Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (17 page)

But, though the women of the Border country watched the fires all night with sick hearts, they might have slept in peace. A chance spark from a limekiln and not Boney's coming had set the northern beacons blazing. And far away, off Ushant and Rochefort, Toulon and Ferrol, the Grand Fleet was on guard. " I do not say the French cannot come," growled the old First Lord of the Admiralty, " I only s
ay they cannot come by water!"

An angry conqueror, now impatiently riding the Boulogne cliffs, now dictating dispatch after dispatch to dilatory Admirals and dockyard officials from his cabinet at St. Cloud, was being driven slowly and reluctantly to the same conclusion. All through the summer and autumn he had been issuing and revising orders and counter-orders down to the minutest detail for mobilising the flotilla. Indeed his subordinates had found it impossible to keep pace with them. For the marine industry of France was altogether inadequate for the
tempo
and scope of the First Consul's conceptions. In July during his six weeks' tour of the invasion ports, finding the boat-building programme behindhand, he had promptly ordered another fourteen hundred barges, bringing the schedule up to more than three thousand. But it was one thing to order, another to execute. The slow and exact pace of naval construction did not conform to the revolutionary canon that will-power could achi
eve all things; patience and an
exact adherence to the laws of nature were also required. In the middle of August, when the impatient dictator had ordered a hundred invasion barges to sail from Dunkirk for the
rendezvous
at Boulogne, only twenty-one were ready. When Decres, the brave and vigorous sailor whom he had made his Minister of Marine, reported that two thousand barges would be finished by November, not half that number had even been begun. On some days the First Consul was forced to send half a dozen orders to the same official. To relieve his nerves and hurry on the work he took a chateau at Pont-de-Briques outside Boulogne and built a wooden hut on the Tour d'Ordre whence he could see the harbour, the crowded, tossing boats on its waters, the questing British frigates

¹
Minto III,
300-1, 417-18;
-Wheeler and Broadley, II,
135;
W. Scott,
The Antiquary,
Ch. XLV. and Note II.

outside and on clear days the beckoning cliffs of England. For on his ability to cross while his foe was still weak, subconscious instinct perhaps warned him that his future depended. Against his dreams of universal conquest was set the invisible and distant menace of sea power. Its possession enabled a few million shopkeepers and farmers, anchored across the northern European trade routes, to impede the destiny of mankind.

Apart from the delays of the shipbuilding yards, Napoleon was faced by three major obstacles. The vessels that were to carry his army to England were being built in every seaport and principal river of France. Few of the former and none of the latter were situated near the Straits of Dover. The boats had therefore to be brought along the coast to the assembly point at Boulogne. No one knew this better than the blockading British Admirals. The ravening wolves of the sea, as the First Consul called them, were perpetually on the prowl. Within six weeks of the outbreak of war a large gunboat in the He de Batz roads had been captured and carried out to sea under the very noses of the shore batteries by the boats of a frigate. A still more remarkable example of British enterprise occurred early in September when four men and a young officer from a minute cutter rowed ashore, boarded and succeeded in floating a beached
chasse
maree
in the face of her astonished crew and a platoon of French infantry.
¹

To prevent such incidents Napoleon used his immense resources in artillery to turn the Channel and North Sea littoral into " a coast of iron and bronze." Batteries sprang up at all points where warships could interfere with coastwise movements, and every promontory bristled with guns. As well as fixed defences under which convoys could shelter, detachments of field artillery were stationed at convenient junctions ready to rush to the scene when summoned by manual telegraph. "One field gun to every league of coast is the least allowance," wrote Napoleon. By employing 60,000 men on such defensive work he was able to make the cutting-out expeditions too expensive to maintain. The British could still harass and delay the passage of his invasion boats towards the Straits, but they could no longer stop them.

Yet even when the precious barges, hugging the coast and moving in packs of thirty or forty, reached the neighbourhood of Boulogne, Napoleon's difficulties had only begun. The harbours of the Pas de Calais are notoriously bad. Before a force large enough to conquer England could embark, the basin at Boulogne had to be widened and -deepened, and the neighbouring fishing ports transformed into

¹
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
70-80, 94-5, 167;
Blockade
of
Brest,
I,
53-4.

substantial anchorages. When this feat of engineering had been accomplished under the First Consul's dynamic direction, it was still impossible to get the whole flotilla out to sea in a single tide. An outer anchorage in which the leading vessels could wait for the remainder had to be constructed and made safe from prowling British cruisers. All this took time. By November the Paris wits were making sly jokes about the Don Quixote of La Manche, and Brunet, the famous comedian, cracking nuts on the stage, announced to giggling houses that he was making
peniches.

There still remained the supreme difficulty of crossing the Channel. Because, to evade the enemy's cruisers Napoleon needed to cross in a calm and therefore by oar, and because he had to rely on vessels of light draught able to lie in shallow harbours and be beached on the English coast, he built his invasion craft without keels. But, though he peremptorily ignored the fact, this made them helpless in wind and tide. Two years before, the intricate tides of the Straits -of Dover had prevented Nelson's superlatively skilled seamen from raiding Boulogne. And in a Channel notorious for sudden shifts of wind even the slightest sea was bound to deprive low, flat-bottomed barges of all power of manoeuvre and immobilise the guns with which an artilleryman, turned dictator, had insisted on loading them. Crowded with seasick soldiers, they would have nothing but musketry to repel the swarms of sloops and gun-vessels which, under protection of the larger frigates and the distant blockading battle squadrons, constantly patrolled the narrow waters from Le Havre to the Texel.

A British Admiral, who captured one of the barges in November drifting helplessly towards Calais from Boulogne Bay, reported that it was impossible that anything could be achieved by such "contemptible and ridiculous craft." Either the first storm would send them flying down Channel " li
ke so many chips down a millrace
" or they would be destroyed piecemeal like swimmers by sharks. Those who knew the Channel best, finding it impossible to take the flotil
la seriously, supposed it to be
a blind to deflect attention from the movements of the French battle-fleets. "As to the possibility," Admiral Pellew assured the Commons, " of the enemy being able in the narrow seas to pass through any of our blockading and protecting squadrons with all that secrecy and dexterity and by those hidden means that some worthy people expect, I really, from anything that I have seen in the course of my professional experiences, am not disposed to concur in it."

The hot-tempered veteran who presided at the Admiralty made no attempt to conceal his impatience with the popular defensive mentality. " If it will give any satisfaction to the Duke of Buccleuch," he wrote, "to fit twenty or thirty more of the best herring boats, direction shall be given accordingly, though I confess the application of them in the manner described does appear to me too absurd to be treated seriously."
¹
Because Bonaparte, trying to conquer the sea from the land, chose to fritter away the resources of French shipyards in building cockle-boats, there was no reason for the first Naval Power in the world to copy him. Gun vessels for patrolling the English coast—the "mosquito fleet" of Pellew's contemptuous phrase —and the employment of sea-going per
sonnel on shore duty as Sea Fe
ncibles, " tending to screen officers and men from active service to their country," seemed to St. Vincent's mind so much waste of effort. To satisfy his colleagues and quiet public fears, he was forced to make a few minor concessions. But on the main issue: that nothing should be allowed to delay or weaken the mobilisation of the battle-fleet, the First Lord was adamant. For he shared the belief of every officer of the Navy that the country's first line of defence lay, not on the English coast, but outside the enemy's ports.

Here, and not in scarlet-coated Volunteers or in Moore's perspiring Regulars practising for future victories at Shorncliffe, was an island's bulwark against tyranny. So long as her ships lay off the French naval ports, Napoleon's only means of protecting his flotilla was immobilised in harbour. Cornwallis, the sixty-year-old Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet—old Billy-go-tight, as his men called him from his florid countenance, who looked like a quiet country squire and lived on pulse and vegetables yet rode out every tempest; his lieutenant, Collingwood, who had served so long at sea that his children scarcely knew him; Gardner, Cotton, Calder, Keith, Thornbrough, Alexander Cochrane, Campbell, the Comishman Pellew, and the fretting, ailing, lion-hearted Nelson were the real heroes of the invasion years. A few thousand mariners, complete masters since boyhood of the hardest craft known to man, put a ring round the great Captain's conquests and soaring dreams.

There was nothing perfunctory in that blockade. Seemingly so automatic and effortless, it taxed all the resources and skill of the nation that maintained it. The ships—minute by modern computation—that clung to their stations on the stormy shores of western Europe were the highest masterpieces of the constructional skill and capacity of their age. A line-of-battle ship in all her formidable glory was the equivalent in her day of a medieval cathedral or a modern Dreadnought. Her handling in the Biscay gales was as much an achievement as her making. So were her rhythm and precision in

¹
Sherrard,
208.
80

action. The perfect order and skill of the British Fleet as much transcended ordinary terrestrial accomplishment as Napoleon's leadership of his armies. Never before in human history had two such mighty Forces clashed.

The background of blockade was hard and grim. In the interstices of unceasing monotony and discomfort, there were gales out of the west that split the masts and tore the sails to tatters,
¹
and struggles with tides and rocks which had more of danger in them, wrote Collingwood, than battle once a week. "Thrice up," ran the sea song:

" and lay out and take two reefs in one,

And all in a moment this work must be done,

Then man your head-braces, topsail-halliards and all.

And its hoist away topsail, as you let go and haul."

^‘
Fire and hard service" and unremitting toil were the lot of the men who preserved England's age-long immunity. Only the sternest duty and discipline could have kept them at their stations. They passed their lives in crowded wooden ships not much bigger than modern destroyers with three or four times as many inhabitants, and, for lack of fresh vegetables and water, suffered from recurrent scurvy and ulcers. They bade farewell to snug beds and comfortable naps at night and even taking off their clothes, and lived for months at a stretch in seclusion from the world, with nothing to gratify the mind but the hope of rendering service to their country. " If I could but make you comprehend," says Jane Austen's Captain Harville to Anne Elliot, "what a man suffers when he takes a last look at his wife and children and watches the boat he has sent them off in as long as it is in sight, and then turns and says,
God knows whether we ever meet again.'
...
If I could explain to you all this, and all that a man can bear and do, and glories to do for the sake of these treasures of his existence." The long blockade took from men all that was pleasurable to the soul or soothing to the mind, giving

¹
See the Log of the
Impitueux
for Christmas Day in the great gale of December,
1803.
"At four strong gales, with heavy squalls. At half-past six strong gales, with heavy squalls; carried away the starboard main brace and larboard main topsail sheet; sail blew to pieces; set a storm mizen and forestay sail; lost sight of the Admiral. At half-past seven the storm mizen and fore stay-sail blew to pieces, and mainsail blew from the yard. At eight obliged to scuttle the lower deck; ship labouring very much, and gained six inches on the pumps. At quarter-past eight the carpenter reported the mizen mast was sprung, in consequence of the vangs of the gaff giving way. At half-past eight was struck with a sea on the larboard quarter, stove in eleven of the main-deck ports, half-filled the maindeck, and carried away the bulkheads of the wardroom. At eleven hard gales with violent squalls. Carried away the chain-plate of the foremost main shroud. Bore up under a reefed foresail. Saw a line-of-battle ship lying to, with her head to the southward, and her sails split and blowing from the yards."—
Blockade
of
Brest,
I,
225-26.