The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Napoleon was always a combination of dreamer and practical man of action, and the sheer immensity and imagination of the task ahead must have gone to the young man’s head and seriously warped his judgement, making him severely misjudge the terrain and the enemies facing him. Even his later invasions of Spain and Russia showed more careful planning, more limited objectives and a greater grasp of reality, although they too ended in disaster. The expedition to Egypt was to be an awesome foreshadowing of both, exposing the dangers of penetrating hundreds of miles into hostile, unknown territory in ignorance of the dangers, the enemy, the terrain and the climate – in this case intense heat and shortage of water. It was mounted as though the French army could expect to live off the land and move as easily across desert as across fertile Europe.

  * * *

  Napoleon’s first objective was the island of Malta. He had a strange, almost upstart contempt for the ancient order that governed the island, a key staging post in the Mediterranean, which he accused of exploiting and starving the local population. They were certainly a decadent lot, a rotten fruit waiting to be picked off the tree by the modernizing Napoleon. The Order of the Knights Hospitalier of St John of Jerusalem had come into existence during the First Crusade and had been recognized as a religious order by the Pope in 1113. They had been evicted from Jerusalem in 1187 and then from Acre, their last castle in the Holy Land, in 1291 before settling on Rhodes from which they staged raids against Moslem shipping. Not until 1522 were they evicted from Rhodes, finally settling in Malta in 1530. There they had defended the island heroically in 1565 for five months against the Saracen navy and army of Suleiman the Magnificent, which lost 30,000 men.

  For the next century they continued to harass the Ottoman navy before turning to trade in an increasingly peaceful Mediterranean lake. Then the warlike chivalric order declined into an ineffectual customs force protecting a lucrative trading network. Although most of the Knights were French, they were deeply hostile to the Revolution and in 1797 the French government was alarmed to learn that both Russia and Austria were considering seizing the strategically placed island. Napoleon was instructed to get there first as a strategic way station on his path to Egypt.

  On 9 June the Maltese awoke to witness a truly terrifying spectacle: the entire French fleet and invasion force stretching across the horizon. The newly elected German Grand Master of the Order, Baron von Hompesch, surveyed with dismay his own forces: 332 Knights, of whom fifty were too old to fight (many instantly deserted): a garrison of just 1,500 men manning 1,000 guns, many of which had not been fired for nearly half a century, whose powder was mostly rotten; and a local ill-armed militia of some 10,000.

  Napoleon delivered an ultimatum and a little sporadic resistance broke out, mainly in Gozo. Three Frenchmen were killed. Two days later Hompesch sued for an armistice – he could do little else – on condition that he receive a principality and a generous pension from the French, with the other Knights also getting pensions. The French joyously descended on to what was to be their last slice of paradise before the hell for which they little knew they were destined.

  Malta’s huge population of prostitutes and its luxurious orange groves and fruit were enjoyed to the full. As Lieutenant Desvernois observed: ‘They showered us with a thousand attentions and civilities. It is not surprising that they bear so easily the state of celibacy to which the rules of their Order condemn them. Most of them have mistresses who are ravishingly beautiful and charming and of whom they are not the least bit jealous.’

  Thus the greatest chivalric order in Europe had been bullied into surrendering without a fight. They were rewarded with ashes, for Napoleon immediately reneged on the armistice agreement and ordered the summary destruction of all traces of the order’s rule, while also spurring his men into a characteristic frenzy of plunder. Napoleon ordered the Knights to leave within three days without their pensions or possessions, carrying just 40 francs each. The mint and the church of St John were plundered, yielding a booty of 5 million francs of gold, 1 million of silver and 1 million of gems. As consolation, the Knights were allowed to keep a cherished splinter of the True Cross. It is hard to explain this callous ruthlessness except as an attempt to endear him to the Moslems of Egypt, as a belated act of vengeance against their old Christian foe; he was shortly to display the astonishing lengths he would go to to win over Islamic support.

  After just a week of frenzied orders issued to stamp out Malta’s separate existence and incorporate it as a French protectorate, he departed with his troops and ships on 18 and 19 June. It took a further fortnight to reach Alexandria. During that time a remarkable comedy of errors was played out in the eastern Mediterranean. Napoleon’s officers and men were ignorant of their destination, as elaborate precautions had been taken to conceal it, except from senior officers, to the extent that Napoleon had failed to equip his troops with water-containers for the Egyptian desert – a shocking omission which was to cost innumerable French lives – or training in landing ashore or desert survival and warfare.

  Nor was Napoleon aware that his fleet’s nemesis was approaching in the shape of a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson; the French commander knew only that a squadron of three British ships was believed to be in the Mediterranean, which his hugely superior naval forces could make short work of. Nelson himself, however, was equally unaware of the position of the immense French fleet and, by a series of fantastic coincidences, utterly failed to find them on their sea crossing, which might have spelt the end of the French expedition and a watery grave for some 50,000 Frenchmen, mostly aboard defenceless transports. Instead there followed one of the most remarkable duets in the history of naval warfare – a cat and mouse game in which each adversary was blind and only vaguely aware of the existence of the other.

  Chapter 32

  STRANGE YOUNG MAN

  Horatio Nelson, Napoleon’s adversary in the Mediterranean, was one of the most extraordinary military fighters these islands have ever produced, a man whose temperament resembled none more so than that of Napoleon himself, although his motivations were very different.

  Nelson was born on 29 September 1758, a year before William Pitt, who was to be his war leader, and more than a decade before Napoleon Bonaparte, who was to be his mortal enemy. Like the latter, and unlike Pitt, he was born in provincial obscurity, in the tiny Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe, the son of a well-to-do parson, Edmund Nelson, whose wife had aristocratic connections – her great-great grandfather had been son to Sir Robert Walpole, the British first minister throughout the reigns of George I and George II. His son, Horace Walpole, fop, dilettante and creator of Strawberry Hill Gothic, was Nelson’s godfather, which was a powerful connection indeed.

  His father’s clerical ‘livings’ – one of them awarded by Eton College – were prosperous, affording him four servants and allowing his wife to bear eleven children, of which eight survived, which even in those days was a large family. Horatio was the fourth surviving son, preceded by two elder brothers, Maurice and William, and a sister, Susannah. His two younger brothers died young, as did a sister; a much younger sister, Horatio’s favourite, Catherine, survived. Nelson’s mother, perhaps worn out by childbirth, died at the age of only forty-two in 1767, when Horatio was at the impressionable age of nine. In 1770, the boy Horatio, by common consent a forceful personality even in childhood, asked his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, whether he could serve on his ship which was due to see service against Spain in the dispute over the remote Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic. Aged just twelve, he was appointed midshipman – not an unusual age to start in those days. When the international crisis eased, he was posted under Suckling aboard a guard-ship in the Medway, the 74-gun Triumph.

  As a middling son in a gentry family Horatio would be expected to make his own way in life, and the navy presented an attractive career for a resourceful boy. In academic studies at the respectable Royal Grammar School in Norwich, Horatio had shown little aptitude for academic
work, except in his written English, which was to show later in his despatches. As a midshipman aboard a formidably large two-deck ship of the line, he pursued a simple, spartan and unexceptional life of mundane duties, acquiring the skills of seamanship from the bottom; he also served aboard a merchantman to acquire sailing experience.

  At the age of fifteen he was granted his first adventure. The Carcass was due to sail to seek the fabled North-West Passage across the top of America to the East Indies. The young midshipman begged his uncle, Captain Suckling, to be allowed to go on the expedition. Its Captain Lutwidge was a friend of Suckling’s; Horatio got his way. The journey took four months and brought Nelson within ten degrees of the North Pole. Another midshipman vividly described the twenty-four-foot ice wall which threatened to destroy the ship and the walrus to which they harnessed it to try and tow it to safety. The North-West Passage went undiscovered. Horatio was proud enough of being given command of a cutter with twelve men and boasted of his navigational abilities. Later writers embroidered it with a supposed encounter between Horatio and a bear on an ice floe which he was supposed to have fought off with the butt of a musket.

  On his return he was promoted to a frigate, the Seahorse, bound for the East Indies. He was blown back by the trade winds to the Cape of Good Hope – he was later to scorn Cape Town, which he evidently disliked on this occasion. He won £300 at cards in one port but vowed to give up gambling. He formed a favourable impression of Trincomalee in Ceylon, visited the magnificent British settlements at Calcutta and Bombay and even sailed up the Persian Gulf to the foetid port of Basra. Virtually no record survives of his adventures there, perhaps because he wrote few letters or his family destroyed them later as not reflecting on his glory in later life. He may indeed, like that other young man seeking his fortune in the Indies half a century before, Robert Clive, father of Britain’s Indian empire, have been unhappy on his travels.

  He contracted malaria, which was to recur all his life, and was despatched on the six-month journey home, ailing and seemingly condemned to obscurity in his profession, even voicing thoughts of suicide by throwing himself overboard (malaria is a notoriously depressive illness). He had already acquired the frail and delicate appearance that made others want to mother him, and which seemed so implausible in a hero. In his fevered state he experienced a curious conversion, believing that he would become ‘a hero and confiding in Providence that I will brave every danger’. Intriguingly, Clive had experienced a similar call of destiny on his own failure as a young clerk to commit suicide with a pistol: the gun did not go off. Horatio may have felt that having escaped death, yet felt its closeness, he was unafraid in future to brave it.

  On his arrival in Britain in the summer of 1776, as the American colonies raised the banner of independence, at the age of eighteen he found his fortunes had changed dramatically for the better. Captain Suckling had been appointed to the key post of Controller of the Navy. His young protégé was promptly appointed acting lieutenant aboard the 64-gun Worcester, which sailed to Cadiz.

  The keen young man evidently made a good impression and the following year he took his lieutenant’s examination before three captains – the chairman of which, in a not uncommon display of nepotism in the supposedly egalitarian navy, was none other than Captain Suckling. He passed with flying colours and unlike so many of his more frustrated peers, almost certainly under Suckling’s patronage, was immediately appointed second lieutenant aboard the 32-gun frigate Lowestoffe, under Captain William Locker.

  By the age of nineteen the young man had thus travelled twice halfway around the world, to its coldest northern reaches and its most tropical equatorial climates, experienced a dozen of the world’s ports, and now, under the close patronage of a very senior naval figure, seemed embarked on a solid if unexceptional career.

  Locker, as was his custom with his younger officers, commissioned the first known portrait of the young Horatio. He emerges as slim, fresh-faced, with a delicate, almost feminine complexion and an expression of a sensitivity. The keen alert brow and eyes and the dominant nose are offset by the gentle lips and chin: at that tender age Horatio exuded a curious mixture of determination, intelligence and grace. He looked more like a foppish, art-loving young nobleman than a naval warrior.

  Horatio tended to get on with his superiors and he and Locker hit it off right from the start. The young lieutenant admired Locker for his dictum: ‘Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him’ which was reminiscent of his own advice to the young Thomas Cochrane years later: ‘Always go at ‘em’. He was fearless from the start, his courage belying his slight frame. He was appointed to the Jamaica station, notorious for its tropical diseases, where he boarded a French privateer in a gale in his first real naval action; afterwards he admitted to his enjoyment of the danger. Admiral Sir Peter Parker, the fleet commander there, was an old friend of Horatio’s uncle and took him aboard his flagship as third lieutenant, soon promoted to first. When Suckling died, Parker took over as Horatio’s mentor.

  The war between Britain and France and its rebellious American allies was now under way. Horatio soon showed his mettle, taking part in the capture of three prizes, of which he was entitled to a thirty-second share, securing his first modest financial capital. In 1779 he was made master and commander of his first ship, the Badger, a small two-masted brig. With this he rescued the crew of a sloop accidentally set on fire. Under Parker’s patronage Horatio continued his effortless rise, being appointed to the coveted position of post-captain of the Hinchinbrook in June 1779. Still only twenty, he was one of the youngest ever to be so appointed – a faster rise than either Hood or Jervis.

  He had risen through family connection and patronage – first from Suckling, then Locker, then Parker. Being respectful, loyal, disciplined and a fine sailor, he clearly had an uncanny ability to impress his superiors. As promotion to admiral was merely a matter of seniority among post-captains, Nelson was now clearly in the fast stream to the top. Yet extraordinarily he was largely untested, except as a promising seaman: he had never been in a significant engagement.

  It was not that the young captain showed any reluctance to put himself in the line of fire. In February 1780 the governor of Jamaica, General John Dalling, conceived a madcap scheme for invading the Spanish province of Nicaragua, securing the towns of the north during the American War of Independence. He assembled 2,000 regular troops and a hundred ‘volunteers’ from the backstreets of Kingston to stage a landing at the mouth of the San Juan river.

  Nelson was ordered by a reluctant Parker to escort this force to the mouth of the river. On arrival, the intrepid young officer ignored his orders to return and took command of the land force, which had to drag canoes along the bank of the river to avoid its strong downstream currents, plunging deep into the rainforest which was infested with snakes and alligators. By early April they reached the fortress of the Immaculate Conception, near the huge freshwater inland sea of Lake Nicaragua. Nelson urged immediate attack, but fell seriously ill and was evacuated downstream in a canoe to take up a new appointment as captain of the 44-gun frigate Janus. The castle meanwhile surrendered, but the hopeless expedition fizzled out as the little British invading force succumbed to tropical diseases.

  Nelson himself only just survived his illness, and was unable to take up his new command, to his bitter disappointment. He was shipped back to England and sent to convalesce at Bath, where he spent months recovering. It had been another terrible career setback for a man with an apparently golden staircase to the top. He still had seen no significant action.

  In the autumn of 1791 he was given a new command: the 32-gun Albemarle, a French prize of unprepossessing appearance. Still less promising was his mission: dull escort duty for convoys of merchantmen in the Baltic, the North Sea and the Atlantic. There at last he ran into the enemy: he was pursued by five French ships of the line and a frigate for ten hours before, in a first superb display of seamanship, eluding them in fog and then sailing across the shoals
of Newfoundland’s St George’s Bay, and on to where the larger ships could not follow.

  In Quebec he fell in love with the daughter of the provost marshal of the garrison, the sixteen-year-old Mary Simpson. When ordered to New York – perhaps because her father disapproved – he displayed his romantic streak by threatening to disobey orders in order to stay with her. When he arrived in New York, his old talent for ingratiating himself with his superiors had not deserted him, and Admiral Hood, another old friend of Suckling, took an immediate shine to him, although he turned down the twenty-four-year-old’s extraordinarily ambitious request to command a ship of the line.

  Nelson made friends with the King’s younger son, Prince William, who was serving as a midshipman aboard Hood’s flagship. The Prince later gave this impression of the strange, ambitious, slight young man:

  He appeared to be the merest boy of a captain I ever beheld; and his dress was worthy of attention. He had on a full-laced uniform: his lank unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian tail, of an extraordinary length; the old-fashioned flaps of his waistcoat added to the general quaintness of his figure, and produced an appearance which particularly attracted my notice; for I had never seen anything like it before . . . My doubts were, however, removed when Lord Hood introduced me to him. There was something irresistibly pleasing in his address and conversation; and an enthusiasm, when speaking on professional subjects, that showed he was no common being . . . I found him warmly attached to my father . . .

  Thus Nelson first displayed the romantic – or perhaps merely snobbish and self-interested – attachment to royalty which was later to do him so much harm.

  Nelson learnt that Turks Island in the West Indies had been taken by the French. He assembled a force of four small ships, bombarded the town and landed some 170 seamen, before being forced to retire with eight men wounded. It was a small attack and, with peace soon concluded, Nelson returned to England where his ship was laid up. He continued to cultivate his grand friends, however, being introduced by Hood to the King and visiting his friend Prince William at Windsor as well as Admiral Parker at his country seat. He paid a visit to France and nearly became engaged to Elizabeth Andrews, a minor heiress he met there. Nelson dabbled in politics, enthusiastically supporting Pitt who, just a year younger than he, had been asked to form a government. He even considered standing for parliament himself.