by Tom Anderson
One might suppose this would cause the downfall of Churchill, but by this point he was too cemented in place, ruling over the burnt wreck of London and risen to iconic, almost religious status in the minds of the liberated men and women of the Home Counties. Instead, Churchill finally bowed to the will of Charles Bone’s faction. The evacuation from Dunkerque had been accomplished partly by the assistance of the Royal French, who had even lost a ship under fire from Poulenc’s guns. The decision to assist had been that of Counter-Admiral Jules Réage, a former political enemy of Leo Bone who nonetheless now aped his nemesis’ daring impulsiveness. Admiral Jervis noted that the evacuation would probably have been impossible without the Royal French, and doubts about the proposed cooperation vanished. The troops that had been prepared to reinforce Græme instead went to Royal France, half landing at Nantes, the other half behind enemy lines at Granville, in late February…
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From: "England's Captain, France's Saviour" by Albert Harrison (Oxford University Press, 1940)—
Leo Bone had become Napoléon Bonaparte, but he did not forget England. Though stridently leading Royal France through her time of trials, he nonetheless became ashen-faced in private at the news, slowly trickling in, of London falling to Modigliani’s brutal killers. “Even as one faces the enemy here, in one’s adopted homeland,” he wrote, “it is somehow unsettling to learn that the coffee-house in which one once debated politics with Mister Nelson is now a smoking ruin, that one’s father barely escaped with his life, that his beloved Cambridge stands threatened by the insane slaughterman that mockingly drapes himself in the absurdities of the red flag. My father always considered the confidence of the Englishman in the special nature of his homeland to be somewhat misplaced; now I finally understand why.”
Royal France would have to last a year before battered Britain came to her aid once more. General Devilliers’ seven regiments could not be matched man for man by the Royalists, and that meant defensive sieges and carefully measured counter-attacks. The one advantage the Royal French had was that Devilliers seemed unlikely to get much in the way of reinforcements. Boulanger’s campaign in the Low Countries – despite its success – seemed to draw more and more of the French Republican Army into its maw. The Republicans also had to hold the line against the Austrians in the Piedmontese Latin Republic – which eventually collapsed in April 1806 after the Battle of Ciamberì, General Bourcier withdrawing his troops to the Saône.[90] Even Lisieux was forced to recognise that this penetration into what was undeniably core French territory by Archduke Ferdinand could not be tolerated. Reinforcements intended for Devilliers (or, at first, Modigliani in England) were redispatched to hold the Saône against the Austrians. Bourcier briefly recovered his position by defeating General Alvinczi at Rives in July, but French Piedmont was lost to the Austrians and their puppet Kingdom of Italy.
Bone’s Vauban-esque system of fortresses held back Devilliers for around six months, a remarkable effort. This was aided by limited cavalry raids on Republican siege positions with the goal of spiking and destroying immobilised guns, and – a new variation necessitated by this modern war – blocking the vents of steam engines and leaving them to burst. The Royal French managed, in the process, to capture a few Republican steam tractors and guns. Under Barras’ tutelage, the troops proceeded to use them for propaganda purposes, mocking Lisieux’s still-celebrated 1795 pamphlet La Vapeur est Républicaine by daubing “Non, la Vapeur, c’est Royaliste!” along the sides of the guns along with King Louis XVII’s favoured new flag: a single golden fleur-de-lys in a blue circle on a white field. Louis, like most halfway competent monarchs of the period, had recognised the new fervour of nationalism that had been unleashed across Europe and knew that to crest that wave he must ride it out; thus, the vague mishmash of royalist symbols had been concentrated into a simple rallying point as distinctive as the Republicans’ red flag. The white Bourbon cockade was reinvented as blue-gold-white, and the single fleur-de-lys defied the Jacobin’s inverted version. In heraldic circles it came to signify “France Ultramodern”.[91]
Though Bone was key in saving the kingdom from total destruction, Barras’ contributions should not be overlooked. Bone was the classically headstrong Royal Navy captain, always for staking everything on big, dramatic raids, and it was Barras who forced him to cool down and recognise that they had little to gain and everything to lose. Barras’ more restrained strategy meant that when Devilliers and his subordinates successfully predicted, trapped and destroyed a Royalist raid, it was not an immediate war-losing event. Reserves had been kept and not everything risked on one toss of the dice. Furthermore, Barras masterminded Royal France’s supply system, ensuring that the scrap of a kingdom could continue to feed itself through the long siege. Then, after Devilliers finally broke through Bone’s line of fortresses in July 1807 and Republican troops began to pour into the interior, Barras ensured her cities could be fed from abroad. Much of the merchant fleet of the Royal French East India Company was redeployed to bring in grain from Ireland, Portugal, Wales and western England. Though a system of rationing was necessary, Barras and his subordinates managed to keep the people well fed enough that few ever viewed the Republicans as a potentially better alternative regime.
There were, however, a few impressionable young minds who had grown to maturity during the seven years of peace and had become convinced that the horrors of Lisieux’s regime had been invented by their rulers as an excuse to tax them. In a few places, therefore, Devilliers was welcomed with relatively open arms. Now Devilliers was a veteran of Spain and a pragmatist; he was no Fabien Lascelles. To that end, he used the knowledge of the local fellow thinkers, or les collaborateurs as history has labelled them, to help feed his army and disarm a few more of Bone’s fortresses more rapidly than he might otherwise have. Recognising that the outnumbered Royal French army could not hope to stand in the field against Devilliers, Bone withdrew it to several cities that had been fortified as a hedge against just this disaster. Now the second phase of his plan came into play. In private, he was despondent. He had always pinned his hopes on Britain to come to Royal France’s rescue, and his defensive strategies had been aimed at buying time until this could happen. But Britain herself was invaded and fighting for her life. Would he achieve anything in the long run, or just postpone the inevitable?
“It is always worth fighting to postpone the inevitable,” Bone wrote on the day the news arrived of the defeat of General Gabin in East Anglia, incidentally coining a catchphrase which would become almost the unofficial motto of Royal France. The official one, of course, would be the more pompous “La Nation, la Loi, le Roi”; Louis would duplicate every nationalistic aspect that the Republicans could field.[92]
Bone achieved the seemingly impossible feat of keeping the last shreds of Royal France on their feet for months more by taking advantage of the fact that the Royal French ruled the waves. He had fortified Nantes, Brest, St Malo, La Roche, and a half-dozen other cities. Devilliers, acting on the usual Revolutionary doctrine of ‘to hold the heart is to hold the nation’ should concentrate on the capital city, which was de facto Nantes. He swiftly realised however that he would do better to focus on the city from which King Louis, Bone and Barras were actually ruling the nation. At first this would also appear to be Nantes, but he heard that Bone had been sighted in Brest giving a rousing speech to the troops, so marched his army deep into Brittany to take this presupposed new capital. Enroute his train was raided mercilessly by both regular Royalist cavalry and irregular Chouan Kleinkriegers. Once he had arrived in late August 1807 and besieged the town, however, he found that Bone had instead been sighted in St Malo, and Barras in Quiberon. The Royalists’ strategy became apparent; with their control of the seas, they could keep shifting their key commanders from one city to the next by ship. This meant there was no one target for Devilliers to focus on. In addition, Barras had improved on Bone’s strategy by muddying the waters further, hiring skilled actors and impersonators so
that they could appear in more than one place at once and Devilliers would be unable to prove which was real.
It was this addition which perhaps saved Royal France, as Devilliers’ response to the cunning plan was to infiltrate assassins into the besieged cities in an attempt to deal with the problem directly. One such assassin successfully killed his target, who was, fortunately for the Royalists, an actor playing Leo Bone.[93] Barras also narrowly escaped poisoning, being brought back from the brink by skilled physician Dr Mathieu Dissard, who would later be rewarded with a duchy. In the meantime, Devilliers split his forces, attempting to besiege several fortress cities at once. Focusing on one or two, he found, meant that the others opened their gates and let their cavalry out to raid his camps once more, only to quickly retreat if he aggregated his army to face them. The general found himself increasingly frustrated by his own lack of cavalry, but Republican France still had a shortage of such soldiers, and those cavalrymen they did possess had mostly gone to the Flemish or Piedmontese fronts.
In the following months, only three cities fell, most famously La Roche, which was not subject to the Bone-Barras strategy thanks to being landlocked. As Devilliers slowly ground the Royalists down through the winter of 1807, though, Britain finally re-entered the war. What followed had often been misrepresented as a feat of strategic insight on the part of Bone, Churchill, Wesley and many others; in fact it was achieved largely through fortune. To read many contrary accounts, one might presume the absurdity that the British had carefully sat down and assembled an alienistic cameo[94] of Etienne Devilliers, then based their strategy around it.
On February 28th 1808, five regiments under the Duke of Mornington, Richard Wesley, were landed near the village of Granville in Normandy. This was territory which had been Republican ever since the brief British incursion there eight years before. Wesley’s force was about one-half British and one-half Irish or American. He proceeded to occupy much of western Normandy with little resistance, somewhat vindicating Burke’s theory that the area was underdefended thanks to being stripped of troops. When Devilliers heard of this, he decided that his was the only army within range capable of doing something about this provocation – and, jealous of Boulanger’s reputation, he wanted to duplicate the Marshal’s feat of throwing the Englishmen back into the sea. To that end, the siege parties on the Royal French cities were stripped to a minimum, the army re-assembled, and Devilliers marched it north.
Two days later, the second British force under Sir John Moore landed at Nantes, being greeted with open arms by the desperate Royal French. Moore, naturally, had brought the products of the ‘Whistler’ project with him. The siege party at Nantes was rapidly crushed by the British forces, which were mostly drawn from England, Wales or Scotland. Some were from the southern English counties that had been under Republican occupation – and those regiments had often not been present at the time and had helplessly heard the news while assigned elsewhere. Now they had returned home to take part in this mission. They were not forgiving to those Republicans they captured.
On April 2nd, Wesley faced Devilliers’ slightly numerically superior forces at Laval, site of a Republican defeat to the British eight years earlier. Devilliers, once more mindful of his place in history, was determined to avenge that defeat – for all that it had been politically arranged by Lisieux in order to support his ascendancy. And the general achieved his victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one, forcing a British retreat from the field of battle. The conflict nonetheless saw several British successes, not all of them truly “British”; for example, a ridge was held by two rival Irish regiments, the 120th Duke of Leinster’s Own Volunteers (majority Catholic) and the much older 5th Irish Regiment (majority Protestant). The two fractious groups were held together by the example of the American Colonel John Alexander, whose 101st Carolinians held the ground in between the two. Alexander addressed the troops (who were catcalling at each other) and dryly quoted Benjamin Franklin’s infamous quip from the Troubled Sixties, “If we don’t hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”[95] They hung together, and did not break in the face of the French attacks.
At the same time, the 79th New Yorkers raised eyebrows across Europe; equipped to a man with the newest version of the Ferguson breech-loading rifle, they annihilated a veteran company of Devilliers’ Tirailleurs. Questions were swiftly asked about whether a breech-loading rifle really was just a toy for American hunters, and furthermore, whether the Jacobins had a monopoly on war-changing inventions…
Nonetheless the British were being overwhelmed, and Wesley made the controversial decision to retreat. He had prepared for the possibility, and to Devilliers’ surprise retreated southwards, rather than heading for the sea as Græme had a few months before. The following weeks saw Wesley’s army retreating south and west at a steady pace, being constantly harried by Devilliers’ outriders (though once again the Frenchman was hampered by his lack of cavalry, a decision which perhaps Wesley took into account). Wesley, inspired by strategies he had learned in the confusing battles he had taken part in in the sweltering heat of India, decided to crack down harshly on men who raided the countryside for supplies and instead set up a much-lauded system by which the local peasants would always be paid for food that the British requisitioned, however forcefully.[96] This had the unintended effect of making the locals – most of whom had lived under Republican rule for over a decade – make an unfavourable comparison when Devilliers’ pursuing army followed and practiced la maraude as usual…
Devilliers finally caught up with Wesley at Angers, site of Leo Bone’s famous earlier battle, only to find that Leo Bone himself was there, along with Sir John Moore. The Royal French and their British allies had defeated most of the Republican siege garrisons, reassembled the Royal French army from its component parts, and now held the field. Devilliers, realising the trap he was caught in, attempted to retreat. But the Jacobin general was killed by a bullet to the head from 350 yards away by James Roosevelt in that famed sniper’s most celebrated achievement. Roosevelt achieved the thought-to-be-impossible feat by lying down and holding the barrel of his specially modified Hall rifle[97] steady between his feet. It was certainly a case of, in the words of Philip Bulkeley, “the shot heard ‘round the world”.
The loss of Devilliers’ leadership transformed what could have been a fighting retreat into a rout. The Republicans were trapped between Wesley’s army and the combined forces of Bone and Moore, resulting in the almost complete destruction of Devilliers’ army – though not without inflicting savage losses upon their enemy. Nonetheless, as the day of June 2nd 1808 dawned, the Republican forces in Royal France had been reduced to the few siege garrisons that had not been dealt with yet, and an avenue was open for the allies to drive into the heart of the Republic itself…
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From: “King of the Middle Sea: Horatio Nelson” by César Cardini (1959, English translation 1961)—
There were many Royal Navy sailors in foreign service in 1807, many who had left the organisation after the False Peace of 1800 and the ensuing cuts by the Fox government. All of them, doubtless, felt some pang of guilt upon learning that the homeland they had left had suffered the impossibility of a French invasion, particularly given that the success of that invasion had hinged upon the failure of the Royal Navy. All of them must have asked: What if I had been there? Was there something I could have done to make a difference?
None could have felt it as strongly as Horatio Nelson. Upon hearing the news, ironically at a party in Salamanca to celebrate the fact that General Ballesteros had switched sides and the allies would soon march on Madrid, Nelson literally collapsed, consumed by a funk. It was fortunate that his Venetian steward, Niccolò Fubini, had known him long enough to swiftly locate a local coffee-house’s obscure supply of the tealeaf, not well prized in Spain, purchase it for an absurd amount and mix up the only elixir guaranteed to revive the Englishman.
This helped, but Nelson was only brought back to himself when
Sir John Acton arrived and slapped some sense into him. “Look at you, sir!” the mercenary decried. “Old Delicious must laugh and slap his thighs with joy seeing you so discomfited! ‘Aha,’ he says, ‘one of my most valiant foes is laid useless! Many more of my rapists and murderers will go unpunished now!’ Is that really what you want, sir? Is it?”
Nelson rose to his feet, shaking with rage, and almost demanded a duel on the spot before calming down slightly. “And what have you to say, sir? Where were you when the Navy failed? Where was I?”
“We were here,” Acton replied softly, “hurting Lisieux, killing his men. Every Frenchman we kill here is one that cannot be sent to England to despoil the isle. Don’t you see that?”
Nelson was silent for a moment. “I do,” he said eventually, “but it is not enough.”
“Then find something you can do that will be,” Acton replied, and swept out.
The admiral did so. He immediately resigned his (largely notional) commission from General Pignatelli’s army; with Ballesteros’ defection, the war was all but won anyway. Nelson formally returned to the Neapolitan Navy, which had largely been reduced to ferrying troops back and forth between Naples and Aragon. By force of charisma, he took over a task force and brought it to Corsica. Remembering his friend Leo Bone’s achievements at the start of the war, when the Royal French fleet had been carried off and resulted in the achievement of so much, Nelson appealed to the President of the Corsican Republic, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo. The Republic had tried to retain its splendid aloofness, but the invasion of Britain had frightened everyone; it illustrated that steam could make supposedly impossible military actions practicable, and also threatened to bring down Corsica’s protector Britain.
