Though Hood, as a sailor, was unversed in the military branches of the art of war, he decided after a reconnaissance of Bastia that it would be possible for the troops to carry the defences by a sudden assault from the land side of the town. Dundas, who though cautious by temperament was an educated soldier of much experience, condemned the project as beyond the powers of his small and ill-equipped force, and this difference of opinion at once intensified the friction already existing between the Admiral and the General. Unable to agree on a plan of operations, Hood and Dundas summoned conferences and councils of war, at which no decision was reached; and their relations became so strained that they ceased to meet, transacting business by means of formal and acrimonious correspondence. Throughout the army the question was hotly debated, and Bastia was reconnoitred by many officers, the large majority of whom became converts to Dundas’s opinions. Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, who commanded the XVIIIth, was one of the few in favour of an attack, but his views do not appear to have been supported by convincing arguments, for Sir John Moore (then Lieutenant-Colonel Moore, 51st regiment) recorded in his diary that “Wemyss conceives it would be mighty easy to take them” (i.e., the heights commanding the land fortifications), “but cannot explain how, and talks so like a boy that little weight can be given to his opinion.”[91] Hood’s conduct towards the General and the troops became so intolerable that Dundas took the unjustifiable step of resigning his command and returning to England. Not long after his departure reinforcements reached the officer in temporary command of the army, whose offer to co-operate in the operations was contemptuously rejected by Lord Hood; and thus, when on May 24th the garrison of 4500 men surrendered, the success was due to the Navy, whose blockading vessels had fairly starved the French into submission, while, with the exception of some artillerymen and the troops serving on the warships as marines, the land forces were hardly employed in the reduction of Bastia.
The only place in Corsica now remaining in the occupation of the French was Calvi, a well-fortified town on the western coast. Lieutenant-General the Hon. Charles Stuart, who on the day of the surrender of Bastia had arrived from England to replace Dundas, lost no time in reorganising his command, and then reconnoitred Calvi, where he was followed by Moore, who had been placed in command of a corps termed “the reserve,” and formed of the flank companies of the Royal Irish, the 50th, 51st, and the remains of the 2nd battalion of the Royals. Calvi was by no means an easy place to besiege, for it was surrounded on three sides by the sea and had good interior fortifications, with outer works of considerable strength. About eight hundred yards west of the town stood the Mozello, a bomb-proof, star-shaped fort, built of solid masonry and mounting ten guns; north of this fort was a smaller battery, flanked by an entrenchment, and to the east rose another battery of three guns. Two thousand yards south-west of the town the fort of Monteciesco commanded the approaches from the southward, which were also swept by the guns of two French frigates anchored in the bay. But though these works were formidable, Stuart considered that the “real strength of the defence lay in the height of the mountains and the rugged, rocky country over which it was necessary to penetrate. It was necessary to abandon regular approaches and to adopt rapid and forward movements.” He accordingly decided to bombard Fort Monteciesco with three 26-prs., and under cover of their fire to throw up a heavier battery at night within seven hundred and fifty yards of the Mozello. The labour of moving the guns, ammunition, and stores was immense, for roads had to be cut up the sides of steep hills nine hundred feet in height, and the cannon to be dragged by hand over the cliffs that overhang the landing-place. At the end of June more troops were brought round from Bastia; among them were the Royal Irish, recently reinforced by the return of the Pompée detachment, which rejoined in time to share in the fatigues and dangers of the siege.
On the evening of the 6th of July,[92] the Royal Irish were ordered to make a feigned attack on Monteciesco to draw the attention of the enemy from Moore’s column, which was preparing to throw up the battery against the Mozello. The ruse was successful; the XVIIIth showed themselves so ostentatiously that the French not only turned all their fire upon them, but reinforced Monteciesco with a body of men who had been posted on the very spot where Moore proposed to place his guns. By dint of great efforts the last of Moore’s 26-prs. was dragged into position just before daybreak, thus raising the number of ordnance playing upon Calvi to eleven guns and three mortars, whose fire forced the French to evacuate Monteciesco and move their warships out of range. Stuart then bombarded Mozello assiduously; the French replied with equal vigour; for some days our shot appeared to make little impression on the fort, but on the 18th of July the breach was reported to be practicable, and orders were issued for its assault that night. To conceal the real object of his movements, he arranged that an advance battery should be built in the night in order that the French might think the concentration of troops was merely for the protection of the working party. The task was entrusted to the 50th, who, undiscovered by the enemy, threw up the battery, and then, to quote the words of the despatch, “the Grenadiers, Light Infantry and 2nd Battalion Royals under Lieutenant-Colonel Moore of the 51st Regiment and Major Brereton of the 30th Regiment proceeded with a cool steady confidence and unloaded arms towards the enemy, forced their way through a smart fire of musketry, and regardless of live shells flung from the breach or the additional defence of pikes, stormed the Mozello” ... while “Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, equally regardless of opposition carried the enemy’s battery on the left without firing a shot.” In Sir John Moore’s diary fuller details of this spirited affair are to be found. The various corps assembled at their rendezvous at 1 A.M. on the 19th: the Royal Irish were to attack the half moon (or Fountain) battery on the left, while “the reserve” stormed the Mozello. In ground dead to the fort, though only two or three hundred yards distant from it, Moore formed the grenadiers and light infantry (among whom, it will be remembered, were the flank companies of the XVIIIth) into a column of companies.
“Each grenadier carried a sandbag, and we had a sufficient number of ladders (about fourteen in all). Here we waited for the signal which was to be a gun from the new battery. The General came to me about half-past three. About this time some of the enemy’s sentries or piquets fired upon the XVIIIth upon our left, and soon after the signal to advance was given. The General kept for some time at the head of the Grenadiers. A party of artificers a little in our front began to cut the palisades, but we were upon them before they could effect it. Captain McDonald, who commanded the Royal Grenadiers,[93] and I got through the palisades first at an opening made by our shot. The men instantly followed, and giving a cheer, ran up to the bottom of the breach. We were annoyed both by shot, hand-grenades, and live shells, which the enemy had placed on the parapet and rolled over upon us. Luckily neither sand-bags nor ladders were necessary. The Grenadiers advanced with their bayonets with such intrepidity that the French gave way and ran out of the fort—and in a moment the place was filled with the five companies of Grenadiers. Two companies of Light Infantry had been ordered to move quickly round the foot of the fort and get between the enemy and the town, but the Grenadiers stormed so briskly that the Light Infantry could not arrive in time: by this means most of them escaped.”
The Royal Irish lost no time in entrenching themselves in the Fountain battery, and worked so well that when at daybreak the enemy opened with grape and round shot the cannonade did them little harm.
Stuart had every reason for wishing to bring the operations to a close, for though his casualties were small, bad food, excessive fatigue, and a pestilential climate had so devastated the camp that by the middle of July two-thirds of his men were in hospital, and the remainder were breaking down at an alarming rate. The large number of sailors who were serving on shore under Nelson were in equally bad case, and the necessity of watching the French at Toulon made it impossible to replace them from the fleet. In the hope that the loss of their principal outworks had shaken the spirit of the French, General Stuart sent word to the garrison that he was prepared to offer them favourable terms; but when Casabianca, their commander, refused to negotiate, he pressed forward his siege-works so fast that on July 31, thirteen heavy guns, four mortars, and three howitzers were in position within six hundred yards of the walls of the town. So effective was their fire that on the 1st of August Casabianca asked for a suspension of hostilities, undertaking to yield in nine days if during that time he was not relieved from France, and as no help arrived the nine hundred men of the garrison surrendered on the 10th. In recognition of their spirited defence of Calvi, which had lasted for fifty-one days, they were granted excellent terms; they marched out with all the honours of war; they retained their side-arms; and they were sent back to France, free to serve against us again as soon as they pleased. The capture of Calvi only cost the British ninety killed and wounded, and the losses of the XVIIIth were proportionately small. Lieutenant W. Byron, whose death assured to his young relative, the future poet, the succession to the peerage, was killed; Lieutenant-Colonel D. D. Wemyss and Lieutenant W. Johnston were wounded; five rank and file were killed, one sergeant and seven rank and file wounded.[94] Yet so greatly had the regiment suffered during the siege from exposure and malarial fever, that when it marched into Calvi its effectives consisted of two officers, four sergeants, and seventy-one rank and file, and though the capitulation brought active operations to an end the losses by disease did not cease. Malaria had taken so firm a hold of the Royal Irish that including those who were killed or died of wounds or sickness during the siege, four officers, nine sergeants, six corporals, and a hundred and fifty-five private soldiers perished during the first nine months the regiment was in Corsica.[95] The mortality was at its height during the month of August, when seventy non-commissioned officers and men died.
Nothing is known of the doings of the XVIIIth during the remainder of our short occupation of Corsica, except that several of the officers were employed on the staff: one of them, Major (afterwards Lieutenant-General Sir H. T.) Montresor, after acting as Governor of Calvi, was placed in command of a battalion of islanders, one of the corps raised for local defence by Sir Gilbert Elliot, who had been appointed Viceroy of Corsica by the Government at home. The lives of the officers left at regimental duty must have been singularly dull, as there was so little communication with England that letters or papers rarely reached the island, and even the Ministry, apparently forgetful of the existence of their new possession, often allowed months to pass without communicating with Elliot. Some amount of cynical amusement, however, was to be derived from studying the mental attitude of the population, who, at first delighted to find themselves British subjects, soon grew weary of the restraints of law and order enforced upon them by their new rulers. The Corsicans watched with ever increasing pride the victories in Italy of their young compatriot, Napoleon Bonaparte; they realised that the English and their Allies made no headway against France on land, and they appreciated the importance of Spain’s change of policy, when after deserting the coalition against the Republic she placed her Mediterranean fleet at the disposal of our enemy. They gradually came to the conclusion that in annexing themselves to the British they had joined the losing side, and when the French troops overran Tuscany and seized upon Leghorn, the Corsicans began to give Elliot broad hints that they wished to see the last of him and his garrison of red-coats. The presence of the French in Leghorn, the principal port of Tuscany, was a direct menace to us in Corsica; and as a counterstroke Elliot threw troops into Porto Ferraio, the capital of the little island of Elba, half way between Bastia and Leghorn. To the Duke of Tuscany, part of whose dominions Elliot had thus occupied, the Viceroy justified himself by pointing out that as Tuscany had been unable to defend her territory on the mainland she would have been equally impotent to keep the French out of Elba.
In the autumn of 1796, the British Government, alarmed at the combination of the French and Spanish fleets, determined to recall their forces from the Mediterranean, and the order for the evacuation of Corsica was conveyed to Elliot by a despatch, wherein the abandonment of the island was described in the stilted language of the period as “the withdrawal of the blessing of the British Constitution from the people of Corsica.” As a preliminary to the general retirement the troops had to be concentrated at Elba; and the embarkation of the garrison of Bastia, which included some, if not all, of the Royal Irish, was effected in very dramatic circumstances. When Nelson arrived off the port on October 14, he found the town in wild confusion: a committee of virulent Anglophobists had seized the reins of power, and their adherents were virtually masters of the place; British property had been confiscated; British merchant ships were forcibly detained in harbour; a plot was on foot to make the Viceroy a prisoner, and the General, de Burgh, had withdrawn the garrison into the citadel, where they had been followed by large numbers of armed men who insisted on falling in with the guards and sentries at every post. By threatening to blow the town to pieces, Nelson succeeded in releasing the captured shipping and in saving public and private property valued at two hundred thousand pounds; but though the soldiers and sailors slaved night and day their work was by no means finished when, on the night of the 18th, news arrived that French troops had landed and were marching rapidly on Bastia, while the Spanish fleet was reported to be only sixty miles distant. Even Nelson realised that nothing more could be done: the troops began to move down to the boats, while the guns were spiked by Mawby, an officer of the XVIIIth, who with the grenadier company of the regiment had just been brought back from detachment on the neighbouring islet of Capreja. Though a heavy gale of wind was blowing and the sea was very high every soldier was safely embarked; and not too soon, for as the last boat pushed off from the shore the French advance-guard began to enter the citadel.
The resources of Elba were insufficient to meet the requirements of her suddenly increased population, and at first she drew largely from Piombino, the port of the district known as the Maremma of Tuscany. By garrisoning the town of Piombino and the villages in its neighbourhood, the French so effectually cut off this source of supply that at the beginning of November Elliot and de Burgh determined to make an effort to reopen communication with the mainland of Italy, and sent a column, chiefly composed of the Royal Irish, to drive the enemy from Piombino and the surrounding country.[96] The expedition is briefly mentioned by the Viceroy in a letter of November 6, 1796, where he says, “We take Piombino this evening. This will be the last act of my reign, and in truth the measure of Porto Ferraio was not complete without it. I shall then feel very happy about our supplies.”[97] No account of the operations is to be found in the printed bulletins or among the documents at the Record Office; but fortunately some details have been preserved in the Royal Military Calendar, in a précis of the services of General Montresor. Brevet-Colonel D. D. Wemyss, XVIIIth, was in command of the column which was composed of the Royal Irish,[98] under Montresor, then a lieutenant-colonel; two companies of de Roll’s Swiss regiment, one of the many corps of continental mercenaries raised at that time by Great Britain, and a detachment of artillery. These troops were embarked on three frigates, which anchored off Piombino early on November 7; Montresor was at once sent on shore to summon the Governor, who after some hesitation agreed to surrender, and without loss of time the soldiers landed. While Wemyss was taking measures to secure Piombino and to improvise transport for his men his heart must have sunk within him. Outside the walls of the town there were hardly any signs of life; autumnal rains had flooded the country in every direction; a few stone buildings, half farm, half fortress, rose like islands out of the water; thick woods concealed the villages on the neighbouring hills, whither for centuries the inhabitants of the Maremma have betaken themselves at night to avoid sleeping on the fever-stricken plain. After a few hours’ hard work Montresor, with a detachment of five hundred men and three field-guns, marched to attack the garrison of Campiglia, a village ten miles off. The country was inundated for three miles, but