“the hedges and trees on either side of the road being their guide the British waded through, though the buffalos attached to their guns had twice knocked up. On approaching the town the Lieutenant-Colonel sent his light company under Captain Dunlop by another road to cut off the enemy’s picquets from the town, and to enter it by the Leghorn road, both of which were executed; after exchanging a few shots with the enemy’s outposts, finding the British in their rear, they were compelled to disperse in the woods, which left the town open to complete surprise, inasmuch, that in front of his advance guard, at one o’clock after midnight, Lieut.-Colonel Montresor got into the town with a confidential servant unperceived, and personally seized an orderly French dragoon going with despatches to the garrison of Castiglione from the Commandant of Campiglia to announce the British having landed at Piombino: the entrance to the town was conducted with so much silence and arrangement that the Royal Irish Grenadiers reached the French main guard just as the enemy were turning out under arms, and rushing on them compelled them to lay down their arms, while the Commandant, (whose quarters were over the main guard), escaped by dropping out of his window over the town walls, leaving his supper, (which he had deferred to this late hour) on the table, and which was finished by the British officers when the prisoners were secured and the British patrols and picquets had been placed.
“Colonel Wemyss having proceeded to attack Castiglione, Lieut.-Colonel Montresor secured his post so effectually that during three months the strong garrison of Leghorn never molested them. This little expedition being effectually accomplished, and the troops of Elba having formed their depôts, the British force was ordered back to Elba.”
Much had happened while the Royal Irish were on the mainland of Italy. In November the fleet had been obliged to go to Gibraltar for stores, and at the end of the year Nelson had reappeared at Elba with orders from the Admiral, Sir John Jervis (afterwards Lord St Vincent), to embark the naval establishment and rejoin him in the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson, however, brought no instructions for de Burgh, and when he suggested that as the Navy had abandoned the Mediterranean it was useless for the troops to remain in Elba, the brave old general, though much perplexed at the situation, decided not to quit his post without orders from his military superiors. Nelson therefore had no option but to abandon de Burgh and his three thousand troops to their fate, and leaving transports enough for the whole of the garrison, and a few vessels with which to keep up communication with the mainland, he rejoined Jervis early in February, 1797. But neither Jervis nor Nelson forgot that a detachment of the British army was marooned in a little island off the coast of Tuscany in imminent danger of capture by the French, and soon after the great naval victory of Cape St Vincent, Nelson dashed back into the Mediterranean, ascertained that de Burgh and his troops were safe, and convoyed them safely to Gibraltar. The Royal Irish landed at the end of April or the beginning of May,[99] and formed part of the garrison of the Rock until, two years later, they again were embarked for active service.
Though the failure of the expedition to Holland in the winter of 1799 had added one more to the list of our unsuccessful enterprises against the French on the continent of Europe, the spring of 1800 found preparations on foot in England for another effort on land against the Republic. Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby, with twenty thousand men, was to disembark on the coast of Italy near Genoa, occupy the maritime Alps, and by cutting the lines of communication between Italy and France relieve the pressure on the Austrians, who faced the French on the plains of Lombardy. Owing, however, to the fear of a Franco-Spanish invasion of Portugal and the consequent loss of the Tagus as a friendly port, a large proportion of Abercromby’s force was kept back to defend Lisbon in case of need, and when Sir Ralph reached Port Mahon, the capital of Minorca, which since its recapture in 1798 had become our advanced post in the Mediterranean, he had only six thousand men available for active operations. He found despatches awaiting him from General Melas, the Austrian Commander-in-Chief in Italy, begging that British troops might be sent to Genoa, which, after a heroic defence by the French under Massena, had recently surrendered to the Austrians. Melas himself was unable to garrison it adequately: would Abercromby therefore do so? Ordering four thousand men, among whom were the XVIIIth Royal Irish, 571 strong, to follow him, Abercromby sailed at once, but on the voyage learned that at Marengo Napoleon had defeated the Austrians, who were retreating all along their line, and had evacuated Genoa. After definitely ascertaining that co-operation with Melas had become impossible, he returned to Minorca, where for many weeks the expedition awaited fresh orders from home. During the halt Abercromby, with the help of Moore who commanded one of his brigades, devoted himself to the improvement of the troops. He strengthened their discipline, made their equipment suitable for active service, and cut down the personal baggage of officers and men to the articles absolutely necessary for a campaign. While he was at Minorca reinforcements gradually reached him, including a body of three thousand eight hundred men who had been on the point of attacking Belle Isle, off the western coast of France, when they were hurriedly diverted to the Mediterranean. Thus, when at the end of August instructions reached him to make a raid against the Spanish port of Cadiz, Abercromby, after providing an adequate garrison for Minorca, was able to embark between ten and eleven thousand men.
A fortnight was spent on the voyage to Gibraltar, where on September 19, he was joined by a large number of troops under Lieutenant-General Sir James Pulteney, the Colonel of the Royal Irish regiment.[100] Pulteney had been sent from England to destroy Ferrol, a naval station on the north-west coast of Spain. He had landed, driven the Spaniards back to the shelter of their works, and then discovered that the Government had sent him on a fool’s errand. Ferrol was well armed and fortified, and as he was not nearly strong enough to attack it, he wisely abandoned the enterprise, re-embarked his men, and made sail for the Rock of Gibraltar.[101] Thanks to Pulteney’s arrival, Abercromby’s command now consisted of about twenty thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry and artillerymen, and in a few days a fleet of a hundred and thirty British men-of-war and troop-ships appeared before Cadiz, the most important naval harbour in the south of Spain. In the conduct of this expedition the General had by no means a free hand, for the Ministry, while ordering him to attack Cadiz, seize the arsenal, and destroy its docks and shipping, emphatically enjoined upon him not to run much risk, and not to land his troops unless he was confident that he could re-embark them safely. Operations conducted on such lines were doomed to failure. After much discussion with the naval authorities, a few thousand troops, including the XVIIIth, were crowded into boats and started for the shore, only to be recalled in a few minutes to their respective vessels, for the Admiral finally declined to guarantee their safe return to the ships if once they landed. After a fruitless paper war between Abercromby and his naval colleague the whole fleet made sail, successful only in having covered itself with ridicule. In a few hours a great storm arose: the ships were driven in every direction along the coast of Morocco, where for many days they tossed and rolled in a tempestuous sea until the weather moderated and they reached Gibraltar.
During this storm, and indeed during the whole of the many months that Abercromby’s command spent on board ship, the sufferings of the troops were great. The transports were so leaky that when it rained the men were constantly wet; so crowded that there was often not room on the decks for all to lie down at the same time; so ill-provided that the soldiers had no bedding, no covering other than their regimental blankets if, indeed, they were lucky enough to possess such articles. The food was not only indifferent, but inadequate, for an idea prevailed that the ration issued on shore was enough for a man who was taking hard exercise, and therefore on board ship, where the soldier theoretically was a passenger with nothing to do, he required less to eat than on land. In practice the soldier on board a transport had to work as hard as a sailor, and consequently was underfed. His diet of salt pork and biscuit, his ration of water, often scanty and generally tasting strongly of the barrels in which it was stored, and the absence of vegetables all combined to reduce his strength, and he often fell a prey to the scurvy which in those days devastated the fleet.
While the soldiers were still in the Straits of Gibraltar, where, as a sea-sick officer wrote, “the tossing of the ship rendered our situation as landsmen at once inconvenient and ridiculous,” Abercromby received despatches of great importance. Dundas, the War Minister of England, had become inspired with a great idea—to abandon the “policy of pin-pricks” by which the conduct of our campaigns in Europe had been hitherto regulated, and strike a blow in defence of the Empire as a whole. The year after we had abandoned Elba Napoleon had embarked in the south of France with forty thousand men, and after seizing Malta made himself master of Egypt and sent emissaries to India, whose intrigues among the native princes complicated our situation in the East.[102] When he returned to France in 1799 he left behind him an army of occupation, whose presence was a continual danger to our power in Hindustan. This army Dundas determined to drive out, and with the reluctant assent of the other members of the Cabinet he now ordered Abercromby to prepare for a campaign in Lower Egypt, while a column, formed of a regiment from Cape Colony[103] and of British and native troops from India, was to land at Kosseir on the Red Sea, strike across the desert to Upper Egypt, descend the Nile, and fall upon the enemy from the rear.[104]
The surrender of the French garrison in Malta on September 5, 1800, placed the island at our disposal, and this, our latest conquest, was fixed as the rendezvous of the fleet, which arrived there in detachments from Gibraltar throughout November. While his troops rested the General strove, though with poor results, to supplement the scanty information about the topography and resources of Egypt vouchsafed to him by Dundas, who had provided him with nothing but an indifferent map of the country and copies of correspondence of doubtful value, intercepted between the French generals at Cairo and their official superiors in Paris. Abercromby, however, learned enough to convince him that without plenty of small craft of light draught he could not land anywhere in Egypt, and on the 20th of December he weighed anchor for the Bay of Marmorice—a deep inlet on the coast of Caramania, one of the provinces of Asia Minor belonging to the Sultan, who was co-operating with England in the Egyptian expedition. Here the General expected to obtain shipping, and the horses with which his cavalry and artillery were still unprovided, but when after a tempestuous voyage he reached his destination on January 2, 1801, he found the Turkish officials so dilatory that he was forced to spend six weeks at Marmorice. Never was time more usefully employed, however, than during this long halt. The troops landed, drilled, collected a great store of firewood for use in Egypt, and prepared gabions and fascines for siege operations. The ships’ carpenters were occupied in making small water-kegs and canteens, and light wooden sleighs to be drawn by hand across the desert. Both services were constantly practised in the art of disembarkation, and before the fleet again put to sea the soldiers could swarm down the sides of the transports and take their places in the boats without confusion; while the sailors who rowed the flotilla had learned to keep station and to reach the shore in the prescribed order.
In conceiving the idea of the expedition to Egypt Dundas apparently thought he had done all that could be expected from him, and took no trouble about details. He failed to comply with Abercromby’s requisitions for stores and matériel. He did not even send him the bullion for which Sir Ralph frequently petitioned, and left him so short of actual cash that for three months the army was unpaid, and the only way by which cavalry horses could be bought at Marmorice was with specie produced by well-to-do officers. It is not surprising, therefore, that Abercromby wrote, “We are now on the point of sailing for the coast of Egypt with very slender means for executing the orders we have received. I never went on any service entertaining greater doubt of success, at the same time with more determination to encounter difficulties.... The Dutch expedition was walking on velvet compared to this.”[105] On February 22, he put to sea, and after a stormy passage of eight days reached Aboukir Bay—a wide indentation on the western coast of the delta of the Nile, where in August, 1798, Nelson had destroyed the fleet which had convoyed Napoleon’s army to Egypt. Though for several days the waves were too high to admit of disembarkation, small ships were able to reconnoitre the coast closely, and their reports determined Abercromby to land on a narrow promontory which, running north-east from Alexandria for eight or nine miles, separates the waters of the Mediterranean from those of Lake Aboukir, or Lake Madie as it is sometimes called.[106]
Sir Ralph’s effective strength consisted of about 16,000 men,[107] including the live hundred cavalry for whom horses had been obtained, and the gunners with sixteen field-pieces. The infantry were formed into six brigades and a reserve; the latter, a unit double the strength of any of the other brigades, was commanded by Major-General (afterwards Sir John) Moore. The XVIIIth doubtless wished to serve under the orders of Moore, whose worth they had learned at Calvi, but, with the 8th, 13th, and 90th regiments, found themselves under Major-General Cradock, whose brigade (the second) was composed of battalions of very unequal strength; the 90th had 850 officers and men; the 13th were weaker by a hundred; the 8th had 538 of all ranks, while the roll of the XVIIIth only bore 523 names.[108] Not all the men in Abercromby’s little army were British born. About 2700 were foreigners: Stuart’s Minorca regiment was a collection of ne’er-do-weels from every country in Europe; De Roll’s was composed of Swiss; Dillon’s of French Royalists; Hompesch’s dragoons were Germans, while the Corsican Rangers probably contained some of the men first raised and disciplined by Montresor of the XVIIIth. To meet this expedition Menou, the French Commander-in-Chief, had under his orders about 21,500 combatants; his cavalry was superb; he possessed sixty-six field-guns; many of his infantry were veterans whom Napoleon had led from victory to victory in the plains of Lombardy. Eleven thousand troops were concentrated at Cairo, 6000 were allotted to the defence of Alexandria and of the coast from that city to Rosetta; 1800 held the country round Damietta; 1000 were absorbed by the garrisons of Suez, Balbeis, and Salalieh; the remainder were stationed in Upper Egypt. The news of Abercromby’s appearance off the Delta reached Cairo about the same time as a report that a Turkish force was advancing slowly through Syria upon Egypt. Menou, puzzled by the situation, frittered away his strength by sending detachments to unimportant points; he did not at once reinforce Alexandria, and thus when Abercromby disembarked he was met by only two thousand men with fifteen pieces of field artillery.