Nelson (89 page)

By far the greater British losses were suffered the next day, when the Royal Irish detachment under Wemyss came under heavy enemy fire as it sheltered in the old Fountain battery and lost eighteen killed and wounded. However, the basic military position could no longer be reversed. The French abandoned Fort San Francesco at daylight, leaving the British in sole possession of all the enemy’s significant defences to the west and southwest of the town. Its imminent surrender seemed assured.

The French were not through yet, however. The garrison in Calvi was badly short of provisions and powder, their casualty list was growing, and they had been beaten back to the limits of the town, which itself now faced punishment. But a dogged spirit survived, and when Stuart offered terms the day after the Mozzello fell he was simply reminded of Calvi’s motto: ‘Civitas Calvi Semper Fidelis’. Stuart immediately started regrouping his guns for another onslaught. For several days the artillery of both sides fell silent, as if the antagonists had been exhausted by the struggle, but Nelson’s men were hard at work nonetheless. They helped to tow thirty-two pieces of artillery to new positions and to establish several batteries at distances of from 560 to 900 yards from the town.

Amid these labours, Nelson still arbitrated between unfriendly commanders-in-chief. Stuart never seemed satisfied, and fired a series of terse ‘my dear sir!’ notes to Nelson demanding more guns, more powder and shot and more men. Horatio passed them on, and Hood grumpily did his best. He complained that while powder was to be had from allies, shot was in short supply, and hinted that Stuart was asking for far more than he needed. Hood even suspected that Stuart was actually courting a refusal so that he could blame the navy if the siege was criticised at home. Nelson’s regard for Stuart never sank so low, but he confessed that while the army’s requests kept coming the materiel piling up behind the captured Fort Mozzello strikingly reminded him of Woolwich arsenal.
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By 28 July, Stuart had the guns to his satisfaction, but with relatively little powder and shot he decided to reopen negotiations with the French before resorting to further violence. General Casabianca, the governor and commander of the town, was ready to agree that if no supplies reached him within twenty-five days he would surrender. That seemed an awful long time to Stuart, who estimated that his ammunition would only survive seven more days of firing, and he went aboard the
Victory
to see Hood. The old admiral was sick but listened with Admiral Hotham at his side. They offered their ideas as suggestions, rather than orders, but made it clear that anything more than a ten-day truce should be ruled out and that Hood favoured a three-day bombardment of the town to bring the French to terms.

Stuart grasped the intermediate position and told Casabianca that he would hold his fire if the French agreed to surrender within eleven days, by 10 August. These terms might have been accepted but for an unfortunate event that occurred on 29 July. While some of the British frigates were away collecting munitions for the siege, four French supply boats slipped into Calvi during the night, the first to get through in two months. They were essential to the besieged town, where food supplies had failed and inhabitants were eating mules, horses, donkeys and – by later report – cats and rats. Eggs were selling for thirty sous apiece. Nelson put little stock in truces, but as the cheers of the embattled garrison carried through the darkness he knew the fight would have to continue. Stiffened by the reinforcements, Casabianca firmly rejected Stuart’s new terms.
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Stuart loosed his artillery on the defences again, savaging civilian and military positions alike. The British opened fire at five o’clock on 30 July and the garrison immediately replied, but it was a one-sided duel. Some of the defenders were driven from their ordnance, three or four of their guns were dismounted before dark and the French fire languished. During the night five fires blazed in the town. For two more days the seamen pounded the helpless town, and young Hoste believed that had the battering continued ‘not one house would have had a stone standing’.
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As at Bastia, there was no shortage of grit in the defence and noncombatants showed inspiring courage and fortitude. Women as well as men went forward under fire to supply the soldiers or repair broken fortifications. A dying boy, his chest opened by the fragment of a shell, bade his mother not to weep because his life had been given
for the nation. But the British fire told terrifyingly. Every house was damaged or reduced to rubble or cinders, and part of the ‘palace’ crumbled, crushing sheltering refugees beneath the falling masonry. Fever and Nelson’s guns combined to destroy the garrison. Only ten of eighty gunners reportedly remained in action; the rest were dead, wounded or sick. A mere two hundred and sixty effective men remained to defend three major breaches that Stuart was battering through their walls, and among them divisions were appearing. Casabianca blamed the Provençal grenadiers for allowing the Mozello to fall, while one of their commanders replied that Casabianca had spent part of the siege hiding in a cellar.

Hood had been right about the effect of another sharp, short bombardment, and on 1 August a white flag flew over Calvi. Stuart’s terms were accepted and the town offered to surrender on the tenth. The siege was over and with it, for the moment, French rule in Corsica.

Captain Nelson peered into a mirror on the
Agamemnon
. His right eye remained painful at times, and he could see that its pupil was abnormally dilated. When he covered his left eye to leave the right unsupported, he also had to accept the unwelcome fact that for all useful purposes it was blind.

Though Nelson was grateful that his ‘beauty’ had not been greatly impaired, and tried to shrug away the worst prognosis (‘never mind, I can see very well with the other’) the prospect of a full recovery seemed to be receding. John Harness, the fleet physician, and the available surgeons were not optimistic, and on 18 August Horatio decided to tell Fanny more about his injuries:

. . . as it is all past, I may tell you that on the 10th [12th] of July last a shot having struck our battery, the splinters of stones from it struck me most severely in the face and breast. Although the blow was so severe as to occasion a great flow of blood from my head, yet I most fortunately escaped by only having my right eye nearly deprived of its sight. It was cut down, but is as far recovered as to be able to distinguish light from darkness, but as to all purpose of use it is gone. However, the blemish is nothing – not to be perceived unless told. The pupil is nearly the size of the blue part, I don’t know the name. At Bastia I got a sharp cut in the back.
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Legend depicts Nelson with a ridiculous black eyepatch, as if hiding an empty socket, but his many portraits and the few descriptions suggest that time more or less restored the appearance of the injured organ. Only the fine pastel made by Johann Schmidt of Dresden in 1800 depicts the slightly clouded aspect it presented to more intent observers. Nelson’s ‘beauty’ survived, but his vision was irreparably damaged. Within a year the eye had begun to cause him occasional pain again and its sight had relapsed towards total darkness. It is possible that damage to the nerve was causing optic atrophy, or that secondary glaucoma was developing with a corneal oedema.
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The Corsican campaign had left a permanent mark upon him, but Nelson still viewed it with mixed feelings. Calvi had surrendered as promised. At ten o’clock on 10 August its haggard defenders had marched out to hand over their arms: 300 French, 247 Corsican auxiliaries and 300 seamen. In the hospital another 313 sick and wounded were found, while for one reason or another four hundred civilians, one of them reputedly the prettiest woman in Calvi, also marched out to be shipped to France with the defeated troops. One hundred and six artillery pieces, more than eight thousand shot and shells, two frigates, two merchantmen, a gunboat and several small craft became undisputed spoils of war. Nelson got great satisfaction from sending Lieutenant Moutray to take possession of the
Melpomene
and
Le Mignonne
frigates because they were the survivors of the squadron he had fought off Sardinia ten months before.

Neither side had suffered heavy casualties, judged by the warfare of the time. Stuart reported his losses as thirty killed and sixty-one wounded, including those sustained by partisan and French royalist allies, while Nelson heard that, despite the severe damage to the town and works of Calvi, the French had only sustained eighty killed and wounded in the fighting.
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Nelson had not entirely approved of the handling of the siege. Nine days between 1 and 10 August had been spent waiting for the French to surrender, as they had agreed to do if no further assistance reached them. Nelson had wanted to bombard the bastion or destroy it with explosives to speed up the result. ‘I had rather take a place by our own fire and efforts than by the enemy being starved and sickly,’ he lamented. There was more glory in a conquest by arms.
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Hood held similar views, but was spiteful enough to air them to government. The admiral was ill and irritable, and inflamed by Stuart’s refusal to involve him in the final negotiations for a capitulation.
Furthermore, he had been talking to a French engineer who visited the
Victory
the day after Calvi surrendered, and was sure that Stuart could have battered the enemy into a speedier submission. The French were starving and sickening, and they only had two days of powder left, having lost sixty barrels in an explosion of their magazine. Nor were the fortifications in the town casemated, so that their occupants had little shelter from enemy artillery. Weighing it all up, Hood’s flag captain scoffed ‘that our
marine
ideas of the distressed, defenceless, deplorable situation of the town and inhabitants of Calvi were well founded’. Another day’s firing was all that was needed, but ‘the humane generosity of the British general is [now] extolled by the bearer of every party-coloured [French] cockade’.
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Stuart, of course, had not been privy to this information when he had agreed his truce on 1 August. He was worried about his own shortages of powder and shot, and was foggy about his enemy’s resources. In using hindsight to wound Stuart the admiral had been less than fair, but he had a point when he complained that those final days of the war in Corsica had been expensive. An enemy older and deadlier than the French guns, one Nelson knew only too well, had begun to damage the British forces. Disease. Men crowded in flimsy tents and unsanitary camps, and working to their physical limits in violent extremes of weather close to the malarial margins of the sea, became targets for several predatory diseases. ‘Every hour our troops and seamen [are] falling ill and dying,’ Nelson wrote the day Calvi surrendered. ‘On that day not 400 soldiers were fit for duty.’ He exaggerated, but not wildly. ‘Considerably more than two-thirds of our number are in hospital; men and officers tumble down daily in the most melancholy manner,’ said Moore. The sailors, perhaps more inured to hardship in foreign climes, fared better than the soldiers, and Nelson had divided his men into two shifts so that only half were at the batteries at any one time. Yet by 5 August thirty had been invalided to the
Agamemnon
and seventy more were ill. Many of Nelson’s friends and officers were down with fever. Lieutenant Colonel Wemyss, with whom he had formed good relations (‘God bless you,’ Wemyss had written to him) asked for a ship to take him away. Hallowell, Suckling, Moutray, Hoste and Bolton were all sick.
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Nelson’s own health wavered but held. Apart from his injured eye, his old feverishness had returned. ‘This is my ague day,’ he told Hood at the end of July. ‘I hope this active scene will keep off the fit. It has shook me a good deal, but I have been used to them, and don’t mind
them much.’ Somehow he kept going. As he marvelled to the Duke of Clarence on a day when a thousand men looked like phantoms, ‘I am here the reed amongst the oak. All the disorders have attacked me, but I have not strength for them to fasten upon. I bow before the storm, whilst the sturdy oak is laid low.’
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When Calvi fell, Hood had hastened back to Mortella Bay, signalling again, as far as Stuart was concerned, his latent indifference to the state of the task force. Nelson’s job had delayed his departure. Transports were needed for victors and vanquished and guns and stores had to be retrieved and returned to the ships. Horatio felt indebted to the agent for transports, Lieutenant Richard Sainthill. ‘Your readiness at all times to expedite the king’s service I shall always bear my testimony of,’ he told him.
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On board the
Agamemnon
the battle to save sick sailors and marines had also continued, not always successfully. ‘Departed this life John Murfey, seaman,’ ran a typical log book entry. ‘Received on board six bullocks, six baskets of onions, seven boxes of lemons for the sick . . . Received thirty-five sick men on board.’ Fresh meat, vegetables and fruit helped combat dietary disorders such as scurvy, but life-threatening fevers needed more. By the end of October, Nelson reckoned some fifty
Agamemnons
had been lost.
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Nevertheless, after many tribulations the Corsican campaign had at last been a success and Nelson was proud of his part in it. The victory owed much to Hood’s determination and Stuart’s extraordinary leadership at Calvi, but probably no officer counted for more in the liberation of Corsica than the captain of the
Agamemnon
. He had been there at the beginning, blockading the hostile ports in winter storms, and he was there at the end after a monumental labour, commanding the guns that fired fourteen thousand projectiles to silence Calvi. He had refused to be beaten by towns others had thought impregnable, and spared nothing in their capture. Some had criticised his judgement, understandably so to a point, but others had seen his achievements as inspirational, no less understandably. To such as young William Hoste, Nelson’s operations suggested that the navy could occasionally transcend its traditional role and reduce major strongholds ashore. He would remember those lessons and draw strength from them twenty years later when he captured the great mountain fortresses of Cattaro and Ragusa in the Adriatic.