The War of Wars (59 page)

In order to satisfy a petty rancour against obscure writers, whom the noble hospitality of the English nation protected, he alone had enkindled [the war], in contempt of the advice of his counsellors, in contempt of the remembrance of all the evils that were not yet retrieved, in contempt of the will of the nation that was hungering for the benefits of peace. And in order to avenge this miserable affront, millions of men were going to fight for more than ten years, to tear each other to pieces, to die all kinds of deaths, upon all the continents, upon all the seas, at every hour of day and night, in the deserts, upon the mountains, in the snow, in flaming cities as in obscurest villages, from the Tagus to the Neva, from the Baltic to the Gulf of Taranto, in Spain, in Russia, and as far off as India!

Napoleon’s vicious and petty act of revenge was to ignore the convention of expelling foreign nationals when going to war, and instead imprisoning the 10,000 or so British civilians in France for the full duration of the war – in most cases a numbing ten years.

It looked more like a water-beetle than any kind of seafaring vessel seen before. It was bulbous, flat-bottomed, with a big 18- or 20-pound cannon-like proboscis peering from its prow. This ungainly vessel was the unlikely prototype of the largest invasion force ever assembled to attack the British Isles, in prosaic contrast to the picturesque galleons of the Spanish armada in 1588, but through sheer force of numbers the much greater threat. For three years, and in particular during the summers of 1803, 1804 and 1805, the British were held in thrall.

The extraordinary invasion craft, like fledgling sea-saucers from another planet, could each contain sixty to eighty troops and were sailed by five to six seamen. They bore rudimentary sail-sloops and were rigged like a Schweling fishing boat, but had only a three- or four-foot draw of water. The troops slept on two inclined platforms which ran the length of the vessel, while the officers had a little cockpit of their own at the stern. Such was the first account given to an incredulous British Admiralty of the extraordinary invasion craft being hammered out in record time by boatbuilders all over France to be marshalled at Boulogne, from which Napoleon’s invasion of England was to be launched.

In January 1804 a much more detailed description had arrived, written by an English spy in Paris, a Mr Sullivan, who asserted that 400–500 of the extraordinary craft were being prepared:

The above boats it is supposed will draw from 2 feet 9 inches to 3 feet 9 inches when the detachments are therein. The number of
such according to report are from 130 to 150 rank and file. The boats are of course of two sizes. The one apparently about 36 feet long by 14 or 15 feet wide, the other 46 feet long by 16 or 18 feet wide, and they are to be provided with 12 or more paddles, one half forward, the other aft, for the purpose of a general dash under the guns of the several batteries of the intended places of invasion, or to advance or retreat as occasion may require. The small boats are intended for this object and the large for the disembarkation.

The boats are about 3/5ths of the length flat, they then swell out into a curve rising from the keel about 8 feet, within which are rows of seats across for the purposes of seating the men; to prevent them being seen; and to protect them from distant small shot, they rising from two benches at a time to fire as occasion may require, viz. either front, rear, obliquely right or left, and also two deep the whole length of the boats’ larboard and starboard sides, in short the whole forms one solid column, and they seat themselves to reload. Please to observe that from the seat upwards the sides of the boat are only of inch deal boards nailed to the ribs, and that the height from the seat is about 3 feet 10 inches. The invading army are to be provided with six days’ provisions of bread and wine, some of the boats are to carry light artillery to be disembarked and drawn by men. . . .

There were other craft as well:
prames
, 100-foot long sailing vessels armed with 24-pound cannon and capable of carrying 150 men;
chaloupes canonnières
armed with howitzers to act as escorts; and
guilots
to transport horses, ammunition and artillery. The invading force resembled nothing so much as a wood-and-sail version of the huge craft that less than 150 years later were to carry out the landings at Normandy on D-Day.

The beetle boats attracted instant derision. The design had been that of Pierre Forfait, the inspector-general of the fleet, a mathematician and scientist previously known for designing shallow-draught cargo barges for use on the Seine. One prominent French academician, Denis Decrès, called them ‘monstrous ideas . . . which are as wrong as they will prove to be disastrous . . . a heap of monstrous baubles’.

General Charles Dumouriez, the most prominent French exile in Britain, observed contemptuously; ‘so far as the hope of even a third of these 1,200 boats navigating in battle order – they are poorly built, heavy, overloaded – across the heavy seas currents and winds of the Channel, it’s an absurdity which reveals the greatest ignorance of the elements in which this tactical march would be carried out.’ A British admiral who captured one of the landing craft called it a ‘contemptible and ridiculous craft’ which would be dispersed by any storm down the Channel ‘like so many chips down a millrace’ or would be picked off one by one, as swimmers are by sharks.

Napoleon, it was asserted, was a gunnery officer who believed such gunboats could hold off the elements as well as the British fleet and overcome Britain’s defences. He considered the Channel little larger an obstacle than some of the big continental rivers his armies had crossed. Indeed, he had considered fantastic plans for the invasion, including a kind of pontoon bridge of ‘floating forts’ (another idea of Forfait), an early version of the Channel Tunnel which would permit troops to be suddenly projected one night into Kent, and even a huge balloon capable of carrying 3,000 men.

Yet it was always a mistake to ridicule or underestimate Napoleon. The sheer size of Napoleon’s forces were awesome: he had some 1,400 craft altogether at his disposal, as well as 115,000 men, including 77,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, 4,000 guns and 4,000 wagons, as well as 17,000 support troops and 7,000 horses. These were concentrated largely at Boulogne, but also dispersed across a wider area of the French coast. Some 60,000 men manned the French defences.

One of Napoleon’s purposes in creating the landing craft was so that they could be easily transported overland, evading the predatory British naval missions mounted along the coast. (Canal transport had been rendered tricky by a brilliant British inland raid to sink canal craft and block the waterways.) Like modern landing craft, the French ones were designed to convey many men. Like them too they could beach to disembark the men along the sandy shores of England, aided by their shallow draught. All Napoleon needed was a day of dead calm across the Channel, and to protect these valuable troop-carriers from the British fleet, which had either to be engaged or diverted safely away.

Napoleon at least was in earnest. He had built a pavilion on the cliffs above Boulogne, a wooden edifice 100 foot long, consisting of three rooms, including a meeting room, and a rotunda overlooking the harbour. The meeting room had only one chair, for the Emperor himself: his officers had to stand. In 1803 he had already staged a triumphal review of his troops outside Boulogne.
The Times
reported:

He rode on a small iron-grey horse of great beauty. He was preceded by about three hundred infantry and about thirty Mamelukes formed a kind of semi-circle about him . . . As soon as he and his attendants had passed through the gates, he ordered them to be shut to prevent their being incommoded by the populace. The execution of this order very much dampened the ardour of the Corsican’s admirers, who remained entirely silent, although the moment before the whole place resounded with
Vive Bonaparte!

Now on the day after his thirty-fifth birthday he reinspected them. To an explosion of salutes from naval batteries and the roll of 2,000 drums, the Emperor mounted a dais on a small hill between which the bands of the Imperial Guard had been drawn up: on the surrounding slopes of this natural amphitheatre were 80,000 men drawn up in sixty infantry regiments and twenty cavalry squadrons. Some 20,000 civilian spectators watched. In the afternoon a flotilla of some 1,000 arrived, converging from different points, safely braving the possibility of British attack. It was a magnificent display. Their successful arrival was, however, spoiled a little as Madame Junot reported:

the officer who commanded the first division of the flotilla had run foul of some works newly erected along the coast. The shock swamped some of the boats and several of the men jumped overboard . . . The accident was exceedingly mortifying, happening as it did, in the full gaze of our enemies, whose telescopes were pointed towards us and it threw the Emperor into a violent rage. He descended from the throne and proceeded with Berthier [his chief of staff] to a sort of terrace, which was formed along the water’s
edge. He paced to and fro very rapidly and we could occasionally hear him utter some energetic expression indicative of his vexation.

The following day a spectacular fireworks display took place, involving 15,000 Roman candles; a ball followed. However, Napoleon was soon to learn, that just two days previously, his best admiral, Louis René de Latouche-Tréville, had died of an infection caught in Santo Domingo, to be replaced by a painfully inept successor, Comte Pierre de Villeneuve.

That Napoleon was deadly serious in his intention of invading was much later confirmed by his doctor in his diary of St Helena. Barry O’Meara was told that Napoleon planned to lure the British fleet away from the Channel:

Before they could return, I would have had the command of the Channel for two months, as I should have had about seventy sail of the line, besides frigates. I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.

The imminent threat of invasion galvanized the ordinary person in Britain far faster than the languid ministry’s feeble calls for mobilization. The arrests of the British citizens in France electrified the country. As Romilly said: ‘If it had been Bonaparte’s object to give strength to the British ministry, and to make the war universally popular in England, he could not have devised a better expedient.’

The new government went on a propaganda offensive. An
Invasion Sketch
declared:

There are some labouring people so deluded, as to think they have nothing to lose if the French should conquer this island. Money, they say, they have none: their goods are not worth an enemy’s
taking; work must be had whoever is master; ploughing, sowing, harvesting, threshing must go on; there must be carpenters, masons, smiths, tailors, and shoemakers in villages, manufacturers in towns; so that their case will be the same as heretofore; and the wisest thing they can do is to keep in a whole skin, and leave the rich to fight it out, if they will, in defence of their property . . .

If there be one person so lost to all love of his country and the British constitution as to suppose that his person, his property, and his rights and his freedom would be respected, let him contemplate the following pictures – not overcharged, but drawn from scenes afforded by every country – Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Hanover, which has been exposed to the miseries of a French invasion.

Bonaparte’s Confession of the Massacre at Jaffa
was widely distributed. A picture book of
The Corsican Assassin’s Progress
was made available at places of public entertainment. Hardy’s Trumpet Major describes:

a hieroglyphic picture of Napoleon. The hat represented a maimed French eagle; the face was ingeniously made up of human carcasses, knotted and writhing together in such directions as to form a human physiognomy; a band or stock shaped to represent the English Channel encircled his throat, and seemed to choke him; his epaulette was a hand tearing a cobweb that represented the treaty of peace with England; and his car was a woman crouching over a dying child.

Napoleon was described variously as a pervert and seducer of his sisters; a dwarf with a squint and jaundice; and the grandson of a butcher and son of a traitor and a whore. A favourite children’s nursery rhyme ran:

Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush, you squalling thing, I say;
Hush your squalling, or it may be,
Bonaparte may pass this way.

Baby, baby, he’s a giant,
Tall and black as Rouen steeple;
And he dines and sups, rely on’t,
Every day on naughty people.

Baby, baby, he will hear you
As he passes by the house,
And he, limb from limb will tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.

Harriet Martineau provided a cheerful antidote to the hysterical jingoism of the times:

One day at dessert when my father was talking anxiously to my mother about the expected invasion, for which preparations were made all along the Norfolk coast, I saw them exchange a glance, because I was standing staring, twitching my pinafore with terror. My father called me to him, and took me on his knee, and I said: ‘But, papa, what will you do if Boney comes?’ ‘What will I do?’ said he, cheerfully. ‘Why, I will ask him to take a glass of port with me,’ helping himself to a glass as he spoke. That reply was of immense service to me. From the moment I knew that Boney was a creature who would take a glass of wine I dreaded him no more.

This outpouring of hatred against the potential invader was matched by a patriotic call to bear arms. Never before had Britain mobilized on such a scale. By the autumn of 1803, 342,000 men had joined voluntary organizations, swamping the government’s ability to provide appropriate clothing and weaponry. William Wilberforce believed fully 1 million would have joined if permitted to – a tenth of the population. They were paid for eighty-five days’ training a year. Ordinary farm labourers in smocks were drilled by dashing young men in expensively bought uniforms. One description might have come straight from
Dad’s Army
nearly a century and a half later: ‘The Wimborne Volunteers have been ordered to march to Poole and their Captain, Doctor Pickford, a fat little man, was strutting up and down the town with a fussy step and
important mien, which diverted us extremely but spread terror in the hearts of many of the inhabitants of Wimborne.’