Napoleon buried in the breaches of Acre not merely 3000 of his bravest troops, but the golden dream of his life. "In that miserable fort," as he said, "lay the fate of the East." Napoleon expected to find in it the pasha's treasures, and arms for 300,000 men. "When I have captured it," he said to Bourrienne, "I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. I shall arm the tribes; I shall reach Constantinople; I shall overturn the Turkish Empire; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire. Perhaps I shall return to Paris by Adrianople and Vienna!" Napoleon was cheerfully willing to pay the price of what religion he had to accomplish this dream. He was willing, that is, to turn Turk. Henri IV. said "Paris was worth a mass," and was not the East, said Napoleon, "worth a turban and a pair of trousers?" In his conversation at St. Helena with Las Cases he seriously defended this policy. His army, he added, would have shared his "conversion," and have taken their new creed with a Parisian laugh. "Had I but captured Acre," Napoleon added, "I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I would have changed the face of the world. But that man made me miss my destiny."
Las Cases dwells upon the curious correspondence which existed between Philippeaux, who engineered the defences of Acre, and Napoleon, who attacked it. "They were," he says, "of the same nation, of the same age, of the same rank, of the same corps, and of the same school." But if Philippeaux was in a sense the brains of the defence, Sidney Smith was the sword. There was, perhaps, it may be regretfully confessed, a streak of the charlatan in him. He shocked the judgment of more sober men. Wellington's stern, sober sense was affronted by him, and he described him as "a mere vaporiser." "Of all the men whom I ever knew who have any reputation," Wellington told Croker "the man who least deserved it is Sir Sidney Smith." Wellington's temperament made it impossible for him to understand Sidney Smith's erratic and dazzling genius. Napoleon's phrase is the best epitaph of the man who defended Acre. It is true Napoleon himself describes Sidney Smith afterwards as "a young fool," who was "capable of invading France with 800 men." But such "young fools" are often the makers of history.
GREAT SEA-DUELS
"The captain stood on the carronade: 'First Lieutenant,' says he,
'Send all my merry men after here, for they must list to me.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my sons, because I'm bred to the sea.
That ship there is a Frenchman, who means to fight with we.
And odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds—but I've gained the victory!
********
That ship there is a Frenchman, and if we don't take she,
'Tis a thousand bullets to one, that she will capture we.
I haven't the gift of the gab, my boys; so each man to his gun;
If she's not mine in half-an-hour, I'll flog each mother's son.
For odds, bobs, hammer and tongs, long as I've been to sea,
I've fought 'gainst every odds—and I've gained the victory!'"
—MARRYAT.
British naval history is rich in the records of what may be called great sea-duels—combats, that is, of single ship against single ship, waged often with extraordinary fierceness and daring. They resemble the combat of knight against knight, with flash of cannon instead of thrust of lance, and the floor of the lonely sea for the trampled lists.
He must have a very slow-beating imagination who cannot realise the picturesqueness of these ancient sea-duels. Two frigates cruising for prey catch the far-off gleam of each other's topsails over the rim of the horizon. They approach each other warily, two high-sniffing sea-mastiffs. A glimpse of fluttering colour—the red flag and the drapeau blanc, or the Union Jack and the tricolour—reveals to each ship its foe. The men stand grimly at quarters; the captain, with perhaps a solitary lieutenant, and a middy as aide-de-camp, is on his quarter-deck. There is the manoeuvring for the weather-gage, the thunder of the sudden broadside, the hurtle and crash of the shot, the stern, quick word of command as the clumsy guns are run in to be reloaded and fired again and again with furious haste. The ships drift into closer wrestle. Masts and yards come tumbling on to the blood-splashed decks. There is the grinding shock of the great wooden hulls as they meet, the wild leap of the boarders, the clash of cutlass on cutlass, the shout of victory, the sight of the fluttering flag as it sinks reluctantly from the mizzen of the beaten ship. Then the smoke drifts away, and on the tossing sea-floor lie, little better than dismantled wrecks, victor and vanquished.
No great issue, perhaps, ever hung upon these lonely sea-combats; but as object-lessons in the qualities by which the empire has been won, and by which it must be maintained, these ancient sea-fights have real and permanent value. What better examples of cool hardihood, of chivalrous loyalty to the flag, of self-reliant energy, need be imagined or desired? The generation that carries the heavy burden of the empire to-day cannot afford to forget the tale of such exploits.
One of the most famous frigate fights in British history is that between the Arethusa and La Belle Poule, fought off Brest on June 17, 1778. Who is not familiar with the name and fame of "the saucy Arethusa"? Yet there is a curious absence of detail as to the fight. The combat, indeed, owes its enduring fame to two somewhat irrelevant circumstances—first, that it was fought when France and England were not actually at war, but were trembling on the verge of it. The sound of the Arethusa's guns, indeed, was the signal of war between the two nations. The other fact is that an ingenious rhymester—scarcely a poet—crystallised the fight into a set of verses in which there is something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song.
The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest. Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to a British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her American colonies, and there was every sign that France intended to add herself to the fight. No fewer than thirty-two sail of the line and twelve frigates were gathered in Brest roads, and another fleet of almost equal strength in Toulon. Spain, too, was slowly collecting a mighty armament. What would happen to England if the Toulon and Brest fleets united, were joined by a third fleet from Spain, and the mighty array of ships thus collected swept up the British Channel? On June 13, 1778, Keppel, with twenty-one ships of the line and three frigates, was despatched to keep watch over the Brest fleet. War had not been proclaimed, but Keppel was to prevent a junction of the Brest and Toulon fleets, by persuasion if he could, but by gunpowder in the last resort.