by Alan Schom
Ironically, of the entire vast shipbuilding effort it was thanks principally to the virtually enslaved Dutch nation that the flotilla was even beginning to take shape; they soon delivered 371 fully outfitted and armed vessels, complete with Dutch crews and officers. Little Holland was contributing the nucleus of the entire flotilla.[553]
The French were obviously in no position to launch an invasion expedition against Britain when war resumed in May 1803. Not only were transport vessels just being ordered, but not even the specific geographical areas for staging and launching the army for this projected conquest had been established.
With the collapse of the Peace of Amiens merely a matter of time, Napoleon had instructed War Minister Bcrthier to prepare for the inevitable. As early as April 18, 1803, the general duly presented the first tentative army plans, calling for the creation of five major encampments (one in Holland, one in Germany, and three in France). However, over the next six months the plans for campsites were changed no fewer than five times, Napoleon finally settling on plan number six, calling for three principal training/staging camps at Bruges, where General Davout would command a corps of three divisions; a corps of four divisions at St.-Omer, under Gen. Jean Soult; and another camp at Montreuil (near Boulogne), where Gen. Michel Ney would head his corps of three divisions. In addition there were dozens of smaller support units at other camps, while army units of all sizes and kinds were being transferred to the Channel in a blizzard of moves. It was not until December 12, 1803, that Napoleon officially, “definitively” announced “the organization of the great expedition.”
By March 1804, as a result of the usual vigorous action by General Berthier, the three principal staging centers at Bruges, St.-Omer, and Montreuil had some 71,336 troops in place. That figure would soon be doubled.[554]
Napoleon had at long last settled on a massive invasion of Great Britain, one intended to bring the French army to Piccadilly Circus itself. He had yet to decide, however, on the ports of embarkation or the plans for the warships required to escort the flotilla across the Channel, on which in the final analysis all would depend. Officers at Boulogne may already have toasted: “To the first review of French troops in St. James’s Park!” but the twenty-odd miles of sea separating Calais and Dover were to prove the longest Napoleon would ever attempt to traverse.
The great expedition occupied him more and more. He spent hours on it daily in an attempt to cope with the seemingly insoluble problems that tested even his prodigious abilities. At the same time the very array and complexity of the difficulties enthralled him, and thus despite them all, he loved every minute of it. It was this soldier’s hour of supreme happiness.
That the problems were monumental seemed only appropriate for a Napoleon (a view not fully shared by his hard-pressed general staff). Housing, for instance, was almost nonexistent along the dank, windswept Channel coast, apart from fishing villages. At the camp of St.-Omer, for example, quarters suddenly had to be found overnight for some thirty thousand troops arriving from all parts of the country. Eventually some 2,750 barracks and huts were built, providing semipermanent housing for an army of 167,500 men. This was one problem the first consul left to General Berthier to resolve. Procuring, transporting, storing, and distributing mountains of food, clothing, arms, munitions depots, artillery and transport parks, and thousands of horses (to be stabled, fed, and maintained) soon reached nightmarish proportions along that bleak stretch of sparsely inhabited coast, which offered no facilities of any kind. Obtaining forage and grain supplies for the horses became a feat. Great wagon trains of all these supplies were converging on the Channel camps daily from every corner of the land.
The navy had similar problems, being required to stockpile in the uncompleted port facilities not only for thousands of sailors but for all the troops once they actually boarded the transport vessels. The demands on Finance Minister Gaudin and on the French treasury were intimidating. To this complex problem was added Napoleon’s constant interference, ever traveling among the camps, demanding to see the books, insisting on hastening preparations. That a reasonable sense of efficiency and order was finally established was due in large part to War Minister Berthier.
Berthier was fifty years old in 1803, when he began organizing the entire army side of the expedition. After an initial meeting with a young General Bonaparte back in 1796, he had found himself summoned and appointed chief of staff to Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition. It was as Napoleon’s chief of staff that he was to spend most of the remainder of his career, and it was in this position that he excelled above all others.
Although mediocre in just about every other way — and forever the butt of jokes by most of his fellow officers, including Bonaparte himself — the slender, tense, neurotic, nailbiting Berthier was an excellent mathematician and a first-rate organizer and administrator. It was thanks to his unique set of abilities that Napoleon went from victory to victory. Bonaparte could win some battles without Berthier preparing the way, but he had a far better chance of doing so with him at his side.
It was the job of the chief of staff to prepare the orders for troop movements, instructing each commander clearly on his precise orders for the forthcoming campaign. It was he who dispatched supplies, arms, and muntions well in advance along the projected route of the army, so that all was in readiness when Napoleon himself required them. It was Berthier who was responsible for having all troops and commanders in their allotted places on time prior to a battle, at Napoleon’s beck and call. In the course of these operations Berthier completely reorganized the concept and work of the French general staff.
Despite his many insensitive jokes at poor Berthier’s expense, Napoleon ultimately grew to depend upon him as on no other individual in the French army (the only battle at which Berthier was not present was the disastrous Battle of Waterloo). If Berthier was an elusive character, a loner — apart from the one love of his life, Giuseppa Visconti (wife of the Marquis Visconti, president of the Cisalpine Republic) with whom he lived openly in Paris — he was dedicated to Napoleon in an almost symbiotic relationship. If Napoleon and Berthier were never intimate personal friends, such as Napoleon and Monge had become, nevertheless they were close professional colleagues, usually meeting daily regarding the military campaign of the hour.[555] Thus with the expedition’s army in Berthier’s capable hands, Bonaparte could confidently concentrate his own enormous energies on all the rest.
While Rear Admiral Decrès was also coping with his own major preoccupation, the flotilla, there remained two more aspects to be dealt with before this invasion force would be operational: ports and the navy. The most baffling in its complexity and infinite difficulties, and on which all success initially depended but to which Napoleon had paid the least attention, was the problem of ports from which to launch a couple of thousand vessels. These ports were still largely nonexistent. It is astonishing that Napoleon even contemplated such an expedition with so many basic elements of his plan not in place, but it was no doubt the very challenge of “achieving the impossible” that so attracted him. There was not an admiral or post captain in the entire French navy who thought that an armada could be launched from this part of the coast, simply because of the lack of ports.
From the very beginning, the lack of ports large enough to hold all the needed vessels would be a crippling factor, limiting Bonaparte’s options, helping to eliminate a military surprise, on which he initially claimed success depended. And from the outset all estimates as to the time and money needed for these engineering feats and their ultimate completion were so out of kilter with reality as to result in delay after delay, threatening financial ruin. But with the eyes of the whole of Europe now on this venture, Napoleon could not back down, even if he wanted to. As in the case of the Egyptian campaign, he was yet again prisoner of his own bizarre genius and his own vivid imagination that failed to face the realities of human limitations.
Deciding which ports to sail from was of crucial importance. As already me
ntioned, Napoleon had earlier considered basing the flotilla as far south as Brest, but the very design of the flat-bottomed boats precluded such a long crossing. Le Havre and Dieppe were closer and offered the advantage of being already in existence, but they were neither large nor close enough. Eventually he settled on the one place along the Channel coast that no naval officer in his right mind would have contemplated — Boulogne, where no port (apart from a primitive jetty) even existed. What is more, there were no natural, existing protecting bays, basins, or harbors anywhere along this entire northern stretch of coast. “It is one of the worst port sites of the Channel,” one engineering report concluded succinctly. Only a soldier could have made such a decision.
Naval ministry files revealed previous assessments of developing ports at Boulogne and elsewhere right up to Dunkirk, and Napoleon commissioned others.[556] Then he rejected all negative feasibility reports (including his own) on Boulogne and nine other ports, and on July 21 he ordered tentative plans that they be prepared to handle a total of 2,380 boats, capable of transporting (at this stage at least) some one hundred thousand men and three thousand horses. That these ports did not yet exist was quite immaterial. That similarly negative reports had been submitted by engineers for most of the other proposed sites was equally irrelevant. Incredulous and dismayed, chief engineer of bridges and highways Sganzin and his staff left the Tuileries wringing their hands.
Beginning work on sinking huge pilings and excavating an enormous boat basin at Boulogne, Sganzin set some three thousand men to work in early May 1803, foolishly agreeing to completion of that port by October, the date insisted on by Napoleon. “There will be no shortage of money,” Bonaparte assured him, promising the 2,126,846 francs he estimated it would require to finance the entire project. He wanted a temporary port only, he pointed out, the bare minimum needed for the launching of the flotilla. He was not interested in the future of that harbor.
Despite the use of very cheap labor, including the troops seconded from the nearby camp at Montreuil, Boulogne alone was soon costing 393,000 francs a month, and instead of completion by October, the works (including massive artillery batteries) would not be finished even by October of the following year. The cost of the port would double and then treble even the highest estimates. The artillery batteries alone were to cost an additional 3 million francs. A large jetty had to be built, along with quays, docking facilities, and a basin capable of holding many hundreds of flat-bottom boats, not to mention the expensive locks engineers insisted were required to raise and maintain the water level in the port.[557]
Napoleon personally inspected the entire northwestern Channel coast. “I have found an important place for [another] new port,” he announced enthusiastically, “in a swamp” near the seaside hamlet of Wissant. But this time Sganzin categorically rejected it, and even Napoleon could not overrule him, so vehement was the exasperated engineer.[558]
The much smaller projected port of Ambleteuse, which Sganzin had optimistically informed the first consul could also be operational by the autumn of 1803, using a mere 600 laborers at a cost of 180,000 francs per month, was still far from completion by January 1804, although some 3,300 men were now working on it round the clock. Millions were again spent. The same occurred subsequently at Wimereux and at Etaples.
Was Bonaparte completely mad? He certainly had no practical grasp of reality — despite his strong mathematical background — concerning engineering feasibility, or time, or the vast sums involved (and where they were to be found). He was translating his daydreams into nightmares, not only for his hard-put engineers but also for the French people and his allies.
And now the challenge of constructing the port sites and installations was being compounded by another most urgent situation. Ships from Admiral Lord Keith’s Home Fleet were bombarding Boulogne and the other coastal projects. Some of these bombardments were very heavy from ships less than a mile offshore, killing or scattering unprotected laborers.
In London the Admiralty Board began receiving ominous reports from across the Channel before 1803 was out. "It seems evident an expedition of some extent is being prepared” along the Channel coast, Commander in Chief Lord Keith informed Adm. John Markham. “Boulogne is undoubtedly the place,” Lord Keith concluded. A Portsmouth newspaper warned its readers in the autumn of 1803: “It appears that the information communicated to the Government induces it to believe that the French [war] preparations are in such a state for execution that an immediate attack from the French coast may be expected.” Emigre general Charles François Dumouriez agreed about the danger in a private memo to King George III: “If the French do carry out this expedition,” movements are sure to be abrupt. Eight days,” he solemnly predicted, “will decide the fate of the war.”[559]
Duly warned, England hurriedly armed its traditionally weak land forces. A series of crash defensive measures were taken, as the country’s military forces and the coasts of Kent and Essex were fortified, including the banks of the River Stour and the islands of Mersea, Sheppey, and Grain. Signal, or beacon, hills along hundreds of miles of coast were prepared with large stores of wood, hay, and tar, to be ignited in the event of enemy landings, while some seventy-four squat stone martello towers were hastily erected along the nation’s beaches. A triple line of defense was established from the coast to points several miles inland. A dozen sprawling new army camps sprang up in support of them, from which troops could march at the first sighting of the French, while alarums and rumors of impending disaster caused some coastal residents to load their mattresses and valuables on carts and flee to the safety of the interior.[560]
All preparations for the defense of the British Isles were heightened as of May 18, 1804, as William Pitt once again kissed the king’s hand and returned to Downing Street as prime minister (the very day that Lord Nelson was taking command of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet off Toulon). Legislation was quickly passed by Parliament and the war budgets increased. Several hundred thousand men rushed to join newly formed “volunteer regiments,” though ultimately only 275,000 were accepted (for want of guns and munitions), their number reinforced by 99,411 militiamen and a beefed-up regular army now totaling 116,000 men in England and another 55,000 in Ireland. Troops were garrisoned around London, or in the large coastal army camps at Harwich, Lowestoft, Colchester, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Weymouth, and Launceton, the remainder dispersed among the nation’s sixteen military districts. Everyone was joining up, including the royal family. “My dear son,” wrote George III to the Prince of Wales, “should the implacable enemy so far succeed as to land, you will have an opportunity of showing your zeal at the head of your regiment.”[561]
Nor was the navy slow to act, with its new, vigorous First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville (replacing Lord St. Vincent — “the greatest seaman that ever existed”), spurred on to new patriotic steps. The number of sailors was increased to some one hundred thousand, to whom were added twenty thousand marines. The number of warships of the Royal Navy was increased from 469 to 551 between 1803 and 1805, as the navy’s wartime budget rose sharply from £12,350,000 in 1804 to £18,864,000 the following year. The long, irregular shoreline was divided into twenty-eight coastal districts, its shallows and minor ports and estuaries — from Falmouth in the southwest all the way to the Firth of Forth in Scotland — guarded by some seven hundred or so small gunboats and their crews — the so-called sea fencibles. Lord Melville added 119 vessels to the Royal Navy by the beginning of 1805 to give Britain an average of 83 to 88 ships of the line and between 101 and 128 frigates at sea between 1804 and 1805, depending on the month. And yet of all those imposing ships of the line, only eight carried powerful twenty-four-pound cannon, and mostly twelve- and eighteen-pounders, as opposed to the French navy, which was largely armed with the mighty twenty-four-pounders. (What is more, thanks to Admiral Decrès’s impressive shipbuilding program, the French fleet was now being strengthened by approximately 20 ships and frigates annually.) Despite
superior gun power at sea, on the few occasions when the French actually dared to challenge the British, the British led in the critical element, professional manpower, with close to 3,700 career officers, including fifty vice and full admirals alone. Indeed, the British had more vice admirals than all the French flag officers combined (rear, vice, and full admirals), while the junior British officers greatly outnumbered those available to the French.[562] In this respect there was clearly no contest.
Not only were the senior British naval officers aggressively alert to the portent of invasion and fully determined to end that threat quickly and rigorosly, but their patriotic determination was fully supported by the British public.
Unlike the heavily stifled and severely censored French press and theater, for instance, the British were completely free to express their feelings, which they did without any artificial prodding by His Majesty’s Government. Theaters in London were bursting with ingenuity, drawing full-house crowds most nights of the week. The Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, the Sans Souci Theatre in the Strand, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and the Royal Amphitheatre at Westminister Bridge, to mention but a few, were vying with one another in support of “the boys” at sea and defending the clifftops of Dover. Such offerings as The Surrender of Calais, The Ship Launch, and The Female Hussar were matched by patriotic songs — “The Country Squire a Volunteer,” “Flat-botton’d Boats,” “The Strutting Emperor,” and “Albion Will Govern the Sea.”
Posters joined in the fun. One demanded the arrest of
a certain ill-disposed Vagrant and common Disturber, commonly called or known by the name of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, alias Jaffa Bonaparte, alias Opium Bonaparte...[who] hath been guilty of divers Outrages, Rapes, and Murders,” ordering that he “be forthwith sent to our Jail for WILD BEASTS...with the Ouran Outang, or some other ferocious and voracious animals like himself.[563]