Nelson (82 page)

It was not just redcoats who felt the animosity Hood was breeding. Elliot, a firm admirer of the formidable admiral, watched with growing alarm, while Captain Fremantle considered that ‘the presumptuousness and overbearing conduct of Lord Hood to Dundas and all the army has been such as not to be borne with by any corps whatsoever, particularly from the army who are independent of us’. The spirit of cooperation and joint endeavour so essential to combined operations waned, and several aggrieved and underappreciated army officers found themselves resisting the admiral not only because they felt he was mistaken but also from an instinct to preserve the independence and dignity of their profession.
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It was in this context that Dundas led a party in pursuit of the flying French and found himself looking upon Bastia from the mountain heights of the Colle de Teghime behind the town on 23 February.
The general’s officers agreed that the ideal place for a battery was the ridge where a village named Cardo stood, commanding the four stone hill forts guarding the rear of Bastia. Moore, who was present, did not expect an easy victory. He worried about getting guns and supplies along the difficult road from St Fiorenzo and estimated that the town was defended by about four thousand men, a quarter of them Corsicans allied to the French, but he did not foresee a withdrawal. However, when the French made a sortie, expelled Dundas’s Corsicans from Cardo and began to dig themselves in there, the British made no attempt to intervene. Worse, to the surprise of ‘everybody’, the general ordered the force back to St Fiorenzo without making any effort to resecure what he deemed to be crucial ground.
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Back at base Dundas told Hood that he thought Bastia ‘out of [the] reach of any attempt that we can at present undertake’, and that he would need another two thousand men to launch an attack. Within a few days he was accumulating a formidable collection of pretexts for inaction. The weather was bad; the communication lines were difficult; the enemy had too many men; and the partisans were not holding the summit of the heights. He pointed out that an enemy sortie of 25 February seized the very ground from which Dundas and his staff had reconnoitred Bastia two days before, driving off the partisans and placing guns on a nearby height. They had also burned Cardo. In effect Dundas was admitting his failure to secure significant positions, but his argument was that the French were getting hold of the heights above the town and making an assault impossible. Without more men no more than a naval blockade of Bastia was feasible.
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Although the capture of St Fiorenzo gave Hood a base for his fleet, he could not tie up forces reducing Bastia and Calvi for long, and was also conscious of the need to wind up operations before the ferocious summer heat attacked his forces. He could scarcely contain his anger at Dundas’s procrastination, and a flurry of testy letters flew back and forth. On 2 March, Hood wrote that he was ‘extremely concerned to find that you have given up all thought of reducing Corsica until you are reinforced by additional troops from Europe, because I do not see there is a prospect of any coming’. High-handedly he asked Dundas to return those members of the 11th, 25th, 30th and 69th regiments who had formerly served with the fleet as temporary marines, and demanded that any lost through sickness be replaced by men from other contingents of the army. At this further erosion of his forces, Dundas protested his inability both to supply the men and defend
St Fiorenzo. He went further. He expressed his opposition to attacking Bastia in blunter terms than ever. ‘I consider the siege of Bastia, with our present means and force, to be a most visionary and rash attempt, such as no officer could be justified in undertaking,’ he fulminated. The battle lines between the two commanders were solidifying. It had become personal, with neither man willing to think or yield.
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Momentarily Hood was deflated by Dundas’s opinion, backed as it was by the authority of at least one personal reconnaissance of the target. He began to reflect upon the unpleasant prospect of a costly, drawn-out blockade pinning down men and ships while allied powers screamed lustily for help elsewhere. ‘Poor Paoli,’ said Hood, was ‘distressed beyond measure by our inactivity, which I cannot cure because the more I urge a contrary conduct the more he [Dundas] is determined to lay upon his oars, by which our difficulties will daily increase.’ Then, after an abortive attempt to reconnoitre Bastia for himself, Hood got a letter from his man on the spot. Horatio Nelson had been blockading Corsica for more than three months, and no naval officer knew more about Bastia. Even more important, amidst counsels of despair Nelson alone talked the sort of language that Hood wanted to hear.
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At the beginning of March, Nelson’s squadron, cruising all hours off Bastia, was reinforced by the
Romney
of fifty guns, captained by the able William Paget. In late February the
Leda
intercepted a Danish ship leaving the port, and learned from her that fear was spreading in Bastia, bread was scarce, merchants were preparing to flee and some residents were burying their valuables in the earth. The picture seemed to be confirmed by a Ragusan brig taken by the
Agamemnon
and
Tartar
in March and the talk of every local Nelson could find, as well as the activities revealed through his telescope. When he wrote to Hood on the 5th the tone remained decidedly upbeat. Nelson confirmed Dundas’s report that the enemy was at work on the ridges above the hill forts and noted the strengthening of other defences, but dwelt upon the panic in the town itself, where the citizens dreaded being exposed to Paoli’s wild partisans and spoke about burning
La Flêche
at anchor. ‘I learn that the enemy are in the greatest apprehension of our landing near the town, which in my opinion would fall on the first vigorous attack,’ he said.
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Words like these were a tonic to Admiral Hood, and sent the blood coursing through his veins. He decided to sidestep Dundas, and on 7 March called upon two lieutenant colonels, Moore of the 51st and
William Anne Villettes of the 69th Regiment, for independent opinions of the propriety of an attack. Though Moore disagreed with Dundas, he felt as if he was being asked to betray a superior officer, and to the admiral’s annoyance declined to report. Instead he told Dundas what had happened. The general was ‘warm and irritated to the highest degree’ and snorted to Moore that Hood ‘never reasoned himself nor would he listen to reason from others’.
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Well might Dundas boil, for Hood was moving decisively to neutralise him. In two letters the admiral arrogantly informed Dundas that ‘however visionary and rash an attempt to reduce Bastia may be in your opinion, to me it appears very much the reverse and to be a perfectly right measure’. Far from needing Dundas’s blessing, he would make the attack ‘at my own risk’, and what was more he would use the soldiers as he saw fit. ‘I do not hesitate to say that your power most undoubtedly ceased after the evacuation of Toulon, when the troops as well as ships were at my disposal,’ he wrote. Dundas read in horror that he had only been consulted in Corsica at all as a mere ‘courtesy’.
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Dundas was being treated as if he was in charge of a detachment of marines rather than a field army, or worse ‘a mere passenger’. Storming to his officers, he won their support and then resigned his command, sailing almost immediately for Civita Vecchia on 11 March. His parting shot to Hood mentioned his indifferent health and demanded to see any written authority that put the soldiers under the admiral’s command. Justifying himself to the home secretary (soon to become the minister of war), Dundas comprehensively catalogued his difficulties: the number of the enemy (at least fourteen hundred regulars, a civilian militia and the crew of
La Flêche
); the inclement mountainous weather; the problem of bringing artillery from St Fiorenzo; and shortages of camp equipment, medical supplies, men, carriages and guns. In such circumstances, opined the general, a direct attack on Bastia was ‘visionary and hazardous in the highest degree, and most likely to be attended with loss and disgrace’. He had made some good points, though his unrelieved pessimism failed to consider a single problem of a caged enemy. Elliot observed that Dundas’s resignation was regrettable but ‘necessary’ for the service to go ‘forward’.
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The departure of the doubting general failed to ease difficulties because the resentment he and Hood had generated lived on. Even moderate, sensible men were taking sides. Elliot the diplomat was leaning towards the navy, convinced that sea officers were a ‘manly’
breed, ‘full of life and action’ and entirely preferable to the ‘high lounge and still life’ in the army camps. Moore, on the other hand, grew to detest Hood, who was ‘illiberal to a degree’ and whose ‘actions in the Mediterranean have been unwise . . . He is so false and so unmanageable that it is impossible for any general to carry on service with him.’ Not surprisingly, Brigadier General Abraham D’Aubant of the engineers was no blank sheet when he temporarily succeeded to the command Dundas had vacated. His mind had already been poisoned by the feud between the service chiefs.
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More, professionally speaking D’Aubant was much poorer material than his predecessor. Moore found him ‘much averse’ to attacking Bastia without ever having seen the town, and thought he should be ‘broke’ for it. ‘It is difficult to speak more nonsense than he does with more gravity and decorum of matter,’ thought Moore. In fact the lieutenant colonel’s opinion of his new superior was so poor that he began to question the wisdom of moving against Bastia. His former opinion, in favour of an assault, began to quake. With D’Aubant in charge Moore was sure it would be botched.
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Wrapped in his blockade, Nelson hardly knew that the task force was disintegrating behind him at St Fiorenzo. He appealed to Hood for shallow vessels to help him fire on fortifications ashore and stop supplies edging along the coast, and busily stationed them as each arrived,
La Billette
, the
Fortune, Swallow
,
Scout
,
Fox
,
Vanneau
,
Rose
,
Petit Bonbon
,
Jean Bart
,
Vigilant
and the
St Croix
, which was now commanded by an old
Agamemnon
, Lieutenant Suckling. Nelson’s confidence remained unshaken. His temperament was to make light of his own difficulties and fix upon those of the French. Indeed, in his impatience for action he overeagerly seized upon every indication of the enemy’s weakness. He was told, for example, that Bastia was so close to panic that Lacombe St Michel, a one-time artillery officer the French National Convention had sent to defend the town, was threatening to blow himself up in the citadel rather than yield to the public clamour for surrender. This, however, dangerously caricatured the strength of resistance.
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But Nelson was right about the eventual futility of the French predicament, and about himself and his men. There would be no stinting on the part of the captain of the
Agamemnon
. It was not in his nature, and he felt duty bound, in part to the Corsican struggle for independence. As he promised Paoli, ‘nothing shall be wanting on my part to assist your brave Corsicans’. As for his ship’s company he
believed them capable of most things naval. He had sharpened them in success after success until they were as keen as bayonet points. ‘My seamen are now what British seamen ought to be,’ he told his wife. ‘To you I may say it – almost invincible! They really mind shot no more than peas!’
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There were many differences between warfare on land and sea, and Nelson never fully grasped them. The finer arts of siege work, the interplay of infantry and cavalry, the rapid fluidity of movement ashore and to some extent the importance of ground were apt to confound him. Intelligence was crucial to all armed services, but never more so than in operations on land, where the true state and scale of an opposing force could easily be masked behind terrain or buildings. In Corsica Nelson’s information about Bastia proved seriously deficient and courted disaster. For a while, supposing the enemy on the point of collapse, he talked about launching a frontal attack upon the town, using ships to bombard the defences before storming them with a few hundred soldiers. Fortunately, as he saw the enemy improving their positions, he abandoned the idea early in March. An alternative plan began to evolve.

Even Nelson the optimist understood that his experience of military affairs left much to be desired, and he requested the services of Lieutenants John Duncan of the Royal Artillery and Augustus de Butts of the Royal Engineers to help him examine a landing site he had found north of Bastia. A battery erected close by would not be ideal, Nelson realised. It would be incapable of troubling the hill forts, and was no substitute for batteries the army might have established above the rear of the town, but if it could be positioned high enough and defended it might play with effect upon the citadel, town and Cabanelle outpost. At least Nelson thought it worthy of investigation.

In the midst of such industry Horatio read the latest letter from Hood, dated the 16th, and worried. There was a new despondency in his admiral. Hood promised to react immediately upon a favourable report from Duncan and de Butts, but hinted that if the troops declined to cooperate the enemy would have to be reduced by blockade and starvation. On 18 March Nelson scratched an inspiring rejoinder. He had taken de Butts and Duncan to the proposed landing site that morning, and they had agreed that a battery might reasonably be
established within a mile of it. Bastia was ‘certainly not a place of strength’. Given good weather, it could eventually be reduced by blockade, of course. Though a boat had recently got some corn into the port it was reputedly short of bread. But a formal siege was desirable to drive the business on. Nelson supposed the enemy to consist of no more than one thousand regulars and fifteen hundred auxiliaries (he underestimated the defenders by over two thousand) and encouraged the attempt. Using words that would weigh with an admiral interested in retrieving a damaged reputation, Nelson added that ‘it would be a national disgrace to give it up without a trial’.
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