by John Sugden
The talking was done and it was time to fight, but on the eve of the attack Nelson received important new intelligence. It was bad news. The number of troops waiting for him in Bastia was far greater than anyone had supposed – four thousand, perhaps more. Nelson now knew he was attacking not only well-placed positions, but also superior numbers of soldiers. When the flagship Victory appeared in the offing on 2 April with the first of the larger ships assigned to the blockade, Nelson deliberately kept the new information to himself. Even at this hour, when Hood had staked his reputation and forces on Nelson’s judgement, he feared the attack might still be called off.55
For Moore the tidings would have justified his caution. He doubted that the army and navy together could take Bastia, and prophesied disaster. ‘Without more good luck than can be expected some misfortune will happen,’ he said.56
Nelson thought otherwise, and that nothing could be gained without being ventured. ‘I feel for the honour of my country,’ he said, ‘and had rather be beat than not make the attack. If we do not try we never can be successful. I own I have no fears for the final issue: it will be conquest . . .’57
6
An impressive amount of sail lay off Bastia on 3 April. Six ships of the line, one of them the Agamemnon, two frigates and a brig formed a threatening display, but at the masthead of the Victory, Hood’s impressive flagship, flew a flag of truce. A boat pulled out with a last offer to spare the town. Perhaps the admiral was willing to give the garrison passage to France, or accept a declaration in favour of the monarchy. It hardly mattered, for the appeal went unheeded and before the day was out another flag was running up. It was red, and everybody knew it meant the contest had begun.58
The larger British ships strung out in a huge crescent to the south, beyond the enemy guns, while the Scout brig and some gunboats and launches edged forward to close the harbour and entertain the enemy batteries and gunboats. The greatest threat to the inshore blockade (managed by a big, good-humoured Canadian named Captain Benjamin Hallowell) was the nearby island of Capraia, where French ships were accustomed to shelter. Even before the British net closed around Bastia a few panic-stricken merchants shot out and made for Capraia. Hood sent Captain Wolseley in the Imperieuse to watch the island, ready to intercept any more vessels that tried to run to or from Corsica.59
Hood controlled the entire operation from the Victory, but the landing party was entrusted to Nelson and Villettes and the Agamemnon was generally found hovering maternally offshore near their camp. As a post-captain Nelson outranked Villettes, a military lieutenant colonel, but in a striking contrast to recent interservice relations the two men stuck to their own spheres of influence and became close comrades in arms. In fact, the only demarcation disputes occurred among the naval officers serving ashore. Verbally Hood had authorised Nelson to command all the seamen cooperating with Villettes, but the captain’s written instructions were clumsily worded. They gave Nelson charge of the seamen ‘attached to the batteries’, as if sailors otherwise employed thereabouts were not his responsibility. There was some difficulty, therefore, when Anthony Hunt, a junior captain, appeared. Hunt had served under Nelson before, and Horatio conceded him ‘a most exceedingly good young man’, but he was also one of the admiral’s favourites and his purpose was unclear. Hood assured Nelson that Hunt had no distinct authority, and was entirely subject to Nelson’s direction, but the unnecessary confusion would have unfortunate results.60
Villettes and Nelson went ashore on the 3rd, preparing for an embarkation of men, ordnance and stores during the hours of darkness. In the early hours of the following morning boatload after boatload of redcoats made for the shingle beach three miles north of Bastia and near the tower of Miomo Nelson had captured less than two months before. There were 853 soldiers of the 11th, 25th, 30th and 60th regiments and the Royal Artillery, as well as 218 marines, 112 chasseurs and 250 seamen. The total force amounted to 1,500 and though the work was going to be dangerous there was considerable cheer. Even fourteen-year-old William Hoste had volunteered to accompany Nelson ashore, but the captain kept him aboard the Agamemnon with the rest of his young gentlemen.61
But there was no restraining the old admiral whose attack it was. Hood rose every day before dawn and inspired the whole force. He had himself rowed ashore in his barge, oblivious of the enemy shells splashing around, and no sooner were his feet on land than he scrambled up the hill like a mountain sheep to inspect the site selected for the batteries. Fourteen hundred armed Corsicans were there to pay homage to their liberator, and Hood pronounced himself satisfied. He believed that Bastia would surrender within ten days of a bombardment being opened, while Elliot, who accompanied him, reported ‘the men . . . in the highest spirits, and the officers . . . very confident of success, which is rendered the more probable both by the destitute conditions and the ill disposition and temper of the garrison, as well as the inhabitants’. From the beginning everyone understood that success rested not simply upon one operation, but upon the simultaneous application of naval and military power to the moral and physical capabilities of the defenders.62
The attack was made upon the northern flank of the town, and the force sweated to reach a position for their batteries, some 2,300 yards from the citadel. Not far ahead the enemy held the tower of Toga, defending the northern approach to the town, and Villettes posted pickets and raised a wooden abattis to guard against any sudden counterattack. The British had tents to the rear of their batteries but no beds or fires. However, despite the dire predictions of some army men back at St Fiorenzo, there were no French sorties. It was a good sign, Nelson thought. Maybe the French were already resigned to defeat. Maybe they felt the risks of counterattacking were just not worth the effort.
Enemy inaction helped, but the job of building the batteries was famously hard labour. Some of the guns were more than nine feet long and weighed three tons, and their small, solid wheels were utterly unsuited to moving on land. With them had to be hauled many tons of powder as well as shot and shell, all landed from the Agamemnon and other ships and dragged over broken ground up to the batteries. Daily Nelson’s sailors struggled, slashing their way through scrub and maquis, bridging ravines and blazing crude tracks if there were none. Following the example of Cooke’s men at St Fiorenzo, they made sledges for the guns and hauled them over the uneven ground by slinging huge straps around rocks and using them as pulleys. By one means or another the tars were soon ‘dragging guns up such heights as are scarcely creditable [credible]’ with enormous willpower. Their goal was a rocky crag 1,000 yards from the nearest enemy redoubt (Cabanelle), 1,800 from a twenty-four-pound battery at the north end of the town and 2,300 from the citadel. There Nelson’s men stacked sandbags and casks and packed them with earth to make redoubts, laid gun platforms and mounted an elaborate battery consisting of four mortars, a howitzer, two carronades, a field piece and eight naval cannon, including five twenty-four pounders. On 9 April the French had seen enough, and fired the first shots from mortars and cannons. Drums beat an alarm in the British camp and some tents were torn up in a long bombardment, but not a man was hurt.63
On 11 April, Nelson and Villettes were ready to reply. Again Hood summoned the garrison, but this time his messenger was insulted, and Lacombe St Michel, who commanded in Bastia, brazenly replied that ‘he had hot shot for our ships, and bayonets for our troops, [and] that when two-thirds of his troops were killed he should then trust to the generosity of the English’. The British were not surprised. St Michel was not a man to be easily cowed, and served a particularly unforgiving government that knew how to deal with failures. Indeed, one argument for supporting the blockade of Bastia with a formal siege was to create additional pretexts for an honourable surrender. But that time had not yet come. Hood’s red flag rose ominously to his main topgallant mast and English colours were raised over Nelson’s tent, while his men punched the air and gave three rousing cheers. At nine-thirty the British batteries roared, and shot and shells began to hurt
le upwards and then to shelve down towards the French positions. The Corsican allies were difficult to manage, but many were crack shots, and they squirmed between boulders to snipe at enemy officers.64
The French bit back, however, and that afternoon the British suffered their first serious reverse. As the frigate Proselyte engaged the tower of Toga, which sat on the shore about seven hundred yards from Nelson’s battery, she was hit by red-hot shot. Thick smoke billowed out of her hatchways, and as boats from the fleet rallied round her crew scurried over the side while the ship crackled into flames. She burned to the water’s edge, but two of her officers chose to fight with Nelson on shore rather than quit the contest. One was Captain Walter Serocold, the last man off the doomed frigate, and the other Nelson’s old protégé Commander Joseph Bullen, who had been serving aboard the Proselyte as a temporary volunteer. Though badly burned Bullen reported to Nelson’s batteries for duty.65
Inevitably the landing party was soon suffering casualties of its own, and Nelson and Villettes reported twenty-six between 4 and 25 April. The captain of the Agamemnon himself was usually found where the fight was hottest and had two remarkable escapes. On 12 April a select gathering ascended a rocky ridge dividing two branches of a stream that united and fell into the sea south of Toga. The men were Lieutenant Colonel Villettes and Captain Nelson, the leaders of the British assault force, Captain John Clark of the 69th Regiment, normally assigned to the Agamemnon but now acting as brigade major ashore, Lieutenant John Duncan and a leader of the Corsican partisans. They were there to see whether the ridge would support another battery, for its summit was five hundred yards nearer the town and commanded the Camp de Cabanelle to the southeast. For a while the men discussed the problems of hauling and siting their guns, oblivious to a persistent fire of musketry, round and grape spitting at them from behind the wall of the Cabanelle a few hundred yards or so away. Their reconnaissance completed, they were about to retire when a cannon shot ploughed straight into them. Clark was glancing over Nelson’s right shoulder towards the Cabanelle when the ball wrenched off his right arm and part of his side. Though fearfully mutilated he survived, but the Corsican chief was killed outright. Nelson himself was untouched.66
A week later Horatio sustained the first of many wounds he would receive in the line of duty. Again he was in the van. On the 13th he had begun to build two new advanced batteries, consisting of five cannons and two or three mortars situated close to the seaside where they could fire upon the Toga tower at close range. After days of heaving guns, ammunition and materiel into place, the seamen opened fire at daylight on the 21st, battering the tower and Cabanelle and raining missiles upon another battery the French had established near the government house. The town battery was soon knocked out of action and its gunners had to be flogged by their officers to be kept at their posts.67
During the establishment of his new seaside batteries Nelson customarily walked from the main camp to inspect the work, taking a circuitous but safe route sheltered from enemy fire. But on the 19th he and Captain Fremantle, who occasionally served on shore, took a short cut. A shot from the Toga tower whined by, thumped into a nearby rock and flung stone and earth with the force of a bursting grenade. Nelson rose shakily to his feet to find that he had nothing more than an unpleasant cut in his back, while the captain of the Tartar was showered with dirt. Brushing himself down, Fremantle waggishly vowed he would never take the short cut again.68
7
In normal times the French relieved their garrison at Bastia regularly, every fortnight in the formidably hot summer months. But there was no relief from the British ships and boats hugging the harbour, or from Villettes and Nelson’s guns as they hammered day and night, the shells tracing fiery arcs when they flew through the hours of darkness. Military positions were the main targets, but much fell indiscriminately upon civilian buildings. Hood expected the town to stand only ten or so days of bombardment, but he was wrong. Ten days passed, then twenty and then thirty, but still the French held out and the monotonous thud of the guns and the shriek of shot and shells went on. At the beginning of May the defenders remained defiant, and swore they would ‘give bomb for bomb’. Like his admiral, Nelson marvelled at their dogged resistance.69
It was not that the seamen and artillerists manning the British batteries were not scoring hits, though some of the foreign equipment was proving to be poor stuff. ‘The Neapolitan mortars [are] not worth a farthing,’ growled Fremantle. ‘They crack. The shells don’t fit them, [though they] were very pretty in the nights to see the shells flying.’ But ‘great damage’ was being inflicted on the northern part of the town, where even stone houses were being reduced to rubble or having their roofs smashed in. The Cabanelle camp was quickly silenced, and the town batteries twice demolished, though the French worked desperately to repair fractured barricades and restore guns to action. Reports intimated a rising toll of dead and wounded. A surgeon who got out of the town on the 23rd said that several had been slain and most of nearly three hundred hospital patients were battle casualties. A boat loaded with fifty-four sick and wounded, including the former captain of the frigate La Fortunée, tried to flee Bastia on 12 May and was captured by the Agamemnon. Its occupants put the casualties at five hundred and fifty, and gave a ‘dismal’ account of the ‘distresses’ in the town. At the end of the siege the figure had climbed to some 743, most of them dead, a higher casualty rate than Calvi would suffer in the months ahead.70
The bombardment multiplied the misery of the defenders and probably weakened their morale. They failed to counterattack, and apparently dreaded an overwhelming general assault, something that suggests that they thought themselves greatly outnumbered. The French were also low on food and gunpowder, and rested their hopes on small boats bringing supplies and reinforcements from Capraia. The inhabitants of Bastia had probably been short of provisions when the siege began, stinted by Nelson’s ships over recent months, but now Hood’s tight blockade almost closed the port. The admiral knew the important role the blockade would play. ‘All we have to do is to keep succours out of Bastia,’ he said. At the end of April a formidable number of ships and boats were still before the port. The Victory, Princess Royal, Fortitude, Agamemnon and Illustrious ships of the line, the fifty-gun Romney, the frigates the Tartar and Meleager, the Gorgon store ship under Nelson’s old comrade James Wallis, the Scout brig and a flotilla of gunboats all busied themselves offshore. Elliot believed that their work was ‘the chief means’ of British success.71
By the last week of April the contest had become a grim battle of wills, but both sides were reviewing their situations. Among the French despondency was growing. Little food was getting through, the dispiriting fire continued and the British were closing the range with new advanced batteries. On the dark night of 25 April two figures in disguise crept like criminals to a felucca in the harbour and fled the doomed town. They were Lacombe St Michel and his military commander. They got away, but to no advantage to the besieged. In France, St Michel excused his flight by saying he wanted to prevent a relief expedition risking the trip from Toulon when Bastia was so close to surrender; the town, in other words, had to be abandoned. Back in the forlorn town his deserted soldiers, especially those crouched in squalid redoubts and behind shot-splintered walls, hoped he was bringing flour and gunpowder but when nothing came drew their own conclusions.72
While the defenders faced each dawn with diminished hope, Nelson had also realised that his attack had not lived up to expectations, and that Bastia was a tougher nut to crack than he had anticipated. He had banked on the bombardment and blockade inducing the garrison to surrender, but the French were showing remarkable steadiness under fire. Their obduracy invited the British to storm, but that prospect seemed some way off. Nelson’s guns were too distant to make a breach in the citadel, and while the nearest enemy strongpoint, the Cabanelle, was being battered and broken it was powerfully manned. Eight hundred men defended the camp, enough to deter Villettes from launching a
premature assault. On 26 April, Nelson was almost as deflated as his French opponents, and had begun to talk about the futile bombardment and need for reinforcements as if his name was D’Aubant.73
It was increasingly obvious that while Nelson’s attack was a useful supplementary or diversionary operation, it fell short of substituting for the proper assault that ought to have been made from the heights behind the town. The new redoubts the French had thrown up below the mountain crest, occupying places the British troops ought to have secured after the fall of St Fiorenzo, were far from ideal for bombarding the citadel. Only one of them, the Guaduola redoubt near Cardo, was as close to the citadel as any of Nelson’s batteries, though British guns established there would have gained something from elevation. But they certainly commanded the indifferently manned hill forts immediately below, and in British hands those posts, positioned just above the town itself, would have outflanked Bastia and soon foreclosed any resistance.
As Hood, Nelson and Villettes fretted at their slow progress they were increasingly intrigued by the possibility that even at this stage a successful attack might be made upon the upper posts. According to enemy deserters and the Corsican partisans who stole about to snipe at French sentries, they were weakly garrisoned. It appeared that the four stone hill forts had been bled of men to create the same number of advanced redoubts further up. All eight forts or redoubts were connected, but only Guaduola was thought to house as many as two hundred men. Admiral Hood and Elliot pondered the subject again in the Victory, and wondered whether the French on the heights might have grown complacent. Hitherto, the British had concentrated their attack solely upon the town below, and even in Bastia it was now known that most of the redcoats were refusing to advance. Perhaps a sudden fog-shrouded assault might yet catch the upper posts off guard.74