When it was over, the last bottle drained and the last head broken, they picked themselves up and rolled back to camp, lurching unsteadily up the hill to report in at the guardroom at the top. Often it was still light when they returned, the long summer evening not yet over, the sun still glinting across the sea towards England, where they expected to be in a few days’ time. Sometimes they could make out the Dungeness lighthouse in the gloaming, twinkling at them from the opposite shore.
Their thoughts turned often to England, and the challenge that lay ahead. They would be in London soon, most of whom had never been in Paris. London was the biggest city on earth, and the richest. The Emperor had promised it to them, when they captured it – theirs for the looting. They could take everything they could carry away, and then come back for more. They could steal everything worth stealing and bring it in triumph back to France. There would be enough to buy each of them a farm, or an inn, or anything they wanted. Enough for everyone to retire on the proceeds, once they had conquered the English capital. It was a mouth-watering prospect for illiterate peasant boys without a sou to their name, an opportunity that would never come their way again. And the women, too. There would be plenty of women. The Grand Army was counting the days.
CHAPTER 4
BRITAIN’S MILITARY DEFENCES
In his office overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the British army, viewed the arrival of the French with rather less enthusiasm. He was only too aware of what would happen if they captured London. It was his job to stop them.
The view from the duke’s office has changed very little in the past 200 years. His desk was probably the one still being used in the room today. It looks out across the parade ground towards Buckingham Palace, where his parents lived, at the far end of St James’s Park. To the left of the window, No. 10 Downing Street – where William Pitt had his office – still stands 100 yards away. To the right, also 100 yards away, the Admiralty is still there as well, the shutter telegraph on the roof replaced now by a forest of radio antennas. For more than 250 years, the Prime Minister and the heads of the army and navy have worked within a few minutes’ walk of each other, able to confer at a moment’s notice if need be. In August 1804, they needed to confer more often than not.
The Duke of York was George Ill’s second son. He had been appointed commander-in-chief of the army at thirty-five. Not for him the hard slog and promotion on merit that had accompanied Ney and Soult’s rise to the top. He was commander-in-chief because his father was king.
The duke’s active service record was not distinguished. He was the grand old Duke of York of the nursery rhyme who marched his men to the top of the hill and marched them down again. He had campaigned without distinction in Flanders and Holland, lurching from one disaster to the next until eventually he had had to be recalled. Promotion had swiftly covered his embarrassment. The duke was now the man in charge of defending England against the Grand Army – perhaps the most professional army the world had ever seen.
In fairness to the duke, not everything in Flanders had been his fault. The British army had been incompetent to an astonishing degree. He had done his best with very poor material against an enemy fired with revolutionary zeal. And if he was not very good in the field, he was much better as an administrator. On promotion to commander-in-chief, he had set in motion a wholesale programme of reform, drawing on his experiences in Flanders. He had worked hard to reduce corruption, weeding out the bad officers and rewarding the good, and improving the care of the men. The programme had been under way for several years, but was still very far from complete.
The officers were the biggest headache. Taken collectively, they were idle, ignorant, incompetent and undisciplined, the products of a system that depended entirely on money for promotion, rather than aptitude. The duke himself had been a colonel at seventeen. Others had been bought colonelcies while still at school or even, in one or two cases, while still in the nursery. If their parents had money, it took less than a month to advance from a civilian with no military experience to lieutenant-colonel in a smart regiment. If they didn’t have money, they could serve competently for forty years and never reach that rank.
The system was too entrenched for the duke to abolish it overnight. Instead, he was gradually increasing the possibility of promotion on merit and establishing the principle that commissions could no longer be held by children or others unsuitable for the task. His reforms were beginning to have effect, as the British Military Journal gratefully acknowledged:
We no longer hear of captains at the boarding school, of majors spinning their tops, and of beardless lieutenant-colonels lording it over veterans. An officer cannot now obtain rank but by actual residence with his regiment and he is prevented from skipping from one step to another by being obliged to serve a certain time in each previous to his promotion.
There were exceptions, of course, even in the duke’s own household. His mistress Mary Anne Clarke took advantage of her position to obtain promotions and appointments for officers willing to bribe her for the privilege. It was said that she had even arranged a commission for her own footman, for no other reason than that he thought he might look good in military uniform. Plenty of other officers joined the army for similar reasons. They were always the first to sell out at the prospect of any fighting, hastily disposing of their commissions to the highest bidder and returning to civilian life. Even with the duke’s reforms, there were still a great many officers in the army who really should not have been there.
The duke himself probably knew nothing of his mistress’s activities. He was a nice man, well liked by almost everyone who knew him. ‘Big, burly, loud, jolly, cursing, courageous; he had a most affectionate and lovable disposition, was noble and generous to a fault, and was never known to break a promise.’ The duke had many friends and very few enemies, which made him the antithesis of Napoleon. But his personal pleasantness was not an advantage in his profession. He lacked the killer instinct of the best generals. No one was in any doubt as to what the outcome would be if he and Napoleon ever faced each other in the green fields of southern England or even – God forbid – at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
Fortunately for the army, there was a scattering of highly competent officers in influential positions who knew their business and were just as professional as the French. One was John Moore, who had introduced the Light Infantry to the British army, a new breed of soldier inspired by the French Voltigeurs and the Indians and backwoodsmen of the American wars. The Light Infantry wore green uniforms and travelled light and fast, trotting where others walked, covering long distances with astonishing speed. Another good officer was Sir Arthur Wellesley, unfortunately not in England at the moment, but making a reputation for himself in India. A third was Major Henry Shrapnell, a resourceful artilleryman working on interesting new ways of blowing the French to pieces. These officers and others like them were the glue that held the rest of the army together.
But the fact remained that it was not much of an army compared to the French. No matter how fast they could march, the Light Infantry were not equipped to delay Napoleon for long. The country lay wide open to attack and everyone knew it. For the Duke of York and his staff, the problem was how to react if once the French got ashore and came heading straight for London.
The obvious place to stop them was on the coast, before they could get more than a toehold on dry land. Armies are at their most vulnerable when coming ashore. But the English coastline was long and virtually undefended. What it needed was a series of interlocking strongpoints, mini-castles that the French could neither bypass nor capture quickly. Something that would break up the momentum of their advance and delay them long enough for British reinforcements to arrive.
The idea for such strongpoints – known as Martello towers – was not new. It had been suggested by a tower at Mortella Point in Corsica, Napoleon’s home ground. The British had attacked the tower in 1794 and found it difficult to captu
re – the tower’s tiny garrison had held out for two days before surrendering. John Moore had been one of the officers involved in the attack, and the idea had been brought back to England. A wooden model of the tower had been passed around various government departments, with the recommendation that similar towers should be built all along the invasion coast. But the expense was considered prohibitive, so nothing had been done.
With Napoleon at the gates, however, the idea had been revived. In August 1803, the Duke of York had urged the immediate construction of a chain of Martello towers along the south coast. Again, nothing had been done, largely as a result of bureaucracy and interdepartmental rivalry. The duke had persevered, however, and at long last the Board of Ordnance had been goaded into action. A committee was even now considering what to do. It was planning to report in September 1804 – provided Napoleon hadn’t invaded by then, of course.
What the duke wanted – as a matter of the utmost priority – was a series of military strongpoints along the Kent and Sussex coasts, each no more than 500 or 600 yards from the next, so as to provide each other with covering fire. Garrisoned by one officer and twenty-four men, well supplied with grapeshot and canister, such strongpoints could hold out for days behind thick walls, while the enemy found little shelter on the beach. The towers would pose a serious problem for the French, one they could not easily surmount. The expense was still prodigious, particularly if the towers were going to be square, as originally proposed. A square tower with four big guns would be very costly, but an elliptical tower with one gun and two carronades could be built for a fifth of the price, while guaranteeing three-quarters of the fire power. It was problems of this kind that the committee was considering while the Duke of York fretted and the rest of the country waited daily for Napoleon to arrive.
Whatever the committee decided, it would take time for the towers to be built. The French would encounter little immediate opposition when they stormed ashore. But there were other ways to defeat them, or at least impede their progress. One was a scorched-earth strategy, destroying the harvest and driving the livestock away to prevent the enemy living off the land. Another was to break up the roads, delaying the French advance while British reinforcements arrived from elsewhere to intercept them.
A third possibility open to the duke was the flooding of Romney Marsh. It occupied much of the Dungeness peninsula, an area so wide and flat that it was an obvious landing ground for the French. The marsh was good farming land as well, 28,000 acres of excellent pasture reclaimed from the sea and protected by a sea wall. It was drained through five sluices that let the water out at low tide. But if the sluices were left open, the marsh would fill again with sea water, making it impossible for the French to land.
The trouble was, it would take a while to flood – perhaps three or four tides in all. The process would have to be set in motion before the French put to sea. And once the land was flooded with salt water, it would take a long time to reclaim when the war was over. The farmers would have to be compensated, but the government was not prepared to find the money. The Cabinet had been adamant about that.
So a compromise was being discussed. If flooding the land was too costly, it could still be rendered useless by digging a canal across the Grand Army’s line of advance. The entire Dungeness peninsula could be cut off by a canal from Hythe to Rye. The proposed waterway would be nineteen miles long, but it would neutralise a good thirty miles of invasion beach. The canal would present a considerable impediment to the French, while allowing British reinforcements to arrive quickly by barge. With a military road running parallel to it on the landward side and a rampart made of spoil from the canal, it would be an excellent defensive position from which to harass the French. Napoleon would surely think twice about landing at Romney Marsh if he knew there was a fortified canal further inland.
At the moment, however, the idea was still on the drawing board. The indications were that the canal would gain official approval, but nothing had actually been done yet. Not a spadeful of earth dug, or even the route drawn up and surveyed. The canal existed only in the minds of the officers who had proposed it.
Fortunately, the French weren’t ready either. According to intelligence reports from Boulogne, they were still putting their fleet together, assembling the landing craft for the invasion. The British didn’t have any defences, the French didn’t have enough ships. It was going to be a race to see who could complete their preparations first.
If the French won? If they succeeded in getting ashore before the British could stop them? Where else could the Duke of York block their progress along the approaches to London?
To some extent, it depended on where they came ashore. If the French landed west of Hythe, the North Downs stood in their way – a range of hills that would have to be wrested from the British army before they could go any further. The South Downs presented a similar obstacle if the French landed west of Beachy Head, and the Weald of Kent if they landed west of Hastings. If they arrived in east Kent, however, as seemed most likely, the only natural barrier to their progress was the River Medway. The betting was that none of these physical obstacles would hold Napoleon up for long.
What might delay him was the garrison at Dover. It amounted to 4,000 men, safe behind the walls of the castle. Napoleon needed to capture a port before advancing on London, and Dover was the obvious choice. Even if he captured another port nearby, he still wouldn’t feel secure with so many British troops in his rear. He would have to eliminate them before advancing further inland. The garrison could probably hold out for three weeks in the event of attack – more than enough time for reinforcements to arrive from elsewhere.
If they lost the opening battle against Napoleon, the duke’s strategy was for the Kent troops under General Sir David Dundas to withdraw towards Dover rather than London, creating a military threat in the French rear that they could not ignore on their way to the capital. Dover was dominated by its castle on one side and by a cliff known as the Western Heights on the other. Various generals had been campaigning for years to have the Heights fortified against invasion, and the work was finally under way. The Western Heights were being strengthened with a citadel, a drop redoubt and a barracks for 1,300 men. The work would take several years to complete, but Dover would be virtually impregnable when it was done.
But if Dover failed to delay Napoleon, nothing else would on the way to London. Both sides calculated that if the French invaded immediately, they would almost certainly reach London within five days. Once they arrived, the capital would be almost defenceless. In medieval times it had been protected by stout walls, but these were no defence against artillery and had long since been dismantled. In any case, the city had outgrown them. It sprawled in every direction, the greatest metropolis on earth, yet without any permanent fortifications against an invading army. It hadn’t needed any, for centuries.
Too late to start now. Instead, the duke placed his faith in ‘field’ fortifications – a series of wooden palisades, earthworks and gun platforms that could be erected very quickly. They were much cheaper than permanent fortifications, which was an important consideration. Provided the materials had already been assembled at the chosen site, no further expense need be incurred until the French had actually landed. The duke had reported to William Pitt in July that the defences on the north side of London could probably be completed in four days by 5,000 men and 800 horses. Those on the south could be completed in three days with just 500 men and 300 horses. No rent had to be paid to landowners until the fortifications were actually erected – and if the work was left until the last minute, it would provide ‘useful and animating labour to an overgrown population that might otherwise become dangerous and desponding’. In other words, it would involve Londoners in their own defence, giving them something to do instead of worrying about Napoleon.
The duke’s plan was to defend the approaches to the city first, falling back if necessary on to London itself. Shooter’s Hill would dominate the ap
proaches to the south, but the north was more of a problem. The Lea Valley could be flooded and a camp dug in at Brentwood, but there were no obvious defensive points along the East Anglian coast. The duke toyed with Colchester, Sudbury and Braintree before settling on ‘an Entrenched Camp in Front of Dunmow’. The choice was not entirely satisfactory, but nobody could think of anywhere better.
As for London, the duke defined its perimeter thus:
On the Right bank of the Thames the Line rests upon the River above Deptford and passes along the ridge of the Norwood hills, then turning by Streatham and Tooting to the River behind Wandsworth Crick. The continuation of the Line upon the Left bank of the Thames in front of London passes behind the River Lea by Stratford and Lea Bridge to Stamford Hill; from thence it takes the ridge of Ground by Hornsey Wood, Highgate and Wilsden Green; and again turns by Holland House and Little Chelsea to the Thames.
The duke calculated that he would need 180,000 men to defend this area, most of whom would be drawn from the volunteers. There were no artillerymen among the volunteers, and not enough in the regular army, so he had called on all Londoners who knew how to work a cannon to come forward and offer their services. The response had been swift, but not large. His hope was that the French would only attack on one front at a time, giving him a chance to concentrate his gunners where they were most needed. If they attacked on more than one front, he would just have to rely on musket fire instead . . . assuming the muskets had arrived by then.
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