CHAPTER X
PREPARATIONS FOR WAR WITH ENGLAND—FLOTILLA AT BOULOGNE—SALE OF LOUISIANA
In the spring of 1803 the treaty of Amiens, which a year before had ended the long war with England, was broken. Both countries had many reasons for complaint. Napoleon was angry at the failure to evacuate Malta. The perfect freedom allowed the press in England gave the pamphleteers and caricaturists of the country an opportunity to criticize and ridicule him. He complained bitterly to the English ambassadors of this free press, an institution in his eyes impractical and idealistic. He complained, too, of the hostile émigrés allowed to collect in Jersey; of the presence in England of such a notorious enemy of his as Georges Cadoudal; and of the sympathy and money the Bourbon princes and many nobles of the old régime received in London society. Then, too, he regarded the country as his natural and inevitable enemy. England to Napoleon was only a little island which, like Corsica and Elba, naturally belonged to France, and he considered it part of his business to get possession of her.
England, on the other hand, looked with distrust at the extension of Napoleon’s influence on the Continent. Northern Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Parma, Elba, were under his protectorate. She had been deeply offended by a report published in Paris, on the condition of the Orient, in which the author declared that with six thousand men the French could reconquer Egypt; she resented the violent articles in the official press of Paris in answer to those of the free press of England; her aristocratic spirit was irritated by Napoleon’s success; she despised this parvenu, this “Corsican scoundrel,” as Nelson called him, who had had the hardihood to rise so high by other than the conventional methods for getting on in the world which she sanctioned.
Real and fancied aggressions continued throughout the year of the peace; and when the break finally came, though both nations persisted in declaring that they did not want war, both were in a thoroughly warlike mood.
Napoleon’s preparations against England form one of the most picturesque military movements in his career. Unable to cope with his enemy at sea, he conceived the audacious notion of invading the island, and laying siege to London itself. The plan briefly was this—to gather a great army on the north shore of France, and in some port a flotilla sufficient to transport it to Great Britain. In order to prevent interference with this expedition, he would keep the enemy’s fleet occupied in the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic, until the critical moment. Then, leading the English naval commander by stratagem in the wrong direction, he would call his own fleet to the Channel to protect his passage. He counted to be in London, and to have compelled the English to peace, before Nelson could return from the chase he would have led him.
The preparations began at once. The port chosen for the flotilla was Boulogne; but the whole coast from Antwerp to the mouth of the Seine bristled with iron and bronze. Between Calais and Boulogne, at Cape Gris Nez, where the navigation was the most dangerous, the batteries literally touched one another. Fifty thousand men were put to work at the stupendous excavations necessary to make the ports large enough to receive the flotilla. Large numbers of troops were brought rapidly into the neighborhood: fifty thousand men to Boulogne, under Soult; thirty thousand to Etaples, under Ney; thirty thousand to Ostend, under Davoust; reserves to Arras, Amiens, Saint-Omer.
The work of preparing the flat-bottomed boats, or walnut-shells, as the English called them, which were to carry over the army, went on in all the ports of Holland and France, as well as in interior towns situated on rivers leading to the sea. The troops were taught to row, each soldier being obliged to practise two hours a day so that the rivers of all the north of France were dotted with land-lubbers handling the oar, the most of them for the first time.
In the summer of 1803, Napoleon went to the north to look after the work. His trip was one long ovation. Le Chemin d’Angleterre was the inscription the people of Amiens put on the triumphal arch erected to his honor, and town vied with town in showing its joy at the proposed descent on the old-time enemy.
Such was the interest of the people, that a thousand projects were suggested to help on the invasion, some of them most amusing. In a learned and thoroughly serious memorial, one genius proposed that while the flotilla was preparing, the sailors be employed in catching dolphins, which should be shut up in the ports, tamed, and taught to wear a harness, so as to be driven, in the water, as horses are on land. This novel power was to transport the French to the opposite side of the Channel.
Napoleon occupied himself not only with the preparations at Boulogne and with keeping Nelson busy elsewhere. Every project which could possibly facilitate his undertaking or discomfit his enemies, he considered. Fulton’s diving boat, the “Nautilus,” and his submarine torpedoes, were at that time attracting the attention of the war departments of civilized countries. Already Napoleon had granted ten thousand francs to help the inventor. From the camp at Boulogne he again ordered the matter to be looked into. Fulton promised him a machine which “would deliver France and the whole world from British oppression.”