Death Before Glory

by Martin Howard

  On Grenada in April 1795, Governor Mackenzie was frustrated by the lack of basic artillery supplies. ‘I am at a loss how to issue orders respecting ammunition for the artillery. Lately, their quantity, bulk and weight were matters of inconvenience; and now there is not enough’. Balcarres complained to Dundas that the whole of his field artillery on Jamaica was useless, ‘…the carriages are rotten, and have been filled up from time to time with putty, merely to deceive the eye.’

  Accepting these caveats, there is evidence in the eyewitness record that the Royal Artillery played a significant supporting role in both general operations and sieges. The lighter pieces of ordnance might be employed to defend troops forced back by the enemy or, more commonly, to ‘soften up’ enemy positions prior to their storming. Republican and insurgent forces had their own artillery and duels sometimes developed. Thomas Phipps Howard makes several mentions of artillery skirmishes in Saint Domingue, on one occasion 12 and 18-pounders from Fort Brisbane seeing off a brigand assault on a British detachment. Moore stresses the importance of artillery in gaining higher ground on St Lucia, several batteries, including mortars, playing on enemy positions around Morne Fortune. As is clear from his diary entries in May 1796, the British artillery fire was neither unopposed nor entirely effective.

  17th: The batteries opened yesterday morning at eight o’clock. At first the enemy seemed much alarmed. They soon recovered and commenced a fire from three mortars and seven guns. Our batteries are distant, our fire ill-directed; it has had no effect. A 9-pounder, at their advanced post within 600 yards of us, without breast-work or embrasure, is allowed to exist, and to plague us…

  18th: The Commander-in-Chief [Abercromby] is likewise hurt and surprised that the effect of the artillery [against the Vigie] has not been greater. Those about him are equally disconcerted. When it is determined that a post cannot be assaulted, but must be reduced by cannon, a certain time is required; that time, according to circumstances must be greater or less. In a country so mountainous and difficult as this, it must be long.

  Moore recommended the use of large calibre cannon and howitzers, believing that the extra labour involved in moving these weapons would be well rewarded. Heavier guns were required for siege work and the existence of powerful fortresses guarding the principal towns and harbours of the islands meant that attempts at their reduction were a regular feature of the West Indian campaigns. The military essentials of these sieges have been related in the campaign chapters but we will consider their human dimension. Siege work was brutal, dangerous and demoralising for the attacking force. The reliance on gun and spade was the same in the Caribbean as in Europe but the rocky terrain meant that the routine tasks of digging in, creating parallels and locating the batteries were especially challenging. As in Europe, the offensive army, usually the British, sometimes resorted to bombarding the fortress into submission.

  The best eyewitness accounts of a siege are of the attack on Fort Desaix on Martinique in February 1809. Captain Thomas Henry Browne of the 23rd methodically details the preparations in his journal. The entries are mundane, but that was the nature of siege work.

  February 7th; Erection of batteries continued in very adverse weather. The French made a sortie against one of our advanced trenches, and carried away some of their tools…8th; Works continued. The picquets and covering parties were severely engaged today. We christened our advanced battery Fort Edward, and in this work several men were killed and wounded by the accidental explosion of a shell…9th; Incessant rains which render all progress in the batteries exceedingly tedious. Fluxes and fevers begin to show themselves…

  Similar entries, detailing the exhausting work, continue up until the 20th when the British batteries opened fire.

  James St Clair was determined to gain revenge for the loss of his brother William, killed earlier in the campaign, and he enjoyed pummelling the French defenders.

  …the signal gun was fired by me, and I saw the ball speeding its whizzing course across the plain below us, skimming beautifully close over the parapet-slope into the fort…At night the flight of shells to one common centre, visible as they whirled through the air from their burning fuses, was a most beautiful sight.

  Sailor James Scott visited the fort after its capitulation and made a more sober assessment of the effects of the bombardment; ‘…I left the scene of desolation and murderous havoc fully impressed with the extent of horrors entailed by a state of warfare’.

  The best accounts by the besieged are French, notably Rochambeau’s of the fall of Fort Royal in 1794 and Villaret’s of Fort Desaix in 1809. We have nothing so evocative from the British side, although there are fragments of information revealing the misery of Prescott’s 58-day defence of Fort Matilda at Basseterre on Guadeloupe in late 1794. The general, in his later dispatch, depicts the increasing desperation of the small garrison as the works crumbled under enemy fire and their own artillery decayed and malfunctioned. Bartholomew James describes the intolerable heat, the shortage of water, the desertions, the sickness and the incessant danger.

  No part of the garrison was safe; the barracks of all descriptions were tumbling on our heads; hot shot was flying in all directions; killed and wounded men were lying in all parts of the works, and the whole garrison was a scene of distress and devastation.10

  The subsequent rescue of Prescott’s garrison by embarkation onto the ships of Jervis’s fleet is a pertinent reminder of the central part played by the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. This is the subject of another book, but it must be acknowledged here that admirals often rescued generals, either by spiriting away defeated British forces from under the noses of the French, as at Fort Matilda, or in supporting the offensive campaigns not only by transferring and landing soldiers, but also by bombarding enemy defences and troops from the sea. Sailors also left their ships to join the fighting on land. For Grey’s first expedition in 1794, numbers of seamen were exercised and trained in the use of small arms and pikes. They were formed into companies commanded by lieutenants of the navy with the rank of captain on shore. They did sterling work. Although there were inter-service rivalries, the sailors were generally acknowledged by the soldiers to be valuable additions to the ranks. William Bentinck saw them in action on Martinique in 1809.

  The Sailors had been brought ashore to man the guns and do occasional hand to hand fighting, which they addressed greatly, not troubling to load their muskets when once discharged, but laying about the French with the stock, a tree bough, or their fists, as chance or inclination might dictate.

  They were, Bentinck tells us, intolerant of the soldiers of the West India Regiments, whom they berated for being cowardly and lazy. Some black soldiers were ‘whacked’ by the seamen and others, who had thrown away their ammunition, were shot.11

  Eighteenth-century war had been brutal enough but the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars introduced the concept of ‘total war’, where the object was to annihilate the enemy and where civilian populations were involved and persecuted in a manner not previously seen. Insurgency warfare, as seen in the Iberian Peninsula and the West Indies, was characterised by ruthlessness on both sides. The campaigns in the Caribbean were littered with well-documented atrocities; black slaves slaughtered white planters who reciprocated in kind; French Royalists and Republicans gave each other no quarter and regular British and French forces were guilty of excesses against each other and also against native insurgent forces and civilians, be they white, black or mulatto.

  British troops were mindful of the consequences of capture by the enemy. On Guadeloupe, where they faced the army of Victor Hugues, reports of the massacre of the sick and wives of the 43rd Regiment in the hospital at Point-à-Pitre in the summer of 1794 were widely known. Captain William Stewart, fighting on the island, was reluctant to leave the wounded behind; ‘Our feelings suffered an additional horror in this cruel necessity by having before our eyes an enemy who, from their savage natures, we could little expect would give quarter to our officers and sold
iers…’ In Saint Domingue, the greatest fear of Thomas Phipps Howard and his men was of getting lost and falling into the clutches of the brigands, ‘…who gave no Quarter to their Prisoners & would therefore have immediately put us to some cruel Death…’ The suicide of Lieutenant Baskerville, abandoned in Fort Tiburon, and at the mercy of Rigaud’s men, was understandable.

  The British were no innocents in this fiendish war. Geggus states that there is substantial evidence of British atrocities in Saint Domingue, Toussaint complaining of ‘cruautés atroces and inouis’. Black captives were drowned at sea in batches, held in chains, branded and beheaded. Neither side were inclined to take prisoners in action. These were systemic cruelties, but there are also anecdotes of the dehumanising effect of the conflict on the ordinary British soldier. A horrified James McGrigor watched an infantryman on Grenada place his loaded musket to the head of a French prisoner and discharge the contents. On St Vincent, David Stewart of the Black Watch describes a similar incident:

  This day [8 June, 1796] occurred an instance of the power of example and habit in exciting ferocity. In the month of August 1795, I enlisted a lad of seventeen years of age. A few days afterwards one of the soldiers was cut in the head and face in some horse-play with his companions, in consequence of which his face and the front of his body were covered with blood. When the recruit saw him in this state, he turned pale and trembled, saying he was much frightened, as he had never seen a man’s blood before. In the assault of the redoubts, as I leaped out of the second to proceed to the third, I found this lad, with his foot on the body of a French soldier, and his bayonet thrust through from ear to ear, attempting to twist off his head. I touched him on the shoulder, and desired him to let the body alone. ‘Oh, the Brigand’, says he, ‘I must take off his head’.

  The soldier only desisted and rejoined the attack when Stewart pointed out that his victim was dead and that he would be better fighting the living enemy.12

  Antagonism between opposing British and French officers and rank and file was not ubiquitous and there are examples of empathy and fraternisation. Following the capture of St Lucia in 1803, the troops of both armies intermingled in friendly fashion. French memoirs contain instances of goodwill towards their British adversaries. Jean-Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse criticises the callous behaviour of a senior British naval officer in Saint Domingue but he is quick to point out that ‘tous les Anglais ne professaient point, même alors, un telle animosité contre nous’. Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès found that he had more in common with his British captors than he expected, ‘…I found in my enemies most well-affected friends’.13

  The lot of prisoners of war was uneven. We have more information pertaining to the fate of French prisoners than British. Many of the captured French ended up in the notorious prison hulks either off the south coast of England or in the West Indies. It is debatable which were the worst. Lemonnier-Delafosse was held in a British floating prison off Jamaica in 1803.

  The English hulks and all the miseries that we experienced there are too well known to recall the details; but that which we did not know yet, and that which is difficult to believe of a nation which claims to be civilised, was the refinement of cruelties invented at Jamaica, that is to say in the harbour of Port-Royal. There, these prisons resembled those of England, but they had in addition vigilant guards in the water. Attracted by the filth of the boats, we saw every day circling in the harbour numerous groups of sharks.

  It is likely that the British soldiers cooped up in prison hulks off Point-à-Pitre in 1794 suffered just as the French. Hugues had promised that Graham’s captured force would be allowed to return to England, but instead they languished in the ships for more than a year, most dying of fever. Lemonnier-Delafosse eventually escaped and there are also instances of British officers fleeing their captors. Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, held by Hugues on a prison ship at Point-à-Pitre, was threatened with the guillotine. He slipped away in the night, letting himself over the side with a rope and making for the British fleet in a small canoe.

  British soldiers who fell into the hands of men such as Hugues and Fédon could expect little mercy and the British reciprocated against those they identified as disloyal or insurgent elements. The near extermination of the Carib people has been recounted. On Grenada, James McGrigor witnessed the policy of repression.

  All the jails were now crowded with such of the rebels as had been made prisoners. Among them were most of the French proprietors who were taken with their arms in their hands. Having often before sworn allegiance to the British crown, there was no excuse for them. Again, some of these gentlemen were said to have been accessory to the murder in cold blood of Governor Home, and several of his council, some time after they had been treacherously made prisoners. In one day, about twenty of the French proprietors were executed on a large gibbet in the market place of St George’s, leaving wives and families.

  Little sympathy was shown to ‘rebels’ captured in action. In his diary entry for 2 July 1796, John Moore details his efforts to suppress the insurgents on St Lucia.

  As I passed through Souffrière four men were brought in who had been taken in a boat coming from St Vincent; there had been eight of them, four had escaped. I ordered the four prisoners to be shot.14

  The profound impact of disease and the wider role of the medical services will be addressed in the next chapter, but we will briefly consider here the experience of wounding and the means of evacuating casualties from the field. Wounds were often the result of a direct hit from artillery, usually catastrophic and fatal, or musketry. In the West Indies it was not unusual for men to be injured by splinters of stones and rocks. Infections such as tetanus commonly intervened. Captain Lasalle de Louisenthal was wounded on St Lucia in 1796.

  I was easily recognisable, I wore a sash over my shirt; the enemy thus spotted me easily. I was wounded for the second time. I had received a first wound to the left thigh at the time of the attack against the first small fort. I received the second to the right thigh two inches below my side. This second shot made me roll over a good twenty metres and I would have hurtled down the slope if a chasseur had not caught me by my sash which had hooked on to some bushes. I was not able to stand. My men laid me down next to the troops. I was bleeding a lot. They tried to stop the haemorrhage. As there was no doctor they took me, according to orders, to the Ferrand plantation. I was immediately operated on there. This was not very easy, even for this country where one is used to difficulties.

  It was normal to use nearby buildings, often on a plantation, as makeshift field hospitals.

  Thomas Henry Browne was wounded in the arm at the storming of Fort Desaix in 1809, the musket ball carrying away a small artery, dividing a nerve and breaking the bone. After some treatment in the nearby general hospital he was eventually carried on an improvised stretcher of Indian corn straw to a small plantation hut where he was well attended by the local slaves under the direction of the French plantation owner’s wife. He was most alarmed by the tarantula hanging over his sick bed.

  My Surgeon then broke to me his opinion, that it would probably be necessary for me to have the arm amputated. I told him, that if the necessity really existed, of course I had nothing to say, and was sure that I should bear it with much greater patience, than I did the pain I was then suffering. At the same time, I represented to him, how very anxious I was to preserve the limb as I was just beginning to learn the Flute.

  The intrepid Browne kept his arm, the wound responding to local treatment with charcoal.

  These accounts are by officers who received special attention. As on most of the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, doctors were in short supply and ordinary soldiers needed luck to survive. Bartholomew James comments that at the failed attack on Point-à-Pitre on Guadeloupe in July 1794 there were at least 300 wounded soldiers and sailors re-embarked, many of whom had lost limbs, and that because of the want of surgeons most had not been dressed since they had received their injuries. David S
tewart confirms that few men could expect medical treatment on the same day as their wounding; he expresses the odd opinion that this was not harmful. Where doctors were available, they often operated on the front line. James McGrigor recalls that whilst he was attending the wounded under a tree during the attack on Port Royal in May 1796, two of his patients were killed close to him. The doctor was covered with blood and brains and he struggled to convince another regimental surgeon that he had not been hit himself.

  General orders usually stipulated that the men should not leave the ranks to assist their injured comrades, this duty instead being delegated to noncombatants such as musicians and drummers. A temporary truce was sometimes declared at the end of the action to allow both sides to collect their casualties. After initial treatment, it was common for the wounded to be moved elsewhere on the island or be evacuated by sea. Lasalle de Louisenthal was transported the five miles to headquarters on St Vincent on a stretcher borne by eight chasseurs. They moved at a steady pace to minimise his pain and he was sustained with goblets of punch. The troops carrying Prevost’s wounded after the fall of Roseau took four days to complete the difficult escape to Rupert’s Bay. On Grenada, William Dyott saw wounded officers and men evacuated on litters on the shoulders of the black inhabitants; ‘The sight of them (many having been most dreadfully wounded) was shocking’. According to McGrigor, the worst cases were moved on to Barbados.15

  One incentive to fight, to run the risk of wounding, was prize money. Cooper Willyams, writing in 1794, stresses its importance; ‘If no booty, no prize money, be the reward of successful heroism, after the dreadful fatigues, diseases and dangers of war. Where then will be the spur to noble actions?’ The furore which followed the extraction and distribution of prize money during the Grey Jervis expedition has been alluded to. Dundas gave Abercromby and Christian a detailed explanation of their entitlement and the system was made fairer and more efficient by the introduction of the 1805 Prize Act. Officers still harboured hopes of a fortune; Jonathan Leach admitting that he and his comrades had ‘golden dreams’ of prize money as they first approached Barbados and George Pinckard joking that he might return home as wealthy as a ‘Eastern Nabob’. The doctor knew that his chances of acquiring quick riches were slim and this was even more the case for the rank and file, who were only ever likely to receive modest amounts, which were often paid out slowly over many years. Expectations were usually disappointed as the impressive hauls were dissipated in the transfer to Europe and tortuous litigation.16