Nelson (88 page)

Nelson and Stuart also recognised the worth of each other, and if they never became friends in the way Nelson and Villettes became friends, at least they worked relatively harmoniously and productively as colleagues. Ultimately the general would commend ‘the assistance and cooperation of Captain Nelson’ and ‘the exertions of the navy’. Given the prevailing climate between the services, a tempest waiting to break, that itself was a small miracle.
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Calvi was France’s last stronghold in Corsica. It was surrounded and beyond outside help. Though a few boats fled the harbour by keeping to the shoreline east or west, British battleships and gunboats waited at sea and pounced upon more than a dozen craft during June and July. The French defenders of Calvi were without hope of succour, but determined to make an honourable resistance. They occupied a formidable defensive position, deployed more than a hundred guns and displayed substantial courage.
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Unfortunately, Stuart and Nelson came from behind, over heights they had thought proof against the passage of artillery, and began fighting their way through the ring of posts that covered the town to the west and southwest. The two British commanders formed an agreeable partnership. Stuart was the commander-in-chief, but in deciding where batteries needed to be established or when and if enemy positions should be stormed he conferred with Nelson and other officers, and the seamen ably seconded him. It was they who for the most part brought the guns and supplies up to the huge grey crags of La Macarona, usually at night, and it was they who generally erected and manned the batteries. Stuart also allocated a professional army
artillerist to each gun, and Nelson found them impervious to advice. ‘They don’t seem to mind me,’ he complained when they insisted on using two wads in the bore instead of one, but he deferred to their expertise when it came to pointing the pieces.
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Despite occasional shortages of men and spells of bad weather, Nelson had established two batteries by the end of June. One, known as the hill battery, stood 1,500 yards southwest of Fort Mozzello and a thousand northwest of Fort Mollinochesco, menacing both. The other was erected near the point of Cape Revellata and entrusted to a shadow from Nelson’s past. James Moutray was the son of Mary, Horatio’s old flame in Antigua. The ‘very fine young man’ was not quite twenty-one years old, but Nelson thought he saw the mother in his ‘amiable disposition’. Moutray had succeeded Courtenay Boyle as second lieutenant of the
Speedy
sloop, and got a transfer to the
Victory
after only a year, falling under the protective wing of Lord Hood. Apparently Hood was the youngster’s godfather, but he also respected the boy’s professional abilities and described him as a ‘most amiable and gallant officer’. He sent him to command the shore battery without any misgivings.
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A third battery was established on 3 July, this one by Stuart’s French royalists, who also manned it. It was the only battery that was not the work of the seamen, and opened fire on Fort Mollinochesco at daylight the next morning. The royalist barrage dismantled the principal enemy gun, muzzling the French fire, but its other purpose was to cover the men who were to establish the fourth and most important of all the British batteries, one designed directly to target Fort Mozzello, the keystone of the enemy defences.

Raising the crucial new work proved complicated. According to Stuart’s plan, the first attempt was made on the evening of 4 July. Most of the serviceable British guns, supported by Corsican muskets, opened up on Mollinochesco to convey the impression that it was to be the focus of the fresh attack. Apparently the deception worked, and some French artillerists in the Fountain battery or the Mozzello even pummelled Mollinochesco themselves, convinced that it was being occupied by the British.

While gunfire shattered the night on all sides, Stuart’s working parties prepared to advance towards the Mozzello with the stuffed casks and sandbags needed to build the foundations of the new battery, and Nelson and his men stood ready to follow with the guns themselvs, four hulking twenty-sixes and two twenty-fours. The plan soon
misfired. By ten-thirty Stuart was storming back and forth, damning his engineer for failing to appear. Soon afterwards hundreds of sappers and seamen surged forward to establish the battery, but Stuart called them back. It was too late, he had decided; if those men were caught in the open at daylight without their guns mounted, they would be cut to ribbons by French fire.

Try again! The plan ran more smoothly on the evening of the 6th. With silent but ‘excessive labour’ the pioneers and sailors threw up the advanced battery about seven hundred and fifty yards from the Mozzello, but it took longer than Nelson expected and daylight found him with only one gun in place. For a while there was a deathly stillness, as if the enemy gunners were paralysed in astonishment at the sight of a British battery suddenly materialising in the early light, but then a fusillade of grape, shot and shell was thrown at the feverish workers. A mate of a transport ship fell in agony, with holes ripped through both thighs. Two crowns in his pocket had been driven through one of his legs and into the other. A seaman of the
Agamemnon
also went down, and three soldiers of the guard. Captain Serocold, ‘a gallant good officer, and as able a seaman as ever went to sea’ according to Nelson, was hit behind the ear by grape shot as he cheered on the men hauling the last cannon into position. His friend, Captain Hallowell, a burly thirty-three-year-old whose ‘indefatigable zeal, activity and ability’ was served by the frame and face of a pugilist, helped carry the injured officer from the field. In a small valley with a gentle stream Serocold found a brief, merciful sanctuary from the noise of battle before he died.
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Still in the thick of the fire, Nelson finished the battery and turned it upon their molesters. Roaring like a wounded lion, it simultaneously engaged the Mozzello, the Fountain battery and Fort San Francesco, and soon began to dowse their fire. This battery, manned by seamen, was Stuart’s principal weapon, especially after the French abandoned and burned Fort Mollinochesco on the 7th and allowed the redundant royalist battery to be dismantled. Nelson and Hallowell took alternate twenty-four-hour shifts supervising the advanced guns. They found that Stuart had chosen his ground well, close enough to inflict terrific damage on the French defences but to some extent shielded by Fort Mozzello from the San Francesco battery and the town bastion of Calvi.

Nevertheless, the new British battery was so obviously a danger that it drew exceptional fire. On its first day it ‘was hit almost every
time’ the Mozzello fired, and even when Nelson’s guns silenced or demolished French batteries during the day, the defenders spent the nights in frantic efforts to renew them for the mornings. An unremitting and murderous thirteen-day slogging match ensued, during which thirty people were slain or injured at the advanced British battery and five of its guns dismounted. ‘’Tis wonderful!’ Nelson remarked.
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Fortunately, with one gun after another being disabled, Nelson was still able to bring replacements from the fleet. Stuart’s advance was giving the British control of more ground, and between Cape Revellata and Calvi Nelson found a little cove that he could protect by gunboats and Moutray’s battery. By using it for landings, Nelson was able to eliminate much of the three-mile, back-bruising journey between Port Agro and the batteries, though the weather continued to sap vitality. During the day the men worked beneath a ferocious glare Corsicans called ‘the Lion sun’, but Nelson’s battery maintained its fire. It had to rely upon more eighteen-pounders as the heavier guns were disabled, but continued to maul the French positions.
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The delicate figure of the captain of the
Agamemnon
seemed inexhaustible, and while many comrades sickened he seemed to exult in the combat, and was invariably at the front, ever at hand in emergencies, ever decisive and confident. Sometimes commanders need to stand at a distance in order to coordinate or oversee an action, but Nelson was never one to enjoy leaving subordinates to execute his orders at the sharp end. For good or ill, he usually stood foursquare with his men, sharing their dangers and toils, and at Calvi he routinely braved the fierce enemy fire that ravaged the British works. Once again Nelson came within seconds, or inches, of destruction. On the second day of fire an enemy shell screamed into the centre of the advanced battery and burst among a hundred people gathered around the captain and General Stuart. The magazine went up, but miraculously not a man was seriously hurt.

Then, at seven in the morning of 12 July, it happened.

A shot, probably nothing more than a chance blind discharge from the town or San Francesco batteries, smashed into a sandbag in the merlon of Nelson’s battery and spattered the vicinity with stones and sand. According to one of the soldiers, Nelson and some of his companions saw it coming and threw themselves face down. If so it was too late. Nelson’s face was covered with blood. When Michael Jefferson, the new surgeon’s mate of the
Agamemnon
, who was on shore, cleaned the wound he found lacerations and part of the right eyebrow blown away.
In considerable pain, and unable to see with his right eye, Nelson let Hallowell take charge for the day, but after that he was back, his eye bandaged, looking like a stereotypical sea rover of less than honest intent.

In those days no diagnostic instruments for optical problems existed, and the ophthalmoscope was still half a century away. Consequently, there is much uncertainty about the nature of Nelson’s injury. He spoke of the eye as being ‘cut down’, but referred to the surrounding skin rather than the eyeball, which was hit but not perforated. The immediate loss of vision and pain experienced has been variously attributed to a detached retina; swelling and watering caused by the concussion; and a vitreous haemorrhage or temporary bleeding within the cavity of the eyeball behind the lens and iris. Whatever the case, though camp talk predicted that Nelson would lose his sight, his initial pain eased and there were signs of visual improvement. ‘The surgeons flatter I shall not entirely lose the sight,’ he told Elliot five days after suffering his injury, ‘which I believe for I can clearly distinguish light from dark. It confined me, thank God, only one day.’
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Certainly he talked bravely. He did not enter the injury in the ship’s logs, or even put himself on the official list of wounded. ‘I got a little hurt this morning,’ he wrote to Hood, but it was ‘not much, as you may judge by my writing.’ A few days later his Uncle William was told that Nelson felt lucky to have a head on his shoulders. It was not until 1 August that he broached the subject to Fanny, from whom he had hidden the injury to his back at Bastia. Yet even then she only learned that Horatio had suffered ‘a very slight scratch towards my right eye which has not been the smallest inconvenience’.
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But others knew their Nelson, including Lord Hood. Writing of the wound to Elliot, the admiral admitted, ‘He speaks lightly of it, but I wish he may not lose the sight of an eye.’ Rightly, Hood suspected that Nelson was minimising what was, in fact, a major injury.
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Putting fears for his sight behind him, Nelson returned to his guns and soon brought the siege to its climax.

As early as 9 July his battery had got the better of the gunners in the Mozzello and the Fountain battery, and systematically disabled their pieces. By the end of the day only Fort San Francesco, sitting behind the Mozzello at a difficult angle on Nelson’s left, and the town
were replying. The town’s projectiles were lobbed blind at the British, over the crippled Mozzello and Fountain batteries, and most missed their mark while a few burst harmlessly in the air soon after leaving the muzzles of their guns. That night Nelson also mounted a ten-inch howitzer near his battery. Its job was to fire every three minutes during the hours of darkness to deter the French from repairing their broken defences.

With what Hood called ‘rapid firing’ Nelson’s guns soon had the town ablaze in one place for three hours, but they concentrated most fire upon the Mozzello, shooting away sandbags, splintering stone and battering breaches in the walls. Hudson Lowe watched the formidable fort ‘crumbling into pieces from the effect of our shot, and the enemy so dismayed as not to return our fire’.
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It was time to storm the Mozzello and Stuart planned a tripartite attack from Nelson’s advanced battery. While the seamen gathered guns and scaling ladders made on the
Agamemnon
, their captain accompanied Stuart to ground a mere three hundred yards from the Mozzello. Stuart explained that if Nelson built a new battery there it would cover the troops storming the breach. On the dark night of 18–19 July large bodies of men moved purposefully about the British positions. At dusk Lieutenant Colonel Wemyss went first, with a detachment of Royal Irish and two field pieces hauled by seamen under Lieutenant Edmonds of the
Agamemnon
. Striking grimly to the left they bloodlessly occupied the Fountain battery, which they found abandoned. Then Edmonds quickly trained his guns on Fort San Francesco and fired a salvo to a furious huzzah from the Royal Irish. Splitting the darkness those shots and cries signalled the main advance.

Nelson was ready for it. About the time Wemyss’s movement began the captain’s party had also set off for the site of the new battery Stuart wanted, pulling two twenty-six-pounders and a mortar. With the aid of Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Wauchope of the 50th Regiment they worked furiously in the dark and had the guns mounted by one-thirty in the morning. As Moore’s grenadiers flowed forward towards the Mozzello, Nelson unleashed a savage point-blank covering fire upon the fort. Soon the redcoats were upon their enemies, battering down the remaining French palisades with the stocks of muskets and pouring through the breach to clamber lustily over the fractured stones and sandbags behind flashing bayonets. There was little opposition, and a party of seamen advancing with the grenadiers helped clear it away with a pair of field guns. A brief flourish of French pikes, the
flash of a hand grenade, and the enemy buckled, running away so fast that Major Brereton’s Light Corps, circling round to the right to cut off their retreat, could not get to the rear in time. Nelson’s battery had so comprehensively destroyed the Mozzello that it fell with little loss to either side. Two gallant Frenchmen who stood in the breach were hacked down and two others overtaken in flight, while the British casualties amounted to thirteen. The fort itself was found to be ‘an absolute heap of ruins’.
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