The War of Wars (37 page)

Years later one of his intimates, his secretary Fauvelet de la Bourienne, suggested that Napoleon’s megalomania was already well advanced by this time. He quoted Napoleon: ‘Europe is a molehill. Everything here wears out: my glory is already past; this tiny Europe does not offer enough of it. We must go to the Orient; all great glory has always been acquired there.’

In around 1800 he remarked to Madame de Rémusat:

In Egypt, I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. I was full of dreams . . . I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my undertakings I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting for my own profit the theatre of all history, attacking the power of England in India and, by means of that conquest, renewing contact with the old Europe. The time I spent in Egypt was the most beautiful in my life, because it was the most ideal.

Napoleon was always a combination of dreamer and practical man of action, and the sheer immensity and imagination of the task ahead must have gone to the young man’s head and seriously warped his judgement, making him severely misjudge the terrain and the enemies facing him. Even his later invasions of Spain and Russia showed more careful planning, more limited objectives and a greater grasp of reality, although they too ended in disaster. The expedition to Egypt was to be an awesome foreshadowing of both, exposing the dangers of penetrating hundreds of miles into hostile, unknown territory in ignorance of the dangers, the enemy, the terrain and the climate – in this case intense heat and shortage of water. It was mounted as though the French army could expect to live off the land and move as easily across desert as across fertile Europe.

Napoleon’s first objective was the island of Malta. He had a strange, almost upstart contempt for the ancient order that governed the island, a key staging post in the Mediterranean, which he accused of exploiting and starving the local population. They were certainly a decadent lot, a rotten fruit waiting to be picked off the tree by the modernizing Napoleon. The Order of the Knights Hospitalier of St John of Jerusalem had come into existence during the First Crusade and had been recognized as a religious order by the Pope in 1113. They had been evicted from Jerusalem in 1187 and then from Acre, their last castle in the Holy Land, in 1291 before settling on Rhodes from which they staged raids against Moslem shipping. Not until 1522 were they evicted from Rhodes, finally settling in Malta in 1530. There they had defended the island heroically in 1565 for five months against the Saracen navy and army of Suleiman the Magnificent, which lost 30,000 men.

For the next century they continued to harass the Ottoman navy before turning to trade in an increasingly peaceful Mediterranean lake. Then the warlike chivalric order declined into an ineffectual customs force protecting a lucrative trading network. Although most of the Knights were French, they were deeply hostile to the Revolution and in 1797 the French government was alarmed to learn that both Russia and Austria were considering seizing the strategically placed island. Napoleon was instructed to get there first as a strategic way station on his path to Egypt.

On 9 June the Maltese awoke to witness a truly terrifying spectacle: the entire French fleet and invasion force stretching across the horizon. The newly elected German Grand Master of the Order, Baron von Hompesch, surveyed with dismay his own forces: 332 Knights, of whom fifty were too old to fight (many instantly deserted): a garrison of just 1,500 men manning 1,000 guns, many of which had not been fired for nearly half a century, whose powder was mostly rotten; and a local ill-armed militia of some 10,000.

Napoleon delivered an ultimatum and a little sporadic resistance broke out, mainly in Gozo. Three Frenchmen were killed. Two days later Hompesch sued for an armistice – he could do little else – on condition that he receive a principality and a generous pension from the French, with the other Knights also getting pensions. The French
joyously descended on to what was to be their last slice of paradise before the hell for which they little knew they were destined.

Malta’s huge population of prostitutes and its luxurious orange groves and fruit were enjoyed to the full. As Lieutenant Desvernois observed: ‘They showered us with a thousand attentions and civilities. It is not surprising that they bear so easily the state of celibacy to which the rules of their Order condemn them. Most of them have mistresses who are ravishingly beautiful and charming and of whom they are not the least bit jealous.’

Thus the greatest chivalric order in Europe had been bullied into surrendering without a fight. They were rewarded with ashes, for Napoleon immediately reneged on the armistice agreement and ordered the summary destruction of all traces of the order’s rule, while also spurring his men into a characteristic frenzy of plunder. Napoleon ordered the Knights to leave within three days without their pensions or possessions, carrying just 40 francs each. The mint and the church of St John were plundered, yielding a booty of 5 million francs of gold, 1 million of silver and 1 million of gems. As consolation, the Knights were allowed to keep a cherished splinter of the True Cross. It is hard to explain this callous ruthlessness except as an attempt to endear him to the Moslems of Egypt, as a belated act of vengeance against their old Christian foe; he was shortly to display the astonishing lengths he would go to to win over Islamic support.

After just a week of frenzied orders issued to stamp out Malta’s separate existence and incorporate it as a French protectorate, he departed with his troops and ships on 18 and 19 June. It took a further fortnight to reach Alexandria. During that time a remarkable comedy of errors was played out in the eastern Mediterranean. Napoleon’s officers and men were ignorant of their destination, as elaborate precautions had been taken to conceal it, except from senior officers, to the extent that Napoleon had failed to equip his troops with water-containers for the Egyptian desert – a shocking omission which was to cost innumerable French lives – or training in landing ashore or desert survival and warfare.

Nor was Napoleon aware that his fleet’s nemesis was approaching in the shape of a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson; the French
commander knew only that a squadron of three British ships was believed to be in the Mediterranean, which his hugely superior naval forces could make short work of. Nelson himself, however, was equally unaware of the position of the immense French fleet and, by a series of fantastic coincidences, utterly failed to find them on their sea crossing, which might have spelt the end of the French expedition and a watery grave for some 50,000 Frenchmen, mostly aboard defenceless transports. Instead there followed one of the most remarkable duets in the history of naval warfare – a cat and mouse game in which each adversary was blind and only vaguely aware of the existence of the other.

Horatio Nelson, Napoleon’s adversary in the Mediterranean, was one of the most extraordinary military fighters these islands have ever produced, a man whose temperament resembled none more so than that of Napoleon himself, although his motivations were very different.

Nelson was born on 29 September 1758, a year before William Pitt, who was to be his war leader, and more than a decade before Napoleon Bonaparte, who was to be his mortal enemy. Like the latter, and unlike Pitt, he was born in provincial obscurity, in the tiny Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe, the son of a well-to-do parson, Edmund Nelson, whose wife had aristocratic connections – her great-great grandfather had been son to Sir Robert Walpole, the British first minister throughout the reigns of George I and George II. His son, Horace Walpole, fop, dilettante and creator of Strawberry Hill Gothic, was Nelson’s godfather, which was a powerful connection indeed.

His father’s clerical ‘livings’ – one of them awarded by Eton College – were prosperous, affording him four servants and allowing his wife to bear eleven children, of which eight survived, which even in those days was a large family. Horatio was the fourth surviving son, preceded by two elder brothers, Maurice and William, and a sister, Susannah. His two younger brothers died young, as did a sister; a much younger sister, Horatio’s favourite, Catherine, survived. Nelson’s mother, perhaps worn out by childbirth, died at the age of only forty-two in 1767, when Horatio was at the impressionable age of nine. In 1770, the boy Horatio, by common consent a forceful personality even in childhood, asked his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, whether he could serve on
his ship which was due to see service against Spain in the dispute over the remote Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic. Aged just twelve, he was appointed midshipman – not an unusual age to start in those days. When the international crisis eased, he was posted under Suckling aboard a guard-ship in the Medway, the 74-gun
Triumph
.

As a middling son in a gentry family Horatio would be expected to make his own way in life, and the navy presented an attractive career for a resourceful boy. In academic studies at the respectable Royal Grammar School in Norwich, Horatio had shown little aptitude for academic work, except in his written English, which was to show later in his despatches. As a midshipman aboard a formidably large two-deck ship of the line, he pursued a simple, spartan and unexceptional life of mundane duties, acquiring the skills of seamanship from the bottom; he also served aboard a merchantman to acquire sailing experience.

At the age of fifteen he was granted his first adventure. The
Carcass
was due to sail to seek the fabled North-West Passage across the top of America to the East Indies. The young midshipman begged his uncle, Captain Suckling, to be allowed to go on the expedition. Its Captain Lutwidge was a friend of Suckling’s; Horatio got his way. The journey took four months and brought Nelson within ten degrees of the North Pole. Another midshipman vividly described the twenty-four-foot ice wall which threatened to destroy the ship and the walrus to which they harnessed it to try and tow it to safety. The North-West Passage went undiscovered. Horatio was proud enough of being given command of a cutter with twelve men and boasted of his navigational abilities. Later writers embroidered it with a supposed encounter between Horatio and a bear on an ice floe which he was supposed to have fought off with the butt of a musket.

On his return he was promoted to a frigate, the
Seahorse
, bound for the East Indies. He was blown back by the trade winds to the Cape of Good Hope – he was later to scorn Cape Town, which he evidently disliked on this occasion. He won £300 at cards in one port but vowed to give up gambling. He formed a favourable impression of Trincomalee in Ceylon, visited the magnificent British settlements at Calcutta and Bombay and even sailed up the Persian Gulf to the foetid port of Basra. Virtually no record survives of his adventures there, perhaps
because he wrote few letters or his family destroyed them later as not reflecting on his glory in later life. He may indeed, like that other young man seeking his fortune in the Indies half a century before, Robert Clive, father of Britain’s Indian empire, have been unhappy on his travels.

He contracted malaria, which was to recur all his life, and was despatched on the six-month journey home, ailing and seemingly condemned to obscurity in his profession, even voicing thoughts of suicide by throwing himself overboard (malaria is a notoriously depressive illness). He had already acquired the frail and delicate appearance that made others want to mother him, and which seemed so implausible in a hero. In his fevered state he experienced a curious conversion, believing that he would become ‘a hero and confiding in Providence that I will brave every danger’. Intriguingly, Clive had experienced a similar call of destiny on his own failure as a young clerk to commit suicide with a pistol: the gun did not go off. Horatio may have felt that having escaped death, yet felt its closeness, he was unafraid in future to brave it.

On his arrival in Britain in the summer of 1776, as the American colonies raised the banner of independence, at the age of eighteen he found his fortunes had changed dramatically for the better. Captain Suckling had been appointed to the key post of Controller of the Navy. His young protégé was promptly appointed acting lieutenant aboard the 64-gun
Worcester
, which sailed to Cadiz.

The keen young man evidently made a good impression and the following year he took his lieutenant’s examination before three captains – the chairman of which, in a not uncommon display of nepotism in the supposedly egalitarian navy, was none other than Captain Suckling. He passed with flying colours and unlike so many of his more frustrated peers, almost certainly under Suckling’s patronage, was immediately appointed second lieutenant aboard the 32-gun frigate
Lowestoffe
, under Captain William Locker.

By the age of nineteen the young man had thus travelled twice halfway around the world, to its coldest northern reaches and its most tropical equatorial climates, experienced a dozen of the world’s ports, and now, under the close patronage of a very senior naval figure, seemed embarked on a solid if unexceptional career.

Locker, as was his custom with his younger officers, commissioned the first known portrait of the young Horatio. He emerges as slim, fresh-faced, with a delicate, almost feminine complexion and an expression of a sensitivity. The keen alert brow and eyes and the dominant nose are offset by the gentle lips and chin: at that tender age Horatio exuded a curious mixture of determination, intelligence and grace. He looked more like a foppish, art-loving young nobleman than a naval warrior.

Horatio tended to get on with his superiors and he and Locker hit it off right from the start. The young lieutenant admired Locker for his dictum: ‘Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him’ which was reminiscent of his own advice to the young Thomas Cochrane years later: ‘Always go at ‘em’. He was fearless from the start, his courage belying his slight frame. He was appointed to the Jamaica station, notorious for its tropical diseases, where he boarded a French privateer in a gale in his first real naval action; afterwards he admitted to his enjoyment of the danger. Admiral Sir Peter Parker, the fleet commander there, was an old friend of Horatio’s uncle and took him aboard his flagship as third lieutenant, soon promoted to first. When Suckling died, Parker took over as Horatio’s mentor.