During the early phases of the French Revolution the British Government assumed an attitude of strict neutrality in the internal affairs of France, and to this policy it adhered until January, 1793, when the excesses of the Jacobins, culminating in the judicial murder of Louis XVI., compelled England to join the coalition of Continental Powers which had taken up arms to restore order in France, and to safeguard their own dominions, threatened, and in some cases actually invaded by the troops of the Republic. The outbreak of war found the British army in a deplorable condition; it had in no way recovered from its disasters in America, and was “lax in its discipline, entirely without system and very weak in numbers. Each colonel of a regiment managed it according to his notions or neglected it altogether. There was no uniformity of drill or movement; professional pride was rare, professional knowledge still more so.... Every department was more or less inefficient. The regimental officers, as well as their men, were hard drinkers, the latter, under a loose discipline were addicted to marauding and to acts of licentious violence.”[84] The physique was often as defective as the morale; some regiments were composed of lads too young to march, while in others the majority of the rank and file were old and worn-out men. A few thousand troops were hurried off to join the forces of the Allies who faced the French in Holland, and a fleet was sent to the Mediterranean under Lord Hood, with orders to co-operate with the adherents of the Monarchy, who were still numerous in the south of France. After Hood passed Gibraltar he bore up for Toulon, then as now one of the principal French naval ports.[85] In its harbour and dockyard lay many warships, commanded by Royalists who hated the Revolution and all its works, and manned by sailors many of whom agreed with the political opinions of their officers. As large numbers of the civilian population in the town shared his views, the Royalist admiral, in the hope of rescuing his country from the anarchy into which it was plunged, took the extreme step of entering into negotiations with Hood for the occupation of the port by the British. The horror inspired by the Revolution must have been deep indeed to induce an officer of high rank and unblemished reputation to think of such an arrangement with a nation regarded by every Frenchman as the hereditary enemy of his race. Since the Normans after conquering France had overrun and subdued England, hostilities between the two countries had been frequent, almost incessant; we had often raided the French coasts, and for a long time our kings held as their own the western half of France. In the hundred years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolution the divergent policy of their rulers had plunged the two countries into a series of five wars: their armies had encountered each other on innumerable battlefields in Germany and the Low Countries, in Spain, Canada and the West Indies: their fleets had met not only in the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, and the Channel, but in parts of the ocean as remote as the Gulf of Bengal and the Caribbean Sea; and bands of French adventurers in the service of the native princes of India had fought with the troops of the East India Company on the plains of Hindustan. Very bitter must have been the feelings of the Royalist officers when they agreed to make over to Hood the forts, the arsenal, the shipping, the docks, and the town of Toulon itself, on the understanding that this national property was to be held in trust for the son of Louis XVI., to whom it was duly to be restored when he ascended the throne. The French men-of-war were to be dismantled, but as a concession to sentiment, and to show that Toulon was not a conquered town but still formed part of the Kingdom of France, the white flag of the Bourbons was to float over its walls.
On August 27, 1793, Hood, who had been joined by a Spanish squadron, took possession of the forts. The landing party consisted of from twelve to fifteen hundred marines and soldiers who were serving on board the ships. There was no officer among them of rank higher than a captain; they had no tents, or stores, or field-guns, and even had they possessed the latter, there were no engineers or artillerymen to plan a battery or to lay a gun. Though the troops met with no active opposition, the attitude of many of the French sailors was so threatening that Hood decided to get rid of as many of them as he could, and selecting four of the least serviceable French vessels, he unshipped their guns and ammunition, and packed into them five thousand of the most troublesome republican seamen, with “safe conducts” for the French ports on the Atlantic seaboard. Having thus disposed of these “undesirables,” Hood applied to those of the Allied Powers whose territories lay in the basin of the Mediterranean for help to hold Toulon against the Republicans who were gathering against him, and by the beginning of November he had collected a very heterogeneous force of about 16,000 men. When our Ministers learned that Toulon was in the hands of the Allies they promised to send Hood large reinforcements; but neither the importance of the place as a base of operations against the Republicans, nor the difficulty of holding its land-locked harbour were adequately appreciated at home; and when more troops were required for our contingent in the Low Countries, for an expedition against the coast of Brittany, and for a raid upon the French islands in the West Indies, the expected reinforcements dwindled to seven hundred and fifty men from Gibraltar, who reached Toulon on the 27th of October. At the beginning of the war the regiments were so weak that this handful of troops included the XVIIIth Royal Irish,[86] the second battalion of the Royals, and detachments of Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery. The exact strength of the XVIIIth is not known, but as on the 25th of June, 1793, there were only two hundred and eighty-three officers and men at the Rock, and as a certain number of sick were left in hospital when the Royal Irish went on active service, the captains must have commanded companies no larger than the sections of the present day. The reinforcements from Gibraltar raised the strength of the British to about 2000 of all ranks; their allies consisted of 6500 Spaniards, 4700 Neapolitans, 1500 Piedmontese, and about the same number of French Royalists.
An army made up of contingents from several nations is necessarily less effective than one formed of soldiers of the same race. Hereditary ill-feeling, professional jealousy, and the want of a common language combine to lessen its value as a fighting machine, unless the General-in-Chief possesses a personality as commanding as that of Marlborough or Wellington. At Toulon none of the senior officers of the Allies were men of genius, and it is doubtful whether even a great soldier, with so curiously composed a force, could have withstood the savage energy that Napoleon, then a young officer of artillery on his first campaign, infused into the Generals commanding the besieging troops. The contingents of the Allies were of very uneven value. The British were excellent, though their courage was not yet thoroughly disciplined; the Piedmontese were very good; the French Royalists, though brave, naturally disliked to fight their republican fellow-countrymen, much as they loathed their political principles; the Spaniards frequently deserted their posts when threatened by a vigorous attack, and the Neapolitans were cowards of the deepest dye. Sir Gilbert Elliot, the diplomatic representative of Britain in the Mediterranean expedition, describes how a party of Neapolitans behaved on outpost. After four of them had been killed in a skirmish, the remainder sent to the officer in charge of the section “to beg to be relieved as they were all sick!” With such allies it is not surprising to learn that “no post was considered safe without a proportion of British troops, and they were obliged to be divided and thin-sowed accordingly.”[87] Whether from genuine illness, from unfitness for the hardships of active service, or from overwork, the sick list was enormous, and the Generals could never count on more than 11,000 or 12,000 effectives—far too few for the heavy duty they had to perform. To prevent the enemy from planting batteries on the hills commanding the harbour, the Allies were forced to hold a perimeter of fifteen miles, guarded by eight main works with a number of subsidiary connecting posts; and nine thousand men were constantly employed at the outposts, with a reserve of three thousand in the town, to overawe the disaffected part of the population and to reinforce any threatened point.
Up to the time of the arrival of the XVIIIth there had not been much fighting, for the French were engaged in mounting guns, and were not yet in strength to attempt a coup-de-main. When the Royal Irish landed they were marched up to the front, but were engaged in no affair of importance until the 30th of November, when they took part in a sortie against a large battery placed by Napoleon himself on the Aresnes heights, from which one of our principal works was commanded. The assaulting column, formed of 400 British, 300 Piedmontese, 600 Neapolitans, 600 Spaniards, and 400 French Royalists, was commanded by General O’Hara, one of the staff at Gibraltar, who had landed at Toulon with the XVIIIth. The instructions he issued were explicit. When the troops reached the plain at the foot of the heights, the column was to break into four detachments, the British on the left, and on reaching the summit they were to capture the battery, occupy the heights, and then stand fast; on no account whatever were they to follow the enemy in pursuit. After making their way, first through a belt of olive-trees intersected by stone walls, and then up a steep mountain cut into terraces of vineyards, the Allies gained the crest, surprised the French, and drove them headlong out of the battery. Had they remembered their orders the success would have been complete, for the guns could have been rolled down the height and carried back to Toulon; but unfortunately the men got out of hand, and dashed madly after the retreating French down a valley and up a hill on the other side, scattering in all directions as they pursued their flying foes. They had lost all vestige of cohesion when they were charged by formed bodies of the enemy, whose counter-stroke changed our victory into a defeat. General O’Hara was wounded and captured; and of the four hundred British engaged, twelve officers and about two hundred other ranks were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The survivors fell back to the battery and attempted to hold it, but being unsupported by their Continental comrades had finally to retreat into Toulon, though not before they had spiked six guns.
During the next fortnight the volume of the enemy’s fire increased daily; fresh batteries were unmasked in various directions, and everything tended to confirm the reports of spies and deserters that the French, now about 40,000 strong, were preparing for an attack in force. The preliminary bombardment began at 2 A.M. on the 16th of December, when Napoleon concentrated the fire of five batteries upon Fort Mulgrave, one of the most important of the western series of redoubts. It was held by a mixed force: a body of Spaniards occupied the northern half of the work; the southern was in charge of a detachment of British, under Captain W. Conolly, Royal Irish Regiment. By the end of the day the redoubt was in ruins, with half its garrison of seven hundred men disabled; at two o’clock in the morning of the 17th the French advanced against it, but though in overpowering force, for half an hour they made no progress till the Spaniards were seized with panic and left the British in the lurch. The enemy had begun to occupy the northern end of the work, when Conolly, though himself hard pressed, sent a subaltern and thirty-six men to retake it. With splendid courage this handful of soldiers drove back the Republicans, and for a time kept them at bay; but soon the weight of numbers began to tell, the survivors of the detachment were forced backwards, and at four o’clock the “remnants of the XVIIIth” were ousted from Fort Mulgrave. An hour or two later the French, breaking through the line of fortifications at a second point, carried Mont Faron, a hill 1800 feet high, which from the north partly commands the harbour and the town. On the enemy’s side of this mountain the slopes are steep and rocky; and as much labour had been expended in increasing their natural difficulties, Faron was considered so impregnable that only four hundred and fifty men were employed to guard its two miles of frontage. At daylight every work upon this hill was attacked and, though none of the British posts were driven in, the French poured through the gaps left by the Spaniards and Neapolitans, and established themselves upon the shoulder of Mont Faron from which Toulon is overlooked.
A disaster such as this had long been foreseen by the senior officers of the British land forces. General O’Hara, and his successor General David Dundas, had frequently represented to Lord Hood the impossibility of making a prolonged defence with so inadequate and so inefficient a garrison as that at his disposal; they had pointed out that if one of the main works should be lost there were no fresh troops with which to recapture it, and that once any part of the line was pierced the harbour and the fleet would be exposed to the enemy’s artillery; and they therefore urged that arrangements should be made beforehand for the orderly and systematic evacuation of the place when it became untenable. But Lord Hood was strongly prejudiced against soldiers: throughout his career he had slighted their advice, and he took no steps to prepare for the retreat which the Generals warned him was inevitable, with the result that when all hope of holding the place was gone nothing was in readiness for the retirement, and nearly the whole of the 17th was spent in settling details with the naval and military officers of the different nations. To organise the evacuation was no easy task; not only were there four thousand sick and wounded to be embarked, but room had to be found on the transports or the men-of-war for thousands of Royalists whom it was impossible to abandon to the vengeance of their republican fellow-countrymen; the French ships had to be burned or towed out of harbour, and the arsenal and dockyard to be destroyed. After many hours of weary discussion it was agreed that the embarkation of the troops should begin at 11 P.M. on the 18th; the least important posts were to be withdrawn early, others were to be held to the last moment. The scheme, which required absolute obedience to orders, was nearly wrecked by the Neapolitans, whose misconduct Elliot thus described in a despatch to Government—
“ ... These arrangements were made on the 17th before dinner. Without notice to any person concerned the Neapolitan officers packed up their baggage, and crowded the streets and quays with their preparations for departing on the evening of the 17th. Their baggage was actually sent on board, their general actually embarked that evening, and the troops, quitting every post where they were stationed, continued their embarcation publicly from the quays of the town, from the evening of the 17th to the middle of the next day. Their eagerness, impatience and panic were so great on the 18th, in the forenoon, that the embarcation of the inhabitants was rendered not only difficult but dangerous, the Neapolitan soldiers firing on those boats which they could not get admission to. Many of themselves were drowned in attempting to crowd into the boats, and there was a temporary appearance of confusion and insurrection in the town. The Neapolitan Admiral seems to have been in as great haste as the military. He sailed long before either the British or Spanish squadrons and, without waiting to make any arrangement about either troops or refugees, pushed off for Naples, leaving a good number of Neapolitan troops on board our fleet to find their way home as well as they can.”[88]
Until nearly all the allied troops were embarked the British and Piedmontese remained resolutely at their posts, which they did not quit until recalled into the town to cover the operations of the sailors, who were burning the arsenal and setting fire to the French ships. When the outposts were withdrawn the French crowded into Toulon, and by the light of the flames shot heavily at the blue-jackets, busy at the work of devastation, in which they were helped by a party of the XVIIIth, commanded by Ensign W. Iremonger, one of the two land officers employed on this dangerous duty. For a time a musketry fight raged; then at the appointed hour the soldiers gradually withdrew to their boats, gained their ships, and in two or three hours the whole of the allied fleet was safely out to sea. Though Hood’s operations on land utterly failed to advance the cause of the Royalists, and though he did not succeed in destroying the arsenal completely, or in burning all the enemy’s ships, he undoubtedly inflicted a serious, though not a crushing blow to the naval power of France in the Mediterranean by his operations at Toulon. When he took possession of the town he found floating in its harbour or building in its dockyard fifty-eight men-of-war of various sizes: thirty-three he annexed or burned to the water’s edge, the remaining twenty-five he was obliged to leave behind him, to become the nucleus of a new fleet. The price paid in human flesh and blood for this success cannot be stated, for the losses of the Allies are not to be traced, and the British returns, as far as they were published in despatches, are incomplete, and in the case of the Royal Irish do not agree with the muster-roll made a week after the evacuation. In it appear the names of three sergeants, one corporal, and thirty-four privates who were killed or died during the siege; and one officer, Lieutenant George Minchin, two sergeants, two drummers, one corporal, and thirty-two privates missing.[89] In the unsuccessful sortie of the 30th of November twenty-four rank and file of the regiment were wounded; how many were injured in the daily fighting at the outposts and in the defence of Fort Mulgrave and Mont Faron cannot be ascertained, but it is clear that the Royal Irish played a distinguished part in the operations, and in proportion to their numbers lost very heavily.
As soon as the allied fleet was clear of the harbour of Toulon it dispersed: the Spaniards and the Neapolitans made sail respectively for the Balearic Isles and Naples, while Hood put into the bay of Hyères, a few miles east of Toulon, where he tried to evolve order out of the chaos produced by the hurried embarkation of the troops, and to obtain fresh provisions of which he was in great need. Unwilling to weaken himself by sending British vessels to buy food in the ports of Italy and Spain, he employed upon this service several of the French ships, which, in theory at least, were still under the orders of the Royalist admiral. British infantry were sent on board them as marines, the XVIIIth furnishing a strong detachment under Lieutenant Mawby, who on going on board the Pompée found that she was still flying the Royalist flag, and was commanded by French naval officers. The duty was heavy, and the cruise must have been a very unpleasant one, for guards had to be mounted in every part of the vessel to keep her crew from breaking into open mutiny. In one respect, however, Mawby and his companions were better off than their comrades at headquarters, for they escaped the overcrowding caused by the presence of thousands of Royalists in the ships at Hyères. Sir Gilbert Elliot mentions that in the cabin he shared with several naval officers, twenty luckless French refugees, men, women, and children slept huddled together on the floor; and if no better quarters could be provided for the diplomatic representative of England, it is easy to imagine that regimental officers must have been hideously uncomfortable.
At this time England had no possessions in the Mediterranean east of Gibraltar, for Minorca, lost to her in 1782, was not recovered till some years later. Yet to watch Toulon and the southern coast of France, and to encourage the various Italian States to fight for their independence which was already threatened by the armies of the Republic, it was essential that England should possess an advanced naval and military base in the Mediterranean. Such a post awaited us in Corsica, where the inhabitants had profited by the turmoil of the Revolution to rise against their French masters, whom they had driven into the north of the island. The garrison had flung themselves into the fortified coast towns of Bastia and Calvi, and the works fringing the bay of S. Fiorenzo, and the Corsicans soon realised that without professional soldiers, cannon, and munitions of war, they could not hope to take these places, while without a fleet it was impossible to prevent reinforcements from the mainland reaching their enemy. When both parties to a bargain are eager to come to terms negotiations are easy, and the islanders willingly agreed to become subjects of George III., provided that a constitution framed on that of England was granted to them. As soon as the arrangements for the annexation of the island were completed Hood left his anchorage at Hyères, where for five weeks the French had allowed him to remain unmolested, and made for the bay of S. Fiorenzo, at the western base of the great northern promontory of Corsica.[90] Driving the French from their defences, he forced them to fall back on Bastia, their foothold on the eastern coast; then leaving some of the troops at S. Fiorenzo, he sailed for Bastia, already closely blockaded by Nelson’s frigates and cut off from communication with the interior by the Corsicans, who excelled in all kinds of partisan warfare. Neither Hood’s ships nor the troops accompanying them were at this time in a satisfactory condition: his crews were so weak that he had tried to borrow sailors from the Neapolitan fleet, but without success; and the soldiers numbered little more than two thousand men, who were very ill provided for a campaign, as most of their camp equipage, baggage, and knapsacks had been left behind at Toulon. A board sat in Corsica to investigate the circumstances in which this loss—a very heavy one to the men—had been incurred, and recommended that £2 should be paid to each sergeant and £1 to each private soldier, adding that though this would not compensate the men for their kit, it was as much as Government could be reasonably expected to give.