In March, 1799, a picquet of sixty Polish soldiers was captured between Capua and Fondi by the Calabrese, who put every one of them to death. In the Campagna Frenchmen were roasted alive by the peasantry, or tied naked to trees and left to be devoured by dogs and wolves. Stragglers were destroyed by every means barbarity could devise.
The King of Naples, who had come from Sicily, fled again; and General Mack, before he was blocked up in Capua, wrote in these terms:—
"Sire, of forty thousand men with whom I entered the Roman territory, only twelve thousand remain; and, of these, many are going over daily to the French."
Macdonald, with Championnet, laid siege to Capua, where Mack made a vigorous resistance and repulsed them; but the attack was renewed with fresh fury; the city was won by assault, and the remains of the Neapolitan army, who had gathered courage from despair, and whom shame for past defeats inspired with a glow of double vengeance, perished under the bayonets of the French. Their bodies choked the bed of the Volturno; and for six leagues from thence the road to Naples was strewed with their dead and dying, till even the conquerors grew tired of slaughter. When Mack yielded himself a prisoner of war to the General of Division, he proffered his sword, a handsome weapon, which had been presented to him by the King of Great Britain in 1795.
Championnet laughed, and returned it to him, saying—
"Keep your sword, M. le General, the laws of the Republic prohibit the use of British manufactures."
At this time the rage of the French army against their peculating commissaries was great, for they had suffered severely by the scarcity of provisions; but Championnet and Macdonald skilfully turned this discontent against the enemy.
"Soldiers," they exclaimed, after the fall of Capua, "your magazines are at Naples!"
"Let us march, then—to Naples lead us!" was the reply, and to the capital the fugitives of Mack's army were pursued. A dreadful slaughter was made among the Lazzaroni, for a fresh struggle ensued at Naples, and every house from which the troops were fired on was burned to the ground, and its inmates bayoneted.
Macdonald had distinguished himself in every engagement with the unfortunate Mack; but now a series of disputes ensued between him and Championnet, who had many troubles to contend with. Irritated by the devastations committed by the Sieur Faitpoult, Commissary of the Directory, the general commanding ordered him to quit Naples, with his horde of plunderers, within twenty-four hours. Faitpoult, instead of obeying, raised the standard of mutiny against Championnet, but was forced to retire.