The Years of Endurance (32 page)

And the enemies of France after three years of war were as embarrassed. Austria, before her unexpected victories in the Palatinate, had seemed at the end of her resources; Piedmont had already sued for an armistice; Spain, Holland and Prussia had given up the fight and entered the Jacobin camp. Britain was suffering from food shortage and unrest. In the autumn of 1795 she sustained serious losses at sea. Hotham allowed a French squadron to escape from Toulon into the Adantic, where it captured the entire

¹
Madelin,
550.

Levant convoy of thirty-one vessels, together with one of the three escorting battleships. This grim disaster, which spread ruin through the City, was followed by a raid on the Jamaica convoy by French frigates. Another force from Toulon harried the Levant, and in the New Year squadrons from Rochefort and the Texel, evading Bridport's cruisers, threatened the East Indies and the Cape.

These calamities made the City think more kindly of peace. To idealists like Windham or to the old King it was still something unthinkable.
¹
But shrewd men of business were growing concerned at the continued fail
ure of British mili
tary enterprises and their rising cost. The tame dissolution of the terrible Convention in October and its succession by a board of five Directors—of a somewhat commercial complexion—seemed evidence of a more reasonable frame of mind. And now that the Republican armies, after all their victories, were shown to be as liable to defeat as the Austrian and British, might not some better basis be found for future security than eternal war? Even Pitt, never very far in his vantage point at the Treasury from the general feeling of the City, began to fancy so.

The first hint of the way his mind was moving came in a speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament in October, 1795. Anarchy in France had at last led to a crisis: should it end in any order compatible with the tranquillity of other countries and the observance of international treaties, the Government would not be backward in readiness to negotiate a general peace. In the meantime the wisest course was to prosecute the war with vigour. A still clearer indication was contained in a royal message to Parliament a few weeks after the Directory assumed office.

The pursuit of such a peace became the Government's main concern in the new year. After a tussle with the King,
²
who foretold that any overtures would be met with a humiliating rejection, feelers were put out through the British agent in Switzerland. The King's prediction was exactly fulfilled. Britain was rudely reminded that the new Constitution had incorporated all France's conquests, and that return of the Netherla
nds to Austria or Savoy to Pied
mont

¹
Windham Papers,
I, 302 : II, 2-3 ;
H. M. C. Dropmore,
III, 149.

²
The old gentleman had the last word, assuring Grenville :
"I
always choose to act on simple principles; Italian politics are too complicated paths for my understanding."—King to Grenville, 9th Feb., 1796.
H. M.
C.
Dropmore,
III, 174
.

was out of the question. To crown the indignity the Directory, in defiance of diplomatic manners, published the correspondence.

What Pitt failed to see was that the new rulers of France no more wanted peace than the old. They were not high-minded patriots absorbed in the economic well-being of their country: they were only concerned with what happened to themselves. They were fraudulent contractors, debauchees, even murderers, who had stolen power and were now enjoying its fruits. They could not afford to let it go lest those they had wronged should avenge themselves. Peace was their nightmare; as Sieyes put it: " We shall all be destroyed if peace is made." The slightest turn of the roulette of terror which had brought them to the top would sink them.

Even had they been altruistic patriots, longing to give their countrymen peace, it is hard to see how they could have done so. The two inescapable facts in French life in 1796 were bankruptcy and the army. The latter's pay was years in arrears: it could only exist by living on a civilian population. No Frenchman wanted it to live on that of France. To disband it would mean chaos. Its only future was conquest, which also seemed the one way to lighten the Republic's burden of debt. The only alternative to a vista of drab poverty was victory.

In all ages statesmen have found it hard to understand the psychology of revolutionary governments bound to the wheel of armaments and debts. For it is a cycle that cannot be reversed. It can only be broken or its pace accelerated. Pitt, in his touching belief in the inevitable triumph of financial integrity, could never realise the explosive force of the evil thing against which he was contending. That guest of Wilberforce was wiser who, hearing how the Prime Minister said he would calculate to a day the coming collapse of France, asked if any one could tell him who was Chancellor of the Exchequer to Attila?

For to Pitt's hopes of quietly strangling the Republic with the strings of a money-bag, the Directo
rs' answer was conquest. Belgiu
m and Holland, with their treasuries, had already been swallowed
ex
hausted. There remained
Italy—with its fertile plains, ver
y rich cities, its corrupt governments and effete peoples. Nelson said, a gold m
ine that, once entered, was with
out the means of resistance. So far French attempts to invade it had been stopped by the immense barriers of the Alps and Apennines. But the victory of Loano had given the Republic possession of the Ligurian Passes. And in Paris the young General who had saved the Directorate from the mob of Thermidor was ceaselessly pointing out how that possession might be used
.

Carnot resolved to give him his chance. " Behind the door lies abundance," he wrote to Bonaparte, " it is for you to break it down." The all-powerful Barras was agreeable. His cynical price for the appointment—a job, as it seemed to him—was that the Commander-in-Chief elect of the Army of Italy should marry his cast-off mistress, the widow-by-th
e-guillotine, Josephine de Beau
harnais. As Bonaparte—distinguished in that dissolute society by his absurd austerity—had fallen head over heels in love with the fascinating Creole, there was no difficulty. On March nth, at the age of 26, the Corsican, with his commission in his pocket and his great forehead bulging with plans, set out for the south through a listless and down-at-heels France.

It was Bonaparte's belief that to daring everything was possible.

" He who stays in his entrenchments is beaten," was one of his sayings. He had immense will power, inexhaustible energy, lightning perception, unbounded ambition. There was genius in every inch of his Tom Thumb frame. He arrived at Nice on March'26th, 1796, to find the army starving, despondent and in rags. Within a few days he had inspired it with something of his own dazzling faith and vitality. Then on April 10th, while far away in England farmers grumbled at the " cold, barren, growless weather," the young eagle struck. For just under a fortnight the struggle in the mountain passes continued, Bonaparte making untold demands on his men and taking enormous risks. Had the British been able, as Nelson urged, to land even a small force on the Corniche Road in his rear, his army might have been annihilated, for his tenuous communications were the Achilles heel of his plan. But though he
broke all the rules, in six battl
es against divided forces of twice his strength he drove a wedge between the Austrians and
Piedmontese. On the 23
rd, wi
th the Alps turned and Turin threatened, the
terrified House of
Savoy sought an armistice. The victor gave
them a few hours to accept terms which reduced Pie
dmont to a
cipher for a generation. Then, with his flank secured, he poured into Lombardy.

The war had suddenly come to life. While Nelson's letter, describing the stalemate between the struggling armies in the snow-clad hills above Ceva, was still on its way to his friend Collingwood, Bonaparte's men were marching at unprecedented speed eastwards along the south bank of the Po, seeking for a crossing to cut old Beaulieu off from his bases. On May 6th, having covered 44 miles in 36 hours, they found it in the small neutral town of Piacenza. Without formality they held its rulers to ransom and crossed the river. Three days later they flung back a bewildered Austrian army from the bridge of Lodi and drove on to Milan. On the 15 th the conqueror entered the Lombard capital, the inhabitants, feminine in their worship of success, strewing flowers in his path. " People of Italy! " they were told, " the Army of France has broken your chains: the People of France is the friend of all other Peoples! Come to greet it! "

Their joy vanished when the young hero presented them with his bill. An immediate contribution of twenty million francs, vast stores of provisions and thousands of horses were demanded as the price of French protection. A hundred of the finest carriage horses in the province were dispatched across the Alps to grace the coaches of the Directors. The Grand Duke of Parma, who had been slower to acclaim the liberator than the fickle Milanese, had to yield twenty of the best pictures in his gallery and a crushing tribute. And when the people of Pavia contested Bonaparte's requisitions, they were quickly enlightened as to the conditions of Italian emancipation. The magistrates and leading inhabitants were shot, the city sacked and all who resisted massacred. A few weeks later a village near Bologna was burnt to the ground and the entire population murdered to strike fear through Italy. For Bonaparte, once a follower of Robespierre, did not believe in terror for its own sake but only as an instrument of policy.

Before the end. of May he had resumed his eastward march across the richest plain in Europe. On the 30th he forced the Mincio and laid siege to Mantua. Around this great marsh fortress the failing fortunes of the old Europe turned during the next few months, while the Austrians from the Alpine passes to the north made attempt after attempt to relieve it and regain control of their lost province. Meanwhile the rest of the peninsula lay at the conqueror's mercy. As the fame of the French triumphs flashed down its mountain spine to its corrupt courts and cities, prince after prince sought to make his peace with the terrible Republic.

Within a few weeks the Mediterranean situation had been transformed. At the end of June, having sworn eternal peace to its Grand Duke, Bonaparte sent his most brilliant cavalry officer, Joachim Murat—the 29-year-old son of a Gascon innkeeper—on a flying raid into Tuscany to seize Leghorn and the goods of its British merchants. For one English girl the sudden scamper of the British colony to Nelson's waiting frigates brought romance; the clean, beautiful ship, the attentive officers who gave up their cabins, the calm, efficient assurance and friendliness of it all set Betsey Wynne's heart in a whirl of love for its fiery dark-eyed captain.
¹

The unconscious Captain Fremantl
e and his Commodore— " old " Nelson, as 17-year-old Betsey called him—had preoccupations which they courteously did not betray to their guests. For their position had suddenly become intensely grave. The whole of Italy had turned stony and hostile, and with " the flesh kettles " of Leghorn cut off and Gibraltar nearly a thousand miles away, only barren Corsica remained open to their ships. It did not look as though even Corsica would do so long. For not only was the island inhabited, in Admiral Jervis's words, by " infernal miscreants " seething with unrest, but the garrison was quite
inadequate to protect its coastl
ine from French landings. Appeals for reinforcements had met with
little
response from England: the Secretary of State, raising his ducal spectacles with infinite slowness from his nose to his forehead, had written to remind the Viceroy that his countrymen were not foreign politicians and had no interest in their expensive Mediterranean possession.
²
And it was only too plain from Bonaparte's preparations at Leghorn and Genoa that he was contemplating invasion.

Fortunately the new Commander-in-Chief was a very different man from Hotham. Sir John Jervis, who had taken over the Mediterranean fleet at the end of the previous year, was worthy in his

¹
She subsequently married him, accompanied him on his voyages, nursed him and Nelson after their wounds at Tenerife, and, first seeing her native land in their company, became the ancestress of a line of English Admirals.
—Wynne Diaries.

²
See also
Collingwood, 27.

own element to cross swords with Bonaparte. " Old Jack," as the seamen called him, was a naval strategist of the first order. As a young officer he had piloted Wolfe on his last journey to the Heights of Abraham; in the present war he had won fame as the sailor who had helped Grey to reduce Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia in thirteen weeks. His arrival in the Mediterranean had been delayed by a scandalous vote of censure moved on him by West Indian financiers in the House of Commons for having levied a contribution on merchandise in Martinique: but for this, he always believed he could have prevented the Austrian defeat at Loano and so have saved Italy from Bonaparte.
¹
He was now 61. The child of poor parents, he had evolved through a stern, impecunious youth into a man of iron: a devotee of duty in its grimmest and most unyielding aspects. He had long steeled himself out of both moral and physical fear: none of the ordinary failings of men affected his cool judgment. With his long nose, heavy brows and thoughtful eyes, he was the picture of a disciplinarian. Yet he had unexpected streaks of warmth in his rock-like composition: a saturnine humour,
²
great generosity to those who merited it and, when he could escape the effects of ill-health and a harsh dictatorial temper, a taste for unbending in congenial company. Betsey Wynne and her sisters when he entertained them on board the
Victory
found him a kind, gallant, friendly old man, without anything stiff or formal, who made them sing duets after dinner and thanked them for their trouble by a chaste embrace. " The old gentleman is very partial to kisses: he abuses all who do not salute the ladies and always obliges all the gentlemen that are present to kiss us." To Nelson he always showed the softer side of his character: the ardent,, sensitive, affectionate captain was happier under his command than he had been since Hood left the Mediterranean. For he felt that Jervis appreciated him.