The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  At a quarter to ten the Orient blew up with a terrifying detonation. The shock could be felt by French watchers at Rosetta ten miles away, and down in the magazine of the Goliath the boys and women1 at their blind monotonous task of passing up the powder thought that the after-part of their own vessel had exploded. The whole bay was lit as brightly as day by the expiring flame of the great ship as she rose into the air. After she vanished silence fell on the combatants: then after some minutes the guns opened out again. As they did so the moon rose dazzling in her Egyptian beauty over the wreckage and slaughter.

  Yet though the night was still young the battle was losing momentum. With the great Admiral who had conceived it dazed and disabled by his wound, the soul was gone out of it. Five of the French ships had already struck: another, the 8o-gun Franklin, was failing fast. But the victors after sailing, and fighting all day were exhausted. They would fire for a time and then desist: all night the battle flared up and then died away. " My people were so extremely jaded," reported Captain Miller of the Theseus9 " that as soon as they had hove our sheet anchor up they dropped under the capstan bars and were asleep in a moment in every sort of posture." 2 After the surrender of the Franklin the second lieutenant of Alexander approached Ball to tell him that, though the hearts of his men were as good as ever, they could do no more and begged him to let them sleep for half an hour by their guns. Nelson's slightly disjointed messages speeding through the night were received rather than obeyed: in that confused interminable nightmare of weariness nothing was ever quite carried through to an end.

  As it began to grow light the magnitude of the victory became

  1 One Scottish woman bore a son in the heat of the action.—Long, 198.

  2 Mahan, Nelson, I, 335.

  apparent. At 5.27 a.m. Captain Hallo well noted that six enemy battleships had struck their colours; on board his own ship " carpenters were busy stopping the shot holes . . . , people employed knotting and splicing the rigging." At six he heard the minute guns of the Majestic firing as she buried her captain. The whole bay was floating with charred wreckage and dead bodies, mangled and scorched. By this time it was light enough to see that three other battleships were at the victors' mercy: dismasted hulks aground or drifting. Only Villeneuve's three spectators in the rear remained uninjured. Presently these slipped their anchors and began to bear out to sea. But one of them, the Timoleon, in her haste to be gone ran on to the sandbanks. Her crew swam ashore and made off inland, a cloud of smoke revealing that her captain had fired her. Alone of the thirteen French ships of the line the Guillaume Tell and the Genereux with two frigates escaped into the blue of the Mediterranean. For a while Theseus, the only British ship sufficiently undamaged to carry sail, pursued them till a signal from the Admiral recalled her.

  In the first aftermath of battle Nelson and his men could scarcely conceive the fullness of what they had done. All day on August 2nd they were engaged in fishing naked prisoners from rafts and floating wreckage—sullen, downcast fellows very different from the merry Frenchmen some of the older sailors remembered capturing in the American war before the Tricolour had supplanted the Lilies.1 More than two thousand unwounded prisoners were taken and nearly fifteen hundred wounded: that night Nelson dined half a dozen wounded French captains in his cabin. Brueys, the first Admiral in France, had been cut in half by a British cannon ball before the Orient blew up. Two thousand more of his men had been killed or drowned, nine of his thirteen battleships captured, two more destroyed. Nothing like it had been known since the day when the Duke of Marlborough had entertained a French Marshal and two Generals in his coach after Blenheim.

  For it was not so much defeat that the French had suffered as annihilation. Though superior to their assailants by thirty per cent in men and twenty per cent in weight of broadside, and fighting m a chosen position in a dangerous bay with the head of their line protected by shore batteries, they had been overwhelmed by the

  1 Long, 199.

  skill and ferocity of the attack. In a few hours they had literally been blown out of the water. And the price paid by the victors had been scarcely 200 men killed and 700 wounded. It was an astonishing testimony to the intensity and accuracy of British gunfire, to Nelson's leadership and to the new school of close fighting he had initiated. Above all it revealed, in the hands of an inspired commander, the quality of British discipline. In his general order thanking his men Nelson, recalling the mutinies of the previous summer, emphasised this point. " It must strike forcibly every British seaman how superior their conduct is, when in discipline and good order, to the riotous behaviour of lawless Frenchmen." 1 Nothing so deeply impressed the same lawless Frenchmen, many of them professed atheists, as the religious service which was held on the morrow of the battle on the splintered, bloodstained decks of the British flagship. It struck them as an extraordinary thing that six hundred men—the roughest of the rough—could be assembled for such a purpose amid the scene of so much carnage and profess their mild faith with such order and quietness.

  The battle was evidence also of the inadequacy of Revolutionary France's administration and the selfishness of her General. Because of the corruption prevailing everywhere after nine years of social scramble, the great ships—triumphs of the marine builder's art— were neglected and rotten, short of essential stores and their crews ill-fed and discontented at the long arrears in their pay. These handicaps to French courage and elan had been increased by Bonaparte's conscienceless theft of skilled gunners and seamen for his land operations and by his utter disregard of the needs of the fleet since his landing. Only a week before the battle Brueys had urged that its security depended on an immediate return to Toulon to refit. This, though he afterwards endeavoured to conceal the fact, Bonaparte had forbidden. Wishing to retain the fleet for his private purposes, he ignored expert advice and jeopardised the existence of the force on which French mastery of the Mediterranean depended. For so long as the Republican battle fleet was in being, the incursion of the British into that, to them baseless, sea could be only temporary and precarious.

  With its destruction the whole position had changed in a night. On August ist the French, as masters of Egypt, Corfu and Malta

  1 Mahan, Nelson, I, 359.

  and—save for Naples—of the entire southern shore of Europe from Cadiz to the Turkish frontier, held the Mediterranean in their grip. On August 2nd they were themselves immobilised in all the lands and islands they had crossed its waters to conquer.

  The full consequence of this only dawned on men gradually. The transformation wrought by the battle of the Nile was too sudden to be realised in a night. The first assessment came from the ignorant Arabs of the Egyptian shore, who prompdy cut the throats of every Frenchman within reach and, lighting bonfires on the dunes, illuminated the coastline for three nights. Only the courage and energy of Bonaparte saved the victorious French army from immediate disaster. " Ah well," he observed when the news was brought him, " we must either remain in this country or quit it as great as the ancients. . .. These English will compel us to do greater things than we meant." But though he rallied his men and by ruthless terrorism suppressed an Arab revolt, the fact remained that he and his army were virtually prisoners in a remote land, encircled by sea and desert, with no possibility of either receiving supplies from, or returning to, France. Five months after the battle he wrote that no news of any kind had been received from the Directory since July 6th. Even his communications between Rosetta and Alexandria were cut by the British warships.

  Through weaknesses inherent in the early conduct of the war the Navy had failed to blockade the enemy in his own ports and so keep an unbroken ring of water round his swelling power. It had failed through a shortage of frigates to destroy the enemy's offensive while at sea. But in the third resort, through the splendour of Nelson's offensive, it had succeeded gloriously. By destroying the enemy's communications it had paralysed Ins movements. By depriving him of stores, reinforcements and sea-borne transports it had stopp
ed Bonaparte from advancing on either India or Asia Minor. It had re-established British control over two thousand miles of vital sea highway, making possible the expulsion of the French from Malta, Corfu and the Adriatic islands, the defence of Naples and Sicily, the capture of bases in the Balearics and the resurrection of all the dormant forces of Europe against the overgrown power of France.

  For months past the cowed nations of the Continent had beea showing signs of revolt against the greed and overbearing tyranny of their conquerors. In April a Viennese mob had torn the Tricolour, insolently flaunted in the populace's face, from the French embassy, and, though the Imperial authorities had subsequently made an abject apology, the underswell of national feeling remained. In May the Neapolitan Crown, terrified by the presence of " the merciless French robbers " in the States of the Pope, had secretly concluded a defensive alliance with Austria. Three months later the Emperor Paul of Russia, enraged by the French seizure of Malta, signed a military convention with Austria.

  Yet so long as the French controlled the sea lanes of the Mediterranean, these indications of the reviving spirit of European independence were confined to the street corner and the secret archives of the Chancelleries. It was the news of Nelson's astonishing victory, spreading outwards in ever larger ripples, that woke the closet courage of the continent. Five weeks after the battle, the Sultan of Turkey—first of the European rulers to hear the tidings —resolved to resent the intrusion of the French into his territories and, rejecting Talleyrand's insinuating diplomacy, declared a Holy War against the infidel invaders of Egypt.

  But because of Nelson's lack of frigates and the very depth of his penetration into the French position, the news of his achievement travelled slowly. Its effect was not an instantaneous explosion but the spluttering of a charge of powder. For many days after the battle the victors remained in Egyptian waters, remote from a world which had lost trace of them. It took Nelson a fortnight before he could make his dismasted prizes fit for sea. Three he was forced to bum: the other six he sent off to Gibraltar under escort of seven of his battleships on August 14th. Their progress up the Mediterranean was painfully slow.

  Want of frigates, Nelson wrote, would be found stamped on his heart. The first vessel available to carry the report of the victory to St. Vincent, the 50-gun Leander, did not leave Aboukir Bay until nearly a week after the battle. As ill-luck would have it, she and Captain Berry—the bearer of the official dispatches—were captured twelve days later in a calm by one of the two fugitive survivors of Brueys' line of battle.

  So it came about chat no intelligence of the victory reached western Europe till September 4th, when it was brought to Naples by the Mutine sloop, which Nelson on the arrival of his long-lost frigates had sent off with duplicate dispatches on August 14th. Before they arrived Nelson himself was on his way to Europe. On August 14th he had received a summons from St. Vincent to return to save Naples from the threat of sea-borne invasion and co-operate in the capture of a British Mediterranean base in the Balearics. Accordingly, leaving three battleships and three frigates under Captain Hood to blockade Egypt, Nelson reluctantly set out on the 19th for Neapolitan waters. He was still suffering from the effects of his head wound and from perpetual headaches and vomitings. The voyage, prolonged by the derelict state of his flagship, acted as an enforced holiday.

  On September 22nd, towed ironically by a frigate, the Vanguard anchored off Naples. " I hope," Nelson wrote to Sir William Hamilton, "to be no more than four or five days at Naples, for diese are not times for idleness." 1 He had reckoned without the Ambassador's lady. Accompanied by the King and Queen of Naples, this large, fascinating, vulgar, dynamic woman of thirty-three bore down on the Admiral with the same spirit that he himself had borne down on the French. She had only set eyes on him once before when, five years earlier during the siege of Toulon, he had borne dispatches to Naples. But she was resolved to conquer him as he had conquered Brueys. Acknowledged as a mistress of dramatic effect—her " attitudes " were the talk of the less exacting salons of Europe—she positively boarded the unsophisticated sailor on his own quarter-deck. Still bemused from that astonishing encounter, he described it in a letter three days later to his wife. " Up flew her ladyship and exclaiming ' O God, is it possible? ' she feu into my arm more dead than alive." She was followed by the King who, seizing the Admiral by the hand, hailed him as his deliverer and preserver.

  It was all too much for Nelson and his poor dazed head. The loveliest city of southern Europe was in summer gala to receive him, the most voluptuous of women at his feet. After the strain and intense excitement of the summer and the dreary reaction of the voyage west, he could not refrain from yielding to all this overflow of tenderness and adulation. It seemed a sailor's due, after the hardships and deprivations of the sea. He had known little of luxury and

  1 Mahan, Nelson, I, 368-9.

  nothing of Courts. He found himself when he was least able to withstand its fatal charm the adored hero of the most luxurious and enervating society in existence. He struggled for a little while: wrote to St. Vincent a week after his arrival that he was in a country of fiddlers and puppets, whores and scoundrels: that it was a dangerous place for a simple sailor and he must keep clear of it. A fortnight later he sailed for Malta, where the islanders had risen against the French garrison at the first news of the Nile to organise a blockade of Valetta. But he left his heart behind in Naples and early in November, at the first stirrings of Continental war, he returned there to be the counsellor of an admiring King and Queen and the hero of a lovely and designing woman, and to waste his genius in an element alien to it.

  While Nelson was driving in triumph under the Neapolitan sunshine England was still waiting for news. Throughout the summer the country remained in suspense. During the agony of his long chase, criticism of the young Rear-Admiral had been widespread and even his friend, Collingwood, who never doubted his skill and courage, began to have fears that his good fortune had forsaken him. About the time that he reached Alexandria the second time it became known in London that he had sailed for the first time to seek the enemy in the Levant and that Bonaparte had left Malta on June 19th. For a few days expectation, therefore, ran high. " The grand event," wrote Lloyd's Evening Post on Saturday, August 4th, " which has in all probability taken place in the Mediterranean between the English and French fleets, nearly occupies the entire attention of the public as if, on the fate of the expedition entrusted to Bonaparte, depended that of the existing war." Lady Spencer, catching the confidence of old St. Vincent, even speculated as to how she should treat Bonaparte when he dined, a prisoner, at her side: should she do it, she asked, " in a sincere and a brutal style? or in a false and generous one." 1

  But by the second week in August nothing had come in but vague reports from French sources that Bonaparte had landed in Egypt and—though nobody would admit this—that he had met Nelson at sea and been victorious.2 The country, still drilling against

  1 Windham Papers, II, 108.

  2 Pitt to Rose, 10th Aug., 1798.—Rose, I, 216.

  an increasingly dubious invasion, began to grow despondent. " At no period of the war," wrote a leading Daily on August 8th, " have public affairs been more critically situated than they are at the present moment. But we are sorry to say, that to whatever point we direct our attention, there is much to lament and little to console us!" The only hopeful sign was in Ireland, where, since the arrival of Lord Cornwallis as Viceroy in the middle of the rebellion, a wise combination of firmness and clemency had been producing steadying results.

  On August 22nd an overland courier from Constantinople brought authentic news that the French had landed at Alexandria at the beginning of July. It caused a sudden drop in the Funds. It was offset by exciting though unreliable accounts from German newspapers of a great sea fight off Crete in which Nelson had sunk many transports and blockaded the Orient with Bonaparte aboard or, according to another version, driven her on to a rock.

  At the height of the te
nsion caused by these reports news arrived that a small French force had landed in the west of Ireland on August 22nd. It turned out to be only a single brigade from Brest— too small to be a menace to the British and too late to be of any aid to the Irish. But though the first thing that greeted its commander, General Humbert, on his landing at Killala Bay was the sight of a French agent hanging on a tree, and though the disarmed and dispirited peasants of the west gave him little support, he boldly brushed aside the local Fencibles who attempted to oppose him. Three days later at Castlebar he plunged the whole country into alarm by routing, with a quarter of their force, 4,000 Militia and Dragoons: a disgraceful exhibition of British incompetence which justified all that experienced soldiers like Abercromby and Cornwallis had said about the discipline of the Irish Army. But the ultimate defeat of Humbert's little force of veterans was a foregone conclusion. After covering a hundred and fifty miles in seventeen days in a series of swift, fox-like movements, it surrendered to Cornwallis at Ballinamuck on September 8th. A week later that noted Irish patriot, Napper Tandy, appeared in a Dunkirk brig off the lonely Donegal coast and on hearing what had happened returned at once to France.

  By this time advices from Italy had made it plain not only that the French had successfully landed at Alexandria but that Nelson had missed them there and returned to Syracuse. All hope now vanished: seldom had public opinion been so depressed.1 Travellers' tales of French defeats at the hands of the Arabs could not dispel the gloom. The British people (save for Pitt who continued hopeful 2) were coming to believe with their enemies that Bonaparte could not be defeated.