The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  Before the Directory's armies poured across the PJiine, their General in Egypt had taken the offensive against Turkey. Undeterred by his isolation, Bonaparte had spent the autumn with his usual indomitable activity. Nor, for all the seas of salt and desert around him, were his plans in the least defensive. In October he was reported to be trying to buy over the wild Abyssinians and obtain a port on the Red Sea eight hundred miles to the south.

  When he found this too visionary, he prepared for an advance across the two hundred miles of desert between Egypt and Palestine to seize the Levantine corridor into Asia Minor. From Damascus he reckoned that he would be able either to drive to Constantinople and found a new Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Sultan's crumbling power, or strike eastwards along the caravan routes into Mesopotamia towards the Persian Gulf. For, true to the Revolutionary creed of energy of which he was the embodiment, Bonaparte believed that to men of will all things were possible.

  On January 15th, 1799, when his arrangements for a desert march were almost complete, he wrote to Tippoo Sahib announcing his arrival with an invincible army and asking him to send envoys to Suez to concert plans for the overthrow of the British in India. Ten days later he learnt from a long delayed dispatch from France —the first to reach him since September—that Turkey had been at war with the Directory for several months and that the Sultan was concentrating armies in Syria and Rhodes for an invasion of Egypt.

  It was never Bonaparte's way to wait to be attacked. Early in February, when the snow in England lay so deep that Parson Woodforde could not reach that place of use at the end of his garden which he called Jericho, the Army of Egypt set out across the eastern desert. On the 20th, after a brief siege, it captured El Arish from the Pasha of Syria who had occupied it a month before with the Turkish advance guard. Thence it drove up the coast through Gaza to Jaffa, which it stormed on March 5th; finding the 3000 Turks of the garrison an embarrassment to his commissariat, Bonaparte had them massacred. It would be a useful Warning, he reflected, to their countrymen of the unwisdom of resisting the French. Then, without wasting time, he resumed his march for Acre—a little town poorly fortified, some sixty miles to the north, barring the coastal road into Syria.

  But here his fate was awaiting him in the now familiar shape of the British Navy. On March 3rd, to the disgust of many of his professional superiors, Captain Sidney Smith had taken over the command of the small squadron which had remained after the Nile in Egyptian waters. This erratic and plausible officer had recently escaped from the Temple prison in Paris and, having returned to England with a great deal of information, reliable and otherwise, about French ambitions in the Orient, had prevailed on Lord Spencer to send him out to the Levant with a roving commission. His command consisted of two battleships and three small frigates. On hearing that Bonaparte had captured Jaffa he sent a brilliant young emigre engineer, Colonel Phelypeaux, to assist the Turkish Governor of Acre. A few days later Smith followed in person.

  On March 17th, Bonaparte, driving northwards from Haifa, saw in his path the white walls of Acre jutting out into the Mediterranean blue. Beyond them lay Aleppo and Damascus, and, so the young conqueror believed, vast treasure, arms for a quarter of a million men, and the high roads to Constantinople and India. But in the roadstead off the little port lay two British ships of the line, their rigging grimly rising against the spring sky. It was a spectacle with which he was to grow strangely familiar during the next seven weeks.

  For, thanks to Phelypeaux's genius for fortification and the naval guns and crews with which Sidney Smith stiffened the Turkish garrison, Acre proved surprisingly formidable. The ubiquitous British warships even captured Bonaparte's siege train as it crept up the coast from Egypt, embarked in gunboats. Its guns were promptly used by the indefatigable Smith against the French. Without them the ridiculous little fort with its 3000 shabby Turks and handful of British tars could not be battered into submission. Frontal assaults, however dashing, produced no results but casualties. There was nothing for it but to sit down and starve the place out. And this, owing to British sea power, was more easily proposed than done.

  In Europe and in India other armies were marching. On March 1st, 1799, the Directory, having received no answer from Austria to its ultimatum, launched its attack. The French crossed the Rhine with the old familiar confidence and, debouching from Switzerland, overran the Grisons. But on March 25 th, advancing through the Black Forest, Jourdan came up against the Archduke Charles at Stockach. He was repulsed with loss and forced to retreat.

  The victory of the Imperialists broke the legend of Republican invincibility. During the next few weeks Bernadotte, Soult, Victor and Souham all suffered defeat in southern Germany, while Massena was forced to fall back in the Grisons. Since its defeat by Bonaparte, two years before, the Austrian Army had been re-organised: it now numbered a quarter of a million well-equipped men. The French Army, on the other hand, had been neglected and cheated by the politicians in Paris and subjected to the demoralising influence of living without war on a conquered countryside. With nearly 100,000 deserters from its colours and scattered over an immense area, it found itself faced for the first time by superior numbers.

  Its weakness was greatest in Italy—the scene of its late glory— where Bonaparte's strategy of concentration had been abandoned for one of dispersal. The Directory's fiscal policy was defined in a memorandum on the occupied Papal States. " The Revolution at Rome has not yet been productive enough. The only course to take, so as to derive from it a more suitable return, is to consider and to treat the finances of the Roman State as the finances of the French Army." 1 The latter, to enforce this extortion, was dissipated in dozens of little garrisons cut off from one another by mountain ranges and almost impassable tracks. On April 5th old Scherer, who had taken the offensive with his depleted field army, was defeated by the Hungarian, Kray, at Magnano. Within a week the French had been driven across the Mincio and forced to retire behind the Adda.

  Here they were assailed by a more formidable enemy. On March 3 rd the Russo-Turkish Fleet had taken Corfu. Six weeks later the advance guard of the Russian Army reached the Italian front under the command of the world-famous Marshal Suvorof. This barbaric genius—a Muscovite Elizabethan of sixty-nine strayed into the eighteenth century, hardy, valiant, eccentric almost at times to madness, who had never known defeat and lived only for war and the adoration of his rough soldiers—at once attacked with a fierceness and speed hitherto only equalled by Bonaparte. Forcing the line of the Adda on the 27th, he entered Milan two days later amid the acclamations of the populace. The entire French Army in Italy was in deadly danger.

  Already in the south the French Parthenopean Republic was crumbling. At first the wise and conciliatory policy of the soldier, Championet, had partially won over the fickle lazzaroni of the capital. But the intrigues of thwarted contractors and venal agents had soon brought about his recall in favour of a more complacent

  1 Cambridge Modern History, VIII, 638.

  commander. Immediately a swarm of harpies had settled on the hapless Republic, robbing the inhabitants of houses, lands and churches, cash, treasure and livestock. Incited by a warlike Cardinal named Ruffo and supplied by British cruisers, the peasants took up arms. When the news of the Allied successes in the north reached the French General Macdonald, his hold on the country became precarious. To save himself from encirclement he abandoned Naples on May 7th and, leaving small delaying garrisons behind him in the principal fortresses, retreated northwards.

  Three days earlier, more than four thousand miles to the east, a British-Sepoy army stormed Seringapatam, capital of the great Mahommedan Power of Mysore. Ever since the French had begun to talk of an eastern expedition Tippoo Sahib, its ruler, had been scheming to drive the British from the Orient. A premature and boastful proclamation by the French Governor of Mauritius, with whom he had been corresponding, gave warning to the British authorities and led, in the summer of 1798, to the dispatch by Dundas of military rei
nforcements to the East. The alarm coincided with the arrival in Calcutta of a new Governor-General. An Irishman with an imperial vision rare among the English, the thirty-seven-year-old Earl of Mornington had at once resolved to abandon his predecessor's humdrum policy of non-intervention in Indian affairs and strike a resounding blow at Tippoo's French-trained army, before a Mahratta confederacy and the arrival of Bonaparte should bring the structure of Clive and Warren Hastings crashing to the ground. He therefore ordered General Harris to concentrate all available troops in Madras and prevailed on the Nizam of Hyderabad to join in alliance against Mysore.

  By the end of 1798 Mornington had prepared a powerful and well-equipped army. He was fortunate in having the aid of his brother, Arthur Wellesley, who had been sent with his regiment to India a year earlier. This able and painstaking young man of twenty-nine possessed an unsuspected genius for planning war, perfectly adapted to a country without roads and normal means of supply. Too unassuming and well bred to arouse envy, the unknown Lieutenant-Colonel of the 33 rd Foot was the brain behind the preparations for the long march through the jungle to Tippoo's capital. His methods were epitomised in a sentence from his official

  correspondence: " It is better to see and communicate the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise and to endeavour to overcome them than to be blind to everything but success till the moment of difficulty comes and then to despond." 1 He had learnt his lesson since his campaign with the British Army in Holland.

  As soon as Mornington heard from Nelson's overland courier of the Nile victory, he abandoned his waiting game and insisted that Tippoo should receive a British envoy. But that subtle Oriental, playing for time until Bonaparte should come, put off the peremptory Governor-General with excuses. Accordingly on February nth, 1799, Harris—a veteran of Bunker's Hill—crossed the Madras border into Mysore with 5,000 British troops and 16,000 Sepoys. He was joined by an army of 16,000 natives from Hyderabad, which Colonel Wellesley, in recognition of "judicious and masterly arrangements in respect of supplies," was seconded to command. A third army of 6,000 under James Stuart started from Bombay.

  Tippoo Sahib had 50,000 men and the advantage of interior lines. By forced marches he surprised and almost overwhelmed Stuart at Periapatam on March 6th. But the unexpectedly rapid advance of the main British force from the west compelled him to face about. On the 22nd, engaged by the combined armies of Britain and Hyderabad at Malavelly, he broke off the fight rather than risk the loss of his guns, and retired behind the formidable fortifications of Seringapatam. He knew that no army could long maintain itself hundreds of miles from its base in the heart of southern India.

  By the beginning of May the British-Sepoy forces had no other choice but starvation or retreat. Fording a swift river 300 yards wide—one of the most remarkable feats in the annals of war—they flung themselves at the breaches. By nightfall on the 4th the British flag was flying over the town. Little quarter was given, for by Tippoo's orders all the prisoners within the fortress had been massacred. Next morning the body of a corpulent, short-necked man with delicate hands and feet was found under a heap of dead in one of the gateways. It was the end of the robber dynasty of Hyder Ali. His country—almost the size of England—was divided between Hyderabad and the East India Company, while a puppet

  1 Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda of the Duke of Wellington, 1, 196.

  representative of the old Hindu royal line was set to rule over the remainder. Arthur Wellesley stayed as Civil Administrator and Commander-in-Chief. His four years of rule—the beginning of British hegemony in southern India—was distinguished by an almost pedantic respect for native rights and customs and a welcome absence of plunder and exaction.

  While the British storming parties were fighting their way into Seringapatam the man who had sailed a year before to conquer an Indian empire was still sulkily surveying the ramparts of Acre. " The whole fate of the East," he said, ‘hangs from this little corner." Phelypeaux had been killed, a Turkish relief force routed at Mount Tabor and the handful of defenders thinned by casualties. But the flags of Turkey and England continued to fly over the fort and English warships to ride in the roadstead. In the first week of May the French made sixteen attempts to storm the place. On the 8th, spurred by the approach of a fleet of Turkish transports from Rhodes, they captured one of the towers. But Sidney Smith, throwing every seaman into the fight, saved the day. Two weeks later Bonaparte, having lost more than a quarter of his force in the sixty-two days' siege, made a final assault on the stinking, corpse-strewn ditches and, failing, threw his guns into the sea and retreated. The plague was in his camp and his men were mutinous. On May 25th he abandoned Jaffa, on the 29th Gaza, on June 2nd El Arish. At each place a trail of plague-stricken, dying Frenchmen testified to Smith's achievement. So did Bonaparte's angry gibes at the rash buffoon of a sea captain who had made him miss his destiny. " If it had not been for you English," he declared afterwards, " I should have been Emperor of the East. But wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in the way."

  With the Russians and Austrians overrunning Bonaparte's conquests in Lombardy and Piedmont and French armies outnumbered on every front from the Rhine to the Campagna, the Republic was in greater danger than at any time since the dark days of 1793. The country was in the utmost confusion. In March, 1799, the flame of civil war had broken out again in the west and the Chouans had taken the field. The Directory were universally detested. In a despairing attempt to retrieve their fortunes, they sent Admiral Bruix, the brilliant young Minister of Marine, to Brest, where a fleet had long been preparing, with orders to put to sea at any cost and, entering the Mediterranean, to shatter the British supremacy that had brought all these disasters on the Republic and rescue from Egypt Bonaparte—the one man who could save it.

  Had the British intelligence system been better or had the Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet understood the full meaning of blockade, such orders would have been useless. But instead of keeping close to Ushant, Bridport, nursing his ships, kept station too far out. On April 25 th he was driven a dozen miles west of the island by a north-easter. That evening Bruix with twenty-five battleships and ten frigates escaped in the haze and, taking the Passage du Raz, steered for the south.

  Bruix's escape imperilled the whole structure of British sea power in the Mediterranean. On it depended Allied military operations from Syria to Genoa and the cohesion of the Coalition. While Bridport mobilised every ship in home waters to defend the Irish coast, the French Fleet appeared off Cadiz where Lord Keith, with fifteen sail of the line, was blockading a superior Spanish force. Fortunately Bruix, doubting his unpractised crews' ability to cope with a westerly gale on a lee-shore, ran for the Straits. Here, on May 5th, St. Vincent, watching from Gibraltar, saw his ships gliding by like ghosts through the mist.

  At that moment half the British Mediterranean Fleet was at the French Admiral's mercy. Duckworth with four battleships was off Minorca, Ball with three blockading Valetta, Sidney Smith with two opposing Bonaparte at Acre, Troubridge with four watching Naples, and Nelson with a solitary ship guarding the Neapolitan Royalties at Palermo. But Bruix after a fortnight at sea had had enough. With the reverberation of the guns at Aboukir haunting him, he saw himself not as a hunter but as the hunted. Instead of sweeping eastwards with the wind to overwhelm St. Vincent's scattered squadrons, he made for Toulon.

  When he arrived on May 14th he found the Republic's danger slightly lessened. For Russian temperament and Austrian greed had given the army of Italy a breathing space. Suvorof after taking Milan had unaccountably paused for a week of junketing. The Aulic Council, intent on acquiring Italian territory, had insisted that the reduction of Lombard fortresses should precede pursuit of the enemy. Consequently Moreau, superseding the defeated

  Scherer, had been able to withdraw to the Genoese hills to cover Macdonald's retreat from the south. Here at the beginning of June Bruix sailed to join him at Vado Bay.

  But though he
brought urgently-needed supplies to Moreau's hungry troops, the French Admiral achieved nothing else. By his flight to Toulon and his prolonged stay there he had given the British Fleet time to mobilise. Nelson, on receipt of St. Vincent's warning, had given immediate orders to his scattered ships to assemble in the channel between Sicily and Africa, barring the way to Egypt. " I consider the best defence for his Sicilian Majesty's dominions," he wrote, " is to place myself alongside the French." St. Vincent, with Spanish connivance—for the wise old Admiral had been showing every courtesy to the weaker of his two enemies and intriguing with them against their bullying ally—managed, despite the easterly gale, to get an overland message to Keith to join him at Gibraltar. He was thus able to sail on May 25th with sixteen ships of the line to retrieve Duckworth from Minorca. Thence cruising midway between that island and the Catalan coast, he waited for the attempted junction of the French and Spanish Fleets.

  Having failed to strike the blow which could alone have turned the tide of defeat in Italy, Bruix on June 6th sailed for Cartagena to join the Spaniards who had entered that port after Keith's withdrawal from Cadiz. But for St. Vincent's illness he would have encountered that which, when divided, he might have destroyed but which now, united, would undoubtedly have destroyed him— the British Fleet off Cape San Sebastian. Fortunately for Bruix, the old Admiral's health, long ailing, at that moment failed him. On June 2nd he handed over his command to Keith and teturned to Gibraltar. Keith, a good sailor and a brave fighter, lacked St. Vincent's moral stature. Haunted by fears for Minorca, he abandoned his cruising station to protect his base. When, three days later, after being reinforced from England, he returned, the French had passed. On the 22nd they entered Cartagena, sailing again on the 29th with sixteen Spanish battleships which they bore off as hostages for Spain's good behaviour. A week later, St. Vincent, waiting at Gibraltar for a ship to take him to England, saw Bruix's fleet for the second time passing the Straits.