless ardour, hurried the brigade up the hill in column of
companies, reached the Spanish right, and began to form line by
succession of battalions as they arrived.
At this moment a wild tempest of rain was sweeping over the British as,
at the double, they came up the hill; the eddying fog, thick and slab
with the smoke of powder, hid everything twenty yards from the panting
soldiers. Suddenly the wall of changing fog to their right sparkled into
swiftly moving spots of red; it shone the next instant with the gleam of
a thousand steel points; above the thunder of the cannon, the shouts of
contending men, rose the awful sound of a tempest of galloping hoofs.
The French lancers and hussars caught the English in open order, and in
five fierce and bloody minutes almost trampled them out of existence!
Two-thirds of the brigade went down. The 31st Regiment flung itself
promptly into square, and stood fast--a tiny island, edged with steel and
flame, amid the mad tumult; but the French lancers, drunk with
excitement, mad with battle fury, swept over the whole slope of the hill.
They captured six guns, and might have done yet more fatal mischief but
that they occupied themselves in galloping to and fro across the line of
their original charge, spearing the wounded.
One lancer charged Beresford as he sat, solitary and huge, on his horse
amid the broken English regiments. But Beresford was at least a
magnificent trooper; he put the lance aside with one hand, and caught the
Frenchman by the throat, lifted him clean from his saddle, and dashed him
senseless on the ground! The ensign who carried the colours of the 3rd
Buffs covered them with his body till he was slain by a dozen
lance-thrusts; the ensign who carried the other colours of the same
regiment tore the flag from its staff and thrust it into his breast, and
it was found there, stiff with his blood, after the fight. The
Spaniards, meanwhile, were firing incessantly but on general principles
merely, and into space or into the ranks of their own allies as might
happen; and the 29th, advancing to the help of Colborne's broken men,
finding the Spaniards in their path and firing into their lines, broke
sternly into volleys on them in turn. Seldom has a battlefield witnessed
a tumult so distracted and wild.
The first English counter-stroke had failed, but the second followed
swiftly. The furious rain and fog which had proved so fatal to
Colborne's men for a moment, was in favour of Beresford. Soult, though
eagerly watching the conflict, could not see the ruin into which the
British had fallen, and hesitated to launch his reserves into the fight.
The 31st still sternly held its own against the French cavalry, and this
gave time for Stewart to bring up Houghton's brigade. But this time
Stewart, though he brought up his men with as much vehemence as before,
brought them up in order of battle. The 29th, the 48th, and the 57th
swept up the hill in line, led by Houghton, hat in hand. He fell,
pierced by three bullets; but over his dead body, eager to close, the
British line still swept. They reached the crest. A deep and narrow
ravine arrested their bayonet charge; but with stubborn valour they held
the ground they had gained, scourged with musketry fire at pistol-shot
distance, and by artillery at fifty yards' range, while a French column
smote them with its musketry on their flask. The men fell fast, but
fought as they fell. Stewart was twice wounded; Colonel Dutworth, of the
48th, slain; of the 57th, out of 570 men, 430, with their colonel,
Inglis, fell. The men, after the battle, were found lying dead in ranks
exactly as they fought. "Die hard! my men, die hard!" said Inglis when
the bullet struck him; and the 57th have borne the name of "Die hards"
ever since. At Inkerman, indeed, more than fifty years afterwards, the
"Die hard!" of Inglis served to harden the valour of the 57th in a fight
as stern as Albuera itself.
But ammunition began to fail. Houghton's men would not yield, but it was
plain that in a few more minutes there would be none of them left, save
the dead and the wounded. And at this dreadful moment Beresford,
distracted with the tumult and horror of the fight, wavered! He called
up Alten's men from the bridge to cover his retreat, and prepared to
yield the fatal hill. At this juncture, however, a mind more masterful
and daring than his own launched a third British attack against the
victorious French and won the dreadful day.
Colonel Hardinge, afterwards famous in Indian battles, acted as
quartermaster-general of the Portuguese army; on his own responsibility
he organised the third English attack. Cole had just come up the road
from Badajos with two brigades, and Hardinge urged him to lead his men
straight up the hill; then riding to Abercrombie's brigade, he ordered
him to sweep round the flank of the hill. Beresford, on learning of this
movement, accepted it, and sent back Alten's men to retake the bridge
which they had abandoned.
Abercrombie's men swept to the left of the hill, and Cole, a gallant and
able soldier, using the Portuguese regiments in his brigade as a guard
against a flank attack of the French cavalry, led his two fusileer
regiments, the 7th and 23rd, straight to the crest.
At this moment the French reserves were coming on, the fragments of
Houghton's brigade were falling back, the field was heaped with carcases,
the lancers were riding furiously about the captured artillery, and with
a storm of exultant shouts the French were sweeping on to assured
victory. It was the dramatic moment of the fight. Suddenly through the
fog, coming rapidly on with stern faces and flashing volleys, appeared
the long line of Cole's fusileers on the right of Houghton's staggering
groups, while at the same exact moment Abercrombie's line broke through
the mist on their left. As these grim and threatening lines became
visible, the French shouts suddenly died down. It was the old contest of
the British line--the "thin red line"--against the favourite French
attack in column, and the story can only be told in Napier's resonant
prose. The passage which describes the attack of the fusileers is one of
the classic passages of English battle literature, and in its syllables
can still almost be heard the tread of marching feet, the shrill clangour
of smitten steel, and the thunder of the musketry volleys:--
"Such a gallant line," says Napier, "arising from amid the smoke, and
rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
startled the enemy's masses, which were increasing and pressing forward
as to assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then, vomiting forth
a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while the
fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the
British ranks. Myers was killed. Cole and the three colonels--Ellis,
Blakeney, and Hawkshawe--fell wounded, and the fusileer battalions,
struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking ships.
Suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies,
and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier
fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen;
in vain did the hardiest veterans break from the crowded columns and
sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open on such a fair
field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire
indiscriminately on friends and foes, while the horsemen, hovering on the
flanks, threatened to charge the advancing line.
"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of
undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of
their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in front,
their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away
the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the
dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as
slowly and with a horrid carnage it was driven by the incessant vigour of
the attack to the farthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French
reserves mix with the struggling multitude to sustain the fight; their
efforts only increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass,
breaking off like a loosened cliff, went headlong down the ascent. The
rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and 1800 unwounded
men, the remnant of 6000 unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant
on the fatal hill."
The battle of Albuera lasted four hours; its slaughter was dreadful.
Within the space of a few hundred feet square were strewn some 7000
bodies, and over this Aceldama the artillery had galloped, the cavalry
had charged! The 3rd Buffs went into the fight with 24 officers and 750
rank and file; at the roll-call next morning there were only 5 officers
and 35 men. One company of the Royal Fusileers came out of the fight
commanded by a corporal; every officer and sergeant had been killed.
Albuera is essentially a soldier's fight. The bayonet of the private,
not the brain of the general, won it; and never was the fighting quality
of our race more brilliantly shown. Soult summed up the battle in words
that deserve to be memorable. "There is no beating those troops," he
wrote, "_in spite of their generals_!" "I always thought them bad
soldiers," he added, with a Frenchman's love of paradox; "now I am sure
of it. For I turned their right, pierced their centre, they were
everywhere broken, the day was mine, and yet _they did not know it_, and
would not run!"
THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE"
"The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!
You, Gunnel, keep the helm in hand--
Thus, thus, boys! steady, steady,
Till right ahead you see the land--
Then soon as you are ready,
The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!"
--C. DIBDIN.
On the early morning of June 1, 1813, a solitary British frigate,
H.M.S. _Shannon_, was cruising within sight of Boston lighthouse. She
was a ship of about 1000 tons, and bore every mark of long and hard
service. No gleam of colour sparkled about her. Her sides were rusty,
her sails weather-stained; a solitary flag flew from her mizzen-peak,
and even its blue had been bleached by sun and rain and wind to a dingy
grey. A less romantic and more severely practical ship did not float,
and her captain was of the same type as the ship.
Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke was an Englishman _pur sang_, and of a
type happily not uncommon. His fame will live as long as the British
flag flies, yet a more sober and prosaic figure can hardly be imagined.
He was not, like Nelson, a quarter-deck Napoleon; he had no gleam of
Dundonald's matchless _ruse de guerre_. He was as deeply religious as
Havelock or one of Cromwell's major-generals; he had the frugality of a
Scotchman, and the heavy-footed common-sense of a
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