The Years of Endurance (61 page)

¹
Windham,
II, 113.

²
Spencer
Papers,
III, 128.

forced, for, as soon as the British had departed, Brune's army set off at full speed for the Loire.

As the hopes of England, so high for the past year, fell, those of France rose. On the day that the British regained the lines of the Zype, Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Frejus. When the people of the little town heard the news they swarmed down to the waterside, breaking quarantine, and bore the hero ashore. For the stature of the absent General had been steadily rising in the French imagination. All others who had taken his place—soldiers and politicians alike—were knaves and bunglers: he alone was invincible, patriotic and virtuous. The people knew nothing of his failures: everything of his successes. His return was preceded by the news of an astonishing victory in July when, following his withdrawal from Syria, he had routed an army of 15,000 Turks landed by a British squadron at Aboukir. Scarcely a man had escaped his terrible recoil.
¹
Now, hearing of the plight of his war-racked country from some newspapers which Sidney Smith had sent him, he had run the gauntlet of the British cruisers and after a thrilling six weeks' voyage reached France.

The pear was ripe for his plucking. The French people were longing for a deliverer. To them Bonaparte appeared as the heir of the Revolutionary dream. All th
e way to Paris, vast crowds sur
rou
nded his carriage, acclaiming h
im as their saviour. Only the corrupt Directors and politicians did not want him, and they were divided among themselves. Within three weeks of his arrival he had cast in his lot with the strongest faction and by armed force had overthrown the Constitution. It was the most popular thing
that
had happened in France since the meeting of the States General.

But to the English, wearily watching these events from the other side of the Channel, it was only another sordid Paris revolution. On the whole, so far as ruined hopes and crops enabled them to rejoice at anything, they welcomed it, for they felt that the new regime could not last. Canning thought it portended a restoration of the Bourbons: the two Dictators, Bonaparte and Sieyes, linked only by their common treachery to others, would soon betray one another. Windham was not so hopeful: to him the only

¹
One of the very few to reach the British ships was an Albanian private, thirty years later to become famous as Mehemet Ali.

lesson to be learnt from the latest display of illegality across the Channel was that all intercourse or compromise with the evil thing must be shunned. " A Government such as the present, dropt from the clouds or rather starting from underneath the ground, is in no state to offer anything. It cannot
answ
er
for its own existence for the next four-and-twenty hours."
¹

Accordingly when, having been elevated under a brand new Constitution to the rank of First Consul, Bonaparte on Christmas Day, 1799, addressed a personal letter to King George proposing peace, it was treated with scant courtesy. Couched in reasonable terms and asking whether the war between the two countries which had ravaged the earth for eight years was to continue until it had destroyed civilisation, it was viewed in England merely as a trick to upset the financial treaty impending with Austria in return for that country's agreement to restore the King of Piedmont. It was also regarded—from an upstart like Napoleon—as an impertinence. No reply was therefore returned. A memorandum, sent by the Foreign Secretary to Talleyrand, stated in frigid terms that His Majesty saw no reason to depart from the forms long established for transacting business with foreign States and that the French people's best hope of peace, if they wanted it, was to restore their ancient rulers. A surer way of rendering the Bourbons unpopular could scarcely have been devised.

Yet British statesmen were right in believing that Bonaparte's motives were not genuine. " What I need," he told Junot at a New Year's Eve reception, " is time, and time is just the one thing that
I
cannot afford. Once conclude peace, and then—a fresh war with England! " His aim was to drive a wedge between the Allies and pose to his countrymen as the apostle of reason and moderation. The Foreign Office's foolish reply enabled him to prove to the French people, who were longing for peace, that peace was made impossible by the selfish, grasping islanders and their dupes, the Austrians. Already the Russians, furious at the Austrian intrigues which had robbed them of victory, had virtually dropped out of the war. The soldier Bonaparte, wanting to give
Europe
peace, was denied it by foreign usurers and mediocre politicians. The only thing left him was to teach these blunderers how to wage war.

So the man who had been raised to supreme power to give

¹
Windham to Pitt, 18th Nov., 1799.—
Windham
Papers,
II, 143.

France peace, was able to ask his countrymen for new armies. He recalled the exiled Carnot to the War Office and raised a quarter of a million men. In the utmost secrecy he built up a great reserve. It was his intention—though he was debarred from doing so
by Sieyes's bogus Constitution-
to lead it in person. For it had not been to keep Cromwell from the battlefield that
the
Self-Denying Ordinance had been passed.

France's recovery was too sudden and miraculous to be yet apparent to the outer world. Despite Russia's defection, the Dutch fiasco and the reverses in Switzerland, the odds still seemed to favour the Allies. Austria, aided by a new British loan, had concentrated an enormous army in Italy, where all but the last vestiges of French conquest had been eliminated. The British Navy, stronger than ever, commanded the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Malta and Egypt were still locked in an iron ring.

Moreover, Britain still had an Army. With 80
,000
Regular troops and a large force of Militia and Volunteers for home defence, she could play her part in the coming land campaign if she chose. " Bring me back as many good troops as you can," Dundas had told Abercromby after the decision to evacuate the Helder, " and before next spring I will show you an army the country never saw before."
¹
In December, Stuart had again urged that the 6000 troops of the Mediterranean Command at Minorca should be brought up to sufficient strength to strike in the rear of the struggling French on the Genoese Riviera. With 15
,
000
more men he guaranteed his ability to cut their communications at any point between Genoa and Toulon.

But the Government's military nerve had been shattered. For six weeks it returned no answer to Stuart's proposals. Not till the beginning of February, 1800, and then only to hearten its Austrian ally, did it approve his plan in principle. But it proceeded to cut down the proposed reinforcement from 15
,
000
to
10,000
,
and in March from
10,000
to 5
,
000
.
And even these were not ready to sail till April.

For the Cabinet was now hopelessly divided. Dundas on the whole was in favour of Stuart's expedition. But Windham still passionately advocated the Chouan cause, which neither he nor his colleagues were aware was already lost. He represented the obliga
tion

¹
Fortescue,
IV,
775.

to help the Royalists before they were overwhelmed as a first call on Britain's honour and was so persistent that be carried his point. Six thousand troops were set apart for an operation off the Brittany coast, and in May were dispatched under Thomas Maitland to seize Belleisle. They found the place far too strongly held to be taken and spent five precious weeks in transports off the Breton coast waiting for new orders from England.

By the time that the other 5000, after idling for nearly a month at their anchorage, sailed under General Pigott for Minorca at the end of April, Stuart, worn out by fretting and disappointment, had resigned. The cause of his final breach with Dundas was his refusal to accede to a Cabinet decision—taken in an eleventh-hour attempt to placate Russia—to hand over the brave people of Malta to the despotism of the Tsar. In this he was politically right: the decision was dishonourable and in any case useless, for Russia had already resolved to withdraw from the Coalition. But as Dundas said: " If officers are to control our councils there is an end to ail government," and Stuart had to go.
¹
He died eleven months later, one of the great soldiers England has wasted.

He was succeeded in the Mediterranean Command by Abercromby. The instructions given to the old man by the Cabinet mark the nadir in British strategy. With a total force of 12,000 he was to reinforce the besiegers of Malta, provide 4000 for the defence of Minorca, assist the Austrian armies in Italy, co-operate with any rising in the south of France, protect Naples and Portugal and, if possible, attack Tenerife.

Abercromby sailed in the frigate
Seahorse
on May 15 th, 1800, accompanied by Major-Generals Moore and Hutchison. Before he reached Minorca on June 22nd, the Continental campaign in which he was to have taken part was over. At the beginning of April the Austrians, concentrating more than 100,000 men in northern Italy, had taken the offensive under old Melas. By the middle of the month they had cut the French army in two and driven Massena into Genoa. At that moment Lord Keith's fleet had complete command of the sea. Had any British troops been available they could have been landed at any point on the French or Italian Riviera.

But the sands of Allied opportunity were running out. On April 25th the French, ostensibly concentrating their main forces

¹
Fortescue,
IV,
777.

in southern Germany, crossed the Rhine under Moreau. Within a fortnight they had defeated Kray at Moesskirch and forced him back to the Upper Danube. This was Bonaparte's moment. On May
15th
,
having made the most careful preparations, he began the passage of the Great Saint Bernard with
50,000
men. A week later he emerged on the north Italian plain in the rear of the Austrian army.

Thereafter events moved at the usual dazzling speed. On June
5
th, three days after Bonaparte entered Milan, Massena, reduced to his last rat, surrendered Genoa. On the same day Lord Keith sent an urgent summons to General Fox at Minorca for British troops to hold the port, since every Austrian was needed to meet the threat of Bonaparte's army to the north. But Fox, though Pigott's
5000
from England had now joined him, could do nothing—save assemble transports—until his new Commander-in-Chief arrived from England. " For God's sake," Grenville had written to Dundas two months before, " for your own honour and the cause for which we are engaged, do not let us, after having by immense exertions collected an army, leave it unemployed, gaping after messengers from Genoa, Augsburg and Vienna till the moment for acting is irrevocably past by."
¹
It was precisely what the Secretary-for-War had done.

It was Britain's last chance to liquidate the Revolution before it turned into something more terrible. On June
14th, 1800
,
the main armies met at Marengo. It was one of the most closely contested battles in history. At one moment disaster faced Bonaparte. Had the troops Stuart had begged for been fighting by the side of the Austrians it must have ended in an Allied victory. As it was, Bonaparte's reserves, flung into the scale at the eleventh hour, gave France the decision. Next day Melas, his communications cut, signed a convention abandoning all northern Italy west of the Mincio.

From the battlefield on June
16th
the victor addressed a letter to the ruler of Austria: " I have the honour of acquainting your Majesty with the desire of the French people that an end be put to the war that lays waste our two countries. English craft and cunning have repressed the effect which this simple and candid wish must have on the heart of your Majesty. On the battlefield of

¹
Pitt
and
the
Great
War,
386.

Marengo, amidst the dying and wounded, surrounded by 15,000 dead bodies, I beg your Majesty to lend ear to the cry of humanity and not to permit the younger generation of two powerful and courageous countries to murder one another in the interest of causes with which they have no concern.''
¹
At that moment the British Secretary-for-War was dispatching new orders to Maitland off Belleisle to send 4000 men to Minorca for important operations on the Italian Riviera.