Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (8 page)

What he should have extracted from Hamilton, and might have done had he not stuck so directly to the point as he saw it to be, was softer news. It might have emerged in speculative or even general conversation, clearly not Troubridge’s strong point. The news was the indication that the French Armament was bound farther afield than Sicily or Malta. On 28 May Acton, whose first language was French (he had been born at Besançon), had told Hamilton that the French ambassador at Naples had told him “that the grand expedition from Toulon . . . was really destined for Egypt.” Hamilton appears to have suspected that he might be dealing with disinformation. As a result, although he minuted Acton’s report to the Foreign Office in London, he did not pass its content on to Troubridge nor put it in writing to Nelson.
¹⁰

WHAT LONDON KNEW

London may indeed have been better informed than Nelson was. The Foreign Office, the Admiralty and the War Office all collected intelligence, from professional agents, consular officials, well-disposed or garrulous travellers and foreign newspapers, among other sources. As early as 24 April Lord Spencer, the Foreign Secretary, had noted the destination of “the Toulon ships” as “Portugal—Naples—Egypt.” Two days later “61’78’71” (the designation of an agent) “believes,” he wrote, “the object to be Egypt incredible as it seems.” Henry Dundas, Secretary of War and a member of the board of the East India Company, was meanwhile telling the Admiralty of news passed by an American recently in France of French plans to invade the Channel Islands, to send an expeditionary force to Ireland (which came about in August), to raise revolution in Naples and Poland (both blows against Austria), but also of a “strange scheme respecting Egypt,” by which 400 French officers were to be sent overland through that country to assist Tipu Sultan against the British in India.

The Admiralty had its own man in the Toulon Armament’s operational zone, Lieutenant William Day, sent to Genoa to sell three Navy Board transports marooned there since the withdrawal from the Mediterranean in 1796. Day’s reports, sent overland via the normal route through Germany to Hamburg and then by sea to London, the transmission time being anything from three to five weeks, first suggested that Spain was the destination. By 1 May, however, when he himself arrived in London, he brought news that indicated the eastern Mediterranean as a possibility. It was that the Armament was embarking 4,000 ten-hooped barrels, without bungholes, the purpose of which was judged to be to buoy warships over shallows. The First Lord deduced that they were needed for the passage through the Dardanelles to the Black Sea. It is indicative of how defective was the Admiralty’s contemporary information that it believed a waterway navigable by modern container ships was not by men-of-war a fraction of their draught.

Other information available in London was, however, better. French newspapers, often acquired within a week or less of publication, were remarkably indiscreet. During late March, April and early May,
L’Echo, Le Surveillant
and
Le Moniteur
all printed material which amplified the picture the government was forming of the Toulon Armament’s strength, provisioning and even destination.
Le Moniteur,
under government control, tried to muddy the water by printing deliberate misinformation but the trend of the news remained unmistakable: a big fleet was preparing for a long-range military operation. Gossip helped to refine the picture. Some of the academics who were to accompany the expedition began to boast, a notorious failing of clever men leading unimportant lives. De Dolemieu, a mineralogist, wrote to de Luc, Professor of Natural History at Göttingen, that books about Egypt, Persia, India and the Black and Caspian seas were being shipped and that rumour had it the objective was Egypt and the purpose to intercept Britain’s commerce with India. De Luc, unfortunately, was both a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, and a Foreign Office agent. He passed the word on 7 May.
¹¹

The best intelligence received in London came, however, through official channels. It had been assembled by what would become classic spy-novel methods. The consul in Leghorn (Livorno) in northern Italy, Udney, had a well-informed contact in a local British merchant, Jones, who maintained commercial correspondence with other trading houses throughout the Mediterranean. His sources led him to overestimate somewhat the size of the Toulon Armament, but he got its departure date roughly right and its destination and purpose uncannily so. Its intermediate stop was to be Malta, which would be surrendered, and then Alexandria (though perhaps alternatively the Black Sea), with the object of landing troops to march overland to the Persian Gulf or sail down the Red Sea to attack the British East India Company’s possessions in India. Udney’s report, dated 16 April, was passed by the Foreign Office to the Admiralty on 24 May.

For a while London chose to discount the information. There were other dangers nearer home that a great French amphibious expedition threatened, a descent on Portugal, in concert with the Spanish, an offensive against Britain itself, perhaps via Ireland, where rebellion broke out in May. What may have been deliberate French disinformation suggested that the rumours about Egypt were a cover story to conceal the real strategic purpose of the Toulon Armament. On 1 June, the Foreign Secretary wrote to Lord Mornington, Governor General in India, that “Bonaparte has at last embarked at Toulon with the project of attacking Ireland . . . taking or not taking Portugal in his way.”

New information soon dispelled these misapprehensions. Some came from the French press, more, and more compelling, from the gossipy academic world. A French scholar, Faujas de St. Fond, was reported from Frankfurt, in the occupied German territories, as affirming that the Armament was sailing for Egypt; had Bonaparte known of their stream of leaks he certainly must have regretted the decision to encumber the expedition with so many professional talkers. St. Fond’s indiscretion was received in London by 13 June. On the 11th a despatch from the diplomatic mission in Florence had brought an even more credible report: the French general Carvoni had revealed that the expedition, which he was to accompany, was going to Egypt and then India. Two days later the Foreign Secretary wrote to his brother, “It really looks as if Bonaparte was after all in sober truth going to Egypt; and Dundas [Secretary of War] seems to think the scheme of attacking India from thence not so impractical as it may appear. I am still incredulous as to the latter point, though as to the former I am shaken. But as Bonaparte on the 23rd was still off Toulon [wrong] and as Lord St. Vincent must have detached [Troubridge’s ships] on the 21st at latest, there is real reason to hope that Nelson may destroy all these visions.”
¹²

NELSON RECOVERS THE SCENT

That was certainly London’s hope, but it was strictly circumscribed by its inability to communicate to the central Mediterranean either what it wanted or what it knew. On 13 June, when Lord Spencer wrote his intelligence summary to his brother, Nelson was still in the Tyrrhenian Sea, between Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. Orders had been sent from London to India, and points in between, to sail ships towards Suez, in particular to Commodore John Blanchett, in the
Leopard,
50 guns, on his way to India, to organise a small squadron in the Red Sea. It was anyone’s guess when word might reach him. It was equally difficult to estimate when either fresh orders or information might be got to Nelson. St. Vincent, off Cadiz, had instructions and good reason to stay there, blockading the Spanish and guarding the Straits of Gibraltar. He had sent all the fast sailers at his disposal to Nelson already and could spare no more. He could forward messages by neutral ships, but they were few, and his own rear link to London was tenuous and slow. He did not even know, from week to week, where Nelson was; after mid-June, when Nelson sent back the brig
Transfer
from Naples with despatches, he did not know at all.

Nelson, by contrast, may have known something of Udney’s intelligence from Leghorn, since his papers contain a copy of an Udney letter which he may have picked up while on his way back to the Toulon rendezvous line after the dismasting; but it tells only of the Toulon Armament’s strength, not its destination. Soon after he left Naples on 18 June, however, he got firm news that it was sailing for Malta. On 20 June, when he was in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the toe of Italy, the British Consul at Messina came aboard “to tell me that Malta had surrendered,” but not before he had written to the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, urging him to put the island into a state of defence, while he hurried to help.

His message left too late. Malta had already been surrendered, as Consul Udney had warned it would be on 26 April. The Knights had caved in. That should not have come as a surprise. The Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John was no longer what it once had been. Founded originally to care for sick Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, it had become during the Crusades an order of military monks, who built and defended castles all over the crusader states. Driven under Muslim pressure step by step from Jerusalem, Acre and the island of Rhodes, the Knights eventually ended up in Malta, where they found a new vigour. In 1565, under the leadership of Grand Master de la Valette, they defeated a major Turkish effort to capture the island and push into the western Mediterranean. For the next 200 years the Knights harried the Ottoman fleet, liberating Christian galley slaves and taking Turks to be their own. There was no nonsense about loving thine enemy in the Knights’ version of the Christian creed. The catafalques of the Grand Masters, in their headquarters church in Valetta, are supported on the bronze shoulders of turbaned Turks, chained to and bowed under their burden.

Grand Master Hompesch lacked Valette’s resolution. When Bonaparte’s armada appeared on 9 June, he quickly came to terms—a pension for himself, resettlement for the remaining Knights. Such resistance as was shown came from the ordinary Maltese, though they had little love for the decayed Order. By 18 June, Bonaparte was off, having installed a French administration and garrison, proclaimed various civil and ecclesiastical reforms and thoroughly looted the churches of treasure. It was a characteristically Napoleonic irruption, not least by its alienation of the Maltese, one of the most Catholic people of Europe. Had the Knights only shown more backbone, and encouraged the islanders to prolong resistance, the outcome would have been very different. Nelson, only a hundred miles behind and pressing onward, would have caught the Armament at a total disadvantage, with its commander and amphibious force ashore and its warships dispersed about the island’s periphery. Disaster would have been unavoidable.

Nelson, however, was misreading the signs. On Wednesday, 20 June, when he had written to Grand Master Hompesch from off Messina, he promised to be at Malta by the 22nd. So he was, or nearly. He was still convinced, however, that Sicily was the French objective and that Malta was to be used only as a base for its capture. His thoughts, therefore, misled him. He was shortly misled by objective misinformation.

Early in the morning of 22 June, when he had promised to be at Malta but was actually just south of Cape Passaro, the south-east point of Sicily nearest the island, he was brought fresh news of the French from two different sources in quick succession. The first came from Hardy, who came aboard
Vanguard
from
Mutine
at 6:25 a.m. to report stopping a brig from Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast), with the news that Malta had fallen. The second was a sighting report from
Leander
of four strange ships to the east-south-east.

Nelson now decided, uncharacteristically, to consult his captains as to what to do. His conferences before Trafalgar would launch the legend of the “Band of Brothers”; but then he was expressing what he intended to do, telling not asking. Yet by 1798 he had already acquired a reputation for decisiveness. It was odd that at this moment he felt the need for moral support. Still, it was a highly complex situation. The Ragusan brig had told that Malta had fallen the previous Friday, and the French fleet sailed the following day, 15 and 16 June respectively. It was now the 22nd. Nelson must have calculated that, if the French had gone to Sicily, they would have arrived, and news could not have failed to reach him of their arrival in the intermediate six days. As there was no news, they had gone somewhere else. Given the current direction of the wind, which was westerly, the Armament was most likely to be heading east, which might mean towards the Dardanelles and the Black Sea but almost certainly meant Egypt. It was a compelling conclusion; but he needed reassurance.

The four captains for whom he sent were senior and trusted—Saumarez of the
Orion
, Troubridge of the
Culloden
, Darby of the
Bellerophon
and Ball of the
Alexander
. In
Vanguard
’s cabin, he put to them the following assessment: “with this information [of the “strange ships” and from the Ragusan brig] what is your opinion? Do you believe under all circumstances which we know that Sicily is [Bonaparte’s] destination? Do you think we had better stand for Malta, or steer for Sicily? Should the Armament be gone for Alexandria [Egypt] and got safe there our possessions in India are probably lost. Do you think that we had better push for that place?”

He got a variety of answers. Berry, of the
Vanguard
itself, was for going to Alexandria, Ball agreed that the French were heading for Alexandria, Darby thought that probable, Saumarez and Troubridge emphasised the importance of protecting Alexandria, without stating an opinion about the French destination. Still, collectively, they made Nelson’s mind up, with regrettable consequences.