The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  The weariness of his foes and his glorious bluff did the rest. While he referred the terms of the proposed armistice back to the London, he cleared his ships from the shoals under the silent guns of the Trekronor batteries and drew off his prizes. His reputation as much as his crew's gunnery had broken the enemy's will to resist. The truce, prolonged from day to day, ended, thanks to Nelson's exquisite skill as a negotiator, in a permanent armistice. The Danes were to suspend their alliance with the Russians and leave their warships in their existing unmasted state for fourteen weeks, during which time they were to supply provisions to the British Fleet. In return the British were to refrain from bombarding Copenhagen.

  Nelson had gained his purpose. The hands of Denmark were tied, and his Admiral was free to proceed against the Russians without fear for his rear. On April 12th the fleet entered the Baltic. But to Nelson's horror, instead of proceeding to Reval with a fair wind, Parker waited off the Swedish coast for new instructions from England. A blow at Russia, Nelson saw, would destroy the whole northern Coalition, for Denmark and Sweden were merely intimidated by their mighty neighbour. And so long as the ice in the Gulf of Finland prevented the Russian squadron at Reval from retiring on its inner base at Kronstadt, Britain by striking could either destroy it or exact terms from the new Tsar. When Parker objected that too rapid an advance up the Baltic might expose the fleet to a superior Russian and Swedish combination, Nelson replied: "I wish they were twice as many: the more numerous, the easier the victory! " For he knew that their inability to manoeuvre in large bodies would place them at his mercy.

  Not till May 5 th did fresh instructions arrive from England. They recalled Parker and left Nelson in command. Immediately the latter left for Reval, but too late. Three days before, the ice had melted sufficiently to enable the threatened Russian squadron to retreat to Kronstadt. There was nothing for Nelson to do but to make as firm and dignified an exchange of letters with the Tsar's Minister, Count Pahlen, as circumstances admitted, and then retire.

  But his work, if incomplete, was done. The shattering effect of the Battle of Copenhagen, coupled with the Tsar Paul's death, had destroyed Bonaparte's prestige throughout the North. The First Consul, on hearing the news, expressed his feelings by stamping and shouting with rage. The new Tsar, Alexander, like his subjects, had no wish to preserve a quarrel with a former ally of such strength and courage as Britain. When Nelson went ashore at Reval, the populace hailed him with cries of " That is him! that is him!—the young Suvorof! " " The Baltic people will never fight me if it is to be avoided," he commented. On May 16th, 1801, Russia raised her embargo on British ships, and a month later a Convention between the two countries affirmed the full legality both of the right of search and the seizure of hostile goods in neutral bottoms. Already Prussia and Denmark had withdrawn their troops from Hanover and Hamburg. The northern threat to Britain's security was dispersed.

  The tidings of Nelson's victory filled the country with relief. For the second time he became the hero of England: Parker was everywhere reviled or forgotten. And though the new Government, with galling mediocrity, replied to Nelson's explanation of the Armistice with Denmark that " upon a consideration of all the circumstances, his Majesty has thought fit to approve," those most competent to judge his achievement did not spare their praise. " Your Lordship's whole conduct," wrote St. Vincent, " is the sub-

  ject of our constant admiration. It does not become me to make comparisons: all agree there is but one Nelson." 1

  England's cup of rejoicing was not yet full. At the beginning of May news arrived from Egypt of a victory won by Abercromby on March 21st. At the outset of his advance along the isthmus, he had driven the French from a strongly fortified position but had then fallen into his old fault of not following i>p his success. Had he done so. he might have seized Alexandria before the main French army under General Menou arrived from Cairo. For that officer, like all the French in Egypt grossly underrating the quality of their adversary, had been in no hurry. Not till the 19th did his field army, 10,000 strong, march into Alexandria.

  By that time the British, pushing forward cautiously, had taken up a new position about three miles short of the port, with their right on the Mediterranean on the site of a ruined Roman palace and the left on the inland lake of Aboukir. About 3000 of those who had landed a fortnight earlier were sick, but the fall of Aboukir Castle on the 18th had secured Abercromby's base. The two armies were equally matched numerically, but the French had the advantage of 1400 cavalry and a slight superiority in guns. Relying on the superior quality of his troops, all of whom were veterans of Bonaparte's first Italian campaign, Menou decided to attack before dawn on the 21st and drive the invaders into the sea before an expected Turkish army could arrive from Syria. He had no doubt whatever of his ability to do so.

  The attack began with a feint against the British left at half-past three in the morning. John Moore, who was Major-General of the day, was only deceived for a minute, and, after investigating, galloped to the right, where he was convinced the real attack was impending. Almost immediately the British pickets in front of the Roman palace were driven back by strong forces, and the French advanced out of the darkness. But the 58th Foot, posted in the ruins, were not in the least perturbed by the beating drums and shouts of " Vive la France! Vive la Republique! " set up by the victors of Lodi. They held their fire till their enemies' glazed hats could be clearly distinguished and then discharged at them several volleys so well directed that they broke in confusion.

  Meanwhile a more serious attack had developed on the left of

  1 Mahan, Nelson, II, 104.

  the Roman camp, where French cavalry had infiltrated in the darkness into the rear of the position held by the 28th Foot and the 42nd Highlanders. While these two regiments were engaged in repelling an infantry attack, they were charged in rear by a large body of armoured horse. But the twenty-five-year-old colonel of the 28th, Edward Paget, calmly gave the order: " Rear rank, right about, fire! " and the men, though completely encircled, repelled the dragoons while continuing to engage the enemy's attack to the west.1 Though the Highlanders were temporarily broken by the weight of the French horse, they continued fighting as individuals. All along the right and centre of the British line the story was the same: calm and resolute resistance by units surrounded but clinging grimly to their positions till the British reserves moving to their help could take the French cavalry between two fires. Much of their success was due to the careful, individual training which Moore had previously given the troops of his division; everybody knew what he ought to do and did it.

  In the course of this engagement, General Abercromby, supervising the elimination of the French dragoons between his closing lines, had galloped forward to the Roman ruin. Here, while almost alone, he was attacked by a small detachment of French horse. Before his assailants were driven off, the brave old man, striking at them with his sword, was wounded in the thigh. Until the battle was won he took no notice of his own condition; only when at ten o'clock the French began to withdraw towards Alexandria did his spirit yield. As he was borne from the field, an officer placed a wrapping over his litter with an apology that it was only a soldier's blanket. " Only a soldier's blanket," replied Abercromby. " A soldier's blanket is of great consequence; you must send me the name of the soldier to whom it belongs."

  The British lost 1500 men or fifteen per cent of the force engaged. The French casualties were far heavier, amounting to nearly forty per cent in killed, wounded and prisoners, including a divisional General. The 42nd, who had already lost 200 men in the two earlier engagements, lost 300 more in the battle, or more than half their strength. Moore, whose skill and coolness was beyond praise, testified that he had never seen men more determined to do their

  1 The 28th, to-day the Gloucestershire Regiment, still wear the Regimental badge on the back as well as the front of their caps.

  duty, while veterans of the Lombardy campaign declared that till that day they had scarcely
known what fighting was.1

  The new British Army had proved itself. After many sufferings and vicissitudes, it had shown its ability not merely to take punishment but to give it. By a curious irony of fate, James Stuart, the man who, given a chance, might have led it to a greater victory, died at Richmond Lodge three days after the battle at the age of forty-eight. Abercromby followed him swiftly. Gangrene set in on March 26th and he died on the 28th universally mourned by his men. His epitaph was published by his old comrade-in-arms, the Duke of York, in a General Order of the Day:

  " His steady observance of discipline, his ever-watchful attention to the health and wants of his troops, the persevering and unconquerable spirit which marked his military career, the splendour of his actions hi the field and the heroism of his death are worthy the imitation of all who desire, like him, a life of honour and a death of glory."

  Alexandria did not fall to the British with the victory. The French retired behind its walls and, lacking a siege train, the victors had no alternative but to starve the town out. But their communications with the fleet were now secure, and with the arrival of 4000 Turks on March 25 th they were able to institute a siege of Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile. The place fell on April 19th, opening the way to Cairo and the conquest of Egypt.

  1 Fortescue, IV, 843.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Truce of Exhaustion 1801-2

  " No one fights with more obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle is over and he comes to the reconciliation, he is so much taken up with the shaking of hands that he is apt to let his antagonist pocket all they have been quarrelling about. ... It is difficult to cudgel him out of a farthing ; but put him in a good humour and you may bargain him out of all the money in his pocket."

  Washington Irving, John Bull.

  THE tide had turned and—despite the odds against her—in England's favour. The First Consul had lost the initiative. So long as Britain fought with Continental allies France had found it easy to divide and destroy their cumbrous combinations. But whenever the great island Power had been left alone, as in 1798, the offensive had passed to her. " We have at this moment in the wreck of surrounding nations," Pitt declared in defence of the new Government, " the glory and satisfaction of maintaining the dignity of the country. We have kept our resources entire, our honour unimpaired, our integrity inviolate. We have not lost a single foot of territory, and we have given the rest of the world many chances of salvation."

  For, unchallenged as was Bonaparte's mastery of western and southern Europe, the martial power of Britain was as tremendous. In eight years of war the strength of her Navy, losses notwithstanding, had grown from 15,000 to 133,000 men, and from 135 ships of the line and 133 frigates to 202 and 277 respectively. According to Bonaparte's estimate of a fleet of 30 sail of the line as equal to 120,000 troops on land, Britain had a sea force equivalent to a Continental army of nearly a million. Against this the French Navy had been reduced by more than fifty per cent: by 1801 she had only 39 battleships and 3 5 frigates left and few of these in condition to take the sea.1 Britain had almost as many building. In the same period the British Army had grown from 64,000 to 380,000 men with more than another 100,000 Volunteers.

  For all this Englishmen were proud and glad. Yet they were not happy. On May 3rd, 1801, Mrs. Fremantle, whose husband commanded the Ganges in Nelson's fleet, noted in her diary the glorious news from Egypt contained in that day's papers. But her only comment was: " I wish all these victories may lead to peace." For more than eight years Britain had been struggling to achieve her aims. But still the war went on. And the country, weighed down by taxes, high prices and bloodshed, was weary of it.

  That spring the sixth bad harvest in succession, accompanied by the stoppage of the Baltic grain trade, brought popular discontent to a head. In Buckinghamshire Mrs. Fremantle found the Swan-bourne villagers starving; in the West Country every family was on a ration of one quartern loaf per week per head.2 For the poor, who depended on bread for their main support, it was a terrible deprivation. As a whole they had borne their distress with noble patriotism; their patience during the winter of 1800-1801 matched Nelson's constancy among the Baltic fogs and ice. But though in the smaller villages, where ancient patriarchal conditions of life still lingered, much was done by their richer neighbours to alleviate their lot,3 in districts where the new economies had supplanted personal responsibility for the common weal, the industrial workers and the starving peasants, deprived of their patrimony by enclosures, took the law into their own hands. In Somerset and Devon village mobs put ropes round farmers' necks to make them reduce the price of their corn;4 the Mendip miners marched into Bristol and held the town up to ransom. At Plymouth the dockyard men became so threatening that the Commissioner had the cannon spiked. The workers of the manufacturing north were equally sullen and explosive.

  These things were reminding the class in whose hands political

  1 Mahan, Sea Power, II, 73 ; Rose, I, 481.

  2 Ham, MS.

  3 Elizabeth Ham's father and his fellow South Dorset farmers during the bad period bought up barrels of imported rice and sold it to the poor at three-halfpence a pound, while their wives and daughters served daily in its distribution.

  4 Hester Stanhope,

  power rested of the price that had to be paid for Pitt's prolonged war against the Revolution. The martial progress and financial resilience of the country on which he had dwelt so often in his speeches could not conceal the dark social reverse. "A very pretty state we are reduced to," was the characteristic comment of a London merchant towards the close of his Administration. "Our pockets filled with paper and our bellies with chicken's meat! " Taxes, rates and prices could not always go on rising: a halt would have to be called some time to the appalling extravagance of the war. Since its start the national debt had more than doubled. The thought of that swelling incubus made prudent, honest men shake their heads and even—in their weaker moments—share the defeatist Fox's gloomy fears for the future.

  Pitt had repeatedly reminded his countrymen that they were at war with armed opinions. So long as the Revolution continued on its bloody course, they needed no reminding: one horror and outrage after another shocked and steeled them for the fight. It was not France as a nation or the abstract speculations of a School they were then fighting, but a fanatic national horde who were turning all the resources of civilisation into a fearful instrument to destroy the laws, manners, property and religions of their neighbours. So long as " this strange, nameless, wild thing " raged in the middle of Europe, consuming and threatening, Britain was forced to contend against it. The existence of everything Englishmen held dear plainly depended on her doing so.

  But eighteen months of Bonaparte's rule had changed the face of affairs. " This last adventurer in the lottery of revolutions," as Pitt described him after his rape of power, had not gone the way of his furious predecessors. Whatever else might be said of his government, it was proving stable. Internally at any rate the revolution of destruction seemed over. While he was still climbing, the First Consul had committed as foul atrocities as any other Jacobin chief: plundered churches, mutilated tombs, " burnt the town of Benasco and massacred eight hundred of its inhabitants," murdered his prisoners in Syria, shot the municipality of Pavia. He was a liar, a perjurer and a robber. But once he had extinguished his rivals, he established some sort of justice and enforced it. And he professed as much desire for external tranquillity as for internal. He was— or appeared to be—coming to terms with the old order. He had made peace with the Emperor of Austria. He was the ally of the Court of Spain, the friend of the Tsar and the patron of the King of Prussia.

  His attempt to force England to make peace by blackmailing her with a Baltic League—a thing no Englishman would brook—had now been defeated. Britons had proved to their satisfaction and every one else's that Bonaparte could not beat them. But they seemed as far away as ever from liquidating the new regrouping of Europe he had stabilised.
The Dutch ports, which the Guards had sailed to protect in 1793, had been in French hands for more than six years; the Austrian Netherlands had been incorporated in France for even longer and had been twice formally renounced by the Austrian Government. The task of conquering the European mainland was as manifestly beyond the English as that of conquering the British Fleet was beyond France. There was no common ground on which they could attack their adversary. And in the meantime they were ruining themselves by their refusal to listen to the First Consul's appeal for peace. By doing so they ran the risk of precipitating in their own country the same social cataclysm that had plunged the Continent into misery and war.

  Such was the growing feeling: an expression of war weariness which had spread even to the Fleet. " Would to God that this war were happily concluded," wrote Collingwood from his vigil off Brest, "nothing good can ever happen to us short of peace." No longer was the first question when officers met, " What news of the French? "; it was now, " What prospect of peace? ". Everywhere men and, above all women, were longing for an end to the interminable business of killing, hatred and sacrifice. It was only, perhaps, a mood, but it was become a very powerful one. " Wearied out," as Coleridge recorded, " by overwhelming novelties; stunned by a series of strange explosions; sick of hope long delayed, and uncertain as to the real objects and motives of the war from the rapid change and general failure of its ostensible objects and motives, the public mind had lost all its tone and elasticity. ... An unmanly impatience for peace became almost universal." 1