Nelson
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Even Nelson the optimist understood that his experience of military affairs left much to be desired, and he requested the services of Lieutenants John Duncan of the Royal Artillery and Augustus de Butts of the Royal Engineers to help him examine a landing site he had found north of Bastia. A battery erected close by would not be ideal, Nelson realised. It would be incapable of troubling the hill forts, and was no substitute for batteries the army might have established above the rear of the town, but if it could be positioned high enough and defended it might play with effect upon the citadel, town and Cabanelle outpost. At least Nelson thought it worthy of investigation.
In the midst of such industry Horatio read the latest letter from Hood, dated the 16th, and worried. There was a new despondency in his admiral. Hood promised to react immediately upon a favourable report from Duncan and de Butts, but hinted that if the troops declined to cooperate the enemy would have to be reduced by blockade and starvation. On 18 March Nelson scratched an inspiring rejoinder. He had taken de Butts and Duncan to the proposed landing site that morning, and they had agreed that a battery might reasonably be established within a mile of it. Bastia was ‘certainly not a place of strength’. Given good weather, it could eventually be reduced by blockade, of course. Though a boat had recently got some corn into the port it was reputedly short of bread. But a formal siege was desirable to drive the business on. Nelson supposed the enemy to consist of no more than one thousand regulars and fifteen hundred auxiliaries (he underestimated the defenders by over two thousand) and encouraged the attempt. Using words that would weigh with an admiral interested in retrieving a damaged reputation, Nelson added that ‘it would be a national disgrace to give it up without a trial’.39
The same day Nelson received another message from Hood. The captain was needed at St Fiorenzo to set his opinion against the army’s. Leaving his blockade in the capable hands of Captain Paget of the Romney, he hurried to the admiral’s assistance.40
Nelson’s suspicion that Hood had taken several steps backward was right. Unquestionably it was Elliot who had warned the admiral that his claim to hold the supreme command was breeding ‘a great jealousy and quickness to suspect and to resist’ among the army officers, and that now a new general was in place appeasement should be the order of the day. Hood took the point and dropped his pretensions. He even visited D’Aubant to assure the general that he alone exercised overall authority over the troops. Though their country was committed to ridding Corsica of the French and every delay enabled the enemy to strengthen Bastia, the decision to deploy the army would rest solely with D’Aubant.41
With Hood’s fresh approach came the job of persuading, rather than ordering, the army to attack Bastia, and it was that task that undermined the admiral’s confidence. He summoned a council of war in which the seniors of both services could thrash the matter out, and recalled Nelson from Bastia to help him prepare for it, but privately he was losing heart. Some of D’Aubant’s senior officers, including Moore and Lieutenant Colonel David Douglas Wemyss of the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment, had favoured an assault, but opinion was now swinging the other way. On 17 March, Moore and Koehler had gone back to the heights above Bastia only to return with long faces. They reckoned the delays had enabled the French to occupy the tactical ground above the hill forts on which Moore had originally wanted to establish batteries. Now it and nearby sites were occupied by four small interconnected camps or redoubts, the principal of which could only be attacked head-on along a narrow ridge. Moore and Koehler consequently threw up their hands. There was no alternative to a sluggish victory by naval blockade.42
Nelson found Hood and Sir Gilbert wilting when he led Duncan and de Butts into the great cabin of the Victory as it rocked gently in Mortella Bay on 19 March. The trio soon got to work, describing their site at the north end of the town and declaring ‘in the strongest and clearest terms that Bastia and its citadel may be taken from that quarter and that the other outposts must fall also’. Nelson told Hood that if eight hundred soldiers and four hundred seamen were landed to establish and fight batteries they could take the town, and repeated his opinion that any failure to make the attempt would be ‘a national disgrace’.43
Backed by Duncan and de Butts, Nelson convinced the sea officers and Elliot that his attack was feasible and worth trying, and changed the complexion of the next morning’s council of war. Nelson, as a junior captain, was excluded, but there was a formidable gathering of shoulder bullion and scarlet and blue uniforms. In the middle of the blue coats sat the severe, hook-nosed features and spare frame of Admiral Hood, flanked by Admirals Hotham and Goodall and Commodore Linzee. On his part D’Aubant fielded nine senior officers. As an attempt to find a consensus, the summit failed abjectly. D’Aubant had already shown himself impervious to argument, and merely dug his heels in further, while Hood was now as intransigent the other way. According to Moore the admiral entered ‘little further into the subject than to say “Take Bastia” just as he would say to a captain “Go to sea!” He conceives they are both to be done with equal facility.’44
Not that Moore himself showed greater impartiality. Having previously condemned D’Aubant for opposing an attack on Bastia without personally reconnoitring the heights, he now proceeded to ridicule the opinions of Nelson, de Butts and Duncan without ever having inspected the ground they proposed to occupy. In the meeting Duncan was at hand to defend his view, but Moore and Koehler dismissed it as ‘impossible to think of’ and ‘perfectly absurd’. The two officers credited the navy with little capability, and apparently embraced an extraordinary idea that Nelson’s position north of Bastia could not be supplied. Moreover, they were overwhelmed by fears of an enemy counterattack. The trouble was that neither Moore nor Koehler had much of an alternative, and so they threw in with D’Aubant and said that nothing could be done.
A simple question was put to each member of the council of war: ‘Is it expedient, in a military point of view, to attempt the reduction of Bastia with the force of the present fleet and army?’
A dispiriting queue of army officers gave the proposal the thumbs down. Major Koehler, deputy quartermaster general of the army, led off with, ‘In the present circumstances, all things considered, it is not.’ Some of the other army men were more equivocal, but all declared the attempt would be hazardous and unlikely to succeed, including Lieutenant Colonels Moore, Wemyss and Villettes. The dismal conclusion was – in Nelson’s phrase – ‘the impossibility of taking Bastia, even if all the force was united’.
Then came the navy men. ‘Taking in every circumstance, and considering the great assistance the fleet can afford, I think an attempt ought to be made,’ said Commodore Linzee. The admirals followed suit and the meeting was deadlocked.
While the army sat on its hands, Hood radiated a new resolution. The council over, he swept aside the military objections and declared that if the army declined to participate the navy would go ahead without them. Soon he had alerted those soldiers who had been serving as auxiliary marines – almost half of D’Aubant’s command – to prepare for service, and informed two of their officers, Villettes of the 69th and Major Robert Brereton of the 30th, that they would probably head the landing party. The admiral also wrote to D’Aubant, telling him that he was sorry the army had decided against action, but he intended to attack according to the Duncan–de Butts–Nelson plan. He asked for Lieutenants John and Alexander Duncan of the Royal Artillery, some artillerymen, and de Butts, and for the use of guns and stores.45
Then came another bombshell. D’Aubant flatly refused to allow his guns and stores to be used. Hood was flabbergasted. The navy, with that part of the army it controlled, was embarking upon a task the army had declared beyond the combined abilities of both services, and now essential stores and guns were also to be denied. Instead of wishing his imperilled comrades well, and supplying what he could, D’Aubant proposed to sit idly by at St Fiorenzo denying them the means to fight. The darkest thoughts must have rumbled through the fleet,
but one thing was plain. Sir Gilbert’s policy of appeasement had failed, and the feud between the services was degenerating into a black farce.
5
‘Why you should deny me every possible assistance in your power to give towards my effecting a most important object, I am at a loss to account for,’ Hood wrote to D’Aubant in growing disbelief.46
It was true that the general’s resources were limited. The army had arrived in Corsica with a field train of only nine guns, and only four howitzers and three mortars were imported thereafter. However, D’Aubant descended into outright obstructionism. He had captured additional guns at St Fiorenzo, and must have known that there was no immediate need for any of them. After all, the French garrisons in Corsica were isolated and surrounded, while the island itself was covered by the might of the British fleet in Mortella Bay. Gradually, as Hood clamoured for guns, entrenching tools, artillerists, sandbags, even kettles, a pattern took shape. D’Aubant’s practice was to refuse, then to reflect and relent a little, and finally to raise more difficulties. ‘You told me in one of your letters that you had granted all the mortars,’ raged a frustrated Hood, ‘and I am now informed you have changed your mind. This is highly prejudicial to the king’s service . . .’47
The case of the 12th Regiment of Light Dragoons stationed in Civita Vecchia typified the duel. Hood and Elliot tried to have them shipped to Corsica to give D’Aubant the men he said he needed to attack Bastia. First the general agreed, but after speaking to his adjutant general and reconsidering orders that told him the light dragoons could only be deployed as a mounted force he began saying they should be sent to Flanders instead.
At the end of March, Elliot was still shuttling helplessly between the ships and the army headquarters ashore in search of an elusive reconciliation. D’Aubant seemed to weaken when Sir Gilbert suggested that the 12th Light Dragoons, the fleet marines and perhaps Sardinian or Neapolitan troops might be added to the general’s forces. But on board the Victory, Hood had had enough imponderables. If they could get additional troops D’Aubant might agree . . . but time was slipping away. The admiral declared ‘his mind was made up’, the army men were merely prevaricating, and ‘he would not be made a fool or a tool of by them’. Maybe he was right. The next time Elliot saw D’Aubant the general was singing a different song, and declaring ‘he was determined not to entangle himself with any cooperation’. Even the long-suffering Sir Gilbert began to bubble angrily. Appalled at the ‘want of spirit’ in the army he muttered about cowardice and treason.48
In the end Hood wrung few more than his minimum needs from D’Aubant. The army spared him twenty-five artillerists, but kept more than a hundred uselessly sitting at St Fiorenzo. That meant that seamen would have to man the siege guns at Bastia. At the same time Hood and Nelson applied to Naples for the mortars, cannons, fuses, entrenching tools, ammunition, timber and stores they could not get from St Fiorenzo.49
Back at sea Horatio was mystified by the dispute. He knew little if anything of Hood’s mismanagement, and had always been good at interservice relations himself. All he saw was an admiral standing tall against younger faint hearts. ‘Upwards of seventy, he possesses the mind of forty years of age,’ Nelson said. ‘He has not a thought separated from honour and glory.’ As for D’Aubant, his conduct was reprehensible. ‘What are we come to that 1,500 or 2,000 British troops . . . are not thought able to attack 1,000 French?’ he told Fanny. The same outrage marked his report to Sir William Hamilton. What would ‘the immortal Wolfe’ have made of it, he railed?50
Yet historians have been wrong to picture this as simply a tragic quarrel between soldiers and sailors. Certainly the navy united behind Nelson’s plan to besiege Bastia, but far from being all ‘peaceable gentlefolks’ (as Elliot sarcastically labelled them) the officers of the army were themselves at loggerheads. Until 17 March, Moore theoretically favoured an assault and was contemptuous of his own generals. It was after reconnoitring Bastia again that he finally changed his mind. The Moore–Koehler report of 18 March then swung army opinion against Hood in the decisive council of war, but unity only lasted until the ground was inspected again. After the meeting Lieutenant Colonel Wemyss and Major Smith twice reconnoitred Bastia from the heights, and completely rejected Moore’s opinion. They were so ‘thoroughly convinced that Bastia may be attacked successfully from the mountain’ that Wemyss offered to do the job with four hundred men. Moreover, unlike Moore, Wemyss saw something in the Nelson– Duncan–de Butts plan. He agreed ‘entirely’ with Lieutenant Duncan about the security of the ground he had chosen, and accepted ‘the practicability of annoying the enemy from thence’. Though Moore dismissed Wemyss’s views with a favourite reproof (‘absurd’) they plunged the army into unhappy disagreement. Its leader, D’Aubant, stubbornly opposed an attack for reasons no one could divine, while two lieutenant colonels argued diametrically opposite opinions. Others squirmed all ways. Koehler wavered, ‘very fluctuating and equivocal’, while the adjutant general, Sir James St Clair Erskine, was one moment so violently opposed to fighting that it seemed ‘as if he had an interest that way’, and the next muttering incomprehensibly about a plan of his own to advance from the south. The force was all over the place.51
Although the mutual malevolence of senior army and navy men and interservice jealousies were involved, the dispute was as much rooted in the different abilities, perspectives and personalities of the officers themselves. Consider for a moment the conflicting positions of Moore and Nelson, both fine warriors in some ways. They, more than D’Aubant and Hood, represented the true poles of the argument. It was Moore who briefly bonded his colleagues behind a report, and it was Nelson who conceived and most ardently championed the alternative approach ultimately adopted by the navy. Neither opinion was entirely right or wrong. Their differences sprang to a large extent from contrasting leadership styles and temperaments, each with strengths and failings.
From the purely military standpoint, Moore’s evaluation of the enemy defences was professional. The best way of directly attacking Bastia lay through the hill forts, for once captured they could be used to command the rear of the town and trap it in a crossfire. But Moore showed himself to be an overcautious soldier, prone to exaggerating his own problems rather than exploiting the enemy’s. Indeed, he seldom seems to have put himself in the French camp, but remained paralysed by imaginary fears of ferocious resistance at every stage of an attack. If the redcoats attacked the hill forts he saw them being punished heavily as they advanced over the rough ground, and suffering progressive attrition as they battled from one post to another. Although the enemy was simultaneously defending the citadel, harbour, town and ten or so redoubts, camps and forts Moore believed they would concentrate forbidding forces to meet his attack.
The same thinking powered his reaction to the Nelson plan. Its supporters saw a use in pinning French forces to different places. Thus, when D’Aubant refused to attack the heights, Hood turned to Paoli’s two thousand Corsicans and asked one half to support Nelson north of the town and the other to worry the hill forts to prevent the French from moving men from place to place. But Moore could only see the dangers of dividing his own men. He worried that troops landed by the fleet would be overpowered in a savage counterattack, and took little account of the navy’s ability to supply or assist them. In the event the French showed none of the spirit Moore ascribed. Not a single sortie was ever launched against the British lines. In short, while Moore’s caution was never going to squander men or ammunition, it risked losing opportunities and creating a demoralising inaction. In Corsica it kept men and guns idling in camp with a vulnerable enemy only twelve miles away.52
In the other corner, across from the robust redcoat, stood the slight, blue-coated figure of Horatio Nelson, captain of the Agamemnon. He worked to a different beat, forever on the move, prowling for opportunities and victories. No enemy could show him a weakness that would be missed. His letters rang with the problems of the French, with their irresolution,
fears and shortages, and they also exuded a heart-raising confidence – perhaps overconfidence. For though Nelson’s policy avoided despair and defeatism, it too was flawed. It risked overextending men and inviting a drubbing, and if Moore overrated his opponents Nelson underestimated them. The French commander, St Michel, spoke highly of his soldiers: ‘Their enthusiasm is such that even the wounded are eager to leave hospital to join in the battle,’ he wrote. Civilians, including women and children, would help to repair broken fortifications and batteries. Nelson expected that the French would quickly succumb to a two-fisted attack. ‘We shall, in time, accomplish the taking [of] Bastia, I have no doubt, in the way we proposed to assault it, by bombardment and cannonading, joined to a close blockade of the harbour.’ But he would be surprised by his enemy’s endurance.53
The differences between Moore and Nelson were now to be tested. As Nelson had requested, he was rewarded with the responsibility of leading the land attack, alongside Lieutenant Colonel Villettes, who headed the seven hundred soldiers Hood had raised. Nelson liked and respected Villettes as an easy-mannered gentleman and ‘a most excellent officer’, considering him the ablest soldier in the army. From a French émigré family, he had lived for forty years and served in the army for almost twenty of them, two as a lieutenant colonel. Apparently he enjoyed his profession, for he had abandoned a career in the law to follow it, and at Toulon won the praise of superiors. When the task force sailed from St Fiorenzo on 25 March it was at least well officered. Nelson bundled Captain Paget and Lieutenant Alexander Duncan off to Naples for the necessary military supplies, and tightened the blockade of Bastia. The Tartar and the Scout brig were anchored on the flanks of the town, guard boats sealed the harbour mouth by rowing back and forth, and the Fox and a few gunboats threw occasional shots at the defences. Corsican volunteers climbed aboard the Agamemnon to replace temporarily men earmarked to work with the troops ashore.54