Nelson

by John Sugden

  A third battery was established on 3 July, this one by Stuart’s French royalists, who also manned it. It was the only battery that was not the work of the seamen, and opened fire on Fort Mollinochesco at daylight the next morning. The royalist barrage dismantled the principal enemy gun, muzzling the French fire, but its other purpose was to cover the men who were to establish the fourth and most important of all the British batteries, one designed directly to target Fort Mozzello, the keystone of the enemy defences.

  Raising the crucial new work proved complicated. According to Stuart’s plan, the first attempt was made on the evening of 4 July. Most of the serviceable British guns, supported by Corsican muskets, opened up on Mollinochesco to convey the impression that it was to be the focus of the fresh attack. Apparently the deception worked, and some French artillerists in the Fountain battery or the Mozzello even pummelled Mollinochesco themselves, convinced that it was being occupied by the British.

  While gunfire shattered the night on all sides, Stuart’s working parties prepared to advance towards the Mozzello with the stuffed casks and sandbags needed to build the foundations of the new battery, and Nelson and his men stood ready to follow with the guns themselvs, four hulking twenty-sixes and two twenty-fours. The plan soon misfired. By ten-thirty Stuart was storming back and forth, damning his engineer for failing to appear. Soon afterwards hundreds of sappers and seamen surged forward to establish the battery, but Stuart called them back. It was too late, he had decided; if those men were caught in the open at daylight without their guns mounted, they would be cut to ribbons by French fire.

  Try again! The plan ran more smoothly on the evening of the 6th. With silent but ‘excessive labour’ the pioneers and sailors threw up the advanced battery about seven hundred and fifty yards from the Mozzello, but it took longer than Nelson expected and daylight found him with only one gun in place. For a while there was a deathly stillness, as if the enemy gunners were paralysed in astonishment at the sight of a British battery suddenly materialising in the early light, but then a fusillade of grape, shot and shell was thrown at the feverish workers. A mate of a transport ship fell in agony, with holes ripped through both thighs. Two crowns in his pocket had been driven through one of his legs and into the other. A seaman of the Agamemnon also went down, and three soldiers of the guard. Captain Serocold, ‘a gallant good officer, and as able a seaman as ever went to sea’ according to Nelson, was hit behind the ear by grape shot as he cheered on the men hauling the last cannon into position. His friend, Captain Hallowell, a burly thirty-three-year-old whose ‘indefatigable zeal, activity and ability’ was served by the frame and face of a pugilist, helped carry the injured officer from the field. In a small valley with a gentle stream Serocold found a brief, merciful sanctuary from the noise of battle before he died.32

  Still in the thick of the fire, Nelson finished the battery and turned it upon their molesters. Roaring like a wounded lion, it simultaneously engaged the Mozzello, the Fountain battery and Fort San Francesco, and soon began to dowse their fire. This battery, manned by seamen, was Stuart’s principal weapon, especially after the French abandoned and burned Fort Mollinochesco on the 7th and allowed the redundant royalist battery to be dismantled. Nelson and Hallowell took alternate twenty-four-hour shifts supervising the advanced guns. They found that Stuart had chosen his ground well, close enough to inflict terrific damage on the French defences but to some extent shielded by Fort Mozzello from the San Francesco battery and the town bastion of Calvi.

  Nevertheless, the new British battery was so obviously a danger that it drew exceptional fire. On its first day it ‘was hit almost every time’ the Mozzello fired, and even when Nelson’s guns silenced or demolished French batteries during the day, the defenders spent the nights in frantic efforts to renew them for the mornings. An unremitting and murderous thirteen-day slogging match ensued, during which thirty people were slain or injured at the advanced British battery and five of its guns dismounted. ‘’Tis wonderful!’ Nelson remarked.33

  Fortunately, with one gun after another being disabled, Nelson was still able to bring replacements from the fleet. Stuart’s advance was giving the British control of more ground, and between Cape Revellata and Calvi Nelson found a little cove that he could protect by gunboats and Moutray’s battery. By using it for landings, Nelson was able to eliminate much of the three-mile, back-bruising journey between Port Agro and the batteries, though the weather continued to sap vitality. During the day the men worked beneath a ferocious glare Corsicans called ‘the Lion sun’, but Nelson’s battery maintained its fire. It had to rely upon more eighteen-pounders as the heavier guns were disabled, but continued to maul the French positions.34

  The delicate figure of the captain of the Agamemnon seemed inexhaustible, and while many comrades sickened he seemed to exult in the combat, and was invariably at the front, ever at hand in emergencies, ever decisive and confident. Sometimes commanders need to stand at a distance in order to coordinate or oversee an action, but Nelson was never one to enjoy leaving subordinates to execute his orders at the sharp end. For good or ill, he usually stood foursquare with his men, sharing their dangers and toils, and at Calvi he routinely braved the fierce enemy fire that ravaged the British works. Once again Nelson came within seconds, or inches, of destruction. On the second day of fire an enemy shell screamed into the centre of the advanced battery and burst among a hundred people gathered around the captain and General Stuart. The magazine went up, but miraculously not a man was seriously hurt.

  Then, at seven in the morning of 12 July, it happened.

  A shot, probably nothing more than a chance blind discharge from the town or San Francesco batteries, smashed into a sandbag in the merlon of Nelson’s battery and spattered the vicinity with stones and sand. According to one of the soldiers, Nelson and some of his companions saw it coming and threw themselves face down. If so it was too late. Nelson’s face was covered with blood. When Michael Jefferson, the new surgeon’s mate of the Agamemnon, who was on shore, cleaned the wound he found lacerations and part of the right eyebrow blown away. In considerable pain, and unable to see with his right eye, Nelson let Hallowell take charge for the day, but after that he was back, his eye bandaged, looking like a stereotypical sea rover of less than honest intent.

  In those days no diagnostic instruments for optical problems existed, and the ophthalmoscope was still half a century away. Consequently, there is much uncertainty about the nature of Nelson’s injury. He spoke of the eye as being ‘cut down’, but referred to the surrounding skin rather than the eyeball, which was hit but not perforated. The immediate loss of vision and pain experienced has been variously attributed to a detached retina; swelling and watering caused by the concussion; and a vitreous haemorrhage or temporary bleeding within the cavity of the eyeball behind the lens and iris. Whatever the case, though camp talk predicted that Nelson would lose his sight, his initial pain eased and there were signs of visual improvement. ‘The surgeons flatter I shall not entirely lose the sight,’ he told Elliot five days after suffering his injury, ‘which I believe for I can clearly distinguish light from dark. It confined me, thank God, only one day.’35

  Certainly he talked bravely. He did not enter the injury in the ship’s logs, or even put himself on the official list of wounded. ‘I got a little hurt this morning,’ he wrote to Hood, but it was ‘not much, as you may judge by my writing.’ A few days later his Uncle William was told that Nelson felt lucky to have a head on his shoulders. It was not until 1 August that he broached the subject to Fanny, from whom he had hidden the injury to his back at Bastia. Yet even then she only learned that Horatio had suffered ‘a very slight scratch towards my right eye which has not been the smallest inconvenience’.36

  But others knew their Nelson, including Lord Hood. Writing of the wound to Elliot, the admiral admitted, ‘He speaks lightly of it, but I wish he may not lose the sight of an eye.’ Rightly, Hood suspected that Nelson was minimising what was, in fact, a majo
r injury.37

  5

  Putting fears for his sight behind him, Nelson returned to his guns and soon brought the siege to its climax.

  As early as 9 July his battery had got the better of the gunners in the Mozzello and the Fountain battery, and systematically disabled their pieces. By the end of the day only Fort San Francesco, sitting behind the Mozzello at a difficult angle on Nelson’s left, and the town were replying. The town’s projectiles were lobbed blind at the British, over the crippled Mozzello and Fountain batteries, and most missed their mark while a few burst harmlessly in the air soon after leaving the muzzles of their guns. That night Nelson also mounted a ten-inch howitzer near his battery. Its job was to fire every three minutes during the hours of darkness to deter the French from repairing their broken defences.

  With what Hood called ‘rapid firing’ Nelson’s guns soon had the town ablaze in one place for three hours, but they concentrated most fire upon the Mozzello, shooting away sandbags, splintering stone and battering breaches in the walls. Hudson Lowe watched the formidable fort ‘crumbling into pieces from the effect of our shot, and the enemy so dismayed as not to return our fire’.38

  It was time to storm the Mozzello and Stuart planned a tripartite attack from Nelson’s advanced battery. While the seamen gathered guns and scaling ladders made on the Agamemnon, their captain accompanied Stuart to ground a mere three hundred yards from the Mozzello. Stuart explained that if Nelson built a new battery there it would cover the troops storming the breach. On the dark night of 18–19 July large bodies of men moved purposefully about the British positions. At dusk Lieutenant Colonel Wemyss went first, with a detachment of Royal Irish and two field pieces hauled by seamen under Lieutenant Edmonds of the Agamemnon. Striking grimly to the left they bloodlessly occupied the Fountain battery, which they found abandoned. Then Edmonds quickly trained his guns on Fort San Francesco and fired a salvo to a furious huzzah from the Royal Irish. Splitting the darkness those shots and cries signalled the main advance.

  Nelson was ready for it. About the time Wemyss’s movement began the captain’s party had also set off for the site of the new battery Stuart wanted, pulling two twenty-six-pounders and a mortar. With the aid of Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Wauchope of the 50th Regiment they worked furiously in the dark and had the guns mounted by one-thirty in the morning. As Moore’s grenadiers flowed forward towards the Mozzello, Nelson unleashed a savage point-blank covering fire upon the fort. Soon the redcoats were upon their enemies, battering down the remaining French palisades with the stocks of muskets and pouring through the breach to clamber lustily over the fractured stones and sandbags behind flashing bayonets. There was little opposition, and a party of seamen advancing with the grenadiers helped clear it away with a pair of field guns. A brief flourish of French pikes, the flash of a hand grenade, and the enemy buckled, running away so fast that Major Brereton’s Light Corps, circling round to the right to cut off their retreat, could not get to the rear in time. Nelson’s battery had so comprehensively destroyed the Mozzello that it fell with little loss to either side. Two gallant Frenchmen who stood in the breach were hacked down and two others overtaken in flight, while the British casualties amounted to thirteen. The fort itself was found to be ‘an absolute heap of ruins’.39

  By far the greater British losses were suffered the next day, when the Royal Irish detachment under Wemyss came under heavy enemy fire as it sheltered in the old Fountain battery and lost eighteen killed and wounded. However, the basic military position could no longer be reversed. The French abandoned Fort San Francesco at daylight, leaving the British in sole possession of all the enemy’s significant defences to the west and southwest of the town. Its imminent surrender seemed assured.

  The French were not through yet, however. The garrison in Calvi was badly short of provisions and powder, their casualty list was growing, and they had been beaten back to the limits of the town, which itself now faced punishment. But a dogged spirit survived, and when Stuart offered terms the day after the Mozzello fell he was simply reminded of Calvi’s motto: ‘Civitas Calvi Semper Fidelis’. Stuart immediately started regrouping his guns for another onslaught. For several days the artillery of both sides fell silent, as if the antagonists had been exhausted by the struggle, but Nelson’s men were hard at work nonetheless. They helped to tow thirty-two pieces of artillery to new positions and to establish several batteries at distances of from 560 to 900 yards from the town.

  Amid these labours, Nelson still arbitrated between unfriendly commanders-in-chief. Stuart never seemed satisfied, and fired a series of terse ‘my dear sir!’ notes to Nelson demanding more guns, more powder and shot and more men. Horatio passed them on, and Hood grumpily did his best. He complained that while powder was to be had from allies, shot was in short supply, and hinted that Stuart was asking for far more than he needed. Hood even suspected that Stuart was actually courting a refusal so that he could blame the navy if the siege was criticised at home. Nelson’s regard for Stuart never sank so low, but he confessed that while the army’s requests kept coming the materiel piling up behind the captured Fort Mozzello strikingly reminded him of Woolwich arsenal.40

  By 28 July, Stuart had the guns to his satisfaction, but with relatively little powder and shot he decided to reopen negotiations with the French before resorting to further violence. General Casabianca, the governor and commander of the town, was ready to agree that if no supplies reached him within twenty-five days he would surrender. That seemed an awful long time to Stuart, who estimated that his ammunition would only survive seven more days of firing, and he went aboard the Victory to see Hood. The old admiral was sick but listened with Admiral Hotham at his side. They offered their ideas as suggestions, rather than orders, but made it clear that anything more than a ten-day truce should be ruled out and that Hood favoured a three-day bombardment of the town to bring the French to terms.

  Stuart grasped the intermediate position and told Casabianca that he would hold his fire if the French agreed to surrender within eleven days, by 10 August. These terms might have been accepted but for an unfortunate event that occurred on 29 July. While some of the British frigates were away collecting munitions for the siege, four French supply boats slipped into Calvi during the night, the first to get through in two months. They were essential to the besieged town, where food supplies had failed and inhabitants were eating mules, horses, donkeys and – by later report – cats and rats. Eggs were selling for thirty sous apiece. Nelson put little stock in truces, but as the cheers of the embattled garrison carried through the darkness he knew the fight would have to continue. Stiffened by the reinforcements, Casabianca firmly rejected Stuart’s new terms.41

  Stuart loosed his artillery on the defences again, savaging civilian and military positions alike. The British opened fire at five o’clock on 30 July and the garrison immediately replied, but it was a one-sided duel. Some of the defenders were driven from their ordnance, three or four of their guns were dismounted before dark and the French fire languished. During the night five fires blazed in the town. For two more days the seamen pounded the helpless town, and young Hoste believed that had the battering continued ‘not one house would have had a stone standing’.42

  As at Bastia, there was no shortage of grit in the defence and noncombatants showed inspiring courage and fortitude. Women as well as men went forward under fire to supply the soldiers or repair broken fortifications. A dying boy, his chest opened by the fragment of a shell, bade his mother not to weep because his life had been given for the nation. But the British fire told terrifyingly. Every house was damaged or reduced to rubble or cinders, and part of the ‘palace’ crumbled, crushing sheltering refugees beneath the falling masonry. Fever and Nelson’s guns combined to destroy the garrison. Only ten of eighty gunners reportedly remained in action; the rest were dead, wounded or sick. A mere two hundred and sixty effective men remained to defend three major breaches that Stuart was battering through their walls, and among them div
isions were appearing. Casabianca blamed the Provençal grenadiers for allowing the Mozello to fall, while one of their commanders replied that Casabianca had spent part of the siege hiding in a cellar.

  Hood had been right about the effect of another sharp, short bombardment, and on 1 August a white flag flew over Calvi. Stuart’s terms were accepted and the town offered to surrender on the tenth. The siege was over and with it, for the moment, French rule in Corsica.

  6

  Captain Nelson peered into a mirror on the Agamemnon. His right eye remained painful at times, and he could see that its pupil was abnormally dilated. When he covered his left eye to leave the right unsupported, he also had to accept the unwelcome fact that for all useful purposes it was blind.

  Though Nelson was grateful that his ‘beauty’ had not been greatly impaired, and tried to shrug away the worst prognosis (‘never mind, I can see very well with the other’) the prospect of a full recovery seemed to be receding. John Harness, the fleet physician, and the available surgeons were not optimistic, and on 18 August Horatio decided to tell Fanny more about his injuries:

  . . . as it is all past, I may tell you that on the 10th [12th] of July last a shot having struck our battery, the splinters of stones from it struck me most severely in the face and breast. Although the blow was so severe as to occasion a great flow of blood from my head, yet I most fortunately escaped by only having my right eye nearly deprived of its sight. It was cut down, but is as far recovered as to be able to distinguish light from darkness, but as to all purpose of use it is gone. However, the blemish is nothing – not to be perceived unless told. The pupil is nearly the size of the blue part, I don’t know the name. At Bastia I got a sharp cut in the back.43