Nelson (85 page)

During the establishment of his new seaside batteries Nelson customarily walked from the main camp to inspect the work, taking a circuitous but safe route sheltered from enemy fire. But on the 19th he and Captain Fremantle, who occasionally served on shore, took a short cut. A shot from the Toga tower whined by, thumped into a nearby rock and flung stone and earth with the force of a bursting grenade. Nelson rose shakily to his feet to find that he had nothing more than an unpleasant cut in his back, while the captain of the
Tartar
was showered with dirt. Brushing himself down, Fremantle waggishly vowed he would never take the short cut again.
⁶⁸

In normal times the French relieved their garrison at Bastia regularly, every fortnight in the formidably hot summer months. But there was no relief from the British ships and boats hugging the harbour, or from Villettes and Nelson’s guns as they hammered day and night, the shells tracing fiery arcs when they flew through the hours of darkness. Military positions were the main targets, but much fell indiscriminately upon civilian buildings. Hood expected the town to stand only ten or so days of bombardment, but he was wrong. Ten days passed, then twenty and then thirty, but still the French held out and the monotonous thud of the guns and the shriek of shot and shells went on. At the beginning of May the defenders remained defiant, and swore they would ‘give bomb for bomb’. Like his admiral, Nelson marvelled at their dogged resistance.
⁶⁹

It was not that the seamen and artillerists manning the British batteries were not scoring hits, though some of the foreign equipment was proving to be poor stuff. ‘The Neapolitan mortars [are] not worth a farthing,’ growled Fremantle. ‘They crack. The shells don’t fit them, [though they] were very pretty in the nights to see the shells flying.’ But ‘great damage’ was being inflicted on the northern part of the town, where even stone houses were being reduced to rubble or having their roofs smashed in. The Cabanelle camp was quickly silenced, and the town batteries twice demolished, though the French worked desperately to repair fractured barricades and restore guns to action. Reports intimated a rising toll of dead and wounded. A surgeon who got out of the town on the 23rd said that several had been slain and most of nearly three hundred hospital patients were battle casualties. A boat loaded with fifty-four sick and wounded, including the former captain of the frigate
La Fortunée
, tried to flee Bastia on 12 May and was captured by the
Agamemnon
. Its occupants put the casualties at five hundred and fifty, and gave a ‘dismal’ account of the ‘distresses’ in the town. At the end of the siege the figure had climbed to some 743, most of them dead, a higher casualty rate than Calvi would suffer in the months ahead.
⁷⁰

The bombardment multiplied the misery of the defenders and probably weakened their morale. They failed to counterattack, and apparently dreaded an overwhelming general assault, something that suggests that they thought themselves greatly outnumbered. The French were also low on food and gunpowder, and rested their hopes on small
boats bringing supplies and reinforcements from Capraia. The inhabitants of Bastia had probably been short of provisions when the siege began, stinted by Nelson’s ships over recent months, but now Hood’s tight blockade almost closed the port. The admiral knew the important role the blockade would play. ‘All we have to do is to keep succours out of Bastia,’ he said. At the end of April a formidable number of ships and boats were still before the port. The
Victory
,
Princess Royal
,
Fortitude
,
Agamemnon
and
Illustrious
ships of the line, the fifty-gun
Romney
, the frigates the
Tartar
and
Meleager
, the
Gorgon
store ship under Nelson’s old comrade James Wallis, the
Scout
brig and a flotilla of gunboats all busied themselves offshore. Elliot believed that their work was ‘the chief means’ of British success.
⁷¹

By the last week of April the contest had become a grim battle of wills, but both sides were reviewing their situations. Among the French despondency was growing. Little food was getting through, the dispiriting fire continued and the British were closing the range with new advanced batteries. On the dark night of 25 April two figures in disguise crept like criminals to a felucca in the harbour and fled the doomed town. They were Lacombe St Michel and his military commander. They got away, but to no advantage to the besieged. In France, St Michel excused his flight by saying he wanted to prevent a relief expedition risking the trip from Toulon when Bastia was so close to surrender; the town, in other words, had to be abandoned. Back in the forlorn town his deserted soldiers, especially those crouched in squalid redoubts and behind shot-splintered walls, hoped he was bringing flour and gunpowder but when nothing came drew their own conclusions.
⁷²

While the defenders faced each dawn with diminished hope, Nelson had also realised that his attack had not lived up to expectations, and that Bastia was a tougher nut to crack than he had anticipated. He had banked on the bombardment and blockade inducing the garrison to surrender, but the French were showing remarkable steadiness under fire. Their obduracy invited the British to storm, but that prospect seemed some way off. Nelson’s guns were too distant to make a breach in the citadel, and while the nearest enemy strongpoint, the Cabanelle, was being battered and broken it was powerfully manned. Eight hundred men defended the camp, enough to deter Villettes from launching a premature assault. On 26 April, Nelson was almost as deflated as his French opponents, and had begun to talk about the futile bombardment and need for reinforcements as if his name was D’Aubant.
⁷³

It was increasingly obvious that while Nelson’s attack was a useful supplementary or diversionary operation, it fell short of substituting for the proper assault that ought to have been made from the heights behind the town. The new redoubts the French had thrown up below the mountain crest, occupying places the British troops ought to have secured after the fall of St Fiorenzo, were far from ideal for bombarding the citadel. Only one of them, the Guaduola redoubt near Cardo, was as close to the citadel as any of Nelson’s batteries, though British guns established there would have gained something from elevation. But they certainly commanded the indifferently manned hill forts immediately below, and in British hands those posts, positioned just above the town itself, would have outflanked Bastia and soon foreclosed any resistance.

As Hood, Nelson and Villettes fretted at their slow progress they were increasingly intrigued by the possibility that even at this stage a successful attack might be made upon the upper posts. According to enemy deserters and the Corsican partisans who stole about to snipe at French sentries, they were weakly garrisoned. It appeared that the four stone hill forts had been bled of men to create the same number of advanced redoubts further up. All eight forts or redoubts were connected, but only Guaduola was thought to house as many as two hundred men. Admiral Hood and Elliot pondered the subject again in the
Victory
, and wondered whether the French on the heights might have grown complacent. Hitherto, the British had concentrated their attack solely upon the town below, and even in Bastia it was now known that most of the redcoats were refusing to advance. Perhaps a sudden fog-shrouded assault might yet catch the upper posts off guard.
⁷⁴

Sir Gilbert was a genial, worldly man, but the testier tone his letters adopted in April betrayed a dwindling patience with General D’Aubant. He had long since addressed a ‘secret and confidential’ letter to the minister of war seeking the general’s immediate recall. ‘We are at this moment entirely ignorant whether he proposes to stir or not,’ carped Sir Gilbert, ‘and I am internally convinced that nothing will move him but the fear . . . of Lord Hood’s separate success.’ At home the recipient, Henry Dundas, thought Hood part of the problem. He hurried out a new military commander with orders to repair the damage between the services, but was careful to ensure that his instructions clearly made him independent of the imperial admiral.
⁷⁵

While the wheels of the administration turned slowly, in Corsica
the final appeals were being made to General D’Aubant. On 18 April, Hood and Elliot jointly invited the general to attack the heights. Now, however, the gulf between the commanders was wider than ever. Hood had been commandeering any army supplies he could find in the ships without a by-your-leave, and the appeal itself was laced with acid sarcasm:

If you had happened, in the course of the last fortnight, to have visited the ground or observed the operations of His Majesty’s troops at this place, which is within four hours’ walk of your headquarters, whatever your first opinion may have been concerning this expedition or whatever it may still be of its ultimate success, you would have had an opportunity of satisfying yourself beyond a doubt that the enemy may be effectually annoyed . . .
⁷⁶

Neither this, nor the statement that D’Aubant would be held to blame for ‘the evils’ that flowed from a delay in the capture of Bastia, moved the general. He was as unyielding as the rocky Corsican heights. Whatever their differences his officers also rallied behind him in a meeting of 22 April, and reaffirmed the judgement that ‘with the whole of our force we were unequal to the taking of Bastia’. On 1 May Hood tried again, and for the last time. Even ‘a show of an intention’ to attack the upper posts might distract the French, he suggested. The general’s reply was as specious as it was final. When Hood read that ‘a mere show’ of attacking would only ‘lessen the respect in which the enemy should ever be kept to hold [off] a British force’, he must have realised that there could be no meeting of minds.
⁷⁷

With the enemy in sight Captain Nelson was rarely depressed for long. His warrior spirit was soon returning, and he searched for new and more effective sites for his artillery. At the end of April he established batteries upon the ridge above Cabanelle, where poor Clark had been hit, shifting two eighteen-pound carronades and twelve- and nine-pound cannons up horrific gradients. ‘The work of getting up guns to this battery was a work of the greatest difficulty, and which never in my opinion would have been accomplished by any other than British seamen,’ Nelson said proudly. Manned by Lieutenant Andrews and five sailors, and protected by soldiers and Corsican skirmishers, the fresh pieces opened fire on May Day. No sooner had they spoken than Nelson had his men dragging a big twenty-four and a howitzer to another part of the ridge. By 8 May three cannons, two carronades and a howitzer were barking from above the Cabanelle. Stationed only
a mile from the citadel, their fire also gained from the greater elevation and was soon ‘sorely’ mutilating the French defences.
⁷⁸

On 15 May the British captured a boat attempting to bring gunpowder from Capraia to Bastia, and on board was a brother of Jean-Baptiste Galeazzini, the mayor of the besieged town. As Hood interrogated the prisoner aboard the
Victory
it became obvious that the citizens of Bastia lived in dread of their town being sacked by wild and uncontrollable partisans. To rule out a massacre the mayor’s brother offered to act as an intermediary, and to send the town his disheartening news that their gunpowder was no longer coming. Suddenly events began to move quickly.

On the 19th someone excitedly drew Nelson’s attention to a flag of truce ascending the
Victory
, and during the dying afternoon boats began flitting between the fleet and town. Something was afoot, but with the guns silent and waiting, Nelson, Villettes and their sweatstained followers could only sit tense and expectant.

Then suddenly enemy officers were striding out of the Cabanelle to shake hands with the besiegers. After forty-five days it was over. Despite self-doubts and the forebodings of ‘Fiorenzo wiseheads’ Bastia had fallen.
⁷⁹

Nelson, by valour led to deathless fame,

All toils surmounted, and all foes o’ercome,

Braved every danger, calm and undismay’d,

Whilst some new triumph marked each step he made.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

ON 24 May a tired but excited Captain Nelson made an entry in his journal. ‘At daylight this morning the most glorious sight an Englishman, and which I believe none but an Englishman, could experience was to be seen. Four thousand five hundred men laying down their arms to less than 1,000 English [British] soldiers. Our loss of men in taking this town containing upwards of 14,000 inhabitants, and [which] fully inhabited would contain 25,000, was the smallest possible to be conceived.’
¹

It was a magnification, of course, though perhaps an excusable one, for the capture of Bastia was a triumph plucked from professional pessimism. After the formal capitulation on the 22nd, Nelson saw his foes yield their outposts and then the citadel, and watched thousands of French soldiers and their Corsican auxiliaries tramp grimly to the mole head to ground their muskets and board the transports waiting to ship them home. He had transmitted the heartfelt thanks of Admiral Hood to all the men who had served ashore.

The British had fired twenty thousand round shot and shells during the siege, and expended a thousand barrels of powder, but in terms of manpower it had been an inexpensive conquest. Only sixty men
had been killed or wounded. The casualties included seven from the
Agamemnon
, one of them Lieutenant Andrews, who retired to Leghorn to heal his wounds. By comparison the enemy had suffered 743 casualties, as noted most of them dead, and yielded four thousand five hundred prisoners, a figure that presumably included the wounded. Nearly eighty artillery pieces, substantial supplies, and
La Flêche
corvette as well as the town itself, the largest in Corsica, also graced the triumph.
²