Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (66 page)

Yet something at least had been learnt from experience. Remembering earlier expeditions, Ministers were careful not to court failure by attacking the Continental coast on
too small a scale. Under Castle
reagh's painstaking direction almost the largest single force the country had ever sent abroad was assembled in Kent. All through the rose months the veteran regiments of Corunna, now once more in good fettle, were marching through leafy lanes and cheering villages towards the great camp at Deal. Here, by the middle of July, 1809, 40,000 men were mustered, together with nearly four hundred transports and over two hundred men-of-war, including thirty-seven ships of the line, thirty of them temporarily fitted out as horse-transports. Haydon, the painter, saw the naval armada at Portsmouth and was deeply impressed by the stark simplicity and perfection of their men, decks and guns.

Yet, though the authorities were careful to act in force, they troubled less about speed. They thus robbed the expedition of what should have been its chief asset. It was not so much that they were slow as that they refused to be hurried: stately gentlemen of the telling period and the lobby, they could not comprehend the unforgiving pace of the battlefield. In vain Popham urged the danger of delaying till the season of settled weather was past and the autumn gales and rains had begun. Orders and counter-orders followed one another in leisurely procession, while the European summer slipped by with England still standing in the wings making final adjustments to her armour. The brave Tyrolese under the giant innkeeper, Hofer, regained their native valleys from the Bavarians; the Westphalian peasants rose at Cassel only to be dispersed by the

¹
Barrow,
304-5;
Castlereagh, VI,
49, 260, 270-1;
VII,
83-7;
Fortescue, VII,
49, 51, 58.

bullets of their renegade countrymen; Colonel Schill marched out of Berlin with 700 Hussars to raise the standard of German liberation and fall at the hands of puppet Danes and Dutch. And on a Danube island Napoleon worked furiously to restore his lines and gather new forces. "I would to God our expedition was off," wrote Walter Scott on July 8th. Two days later, while British warriors were still killing cockchafers in the barrackyard at Deal, Napoleon, after a remarkable recovery, fell on the Austrians at Wagram.

On July 20th the embarkation began. To the strains of martial music and the plaudits of the many who had come down in all the finery of fashion from London to see the spectacle, the men were rowed to the waiting ships in the Downs. Thinking they were going to avenge Moore's death, they set up a great cheer which brought tears to the eyes of one beholder—she could not tell why.
¹
That same day salvos fired on the French coast were heard by watchers at Dover. Next day they continued and London grew anxious. By the 23rd Windham was writing in his journal of "terrible news from Germany": in a great battle fought near Vienna 24,000 Austrians and 18,000 French had fallen and the Archdu
ke had been driven from the fiel
d. Two days later it was learnt that Austria, despairing of England, had signed an armistice.

Yet the British, being British, went on hoping. Though profoundly depressed, they trusted that their ally might still be heartened to resume the fight and repudiate the armistice. They accordingly launched their expedition, entering the Continental arena just as every one else was quitting it. At dawn on July 28th the vast armada weighed from the shores of Kent. A fresh breeze wafted it to the Dutch coast so swiftly and smoothly that an officer on Chatham's staff was reminded of the summer yachting excursions of the Royal Family in Weymouth Bay.
²
By the evening the advanced guard was off the Scheldt. Before it lay the two mouths of the great river, separated by the islands of Walcheren and South Beverland. The main or West Scheldt up which it was intended to pass—for the East Scheldt was barred by the narrow defile between the eastern tip of South Beverland and the mainland—flowed into the North Sea through the four-mile wide Wielingen Channel between Flushing on the southern shore of Walchcren and Fort Breskens on Kadzand. As it was doubtful whether so great a fleet could safely pass between the enemy's batteries at this point, the first step "was to land troops to capture either Flushing or Fort

¹
Nugent,
347-8;
Harris,
172.
2
Gomm,
122.

Breskens or both. Once the Wielingen had been opened, sixty miles of difficult but practicable navigation through winding waters would bring the armada to the eastern extremity of South Beverland where the river narrowed to a thousand yards. Here, within twenty miles of its goal, it was proposed to disembark the army and its immense supplies of guns and stores, preparatory to a crossing from Batz to the mainland at Sandvliet and Fort Lillo and a final march to Antwerp.

Unfortunately the real objectives of the expedition had never been clearly visualised. In the formal instructions issued to Lord Chatham they were defined as "the capture or destruction of the enemy's ships either building at Antwerp and Flushing or afloat in the Scheldt, the destruction of the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp, Terneuse and Flushing, the red
uction of the island of Walchere
n and the rendering, if possible, the Scheldt no Longer navigable for ships of war." A proviso added that, if all the objectives were not practicable, as many should be attained as possible before returning home. Yet those which alone could justify the immense effort England was making were the destruction of Napoleon's fleet and the diversion of his forces from the Danube. Neither could be achieved without the capture of Antwerp. For so long as they held it the French could effectively ward off any serious danger to the Low Count
ries and northern France, while
greater part of the island and had taken the little port of Batz at its eastern tip. They were now only divided from the mainland on which Antwerp lay by the narrowest part of the East Scheldt, and,
any threatened warship lying lower down the river could be moved up under protection of its guns. Antwerp and the French fleet could not be immobilised merely by occupying Walcheren. A Government which doubted its ability
to defend England and Ireland ag
ainst a full concentration of Napoleon's forces could
as they erected batteries against the fort of Sandvliet on the opposite shore, they could see the distant spires of the city across the water meadows. But the barges and gunboats on which they relied to cross were still fifty miles away and on the wrong side of the Wielingen Channel.

Beyond the river the French were feverishly digging in. The appearance of the British armada at the end of July had taken them completely by surprise. At that time the garrison of Antwerp numbered only a few thousand reservists, South Beverland was without defenders, and the total force on Walcheren did not exceed three battalions. Realising the supreme importance of holding the Wielingen Channel for as long as possible, the French commander sent every man he could scrape together, first to hold the -beaches at Kadzand and then to strengthen Flushing. As late as August
6th,
four days after Hope entered Batz, there were still only 1500 defenders of the poorest quality at Sandvliet and Lillo on the other side of the stream. Not till
0
that day did the first reinforcement of 2500 regulars reach Antwerp. In Paris Fouche met the emergency by calling out the National Guard and appointing—as a personal insurance against disaster—the pro-Republican Bernadotte to command it, while Napoleon from t
he Danube wrote passionately un
realist letters—always in him a sign of weakness—declaring the Scheldt to be impregnable and its defenders knaves and traitors.
¹

Before the expedition sailed little had been ascertained in England of the strength of the French defences or of the forces that could be mustered to defend Antwerp: this, indeed, had been the King's objection to the enterprise. Yet it was a reasonable assumption, in view of Napoleon's plight after Aspern-Essling and his commitments in Spain, that few first-line troops would be available to oppose the initial landings, especially since, with sea power in British hands, the enemy could not anticipate their location. The inyaders, therefore, had every reason to take risks at the start. Yet, not only did Huntly remain inactive off Kadzand till August
4th,
when he received Chatham's orders to proceed to the Roompot and subsequently to South Beverland, but the Navy made no attempt to force the Wielingen Channel. Sir Richard Strachan, the Rear-Admiral in command, was a vigorous man still in his forties with a considerable reputation for dash and energy and the distinction of having destroyed Dumanoir's squadron after Trafalgar. But like so many of his profession he had small talent for co-operating with

¹
See M. de Rocca,
Campaigne de Walcheren et d'Anvers,
and an extremely able paper by Colonel A. H. Burne on
Amphibious Operations
in
The Fighting Forces,
Vol. XVI,
389-90;
Casrlercagh, VI,

soldiers—particularly the Court kind like Chatham. Bluff, choleric and hasty,
¹
he was an honest tarpaulin who spoke out his mind and was nonplussed when obstructed by a colleague. A Nelson would have coaxed the Earl into a more active humour or taken the fleet through the Wielingen without him, chancing the shore batteries and the untimely gales of early August. Strachan only grumbled and fumed at his procrastination.

The pace of the command was therefore that of the slowest, and nothing could have been slower than Chatham, who by this time had made himself very much at home—"cool and tranquil" was an onlooker's description—in his headquarters at Middleburg. Here privileged passers-by could see his turtles on their backs in the garden but seldom—for he never appeared on horseback before midday—the Commander-in-Chief. A naval captain, asking a colonel in the trenches before Flushing when the bombardment was to begin, was met with an expressive: "God knows! Everything goes on at Headquarters as if they were at the Horse Guards; it does not signify what you want, you must call between certain hours, send up your name and wait your turn."
²

In the end Strachan became so exasperated at the
General's dilatori
ness that he sent ten frigates under the walls of Flushing to force the Wielingen—an operation performed in high style and with only trifling loss
. But this was not till August 11
th, a fortnight after the Fleet arrived off the coast. Owing to adverse winds it was only on the evening of the 13th that Chatham's batteries and the frigates' guns opened on the town. They were reinforced on the morrow by the broadsides of all seven ships of the line. For two nights and days, till the whole horizon was an arch of fire, a continuous hail of shells and rockets poured into Flushing from sea and land—enough, a French officer remarked afterwards, to have ruined a poor nation.
³
On the night of the 15th, after ever
y house had been hit, half the t
own burnt and six hundred civilians killed, the Governor surrendered. With Chatham's help he managed to spin out negotiations for a further two days, so that it was not till August 18th that the British entered the fortress and the 6000 French laid down their arms.

The Wielingen Channel was now clear for navigation and the scene set for the advance against the outer Antwerp forts. Even

¹
For an interesting and favourable account of him by an Army officer, see Gomm,
131.
See also Burne,
337;
Creevey, I,
133;
Naval Miscellany,
II,
39.

²
Naval Miscellany,
II,
390-1
; Plume
r Ward,
276;
Barrow,
306;
Fremantle
, II,
287-8.