An Awkward Commission

by David Donachie

  The fleet made contact with Gould and HMS Firefly by mid-day but he had little to impart, having seen it as his duty to avoid contact with the enemy, and stay on the station in case a sighting was made or a signal came from HMS Brilliant. Hood had no such scruples; he made straight for the approaches to the French naval port and was close enough by the time he had his dinner to be sighted from Mont Faron. If they were still at anchor he wanted them to see his fleet in the offing, and if they had weighed to find out for himself. The information from his lookouts, once they had got close enough, was satisfying. Admiral de Trogoff, pre-warned by his own patrols, had already began to warp his ships back into the Petit Rade, a place where they would be secure from attack by such things as fire ships. The only worry was that no sighting had been made of Barclay or his frigate.

  Stood bareheaded on the ramparts of the Tour de Mitre, in the late afternoon, Ralph Barclay and his wife watched as the capital ships were towed by their boats through the channel that led to the Petit Rade. He could just see the topsails of his fellow-countrymen on the horizon, where he knew, as much as he wished it otherwise, they would stay. The offshore fleet needed sea room in case of a turn in the weather; being closer to shore would be, in the event of a southerly gale, fraught with peril. To come in even closer was worse; below his terrace they had already got the furnace going behind the battery of forty-two pounder cannon, to make red the shot that would be doubly deadly for a wooden vessel, not only smashing wood, but starting fires as well. Across the bay, at the bastion near the infirmary, they would be doing the same, indeed the shore of the whole outer roadstead was dotted with forts. Any ship sailing into the Grande Rade would be caught between multiple fire from guns heavier than their own, and that with no hope of getting at the enemy vessels in the inner anchorage.

  ‘What will happen husband?’

  There was just a tinge of hope in Emily’s voice, hope that comfortable as their captivity was it would soon be over. He hated to dash that anticipation, but the truth could do nothing other than that. ‘The French will anchor a ship across the entrance to the channel below once all the rest are through, put a spring on her cable till she is broadside on, and effectively shut off the Petit Rade. In an extreme situation, they would sink her there.’

  ‘I meant as regards our ships, not theirs.’

  ‘Little, I fear. Hotham will blockade, staying just on the horizon to keep the French bottled up. Admiral de Trogoff must wait for a wind strong enough to blow our fleet off station, and then, if he wishes, he can put to sea on that same wind and either offer battle of try to evade them.’

  There was no point in adding an even more depressing fact; that Toulon had been studied by many naval minds over the years, who had concluded that it could only be taken by soldiers, and then it was not a matter of siege and assault but of attrition. To even have a chance of attacking the port and the town any aggressor must first subdue the batteries surrounding the Grande Rade, but that only brought them to stout walls and even more cunningly placed artillery. The defences had been designed by the Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s master of the art of fortifications, to discourage an attack from the sea, his aim to make the naval base a nut too tough to crack. Success in such a venture was not impossible, but given the time it would take and the force it would require, Toulon could not be captured before the arrival of a relieving army, so that those invading would have to fight a land battle at the same time as trying to press home a siege.

  ‘What would you do if you were a Frenchman?’

  ‘I would only know that if I knew de Trogoff’s orders.’

  Ralph Barclay declined to add anything about the Admiral obeying them, which was, if Captain d’Imbert was right, questionable. Thinking of that brought back the memory of that dinner, St Julien unashamedly paying court to his wife, and he had to suppress the feelings that induced, the belief that Emily had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Certainly she had failed to do what he, or rather Lutyens, had asked; any information about the state of affairs in the port had been gleaned by him, not her.

  ‘If he can get the rest of his 74’s fit for service he would have an advantage in numbers, but that counts for little if his crews are not worked up, as ours must be. You will have observed aboard Brilliant that men need time to get to know their tasks and each other. If that is true of a ship, it is even more so of a fleet. New to operations, sails take longer to set and take in. Gunnery, the most vital element should it come to a fight, would be slow and poorly aimed, and that against men who have had months of training. If he has orders to get to sea, I would suspect he would try to avoid battle rather than invite it for that very reason.’

  ‘Not very noble, husband, but I must say, for all he has a title, the Admiral did not strike me as overly endowed with that quality. He seemed a timid little man.’

  ‘Unlike his second in command, perhaps?’

  Emily did not respond; she knew how he felt, just as she knew to do so, to protest that it was just a bit of raillery, a pleasant diversion from being cooped up in a frigate with the same faces for months, would cut no ice and only lead to an argument. Instead she pointed up the long arm that enclosed the inner anchorage, to the point. ‘Is that our men returning?’

  Ralph Barclay nodded as he looked towards the town and the Vieux Darse, where his crew had been put to work shifting quarried stone. Led by Sykes, escorted by an armed guard, the dusty and weary Brilliants were trudging back to their underground accommodation. He had visited them at their labours, to find them under the supervision of overseers with whips. A protest had had these removed, but it was a moot point as to whether National Guardsmen with muskets and prodding bayonets were any less an evil. Emily, already indoors, was tying on her apron before gathering the unctions and ointments gifted her by Lutyens. She had taken it upon herself, each evening, to treat what sores and blisters the men had, and to insist on a transfer to the infirmary of any whom she deemed incapable of further exertion.

  Ralph Barclay had accompanied her on the first two nights, but he wearied of endless attempts at reassurance, had a limited ability to look into sad, exhausted eyes concerned about the future and a limited fund of words to maintain the hope that all would be well; that either the war would end or that rescue or exchange would arrive in the form of a British fleet. The men might know that had happened this very day; let Emily be the one to confirm it, for he feared being asked the very same question she had posed, one to which, in terms of time in captivity, there was no answer.

  ‘Will you not visit Glaister and the others? They at least should be made aware of what has happened.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ralph Barclay replied, with some force, to cover for the fact that he had completely forgotten about them.

  With the sun beginning to dip behind the hills to the west, the men on the ground floor had tallow stubs lit in the sconces, which did nothing to make pleasant what was a vista of dank stone walls and a bare earth floor. The news of the fleet lifted the gloom, cheering them immensely, which left their captain wondering how long that would last, though he indulged in a little necessary dissimulation when it was put to him that an exchange might now be arranged, given that officers stood a much better chance in that matter than seamen.

  ‘I am sure,’ he said, without any personal conviction, ‘that as soon as Admiral Hotham knows of our plight, he will send in a flag of truce for just that purpose.’

  ‘I thought Lord Hood might come out of his cabin to wish me luck.’

  Pearce said this as he prepared to lower himself into the waiting boat, bobbing below the entry port and crewed by men from Victory, now heaved to, each one in dark clothing with blackened faces. Ingolby, the premier, responded with an embarrassed cough and an intimation that, ‘The admiral, no doubt, had more important things on his mind.’

  The man to whom this was addressed saw it differently; that for instance, the admiral saw him as expendable. The cloak he needed to hide his clothing was already in the cutter, h
e would use his hat to cover his face, for if he did get ashore, blackened features in daylight would attract attention. The midshipman in charge, a youngster called Trevivian, gave the order to shove off and, once clear, the men began to row in steady rhythmical fashion while above their heads the orders were issued to get under way. The dying sun lit them as they came out from the lee of the flagship, and being the Mediterranean, that soon turned to a full night in which the moon had yet to rise. Not that it was totally dark; above their heads the sky was carpeted with stars and it was only when a cloud obscured them that the men in the boat could feel any sense of security.

  ‘They won’t see us from the shore, your honour,’ said the midshipman, in a voice with a strong West Country burr. ‘We will be like a black dot, the trough of a wave to the eye if we stay mid-channel.’

  The plan was to land him on the eastern shore of the Grande Rade, between a fort called La Malque and a hill called Pointe de Brun, which might, or might not, be home to another battery of cannon. To try to venture into the inner anchorage would be too perilous; crowded with shipping, it would be awash with guard boats. They would have those too in the Grande Rade, but in theory they would be less numerous and, given the area they were obliged to cover, easier to avoid.

  Sitting silently, the only sound the heavy breathing of the oarsmen, allowed Pearce’s imagination to run riot; he saw in the glimmer of the starlight endless chimeras that he took to be boats, even worse, when the cloud cover increased and in stygian darkness, his eyes played more tricks, which induced a longing for this boat journey to be over and for him to be on dry land. He had no doubt that he could pass himself off as a Frenchmen, and in a naval port his accent would not attract any attention from sentinels who must be from all over the country. But that feeling of certainty only applied ashore; at sea with a bunch of British tars, any close inspection would be fatal, which had him saying out loud, as the moon appeared for a brief moment, before slipping behind a cloud again, ‘What in the name of hell am I doing here?’

  ‘We all wonder that, sir,’ said one of the oarsman. ‘That be what we all feel, your honour, for if we is caught by the Johnnie Crapauds, it’ll be the galleys for the rest of our days.’

  Pearce shuddered, not willing to add to his inadvertently spoken complaint, that for him it would be a firing squad, or if the wrong people were in charge in Toulon, a guillotine. As if to make real what was imagined, a gap appeared in the clouds, and a voice cut through the darkness, demanding the private signal for the night, and unshaded a lantern to show the bows of another cutter with a man standing peering into the gloom by the side of a small cannon. The Victory’s oarsmen immediately raised their sticks and the cutter glided to a halt. Pearce had formed in his mind the words ‘j’ai oublié le mot’, when another voice called out, ‘Suffren. La response?’

  ‘De St Tropez.’

  Bobbing up and down slowly, oars still out of the water, Pearce and his rowers sat holding their breath, easier for him than those who had been exerting themselves. The lantern was shaded again, with everyone in the British cutter looking at the sky, at slowly moving clouds tinged with silver edges, praying it would not clear. Pearce, without consulting Trevivian, gave the men an order to row hard and damn the noise, sure that each of the two boats who had exchanged the identification would assume the noise came from the other.

  ‘Christ, that was a stroke of luck.’

  ‘Remember those words on the way back to Victory, Mr Trevivian. Suffren and St Tropez.’

  ‘What do they mean, sir?’

  ‘You a sailor and you have you not heard of Suffren?’

  ‘I’d be obliged if you would tell me of him, sir.’

  ‘He was an admiral and a hero in the Marine Royale, his full title being le Bailli de Suffren de St Tropez, hence the signal.’ Then, thinking of the boy’s accent, and to make safe the journey back, he had him practising saying that and the French for ‘I have forgotten the words,’ all the way to the shore, only to conclude that he would perhaps get away with it if the guard boats thought him Swiss.

  ‘They got an accent then, these Swiss folk?’

  ‘I’ve only met one as far as I know, Mr Trevivian, a lady called Madame de Stael.’

  ‘A madam! God forbid, sir, I should sound like some bawdy house trollop.’

  Pearce laughed. Thinking of Germaine de Stael in her Paris salon, the décor as glittering as the company, he wondered how a woman who prided herself on the sharpness of her mind and the acuity of her wit would take to being likened to a trollop. There was no salon now, no dazzling company. To avoid losing her head, rich and witty Germaine had been forced to flee to England, like so many others.

  Thinking of her took Pearce back to a happier vision of Paris, in the days before those who had brought down the power of the monarchy lost control of the Revolution. It had been an especially sweet time for him, a youth growing to manhood, taken everywhere by a favoured guest, his father. He recalled the city in high summer, could remember the festivals held in the Champ de Mars at which all the folk of Paris could mingle, to exchange greetings as citizens, regardless of previous rank, to kiss in amity and exchange flowers. The thought of kisses led on to those he had bestowed and received, and of those women in salons like that of Germaine de Stael, who had espied and seduced a young, handsome fellow, in the full knowledge of their compliant husbands. Happy times, indeed!

  The prospect of beaching brought his mind sharply back to the present and the knowledge that landing in the right place, the eastern arm of the Grand Rade, would be achieved more by chance than sure knowledge, given that Trevivian had used as guides what sightings he could get of the north star and the twinkling but distant lights from various points around the arms of the bay. Another break in the cloud showed that such methods had sufficed, as the cutter grounded on soft sand. They waited in silence for a full minute, to ensure that there were no foot patrols to worry about, before Pearce was carried ashore for, as Trevivian insisted, ‘It would not do, sir, to be seen ploughing along pretending to be a local with squelching boots.’

  His passenger gave him one more go at the password, took the lantern he would need to help them locate him, then set off up the beach, sniffing the night air, catching on it a whiff of pines, thinking that here he was again, an alien ashore in France for the fourth time since the start of the year. Those pines lay a short way inland, thin trees set well apart at ground level but with enough of a canopy above to blot out any light from stars of the moon. To keep going was to stumble and almost certainly trip and fall, so Pearce sat down, dirk by his side, pulled his cloak around him, and, using the tricorn as a pillow, fell asleep with his back to a tree. Those same trees blotted out the rising sun, so it was well up before he fully awoke from what had been fitful slumber, his first thought that he had not fetched with him anything to drink, and that as a consequence he had a raging thirst.

  Pine needles over sandy soil would provide no relief, so Pearce began to walk towards what he could see of the sun as it filtered through the canopy. Rising ground directed him to the left and after some ten minutes of walking he emerged into open country, cultivated fields, with the town of Toulon rising into the foothills of Mont Faron visible to the north. Looking to the south he saw smoke rising from a hill, which he suspected was the redoubt on the Pointe de Brun. A dusty, rutted track ran from there, parallel to the woods, so, cloak off and rolled under his arm, with the dirk inside and readily available, he strode out and away from what danger that represented.

  Hot in his ill-fitting coat, the discomfort of thirst increased, so Pearce was glad to spy a small village at the base of another hill. There were a few houses only, one of which had a table outside under an awning of reeds, and an owner who was obviously an ex-sailor, for even with only one leg he had the rolling gait and the dress to confirm it. Rough wine was not the thing to quench a thirst, that came from a bunch of juicy grapes, which accompanied his bread and cheese. That the silver he paid with was not French
brought forth no comment from the lame proprietor, though the look spoke of curiosity. But nothing was said; Pearce surmised that the fellow, like so many of his countrymen, was grateful to be paid in coin of any kind rather than assignats, the increasingly worthless paper currency of the Revolution.

  Carrying a second bunch of grapes, eating them slowly, Pearce made his way towards the walls of the city, stone ramparts buttressed by an earthen fosse to absorb cannon shot. This presented a problem, the gate being guarded by armed National Guardsmen, who, with the Rosbifs ships newly come, would probably be in a high state of alert. Watching from the shade of a nearby stable, he saw several people, civilians and soldiers, present papers, passes that let them through. Those that did not, the costermongers and farmers carrying produce into the town to be sold at the market, were obviously well known and greeted as such.

  Must he rob someone for their pass? Could he get through that gate without one? Still popping grapes, Pearce pondered that as he watched, thinking that confusion might work just as well. It seemed an age before an opportunity presented itself, as two carts, one entering one exiting through the narrow opening, became entangled, leading to a loud dispute between the drivers. At the same time a group of besmocked children appeared on the road, being shepherded along by nuns, the whole party obviously heading for the gate. It was a risk, but it was one he had to take, for nothing could be achieved lest he was on the inside of the fortifications, so, placing a hand inside the wrapped cloak to take hold of the dirk, he walked out as the last of the children passed him and, as they approached the gate began to shoo them along.

  Preoccupied with trying to untangle the carts, the sentries gave him a level of attention which was compromised not just by that, but by their need to raise their hats to the nuns, an act which actually surprised Pearce, given that such obeisance to religion would have seen them slung into prison in Revolutionary Paris. Still shooing the children, calling out at them to, ‘Allez, allez, mes enfants’, Pearce looked right at one of the sentries, and shrugged, mouthing, ‘Les jeunes,’ with a weary expression. He carried straight on, any curiosity deflected by the deepening argument behind him, as the two carters’ exchange erupted in a crescendo of mutual recrimination. By the time the sentry turned back to look, Pearce was nowhere to be seen.