Chapter III…

Chapter III

1718-1793.

THE SECOND SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR--THE SIEGE OF OSTEND--LEXINGTON--BUNKER’S HILL.

Less than three years after the Royal Irish returned from the Low Countries they found themselves again on foreign service, this time in the south of Europe. During the war of the Spanish Succession there had been much fighting in the Mediterranean, where Gibraltar, and Port Mahon in Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands, had been captured by England, whose possession of these two fortresses was confirmed by the Peace of Utrecht. When this peace was signed every nation hoped that for many years there would be no more wars on the Continent; but very soon relations between Spain and Austria became so strained that the British Government decided to send a squadron to the Mediterranean, to support Austria if Spain attacked her Italian possessions, and to reinforce the garrison of Minorca. Among these reinforcements were the Royal Irish, who, less fortunate than some of the regiments in Minorca, were not selected to serve as marines in our short but successful campaign off the coast of Sicily.

In 1727, the little world of Port Mahon was startled by grave news from the mainland. Spain still smarted under the loss of Gibraltar: every Spaniard looked upon the presence of the red-coats on the Rock as an affront not only to his nation but to himself, and was prepared to risk much to recover the fortress. For the second time since the XVIIIth had been quartered in Minorca, Spain, regardless of the fact that she was not at war with England, was making preparations to recapture Gibraltar. On the first occasion, in 1720, though peace had been restored between the Courts of Madrid and of St James, the Spaniards, under the pretext of reinforcing their garrison at Ceuta, assembled a large number of troops near the fortress, laid violent hands upon a hundred British merchant ships then lying in the ports of southern Spain, and forced their crews to carry warlike stores to the bay of Algeçiras. Gibraltar at that moment was in a deplorable condition--the regiments were weak; there were only two officers of field rank in the garrison, as the seniors were at home, many of them without leave; the guns were few in number and bad in quality, and there was only fourteen days’ supply of food in store. The place was in such imminent danger that Colonel Kane, then Governor of Minorca, was ordered to come to the rescue with every man who could be spared from his command. When he and his reinforcement of five hundred men[68] arrived off the Rock, he found it threatened by three hundred Spanish transports, escorted by six galleys, each manned by 500 slaves, and three 60-gun Maltese war vessels, hired to take part in the attack. The appearance of the four or five men-of-war with the Minorca contingent frightened away the Maltese, and the Spaniards returned to Ceuta without firing a shot. Now, seven years later, great preparations for war were again on foot--a fleet of trading vessels was employed in transporting guns, ammunition, and stores from Cadiz to Algeçiras, where as many as forty ships arrived in a day; large numbers of troops were assembled, and the peasants of Southern Andalusia were swept together to serve as labourers in the siege. Our Government, however, was under the impression that the Spaniards meditated not a siege but a coup de main, and in December, 1726, warned the authorities at Gibraltar to be prepared for “a sudden push on the sea line by scaling ladders, encouraged by the weakness of the garrison.” The bearer of this important message was not sent from England by a swift frigate, but was left to make his way to Spain as best he could; landing at Malaga, he chartered a ship to take him to Gibraltar, but was captured on the voyage by a Spanish man-of-war and thrown into prison. The despatches, however, were saved and duly reached their destination; Kane was once more summoned from Minorca, and with a regiment on the point of returning to England reached Gibraltar in February, 1727. Doubtless the XVIIIth was deeply disgusted at being left behind, but in a few weeks came the turn, not indeed of the whole regiment, but of a portion of it, to share in the honours of the defence.

According to the memoirs of Marshal Keith, a Scottish soldier of fortune, who before he rose to eminence in the service of Russia held a commission in the Spanish army, Kane did not arrive a moment too soon, for there was but a slender guard at the landward gate, and the Spanish soldiers were allowed to come into the town without being searched for arms. A surprise would have been easy, but the fortress was saved by a strange exhibition of pride. Count de las Torres, who commanded the Spaniards, haughtily said that “would the English give him the town, he would not enter it but by the breach.” In the middle of February his troops, 20,000 strong, took up positions at San Roque, and in order to provoke hostilities began to throw up a battery on the western beach. General Clayton, who was acting Governor at the time, thereupon wrote to de las Torres in the following terms:--

“Having observed this morning that your Excellency has opened a trench in order to attack this fortress, which act I hold to be contrary to the treaties existing between our sovereigns, no declaration of war yet having reached my knowledge, I therefore inform your Excellency, that if you do not forthwith order the works to cease I shall be obliged to take necessary measures in consequence. I transmit this to your Excellency by my secretary, to whom I beg a reply may be delivered.

“JASPER CLAYTON. “GIBRALTAR, February 22nd 1727.”

To this letter the Spaniard replied--

“SIR,--I received your Excellency’s letter of to-day’s date, and regarding the trench which has been opened as you say to attack the city of Gibraltar, I hereby answer, that what has been done has been on our own ground, to fortify those places where our batteries might be of good service, and as there belongs nothing to that fortress beyond its fortifications, as appears by the very treaties your Excellency alludes to; and your Excellency having taken possession of the towers within our jurisdiction, your Excellency may be fully assured that unless they are immediately abandoned I will act in the manner your Excellency insinuates to me, acquainting you at the same time that for besieging the fortress works less distant will be constructed, as you will learn in due time.

“COUNT DAS TORRES. “CAMPO DE GIBRALTAR, February 22nd 1727.”

This truculent answer clearly meant war, and so Clayton understood it; but anxious to do nothing to precipitate hostilities, he contented himself for the moment with firing one shot over the battery as an intimation that work must cease. For an hour he held his hand: then, as the Spaniards wholly disregarded the warning, his guns opened upon them. Thus commenced the second of the series of sieges in which British troops have successfully defended Gibraltar against heavy, sometimes well-nigh overwhelming odds. The first, begun a few months after our capture of the Rock, lasted from October, 1704, to April, 1705; the second continued from the 22nd of February till the 23rd of June, 1727; the third, or Great Siege, lasted nearly four years, from the 16th of July, 1779, to the 5th of February, 1783.

In 1727, the Spaniards attacked from the land side only; their navy took no part in the operations, which were exclusively directed against the North Front and the defences of the Rock from the extremity of the old Mole to Willis’s Battery. At the beginning of the siege the garrison had only sixty guns in position, the heaviest being 32-prs., and as “most of the ordnance was old and worn out, more casualties occurred from the bursting of guns than from the enemy’s fire.”[69] The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought into action ninety-two guns and seventy-two mortars, many of them the best and most modern of their day. De las Torres lost no time in opening his trenches. During the night of February 22nd-23rd five battalions of infantry, a brigade of engineers, and a thousand peasants started work on the first parallel, which ran from the Devil’s Tower on the eastern beach along the base of the Rock to the inundation. Next night two thousand of the enemy were moved northwards into ground dead to the guns of the batteries, but not to those of two British men-of-war which, under cover of the darkness, had anchored off the east of the isthmus connecting the fortress with the mainland, or, in other words, the neutral ground. As soon as it was light the sailors brought their guns to bear upon these troops, raking their ranks from end to end, while from the top of the Rock the soldiers hurled down upon the Spaniards live shell, hand-grenades, and stones. The enemy retreated in confusion and with great loss, but de las Torres, after driving away the men-of-war by an overwhelming artillery fire, threw up batteries so completely commanding the anchorage on the east of the isthmus that further flanking attacks of this nature became impossible. Under a heavy cannonade from the garrison, the Spaniards worked without intermission, and in spite of heavy and continuous rain which flooded their trenches and produced much sickness among their men, gradually completed and unmasked many formidable batteries, some of which were within a hundred yards of the Rock.

Throughout the month of March, before further reinforcements began to arrive from England and Minorca, the British troops suffered greatly from fatigue. The guards and piquets were very heavy, absorbing a daily average of 1200 rank and file, and a thousand men were constantly occupied in mounting guns and strengthening the defences. These working parties were commanded by officers of the line, who were struck off all other duty and received half a crown a-day extra pay. The men also drew sixpence a-day extra, and “were assisted by the Jews, who were employed in taking ammunition to the batteries and clearing the ditch of the rubbish beaten down from the upper works by the enemy’s shot; these unfortunate Israelites received no pay, and for some time were utterly useless, being paralysed with terror when under fire.”[70] Some of them, perhaps to revenge themselves for this forced labour, joined in a conspiracy among the “undesirable” element in the civil population to open the gates to the enemy. The plot was discovered, and punished in the rigorous fashion of the day--two Moors, the chief agents of the Spaniards, were put to death, and after their bodies had been flayed the skins were nailed to the gates of the fortress as an object lesson on the penalties of unsuccessful treachery.

The elements during the siege were strongly in favour of the British, for such deluges of rain fell in April that the Spaniards’ trenches again became untenable and their cover was destroyed. Until the damage could be made good the opening of the great bombardment was necessarily postponed, and during the respite two battalions arrived from home on the 7th of April, and a fortnight later four transports, escorted by the Sole Bay, brought five hundred troops, detachments from the corps stationed in Minorca. How many men the Royal Irish contributed is not known; but as Cosby, their colonel, was in command of the whole contingent, it is natural to suppose that the regiment was largely represented. England’s command of the sea enabled her to reinforce at will, and in the beginning of May two more battalions reached Gibraltar from home, raising the strength of the garrison to about 5500 non-commissioned officers and men. With them came Lord Portmore, the Governor, who was on leave when the siege began: though quite an old man he had refused to plead his age and infirmities as an excuse for evading his duty, and now returned to take his share in the defence. As soon as the Spaniards had finished their batteries and mounted their guns, they opened a tremendous artillery fire, which was kept up for fourteen days without intermission. During every hour of this time seven hundred projectiles were hurled against our works, and to use the words of an eyewitness, “we seemed to live in flames.... Attempts feeble in comparison to the resistless storm of shot and shell that tore over the walls of the fortress, were made to check this murderous fire in vain, guns were everywhere dismounted, and as quickly as they were replaced were again destroyed. In vain the men with dauntless courage threw themselves upon the ramparts and worked to repair the shattered parapets, the heavy shot tore away whole tons of earth and buried the guns beneath the ruins. Butts filled with sand and bound with fascines were heaped together as some covering from the artillery, but they were no sooner in position than they were swept away.”[71]

The strain of this bombardment, said to have been greater than any recorded in the previous history of artillery, proved more than the Spanish ordnance could stand. By the 20th of May the brass guns began to droop at the muzzle, the iron guns to burst, and ammunition to run short. Gradually the enemy’s fire died down, and when there were but nineteen pieces left in action against them the British restored their shattered works, and mounting thirteen new guns and more than a hundred mortars poured upon the Spaniards a storm of projectiles almost equalling that which had scourged the defenders of the Rock. By dint of tremendous exertions a hundred guns were placed in position at the beginning of June, and then the tables were turned, for this mass of ordnance opened upon the Spaniards with such a crash that not a single gun was able to reply; the trenches became a heap of ruins; the parapets of the batteries took fire, and the magazines blew up. The first day’s cannonade drove the enemy from their forts, and gradually the whole line of works was completely knocked to pieces. On the 23rd of June the news reached Gibraltar that a suspension of hostilities had been arranged between the Governments of England and Spain: all fighting then ceased; the soldiers had played their part, and it was now for the diplomatists to settle the differences between their respective countries. The British losses were remarkably small. Five officers were killed or wounded; in the other ranks 69 were killed; 49 died from wounds or disease, and 207 were wounded. It is not known how many of the XVIIIth were injured, as the casualties of the Minorca contingent are given as a whole. To the Spanish army, on the other hand, the siege proved very costly. Fifteen officers were killed, 42 wounded: of the other ranks 346 were killed, 1119 were wounded, and more than 5000 died of sickness or were permanently invalided by the hardships they had undergone. No less than 875 Spaniards deserted during the siege, some of whom surrendered to our piquets and brought much useful information to the Intelligence officers of the garrison.

When the siege was over, the detachment of the XVIIIth rejoined headquarters at Minorca, where the regiment remained until 1742. Nothing would have been known of the life of the Royal Irish during this period had not copies been preserved of a curious correspondence between Major Gillman, who was in command, and Major-General Armstrong, the Colonel of the regiment.[72] The officers were greatly disturbed at the quality of the recruits received from home, and Gillman in 1729 thus reports on a recently joined draft of sixteen men. “They are the worst I ever saw; two of them the officers would not draw for: one of them wanting above half of his right foot, the other having his backbone and ribs of both sides distorted in a prodigious manner, by which means he is an object of compassion, both of which are to be sent back to England at the expense of the person that recruited them.”

Two years later Gillman again entreats that recruiting should be properly conducted.

“I beg leave to assure you that you have a corps of captains that has the credit of the Regiment entirely at heart and will begrudge no expense in supporting it on all occasions therefore I am thoroughly convinced you will give such necessary orders to the person or persons that are to recruit the regt, that they receive no bad or old men upon any account whatever. The standard of the regt, is 5′ 7″ without shoes.... I entreat your further assistance by getting a few fine fellows at home proper for the Grenadier Company let the expense be ever so great which I’ll pay with pleasure, and if two or three beautiful men fit for sergeants to said Company could be sent over I’ll pay them sergeants’ pay until they are provided for because two of the sergeants and the three Corporals are the bane of the Company and not in the least fit to appear under arms but with disgrace.”

The next letter (November 20, 1736) recommends that a commission should be granted to Sergeant John Millner, the author of the history of the war in the Low Countries to which frequent reference has been made in Chapter II.

“I beg leave to recommend to your favour on this occasion Sergt. Millner and if it meets with your condescension I am ready to pay down the money for him. I am thoroughly convinced that when so good a man has the honour of being known to you you’ll not in the least begrudge any favours that you may be pleased to lay upon him which he will always own in the most grateful manner imaginable.

“As I have mentioned to you in mine of 30th August of the absolute necessity the regiment lies under that it is high time that a Proper Person should be thought of to discharge the duty of Adjutant for the reasons therein mentioned. I assure you I know of no person so proper in the regiment to discharge that duty as Sergeant Millner, who is very willing to do it gratis, provided it is for your advantage or any other commands you should be pleased to lay upon him, as you may judge by his journal he wrote of the late war in Flanders to which I find you were pleased to be one of the generous subscribers.

“I should not take the liberty of recommending this poor man to you if I had not sufficient reasons to be thoroughly sensible he is capable of discharging any duty that his superiors are willing to employ him on, and has on all occasions in a very particular manner merited the esteem of all the officers he has had the honour of serving under, as you may see by the generous subscription in his favour, a copy of which I send you enclosed, by which you will plainly see good generous Kane has not forgotten the (illegible? regiment) always desiring to be a subscriber on the like occasion.”

Inclosure--

“We whose names are hereunder written officers of the Royal regiment of Ireland in consideration of the long and faithful service of Sergeant John Millner do hereby desire and empower the agent or paymaster of the said regiment for the time being to stop or cause to be stopped out of respective subsistence or arrears the sum set against our names whenever the colonel of the regiment shall be pleased to recommend the said Millner to his Majesty for a commission in the said regiment.”

Anthony Pujola, £10 0 0 Stephen Gilman, 10 0 0 Charles Hutchinson, 5 0 0 W^m. Sharman, 5 0 0 Anthony (illegible), 5 0 0 Thomas Borrett, 5 0 0 Thomas Dunbar, 5 0 0 Rob Pearson, 5 0 0 James La Tour, 2 10 0 Henry Barrett, 2 10 0 John Coningham, 2 10 0 ---- Cotter, 2 10 0 Jonathan Elder, 2 10 0 George Martin, 5 0 0 E. du Conseille, 2 10 0 --------- £70 0 0 Governor Kane, 10 0 0 ---------

In January, 1737, Gillman reports the loss of a subaltern, who can hardly be said to have been cut off in the flower of his youth.

“ ... This is to acquaint you with the death of Lieut. John Dalbos of Colonel Pujola’s Company who died last night of a tedious and lingering disorder attended with the gout, but in my opinion rather by old age being 75 years....”

The gem of the collection, however, is contained in a letter of introduction given by Major-General Armstrong to Major Gillman, in favour of a young officer just posted to the regiment.

“LONDON, 13th June 1737.

“SIR,--The bearer hereof Ensign Stanhope, son of the Right Hon. the Lord Harrington, Principal Secretary of State, a younger brother and very hopeful gentleman, and ambitious to push his fortune in the Military Way, and moreover being desirous of qualifying himself for that purpose, has tendered to do his duty with the regiment. Therefore I earnestly desire you will encourage him in everything that may conduce to his improvement in this way of life.

“As the first thing a youth should learn at his launching out into the World is to know how to live in it, a spirit of economy should be cultivated in him, for which purpose he should be induced to keep a pocket memorandum book wherein he may with other occurrences set down his daily expenses, by perusing of which in his leisure hours he may see how the money goes out and be thereby enabled to proportion his disbursement to his cash, keep out of debt, and thereby avoid the many inconveniences the want of due care draws young men into such in the whole course of their lives they may not without great difficulty be able to extricate themselves.

“And in order thereto as youth is oftentimes moved by the company they keep I must earnestly desire you will introduce him to that of the most discreet and sober gentlemen, and particularly that you will have a watchful eye he keeps company with no sharpers at play, nor with any persons that may induce him to vices destructive of his health. Your due regard to what is above written will very much oblige

“Your most obed^t. “most humble servant, “J. ARMSTRONG.”

“P.S.--Care must be taken on his arrival to board him with some officer who has a family which I earnestly request you to see done, for much depends on a right beginning.”

Armstrong died in 1742, and was succeeded as colonel of the regiment by Colonel Sir John Mordaunt, K.B. On its return home in 1742 the regiment was quartered in the West of England until the spring of 1744, when it was sent to Fareham to guard prisoners taken in the wars we were then waging with the Spanish and the French. In 1739 a trade dispute with Spain had produced a conflict memorable only for our miserable and costly failure to take Cartagena, a flourishing settlement on the Caribbean Sea, in the part of South America then belonging to Spain, and now the Republic of Columbia. Soon afterwards a great war broke out on the Continent of Europe between France and Spain on the one side and Austria on the other. Various German States joined the Franco-Spanish alliance, while England, Hanover, and Holland sent contingents to the help of Austria. At Dettingen George II. gained a victory over the French in 1743, but two years later his son, the Duke of Cumberland, was defeated at Fontenoy,[73] where the magnificent courage and brilliant local success of the British and Hanoverians were nullified by the apathy, cowardice, or jealousy of the Austrians and the Dutch, who after Cumberland had actually forced his way into the French camp sullenly refused to advance and support his column at the moment when victory was within his grasp. Before the news of this glorious, though disastrous day reached England, the Royal Irish had been warned for service abroad, and formed part of a small column which reached Cumberland in the middle of May. Welcome as this reinforcement was, it did not nearly fill the gaps caused by the slaughter at Fontenoy, where the casualties among the British and Hanoverian infantry amounted to 32 per cent, the former losing 3662, the latter 1410 officers and men. With his weakened force Cumberland could not stand up against the French, and as far as most of the English regiments were concerned, the rest of the campaign of 1745 was spent in entrenching defensive positions, and then, under the pressure of the enemy’s manœuvres, abandoning them, only to repeat the experience farther to the rear, while the French, in greatly superior numbers, gradually reduced the fortified towns of Flanders. Some of these places Marshal Saxe, the French Commander-in-Chief, took by force of arms; others capitulated without resistance, and in August he was able to detach a considerable body of troops to attack Ostend, a vital point in Cumberland’s lines of communication with England. The garrison was hastily reinforced, the last corps to arrive being the Royal Irish, who on the 9th of August embarked at Antwerp on “billanders,” as the boats used for inland navigation were called, and dropping down the Scheldt to Flushing transhipped into sea-going vessels for Ostend. The town was in a wretched condition and quite unfit to stand a siege; the Austrians, to whom it then belonged, had allowed the fortifications to fall into disrepair; the artillery was deficient in guns and stores of every kind, and the three thousand infantry, insufficient for the perimeter they had to guard, were not soldiers of the same nation commanded by generals of their own army, but detachments of British, of Austrians, and of Dutch--men with no common language and dissimilar in discipline, habits, and sentiment. These differences, sufficiently serious in themselves, were accentuated by the undisguised contempt of the English for the Allies who had left them in the lurch at Fontenoy. Nor were these the only difficulties. An essential part in the scheme of defence was the flooding of a large tract of country round the town, but this measure had not been carried into effect, for the Austrians, unwilling to ruin the peasants by inundating the villages and farms, were so slow in issuing the necessary orders that when at length labourers were sent to open the sluices, the French were close at hand and prevented the working parties from accomplishing their task. To have defended Ostend successfully would have taxed the powers of a great leader of men, and none arose to snatch the reins of office from the hands of the governor, a veteran grown old and decrepit in the Austrian service. The General appointed to command the British arrived after the town was invested, and was unable to make his way into Ostend; an Austrian officer of the same rank, de Chanclos, was more fortunate, but though he acted as confidential adviser to the Governor he had not the time, even if he possessed the capacity, to weld the heterogeneous garrison into a good fighting force.

On the same day that the Royal Irish left Antwerp a French General, Löwendahl, appeared before Ostend with 21,000 good troops, a numerous artillery, and 5000 pack horses, laden with fascines for the siege; he finished his first parallel on the 14th of August, and next day threw up batteries on the shore to enfilade the harbour and to keep at a distance the British frigates which hovered about the port. After thus cutting off Ostend from communication with England he pushed on his works with vigour, and on the 18th twenty pieces of artillery and ten or twelve mortars opened a violent cannonade which lasted for four days almost without intermission. The defending troops were greatly overworked; half of them were constantly at the batteries or in the covered way; the remainder had to be ready to turn out at a moment’s notice, and as there were no casemates or bomb-proofs, the only shelter for the men when off duty was in barracks and private houses, which rapidly crumbled under the French projectiles. The officers were rather better off, for they shared with the sick and wounded the cellars of the town-hall, made shell-proof with walls of sandbags. All ranks were vilely fed; the officer of the XVIIIth who wrote the anonymous ‘Continuation of Stearne’s Journal’ says “the beef stank, the biscuits were full of maggots.” There were not enough artillerymen to man the guns; when the gun carriages were knocked to pieces by round shot there were none in reserve to replace them, and by the end of the siege only seven pieces of ordnance remained fit for use. Three days after the bombardment began de Chanclos wrote gloomily to Cumberland--

“This town is a heap of ruins ... the great fatigue, and entire absence of quiet, night or day, owing to bomb-shells and cannon-balls, put the garrison into very bad humour, and it is really not saying too much to call it bad. I might even add that one must be an Englishman to put up with what we are suffering here! The enemy is sapping up to the covered way and is attacking on our weakest side. Nearly all our cannon have been dismounted, many artillerymen have been killed and the survivors decline to work the guns.”

He thus reported the loss of the town:

“August 24.

“On the night of the 22nd a general assault was made on our covered way by fifteen companies of Grenadiers, supported by two battalions. The point chosen was the sea front at low water. We repulsed the enemy more than once, killing and wounding 500 men, and making prisoners of 2 captains, a lieutenant, and 30 odd grenadiers. At day break I assembled my commanding officers to obtain their opinion as to our situation. Everyone agreed that we could not hope to hold out for more than a few days.”

As soon as this informal Council of War was over de Chanclos ordered his drummers to beat the Chamade; and after obtaining a truce for the burial of his dead he offered to capitulate on condition that the garrison should be allowed to march out of Ostend with all the honours of war, and be escorted safely to Austrian territory.[74] In proposing these terms he forgot to specify the Austrian fortress to which his troops were to be conveyed, the route by which they were to travel, and the date on which they were to arrive. The French General, however, noticed these omissions, and with suspicious alacrity agreed to Chanclos’s terms: the garrison marched out with all due pomp, fully expecting to be escorted at once to the nearest Austrian town; but soon the troops learned to their deep disgust that the French had discovered the flaws in the articles of capitulation, and were about to send them by a devious route to Mons. This was considered very sharp practice, not at all worthy of an honourable enemy; but the King of France had every reason for wishing to deprive England as long as possible of the services of the defenders of Ostend, for the young Pretender, Charles Edward, had landed in Scotland; the rebellion, known in history as “the ’45,” was rapidly gaining strength; and Government was clamouring for the return from Belgium of the British troops. After a short halt at Ghent, they were crowded into canal boats for an involuntary “personally conducted” tour through Belgium, and from the description left by an officer of the regiment it is clear that the most ardent sight-seers could have extracted no pleasure from this journey.

“We were escorted by a party of Horse, and constantly attended by agents of theirs (the French) whose business it was to inveigle away our men, and by large promises (of which these rascals were not sparing) induce them to desert; as our progress was rendered designedly slow we were only drawn by the boors of the country a very few miles a day. A French trooper with his carbine was placed at the head of each billander, who did not fail to threaten the poor wretches with firing at them whenever they did not pull to please them. We continued on board this incommodious embarcation seventeen days, when we arrived in Tournai, where we disembarked.”

As Tournai is about thirty-two miles from Mons, the column should have begun its march very early in the morning to have covered the distance in one day, but the escort refused to move till 8 A.M., and consequently it was 7 o’clock in the evening before the British arrived at St Gillain, a fortified village held by the Austrians as an outpost to Mons, a few miles farther on. Alleging that in bringing the garrison of Ostend to this outpost they had fulfilled their undertaking, the French halted, ceremoniously saluted the Colours of each regiment, and then retired. The British officers were at a loss to understand why the French had left the column at St Gillain instead of escorting it to Mons, but in a few minutes they learned the reason from an Austrian general whom Cumberland had sent to meet them. A large body of the enemy’s troops were lurking in the neighbourhood, with orders to attack St Gillain if the regiments from Ostend remained there, and if they attempted to reach Mons to capture or exterminate them on the march; the only hope of escape, therefore, was to start at once on the chance that the intercepting force had not already taken up its position. Without a moment’s delay the ranks were re-formed, the pans of the muskets re-primed and the bayonets fixed; then in profound silence the weary troops plodded along the causeway leading towards Mons. “As it was a moonlight night we could command a view of the country about us, and as we every moment expected the enemy we continued our march in the greatest order; not a whisper was to be heard; the officers who were present will always remember with pleasure the discipline and good disposition every regiment showed on that occasion. At eleven we arrived at Mons, where owing to some mismanagement we waited two hours before we got admittance.”[75] This delay was obviously caused by bad staff work, but the arrangements of the French were no better. The enemy, confident that the Ostend troops would be too tired to push on that night, left no patrols to watch the exits from the village, with the result that 20,000 Frenchmen took up a position astride the causeway an hour after the refugees had found safety within the walls of Mons. For three weeks the Royal Irish were blockaded in this fortress; then thanks to the manœuvres of a relieving force they “slipped out” at dead of night, and in a few days reached the neighbourhood of Brussels.

Affairs in Scotland were now going so badly that nearly every English soldier was recalled from the Continent to defend England against the Jacobite invasion. The XVIIIth landed at Gravesend early in November, and after various changes of quarters embarked for the seat of war in Scotland in the spring of 1746. On the voyage a vexatious incident occurred by which the regiment was prevented from taking any active part in the Scotch campaign. While off the coast of Yorkshire the transports, containing the 12th, 16th, XVIIIth, and 24th regiments, were warned that three French men-of-war were cruising in the neighbourhood; the ships ran for safety into the Humber, where they remained until the report was proved to have no foundation; and owing to this delay the Royal Irish did not reach Leith until the day after the rebels had been finally crushed at the battle of Culloden. For two years the regiment was stationed in Scotland, in the summer making military roads in the Highlands, in the winter quartered at various towns, and when the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle put an end to the war the XVIIIth was ordered to Ireland, after it had been placed on a peace footing by reductions so sweeping that the establishment of each company was fixed at two sergeants, two corporals, one drummer, and twenty-nine private soldiers.

In 1755, our relations with France were again strained to breaking point: in America the French garrison of Canada and the British garrison of the colonies on the Atlantic coast were waging fierce, though unofficial war in the forests south of the river St Lawrence; and as the conflict seemed likely to spread to Europe, troops were withdrawn from Ireland to Great Britain. Among the regiments hurriedly brought across St George’s Channel was the XVIIIth, rapidly recruited up to a strength of seventy-eight men per company. But the “Seven Years’ War” brought no laurels to the Royal Irish, who were condemned to inactivity in the United Kingdom, while other corps were winning fame on the Continent and in the West Indies, in Canada and the Philippine Islands. In 1767, four years after peace was declared, the regiment was ordered to Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, one of the oldest of our American colonies. The beginning of the lamentable quarrel between the mother-country and her English-speaking over-sea provinces found the Royal Irish still quartered at Philadelphia, but in 1774, Boston, the chief town of the colony of Massachusetts, became such a hotbed of disaffection that General Gage, who commanded the troops in British North America, reinforced its garrison with troops drawn from less disloyal centres of population. Among the regiments ordered to Boston was the XVIIIth, at that time very weak in numbers, for hardly any recruits had arrived from home, and those enlisted at Philadelphia were “bounty-jumpers,” who deserted at every opportunity.

The causes of the breach between England and the provincials, as the colonists were then called, have been discussed in innumerable histories, and are far too complex to be dealt with in the chronicles of a regiment. It is enough to say here that the dispute began about questions of taxation and trade; the home Government was stupid, slow, and overbearing in its dealings with the provincials, who on their side were petulant, aggressive, and impatient of control. Many of the young Americans believed that as all danger of an attack by France had been removed by the British conquest of Canada, they would be better off as citizens of a republic than as subjects of King George. Both sides were unable to regard the matters at issue from a point of view other than their own: the English Government failed to appreciate the restlessness and desire for expansion natural to young and growing communities of British stock; the provincials were equally unable to realise how slowly new ideas penetrated into the brains of the governing classes at home.

At the beginning of 1775 the whole of Massachusetts was seething with scarcely veiled rebellion, and though the inhabitants of Boston itself were overawed by the presence of Gage’s troops, the rural population was so hostile that it was unsafe for officers to go any distance into the country without a strong and well-armed escort. The excitement was increased by the action of the provincial Parliament, which, issuing a proclamation urging all able-bodied men to arm themselves and join the militia, began to collect warlike stores at various places in the colony. One of these depôts was at Concord, a village twenty miles from Boston; Gage determined to burn its contents, and on the night of the 18th of April sent a raiding party of eighteen hundred men upon this errand of destruction. Under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Smith the flank companies--i.e. the grenadiers and light infantry[76]--of the 5th, 10th, XVIIIth, 23rd, 38th, 43rd, 52nd, and 59th regiments started from Boston before midnight, followed a few hours later by Lord Percy with a supporting body composed of the whole of the 4th and 47th regiments, the battalion companies of the 23rd, and ten companies of marines. As it was known that the provincials’ intelligence department was well organised, every precaution was taken to keep the expedition secret; but though the gates of the town had been closed early in the evening and the troops assembled silently at dead of night, their movements were reported by the anti-British faction in Boston, and as they marched through the darkness the ringing of bells and firing of guns warned them that the alarm had been given throughout the countryside. At daybreak the advance-guard ran into a small body of militia at Lexington: there was a parley, followed by a skirmish in which several provincials were hit and the remainder retreated in disorder. Smith lost no time in pushing on to Concord, and while his grenadiers began to demolish the stores some of the light companies guarded the approaches to the village.

So far the raid had been successful, but before describing how rapidly the tables were turned against the troops, the reader must realise with what manner of men Smith’s detachment was about to try conclusions. The original settlers in Massachusetts were of picked British stock; the large majority had left the old country to escape from the restraints imposed by the Stuarts upon liberty of conscience, while others had sought in the New World a freer and more adventurous life than England could afford. The mere fact that these men and women had the courage to leave their homes and friends to face the horrors of the unknown, proved them to be above the average in courage and steadfastness of purpose; and the hard life of pioneers; the incessant struggle with nature in a rude climate; fierce fights with the Red Indian savages, who tortured their captives before killing them; long hunting expeditions in vast and trackless forests; life on lonely farms where every man was thrown on his own resources--all had contributed to develop a race of over-sea Britons as formidable to their enemies as they would have been valuable to the Empire if they had been treated with tact, consideration, and justice. It was not in pioneering alone that the New Englanders had found vent for their restless energy; they had taken part in many of our expeditions during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the disastrous failure at Cartagena a considerable number of New Englanders shared in our defeat, and carried home with them a sorry report of the conduct of the army; a contingent of colonists with justice claimed a large share in the glory of the capture of Louisburg, the French Gibraltar at the mouth of the St Lawrence; and in all the interesting, though now forgotten fights between the English and the French in the country round Lake Champlain American volunteers fought side by side with the regular troops. Thus when the provincials determined to take up arms against England, many of the men who later became generals of note in the republican army had served their apprenticeship to war under the Colours of the mother-country. They had studied our drill; they understood our tactics; they knew the merits and demerits of our soldiers, and very soon learned how best to meet our slow and cumbrous movements with their imperfectly trained volunteers, who at the beginning of the War of Independence had many points in common with the Boers of 1899. Both were ardently patriotic; self-reliant to a fault; wholly undisciplined and obeying no order that did not appeal to them as individuals; both fought in bands of friends and neighbours, not infrequently commanded by the local preacher. In one respect, however, the Boers and the American colonists differed widely. In none of their encounters with the British did the burghers ever hold their ground with determination when things had begun to go badly with them, while at Bunker’s Hill, the first real battle of the revolutionary war, the provincials “fought to a finish” with such grim tenacity that, had our army been engaged, not with a raw militia, but with European regular troops, its dearly bought success would have been extolled as a feat of arms equal to any in the annals of England.

While Smith’s grenadiers were looking for the warlike stores, the light infantry outposts were attacked and driven back into Concord by a very superior force of provincials, who from far and wide had collected to do battle with the red-coats. Boys, full-grown men, greybeards almost tottering to the grave, turned out with splendid enthusiasm from the hamlets of Lincoln, Bedford, Carlisle, and Chelmsford, and surrounding the village like a swarm of bees, set themselves to sting the intruders to death with musketry. Smith determined to retire, and as his column filed out of Concord it became the target of sharpshooters lurking behind houses and log fences and in the woods bordering the rough track that led to Boston. In vain were flanking parties thrown out to keep the enemy at a distance from the main body; the provincials disappeared among the trees and then reappeared farther down the road, using their firearms with deadly effect. The soldiers replied so vigorously that ammunition began to fail them, and as it was impossible to charge a foe who had no formation and whose position was only indicated by isolated puffs of smoke on every side of the column, Smith retreated as fast as possible towards Lexington, losing men at every step. His troops straggled into the village so worn out by hunger and thirst, so demoralised by the biting fire of an almost invisible enemy, that when they saw Lord Percy’s detachment drawn up to protect them they flung themselves on the ground, so badly shaken that the supporting troops had to form square round them. For a time there was a lull in the firing; but when more contingents joined the provincials they re-opened such a vigorous fusilade that Percy decided to lose no time in retiring to Boston, fifteen miles away. He handled with much skill the regiments which had accompanied him, falling back from position to position so steadily as to keep his pursuers in some check; and notwithstanding the ever-increasing volume of fire with which reinforcements from Cambridge and Dorchester enabled the colonists to torment him, by nightfall he succeeded in bringing the shattered column safely into Boston. When the casualty returns were prepared, it was found that this disastrous little expedition had cost us in killed, wounded, and prisoners, nineteen officers and two hundred and fifty of the other ranks--a total to which the flank companies of the XVIIIth contributed two private soldiers killed and four wounded,[77] while the losses of the provincials were rather less than a hundred fighting men. The news of the American success spread like wildfire throughout New England; colony after colony threw in its lot with Massachusetts, and in a few days between sixteen and twenty thousand provincials had assembled for the blockade of Boston, then garrisoned by eleven battalions, all under strength, the weakest of all being the Royal Irish, who on the 25th of June could only muster two hundred and fifty-seven of all ranks. Although there was a British fleet at anchor in the bay, Gage could do nothing until more soldiers arrived from England, and by the time the long-expected reinforcements reached him Boston was closely invested by the Americans.

When the first emigrants to Massachusetts decided on the site of their principal town they selected an almost land-locked bay of the Atlantic, where there was good anchorage and shelter from the winter gales. This bay was almost bridged by two peninsulas, which from opposite shores jutted so far towards each other that at the nearest point they were only five hundred yards apart. Boston was built on the southern of these headlands; on the northern, the village of Charlestown nestled at the foot of an underfeature of the semicircle of low hills enveloping the bay. From Bunker’s Hill, as the southern end of this underfeature was called, Boston lay within cannon-shot; but neither side attempted to occupy this important position until Gage’s reinforcements arrived. Then the British General determined to seize it, but the Americans, acting either by intuition or on information from their spies in Boston, forestalled him. On the evening of the 16th of June twelve hundred men paraded on the common at Cambridge, attended a prayer-meeting, and then started on an enterprise the object of which was known only to the most senior of their officers. The column was commanded by Colonel Prescott, who had so greatly distinguished himself at the capture of Louisburg from the French during the Seven Years’ war that the home Government had offered him a commission in the regular army. Many of the men in his ranks had seen powder burned in earnest, and though their muskets were heavy and unwieldy, they had learned to use them in the pursuit of big game, where an ill-aimed bullet may cost the hunter his life. By the glimmer of dark lanterns Prescott led his men across the isthmus connecting the Charlestown peninsula with the mainland, then crossed Bunker’s Hill and halted on a lower ridge, Breed’s Hill, where he quickly traced the lines of a redoubt. To the provincials digging was no novelty, and they plied pick and shovel so silently and so assiduously that when the day broke the sailors on board the nearest man-of-war saw to their amazement an entrenchment, six feet high, standing where overnight there had been nothing but smooth pasture land. The ships lost no time in opening fire, and the colonists, unable to reply to our big guns, were growing unsteady when Prescott hoisted himself on to the parapet where, under a heavy but ill-directed cannonade he sauntered up and down, giving directions to his working parties and encouraging those men whose courage was not as steadfast as his own. With such an example before them none of the militia flinched; the redoubt grew apace, and was practically finished before the troops in Boston were ready to attack it. But though Prescott had every reason to be satisfied with the temper and industry of his detachment, his situation was a desperate one, and had Gage availed himself of all the resources at his command, not one of the twelve hundred adventurers would have made his way back to the provincial camps. The British had command of the bay; vessels of light draught could sail close to any part of the peninsula; the isthmus, the only possible line of retreat for the Americans, was low, sandy, and less than two hundred yards in width. Gage could have landed behind the entrenchments, and have attacked the Americans simultaneously in front and rear; he could have cut off their retreat and starved them into surrender by fortifying himself upon the isthmus, or by stationing gunboats on either side of it, he could have made it absolutely impassable by cross fire. These schemes were suggested to him, but neither he nor any of the British army were in the mood for scientific fighting, and he decided to regain the prestige lost at Concord and Lexington by a direct frontal attack upon Breed’s Hill.[78] Four complete battalions and twenty flank companies, including the grenadiers and light infantry of the Royal Irish, were rowed across to the Charlestown peninsula--the right wing under General Pigot was composed of the provisional battalion of light infantry, the 38th and 43rd regiments; in the left wing were the provisional battalion of grenadiers, the 5th and 52nd regiments, commanded by General Howe. While the troops were landing on ground well out of range of the Americans the officers had time to study the position they were to carry. It was a strong one: a gentle slope, covered with long grass and cut up by a series of fences calculated to throw advancing troops into disorder, led up to the redoubt and to a breastwork, which ran for a hundred yards towards the enemy’s left. Between the end of this breastwork and the sea was a gap, held by a detachment posted at the foot of Bunker’s Hill, where the only cover was a low stone wall, on which hay was piled to give it additional height. The total frontage occupied was about six hundred yards, defended when the fight began by fifteen hundred men and six pieces of artillery.[79] The British brought between two thousand and two thousand five hundred troops into the field, for in addition to the units already mentioned the 47th regiment and a battalion of Marines came into action during the fight.

At three o’clock in the afternoon Howe, who was the senior officer on the Charlestown peninsula, gave the order to advance. At first the movement was covered by the fire of eight pieces--field-guns and howitzers, which had been ferried across from Boston, but soon the supply of cannon-balls ran out, and as the officer in charge of the artillery reported that a marsh prevented his pushing on to within grape-shot range of the enemy, the infantry for a long time were unsupported by the guns. After the regiments had deployed, the light infantry was directed against the enemy’s left, while the grenadiers, 5th and 52nd, with the 38th and 43rd in second line, were to storm the breastwork and the redoubt. The day was intensely hot, and the soldiers, burdened with heavy knapsacks, three days’ rations, cartouche-boxes, ammunition, bayonets, and muskets weighing fifteen pounds, mounted the hill slowly though in good order. They were allowed to open fire too soon, and their volleys, delivered with perfect precision, were almost ineffective. The provincials wished to reply while their enemies were a long way off, but their leaders knew better than to allow such a waste of ammunition, and while some threatened to cut down the first man who discharged his firelock without orders, others ran along the top of the parapet kicking the muzzles into the air. It was not until the red-coats were within fifty or sixty yards that the Americans were allowed to shoot, and then their well-aimed musketry was so terrible that the whole British line recoiled before it to the bottom of the hill. Howe re-formed his troops, and again led them up the slope, only to be hurled backwards once more with a loss so heavy that the glacis of Breed’s Hill looked more like the breach of a fortress after an assault than an ordinary battlefield. But though they had twice failed to reach the works of the Americans neither Howe nor his men were beaten, and the General had the moral courage to order a third attack, while the soldiers

“had that in them which raised them to the level of a feat of arms to which it is not easy, and perhaps not even possible, to recall a parallel. Awful as was the slaughter of Albuera, the contest was eventually decided by a body, however scanty, of fresh troops. The cavalry which pierced the French centre at Blenheim had been hotly engaged but, for the most part, had not been worsted. But at Bunker’s Hill every corps had been broken; every corps had been decimated several times over; and yet the same battalions, or what was left of them, a third time mounted that fatal slope with the intention of staying on the summit. Howe had learned his lesson, and perceived that he was dealing with adversaries whom it required something besides the manœuvres of the parade ground to conquer. And to conquer, then and there, he was steadfastly resolved, in spite of the opposition which respectfully indeed, but quite openly, made itself heard around him. He ordered the men to unbuckle and lay down their knapsacks, to press forward without shooting, and to rely on the bayonet alone until they were on the inner side of the wall.... The officers who had remonstrated with him for proposing to send the troops to what they described as downright butchery, when they were informed of his decision, returned quietly to their posts, and showed by their behaviour that in protesting against any further bloodshed they had been speaking for the sake of their soldiers and not of themselves.”[80]

Prescott had begun to ask for reinforcements of men and ammunition early in the day, but, as was to be expected in a volunteer army chiefly officered by amateurs, the staff arrangements were so bad that very few troops and no ammunition reached him during the action. Thus when Howe for the third time hurled himself at the redoubt, none of its defenders had more than two rounds left. These last shots were not wasted, for as the troops rushed with fixed bayonets towards the work a venomous fire brought nearly every man in the front rank headlong to the ground; but without a check the ranks in rear surged over the parapet, and falling-to with the cold steel drove the provincials in confusion out of the redoubt. With empty muskets and with few bayonets the Americans could do little at close quarters, but many fought stubbornly as they retreated, admirably covered by the men on Bunker’s Hill, who, though heavily cannonaded by the fleet, held their ground until their comrades from Breed’s Hill had shaken off pursuit. This engagement cost our provincial kinsmen 115 killed and 300 wounded, while of the old-country men 19 officers were killed and 70 wounded; in the other ranks 207 were killed and 758 wounded--a total of 1054 casualties.[81] The enormous proportion of losses among the commissioned ranks was due to the good shooting of picked marksmen, who were kept supplied with loaded weapons by their neighbours. These sharpshooters devoted themselves to picking off the officers, whose glittering gorgets not only revealed their rank, but gave an excellent target at which to aim. Of the part played in the action by the grenadier and light companies of the Royal Irish no particulars have been preserved; nothing is known beyond the fact that three privates were killed and an officer, Lieutenant W. Richardson, and seven privates wounded.[82] Compared to the carnage in some of the flank companies, the losses of the XVIIIth were insignificant, yet the actual percentage was high, for in June, 1775,[83] the companies of the regiment only averaged twenty-six of all ranks, and though the grenadiers and light infantry were usually a little stronger than the battalion companies, it is doubtful whether between them they brought more than sixty-five or seventy men into the field.

Although Gage’s dearly-won victory secured to the British the possession of the Charlestown peninsula, and thus guaranteed them against bombardment from Bunker’s Hill, it did not improve the situation in other respects. Soon after the battle Washington was elected to the command of the provincial army, and so closely invested Boston that the garrison began to suffer from the want of fresh food. At first the daily ration of salt pork and peas was occasionally varied by fish, but this source of supply was cut off by the American general, who dragged a number of whale-boats overland from the neighbourhood of Cape Cod to the head-waters of one of the rivers flowing into the bay, and manned the flotilla with sailors, of whom there were many in his ranks. With this mosquito fleet he effectually stopped all fishing operations, and under the very guns of our warships captured small craft, and seized the sheep and cattle grazing on the islands in the bay. That such things were possible shows the depths of inefficiency to which our fleet on the American station had sunk in 1775; supine and stupid as were the generals, they seemed models of talent and energy when compared with the admirals with whom they were expected to co-operate. The want of proper food produced much illness, especially among the wounded, whose diet in hospital was the same as that of the men at duty; and the mortality was great. Coal ran so short that wooden houses and churches were pulled down for firewood. Small-pox broke out and claimed many victims. The duties, heavy everywhere, proved particularly trying at the outposts, for the provincials, ignoring the rule of war that piquets are not to be fired upon wantonly, used to amuse themselves by forming parties to stalk and shoot down the sentries as they paced their beats. Beyond these occasional skirmishes there was no fighting; at first the gunners cannonaded the enemy’s position, but with so little success that the general decided to waste no more powder in teaching the Americans how to stand fire. As month after month passed in misery and inaction, the soldiers, badly fed, thoroughly dispirited and profoundly bored, grew moody, dirty, careless about their dress, while discipline was only maintained by the stern sentences of the courts-martial which awarded punishments of four hundred, six hundred, and even a thousand lashes.

When the Cabinet realised that Boston was in great want of food they sent out many ships filled with stores of every kind. But the ill-luck which dogged the British throughout the American war prevented the arrival of these vessels. Some were lost at sea; others were blown by a tempest to the West Indies; while others again, laden with cannon and mortars, muskets, flints, and much powder and shot fell into the hands of the Americans, who under Washington’s fostering care were rapidly forming a national fleet. These munitions of war were not the only provincial spoils: a daring raid against isolated forts on the Canadian frontier secured a large number of guns, and early in March, 1776, Washington began to bombard Boston with British ordnance, and took possession of high ground to the south of the town, which from want of men neither Gage nor his successor Howe had been able to include within their lines. This position commanded the harbour, and the Admiral warned the General plainly that unless the soldiers could recapture it the men-of-war and transports would be obliged to put to sea. Thereupon Howe, who had long realised that it was impossible to maintain himself in Boston, ordered its evacuation, and on the 17th of March, with the nine thousand troops remaining to him and eleven hundred loyalists who refused to remain behind, he set sail for Halifax in Nova Scotia, in ships so overcrowded that many valuable stores had to be left to fall into Washington’s hands, while much of the officers’ heavy baggage shared the same fate. The Americans did not hinder the embarkation, for Howe had given out that if the bombardment was resumed he would set fire to the town, and Washington, to whom the threat was reported by his spies, allowed him to depart in peace. The men-of-war, after seeing the troopships safely out to sea, hung about the coast of Massachusetts for a time, but effected nothing, and then were ordered to other parts of the theatre of war.

The XVIIIth had been so worn down by privations and misery at Boston, that it was ordered home to recruit. The men still fit for active service were drafted into other regiments, while the officers, non-commissioned officers, and invalids of the Royal Irish returned to England in the course of the summer of 1776. The XVIIIth was not actively employed during the remainder of this war, which, beginning with our attempt to suppress the rebellion in North America, developed into a struggle for existence against the combined forces of France, Holland, and Spain; for these countries, seeing that our resources were heavily taxed by the struggle in America, and desirous to pay off old scores, took up arms against us. For a time we lost the command of the sea, and could not reinforce Cornwallis when he was besieged at Yorktown by Washington’s provincial troops and a large body of French regular soldiers. After a gallant defence, Yorktown fell, and with the lowering of Cornwallis’s flag passed away Britain’s last hope of reconquering her rebellious provinces. By the peace of 1783, England was compelled to recognise the independence of the United States, as her revolted colonies now styled themselves; to restore Florida and Minorca to Spain, and to cede to France the West Indian islands of St Lucia and Tobago.

From 1776 to 1783, the Royal Irish were stationed in England and in the Channel Islands, where their officers drilled and disciplined the recruits to such purpose that when the young soldiers were suddenly called upon to perform a most unpleasant duty they were thoroughly equal to the occasion. Early in 1783 the XVIIIth was in Guernsey, where one of the regiments of the garrison had acquired an evil reputation for insubordination. This corps (long since disbanded) suddenly broke out into open mutiny, and after coercing its colonel into promising them privileges entirely subversive of all discipline, apparently settled down; the officers, thinking the trouble was over for the moment, went to their mess-room and sat down to dinner, when a shower of bullets came rattling about their ears. They took cover under the table, but the would-be murderers mounted to windows from which they could pour plunging fire into the mess-room, and were shooting vigorously when a sergeant advised the officers to make a dash for the gate of the fort. They did so, and by great luck escaping unhurt by the volley with which their appearance in the barrack-square was greeted, hurried into the town to give the alarm. Two of their number, however, could not run, and found shelter in a coal cellar! As soon as this outbreak was reported, the local militia was turned out, and the XVIIIth ordered to parade forthwith; the fort was surrounded; the drums sounded a “parley”; but the mutineers at first declined to treat, and then demanded that they should be disbanded and sent back to their homes at once. When the Lieutenant-Governor attempted to reason with them, these madmen fired at him and next turned their muskets on the troops. Then more infantry came up, followed by some guns; and there seemed every prospect of a sharp fight, when the mutineers suddenly lost heart, piled arms, and marching quietly out of the fort, surrendered. Happily none of the bullets found its billet among the Royal Irish, who were greatly praised by the military authorities for their good behaviour, and the States (the local parliament) of Guernsey presented a hundred guineas to the non-commissioned officers and privates of the XVIIIth as a tangible proof of gratitude for their services on this occasion.

In the summer of 1783 the regiment sailed for Gibraltar, where it was stationed for the next ten years.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter IV

1793-1817.

THE WAR WITH THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: TOULON--CORSICA--EGYPT. THE NAPOLEONIC WAR: THE WEST INDIES.

During the early phases of the French Revolution the British Government assumed an attitude of strict neutrality in the internal affairs of France, and to this policy it adhered until January, 1793, when the excesses of the Jacobins, culminating in the judicial murder of Louis XVI., compelled England to join the coalition of Continental Powers which had taken up arms to restore order in France, and to safeguard their own dominions, threatened, and in some cases actually invaded by the troops of the Republic. The outbreak of war found the British army in a deplorable condition; it had in no way recovered from its disasters in America, and was “lax in its discipline, entirely without system and very weak in numbers. Each colonel of a regiment managed it according to his notions or neglected it altogether. There was no uniformity of drill or movement; professional pride was rare, professional knowledge still more so.... Every department was more or less inefficient. The regimental officers, as well as their men, were hard drinkers, the latter, under a loose discipline were addicted to marauding and to acts of licentious violence.”[84] The physique was often as defective as the morale; some regiments were composed of lads too young to march, while in others the majority of the rank and file were old and worn-out men. A few thousand troops were hurried off to join the forces of the Allies who faced the French in Holland, and a fleet was sent to the Mediterranean under Lord Hood, with orders to co-operate with the adherents of the Monarchy, who were still numerous in the south of France. After Hood passed Gibraltar he bore up for Toulon, then as now one of the principal French naval ports.[85] In its harbour and dockyard lay many warships, commanded by Royalists who hated the Revolution and all its works, and manned by sailors many of whom agreed with the political opinions of their officers. As large numbers of the civilian population in the town shared his views, the Royalist admiral, in the hope of rescuing his country from the anarchy into which it was plunged, took the extreme step of entering into negotiations with Hood for the occupation of the port by the British. The horror inspired by the Revolution must have been deep indeed to induce an officer of high rank and unblemished reputation to think of such an arrangement with a nation regarded by every Frenchman as the hereditary enemy of his race. Since the Normans after conquering France had overrun and subdued England, hostilities between the two countries had been frequent, almost incessant; we had often raided the French coasts, and for a long time our kings held as their own the western half of France. In the hundred years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Revolution the divergent policy of their rulers had plunged the two countries into a series of five wars: their armies had encountered each other on innumerable battlefields in Germany and the Low Countries, in Spain, Canada and the West Indies: their fleets had met not only in the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, and the Channel, but in parts of the ocean as remote as the Gulf of Bengal and the Caribbean Sea; and bands of French adventurers in the service of the native princes of India had fought with the troops of the East India Company on the plains of Hindustan. Very bitter must have been the feelings of the Royalist officers when they agreed to make over to Hood the forts, the arsenal, the shipping, the docks, and the town of Toulon itself, on the understanding that this national property was to be held in trust for the son of Louis XVI., to whom it was duly to be restored when he ascended the throne. The French men-of-war were to be dismantled, but as a concession to sentiment, and to show that Toulon was not a conquered town but still formed part of the Kingdom of France, the white flag of the Bourbons was to float over its walls.

On August 27, 1793, Hood, who had been joined by a Spanish squadron, took possession of the forts. The landing party consisted of from twelve to fifteen hundred marines and soldiers who were serving on board the ships. There was no officer among them of rank higher than a captain; they had no tents, or stores, or field-guns, and even had they possessed the latter, there were no engineers or artillerymen to plan a battery or to lay a gun. Though the troops met with no active opposition, the attitude of many of the French sailors was so threatening that Hood decided to get rid of as many of them as he could, and selecting four of the least serviceable French vessels, he unshipped their guns and ammunition, and packed into them five thousand of the most troublesome republican seamen, with “safe conducts” for the French ports on the Atlantic seaboard. Having thus disposed of these “undesirables,” Hood applied to those of the Allied Powers whose territories lay in the basin of the Mediterranean for help to hold Toulon against the Republicans who were gathering against him, and by the beginning of November he had collected a very heterogeneous force of about 16,000 men. When our Ministers learned that Toulon was in the hands of the Allies they promised to send Hood large reinforcements; but neither the importance of the place as a base of operations against the Republicans, nor the difficulty of holding its land-locked harbour were adequately appreciated at home; and when more troops were required for our contingent in the Low Countries, for an expedition against the coast of Brittany, and for a raid upon the French islands in the West Indies, the expected reinforcements dwindled to seven hundred and fifty men from Gibraltar, who reached Toulon on the 27th of October. At the beginning of the war the regiments were so weak that this handful of troops included the XVIIIth Royal Irish,[86] the second battalion of the Royals, and detachments of Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery. The exact strength of the XVIIIth is not known, but as on the 25th of June, 1793, there were only two hundred and eighty-three officers and men at the Rock, and as a certain number of sick were left in hospital when the Royal Irish went on active service, the captains must have commanded companies no larger than the sections of the present day. The reinforcements from Gibraltar raised the strength of the British to about 2000 of all ranks; their allies consisted of 6500 Spaniards, 4700 Neapolitans, 1500 Piedmontese, and about the same number of French Royalists.

An army made up of contingents from several nations is necessarily less effective than one formed of soldiers of the same race. Hereditary ill-feeling, professional jealousy, and the want of a common language combine to lessen its value as a fighting machine, unless the General-in-Chief possesses a personality as commanding as that of Marlborough or Wellington. At Toulon none of the senior officers of the Allies were men of genius, and it is doubtful whether even a great soldier, with so curiously composed a force, could have withstood the savage energy that Napoleon, then a young officer of artillery on his first campaign, infused into the Generals commanding the besieging troops. The contingents of the Allies were of very uneven value. The British were excellent, though their courage was not yet thoroughly disciplined; the Piedmontese were very good; the French Royalists, though brave, naturally disliked to fight their republican fellow-countrymen, much as they loathed their political principles; the Spaniards frequently deserted their posts when threatened by a vigorous attack, and the Neapolitans were cowards of the deepest dye. Sir Gilbert Elliot, the diplomatic representative of Britain in the Mediterranean expedition, describes how a party of Neapolitans behaved on outpost. After four of them had been killed in a skirmish, the remainder sent to the officer in charge of the section “to beg to be relieved as they were all sick!” With such allies it is not surprising to learn that “no post was considered safe without a proportion of British troops, and they were obliged to be divided and thin-sowed accordingly.”[87] Whether from genuine illness, from unfitness for the hardships of active service, or from overwork, the sick list was enormous, and the Generals could never count on more than 11,000 or 12,000 effectives--far too few for the heavy duty they had to perform. To prevent the enemy from planting batteries on the hills commanding the harbour, the Allies were forced to hold a perimeter of fifteen miles, guarded by eight main works with a number of subsidiary connecting posts; and nine thousand men were constantly employed at the outposts, with a reserve of three thousand in the town, to overawe the disaffected part of the population and to reinforce any threatened point.

Up to the time of the arrival of the XVIIIth there had not been much fighting, for the French were engaged in mounting guns, and were not yet in strength to attempt a coup-de-main. When the Royal Irish landed they were marched up to the front, but were engaged in no affair of importance until the 30th of November, when they took part in a sortie against a large battery placed by Napoleon himself on the Aresnes heights, from which one of our principal works was commanded. The assaulting column, formed of 400 British, 300 Piedmontese, 600 Neapolitans, 600 Spaniards, and 400 French Royalists, was commanded by General O’Hara, one of the staff at Gibraltar, who had landed at Toulon with the XVIIIth. The instructions he issued were explicit. When the troops reached the plain at the foot of the heights, the column was to break into four detachments, the British on the left, and on reaching the summit they were to capture the battery, occupy the heights, and then stand fast; on no account whatever were they to follow the enemy in pursuit. After making their way, first through a belt of olive-trees intersected by stone walls, and then up a steep mountain cut into terraces of vineyards, the Allies gained the crest, surprised the French, and drove them headlong out of the battery. Had they remembered their orders the success would have been complete, for the guns could have been rolled down the height and carried back to Toulon; but unfortunately the men got out of hand, and dashed madly after the retreating French down a valley and up a hill on the other side, scattering in all directions as they pursued their flying foes. They had lost all vestige of cohesion when they were charged by formed bodies of the enemy, whose counter-stroke changed our victory into a defeat. General O’Hara was wounded and captured; and of the four hundred British engaged, twelve officers and about two hundred other ranks were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The survivors fell back to the battery and attempted to hold it, but being unsupported by their Continental comrades had finally to retreat into Toulon, though not before they had spiked six guns.

During the next fortnight the volume of the enemy’s fire increased daily; fresh batteries were unmasked in various directions, and everything tended to confirm the reports of spies and deserters that the French, now about 40,000 strong, were preparing for an attack in force. The preliminary bombardment began at 2 A.M. on the 16th of December, when Napoleon concentrated the fire of five batteries upon Fort Mulgrave, one of the most important of the western series of redoubts. It was held by a mixed force: a body of Spaniards occupied the northern half of the work; the southern was in charge of a detachment of British, under Captain W. Conolly, Royal Irish Regiment. By the end of the day the redoubt was in ruins, with half its garrison of seven hundred men disabled; at two o’clock in the morning of the 17th the French advanced against it, but though in overpowering force, for half an hour they made no progress till the Spaniards were seized with panic and left the British in the lurch. The enemy had begun to occupy the northern end of the work, when Conolly, though himself hard pressed, sent a subaltern and thirty-six men to retake it. With splendid courage this handful of soldiers drove back the Republicans, and for a time kept them at bay; but soon the weight of numbers began to tell, the survivors of the detachment were forced backwards, and at four o’clock the “remnants of the XVIIIth” were ousted from Fort Mulgrave. An hour or two later the French, breaking through the line of fortifications at a second point, carried Mont Faron, a hill 1800 feet high, which from the north partly commands the harbour and the town. On the enemy’s side of this mountain the slopes are steep and rocky; and as much labour had been expended in increasing their natural difficulties, Faron was considered so impregnable that only four hundred and fifty men were employed to guard its two miles of frontage. At daylight every work upon this hill was attacked and, though none of the British posts were driven in, the French poured through the gaps left by the Spaniards and Neapolitans, and established themselves upon the shoulder of Mont Faron from which Toulon is overlooked.

A disaster such as this had long been foreseen by the senior officers of the British land forces. General O’Hara, and his successor General David Dundas, had frequently represented to Lord Hood the impossibility of making a prolonged defence with so inadequate and so inefficient a garrison as that at his disposal; they had pointed out that if one of the main works should be lost there were no fresh troops with which to recapture it, and that once any part of the line was pierced the harbour and the fleet would be exposed to the enemy’s artillery; and they therefore urged that arrangements should be made beforehand for the orderly and systematic evacuation of the place when it became untenable. But Lord Hood was strongly prejudiced against soldiers: throughout his career he had slighted their advice, and he took no steps to prepare for the retreat which the Generals warned him was inevitable, with the result that when all hope of holding the place was gone nothing was in readiness for the retirement, and nearly the whole of the 17th was spent in settling details with the naval and military officers of the different nations. To organise the evacuation was no easy task; not only were there four thousand sick and wounded to be embarked, but room had to be found on the transports or the men-of-war for thousands of Royalists whom it was impossible to abandon to the vengeance of their republican fellow-countrymen; the French ships had to be burned or towed out of harbour, and the arsenal and dockyard to be destroyed. After many hours of weary discussion it was agreed that the embarkation of the troops should begin at 11 P.M. on the 18th; the least important posts were to be withdrawn early, others were to be held to the last moment. The scheme, which required absolute obedience to orders, was nearly wrecked by the Neapolitans, whose misconduct Elliot thus described in a despatch to Government--

“ ... These arrangements were made on the 17th before dinner. Without notice to any person concerned the Neapolitan officers packed up their baggage, and crowded the streets and quays with their preparations for departing on the evening of the 17th. Their baggage was actually sent on board, their general actually embarked that evening, and the troops, quitting every post where they were stationed, continued their embarcation publicly from the quays of the town, from the evening of the 17th to the middle of the next day. Their eagerness, impatience and panic were so great on the 18th, in the forenoon, that the embarcation of the inhabitants was rendered not only difficult but dangerous, the Neapolitan soldiers firing on those boats which they could not get admission to. Many of themselves were drowned in attempting to crowd into the boats, and there was a temporary appearance of confusion and insurrection in the town. The Neapolitan Admiral seems to have been in as great haste as the military. He sailed long before either the British or Spanish squadrons and, without waiting to make any arrangement about either troops or refugees, pushed off for Naples, leaving a good number of Neapolitan troops on board our fleet to find their way home as well as they can.”[88]

Until nearly all the allied troops were embarked the British and Piedmontese remained resolutely at their posts, which they did not quit until recalled into the town to cover the operations of the sailors, who were burning the arsenal and setting fire to the French ships. When the outposts were withdrawn the French crowded into Toulon, and by the light of the flames shot heavily at the blue-jackets, busy at the work of devastation, in which they were helped by a party of the XVIIIth, commanded by Ensign W. Iremonger, one of the two land officers employed on this dangerous duty. For a time a musketry fight raged; then at the appointed hour the soldiers gradually withdrew to their boats, gained their ships, and in two or three hours the whole of the allied fleet was safely out to sea. Though Hood’s operations on land utterly failed to advance the cause of the Royalists, and though he did not succeed in destroying the arsenal completely, or in burning all the enemy’s ships, he undoubtedly inflicted a serious, though not a crushing blow to the naval power of France in the Mediterranean by his operations at Toulon. When he took possession of the town he found floating in its harbour or building in its dockyard fifty-eight men-of-war of various sizes: thirty-three he annexed or burned to the water’s edge, the remaining twenty-five he was obliged to leave behind him, to become the nucleus of a new fleet. The price paid in human flesh and blood for this success cannot be stated, for the losses of the Allies are not to be traced, and the British returns, as far as they were published in despatches, are incomplete, and in the case of the Royal Irish do not agree with the muster-roll made a week after the evacuation. In it appear the names of three sergeants, one corporal, and thirty-four privates who were killed or died during the siege; and one officer, Lieutenant George Minchin, two sergeants, two drummers, one corporal, and thirty-two privates missing.[89] In the unsuccessful sortie of the 30th of November twenty-four rank and file of the regiment were wounded; how many were injured in the daily fighting at the outposts and in the defence of Fort Mulgrave and Mont Faron cannot be ascertained, but it is clear that the Royal Irish played a distinguished part in the operations, and in proportion to their numbers lost very heavily.

As soon as the allied fleet was clear of the harbour of Toulon it dispersed: the Spaniards and the Neapolitans made sail respectively for the Balearic Isles and Naples, while Hood put into the bay of Hyères, a few miles east of Toulon, where he tried to evolve order out of the chaos produced by the hurried embarkation of the troops, and to obtain fresh provisions of which he was in great need. Unwilling to weaken himself by sending British vessels to buy food in the ports of Italy and Spain, he employed upon this service several of the French ships, which, in theory at least, were still under the orders of the Royalist admiral. British infantry were sent on board them as marines, the XVIIIth furnishing a strong detachment under Lieutenant Mawby, who on going on board the Pompée found that she was still flying the Royalist flag, and was commanded by French naval officers. The duty was heavy, and the cruise must have been a very unpleasant one, for guards had to be mounted in every part of the vessel to keep her crew from breaking into open mutiny. In one respect, however, Mawby and his companions were better off than their comrades at headquarters, for they escaped the overcrowding caused by the presence of thousands of Royalists in the ships at Hyères. Sir Gilbert Elliot mentions that in the cabin he shared with several naval officers, twenty luckless French refugees, men, women, and children slept huddled together on the floor; and if no better quarters could be provided for the diplomatic representative of England, it is easy to imagine that regimental officers must have been hideously uncomfortable.

At this time England had no possessions in the Mediterranean east of Gibraltar, for Minorca, lost to her in 1782, was not recovered till some years later. Yet to watch Toulon and the southern coast of France, and to encourage the various Italian States to fight for their independence which was already threatened by the armies of the Republic, it was essential that England should possess an advanced naval and military base in the Mediterranean. Such a post awaited us in Corsica, where the inhabitants had profited by the turmoil of the Revolution to rise against their French masters, whom they had driven into the north of the island. The garrison had flung themselves into the fortified coast towns of Bastia and Calvi, and the works fringing the bay of S. Fiorenzo, and the Corsicans soon realised that without professional soldiers, cannon, and munitions of war, they could not hope to take these places, while without a fleet it was impossible to prevent reinforcements from the mainland reaching their enemy. When both parties to a bargain are eager to come to terms negotiations are easy, and the islanders willingly agreed to become subjects of George III., provided that a constitution framed on that of England was granted to them. As soon as the arrangements for the annexation of the island were completed Hood left his anchorage at Hyères, where for five weeks the French had allowed him to remain unmolested, and made for the bay of S. Fiorenzo, at the western base of the great northern promontory of Corsica.[90] Driving the French from their defences, he forced them to fall back on Bastia, their foothold on the eastern coast; then leaving some of the troops at S. Fiorenzo, he sailed for Bastia, already closely blockaded by Nelson’s frigates and cut off from communication with the interior by the Corsicans, who excelled in all kinds of partisan warfare. Neither Hood’s ships nor the troops accompanying them were at this time in a satisfactory condition: his crews were so weak that he had tried to borrow sailors from the Neapolitan fleet, but without success; and the soldiers numbered little more than two thousand men, who were very ill provided for a campaign, as most of their camp equipage, baggage, and knapsacks had been left behind at Toulon. A board sat in Corsica to investigate the circumstances in which this loss--a very heavy one to the men--had been incurred, and recommended that £2 should be paid to each sergeant and £1 to each private soldier, adding that though this would not compensate the men for their kit, it was as much as Government could be reasonably expected to give.

Though Hood, as a sailor, was unversed in the military branches of the art of war, he decided after a reconnaissance of Bastia that it would be possible for the troops to carry the defences by a sudden assault from the land side of the town. Dundas, who though cautious by temperament was an educated soldier of much experience, condemned the project as beyond the powers of his small and ill-equipped force, and this difference of opinion at once intensified the friction already existing between the Admiral and the General. Unable to agree on a plan of operations, Hood and Dundas summoned conferences and councils of war, at which no decision was reached; and their relations became so strained that they ceased to meet, transacting business by means of formal and acrimonious correspondence. Throughout the army the question was hotly debated, and Bastia was reconnoitred by many officers, the large majority of whom became converts to Dundas’s opinions. Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, who commanded the XVIIIth, was one of the few in favour of an attack, but his views do not appear to have been supported by convincing arguments, for Sir John Moore (then Lieutenant-Colonel Moore, 51st regiment) recorded in his diary that “Wemyss conceives it would be mighty easy to take them” (i.e., the heights commanding the land fortifications), “but cannot explain how, and talks so like a boy that little weight can be given to his opinion.”[91] Hood’s conduct towards the General and the troops became so intolerable that Dundas took the unjustifiable step of resigning his command and returning to England. Not long after his departure reinforcements reached the officer in temporary command of the army, whose offer to co-operate in the operations was contemptuously rejected by Lord Hood; and thus, when on May 24th the garrison of 4500 men surrendered, the success was due to the Navy, whose blockading vessels had fairly starved the French into submission, while, with the exception of some artillerymen and the troops serving on the warships as marines, the land forces were hardly employed in the reduction of Bastia.

The only place in Corsica now remaining in the occupation of the French was Calvi, a well-fortified town on the western coast. Lieutenant-General the Hon. Charles Stuart, who on the day of the surrender of Bastia had arrived from England to replace Dundas, lost no time in reorganising his command, and then reconnoitred Calvi, where he was followed by Moore, who had been placed in command of a corps termed “the reserve,” and formed of the flank companies of the Royal Irish, the 50th, 51st, and the remains of the 2nd battalion of the Royals. Calvi was by no means an easy place to besiege, for it was surrounded on three sides by the sea and had good interior fortifications, with outer works of considerable strength. About eight hundred yards west of the town stood the Mozello, a bomb-proof, star-shaped fort, built of solid masonry and mounting ten guns; north of this fort was a smaller battery, flanked by an entrenchment, and to the east rose another battery of three guns. Two thousand yards south-west of the town the fort of Monteciesco commanded the approaches from the southward, which were also swept by the guns of two French frigates anchored in the bay. But though these works were formidable, Stuart considered that the “real strength of the defence lay in the height of the mountains and the rugged, rocky country over which it was necessary to penetrate. It was necessary to abandon regular approaches and to adopt rapid and forward movements.” He accordingly decided to bombard Fort Monteciesco with three 26-prs., and under cover of their fire to throw up a heavier battery at night within seven hundred and fifty yards of the Mozello. The labour of moving the guns, ammunition, and stores was immense, for roads had to be cut up the sides of steep hills nine hundred feet in height, and the cannon to be dragged by hand over the cliffs that overhang the landing-place. At the end of June more troops were brought round from Bastia; among them were the Royal Irish, recently reinforced by the return of the Pompée detachment, which rejoined in time to share in the fatigues and dangers of the siege.

On the evening of the 6th of July,[92] the Royal Irish were ordered to make a feigned attack on Monteciesco to draw the attention of the enemy from Moore’s column, which was preparing to throw up the battery against the Mozello. The ruse was successful; the XVIIIth showed themselves so ostentatiously that the French not only turned all their fire upon them, but reinforced Monteciesco with a body of men who had been posted on the very spot where Moore proposed to place his guns. By dint of great efforts the last of Moore’s 26-prs. was dragged into position just before daybreak, thus raising the number of ordnance playing upon Calvi to eleven guns and three mortars, whose fire forced the French to evacuate Monteciesco and move their warships out of range. Stuart then bombarded Mozello assiduously; the French replied with equal vigour; for some days our shot appeared to make little impression on the fort, but on the 18th of July the breach was reported to be practicable, and orders were issued for its assault that night. To conceal the real object of his movements, he arranged that an advance battery should be built in the night in order that the French might think the concentration of troops was merely for the protection of the working party. The task was entrusted to the 50th, who, undiscovered by the enemy, threw up the battery, and then, to quote the words of the despatch, “the Grenadiers, Light Infantry and 2nd Battalion Royals under Lieutenant-Colonel Moore of the 51st Regiment and Major Brereton of the 30th Regiment proceeded with a cool steady confidence and unloaded arms towards the enemy, forced their way through a smart fire of musketry, and regardless of live shells flung from the breach or the additional defence of pikes, stormed the Mozello” ... while “Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, equally regardless of opposition carried the enemy’s battery on the left without firing a shot.” In Sir John Moore’s diary fuller details of this spirited affair are to be found. The various corps assembled at their rendezvous at 1 A.M. on the 19th: the Royal Irish were to attack the half moon (or Fountain) battery on the left, while “the reserve” stormed the Mozello. In ground dead to the fort, though only two or three hundred yards distant from it, Moore formed the grenadiers and light infantry (among whom, it will be remembered, were the flank companies of the XVIIIth) into a column of companies.

“Each grenadier carried a sandbag, and we had a sufficient number of ladders (about fourteen in all). Here we waited for the signal which was to be a gun from the new battery. The General came to me about half-past three. About this time some of the enemy’s sentries or piquets fired upon the XVIIIth upon our left, and soon after the signal to advance was given. The General kept for some time at the head of the Grenadiers. A party of artificers a little in our front began to cut the palisades, but we were upon them before they could effect it. Captain McDonald, who commanded the Royal Grenadiers,[93] and I got through the palisades first at an opening made by our shot. The men instantly followed, and giving a cheer, ran up to the bottom of the breach. We were annoyed both by shot, hand-grenades, and live shells, which the enemy had placed on the parapet and rolled over upon us. Luckily neither sand-bags nor ladders were necessary. The Grenadiers advanced with their bayonets with such intrepidity that the French gave way and ran out of the fort--and in a moment the place was filled with the five companies of Grenadiers. Two companies of Light Infantry had been ordered to move quickly round the foot of the fort and get between the enemy and the town, but the Grenadiers stormed so briskly that the Light Infantry could not arrive in time: by this means most of them escaped.”

The Royal Irish lost no time in entrenching themselves in the Fountain battery, and worked so well that when at daybreak the enemy opened with grape and round shot the cannonade did them little harm.

Stuart had every reason for wishing to bring the operations to a close, for though his casualties were small, bad food, excessive fatigue, and a pestilential climate had so devastated the camp that by the middle of July two-thirds of his men were in hospital, and the remainder were breaking down at an alarming rate. The large number of sailors who were serving on shore under Nelson were in equally bad case, and the necessity of watching the French at Toulon made it impossible to replace them from the fleet. In the hope that the loss of their principal outworks had shaken the spirit of the French, General Stuart sent word to the garrison that he was prepared to offer them favourable terms; but when Casabianca, their commander, refused to negotiate, he pressed forward his siege-works so fast that on July 31, thirteen heavy guns, four mortars, and three howitzers were in position within six hundred yards of the walls of the town. So effective was their fire that on the 1st of August Casabianca asked for a suspension of hostilities, undertaking to yield in nine days if during that time he was not relieved from France, and as no help arrived the nine hundred men of the garrison surrendered on the 10th. In recognition of their spirited defence of Calvi, which had lasted for fifty-one days, they were granted excellent terms; they marched out with all the honours of war; they retained their side-arms; and they were sent back to France, free to serve against us again as soon as they pleased. The capture of Calvi only cost the British ninety killed and wounded, and the losses of the XVIIIth were proportionately small. Lieutenant W. Byron, whose death assured to his young relative, the future poet, the succession to the peerage, was killed; Lieutenant-Colonel D. D. Wemyss and Lieutenant W. Johnston were wounded; five rank and file were killed, one sergeant and seven rank and file wounded.[94] Yet so greatly had the regiment suffered during the siege from exposure and malarial fever, that when it marched into Calvi its effectives consisted of two officers, four sergeants, and seventy-one rank and file, and though the capitulation brought active operations to an end the losses by disease did not cease. Malaria had taken so firm a hold of the Royal Irish that including those who were killed or died of wounds or sickness during the siege, four officers, nine sergeants, six corporals, and a hundred and fifty-five private soldiers perished during the first nine months the regiment was in Corsica.[95] The mortality was at its height during the month of August, when seventy non-commissioned officers and men died.

Nothing is known of the doings of the XVIIIth during the remainder of our short occupation of Corsica, except that several of the officers were employed on the staff: one of them, Major (afterwards Lieutenant-General Sir H. T.) Montresor, after acting as Governor of Calvi, was placed in command of a battalion of islanders, one of the corps raised for local defence by Sir Gilbert Elliot, who had been appointed Viceroy of Corsica by the Government at home. The lives of the officers left at regimental duty must have been singularly dull, as there was so little communication with England that letters or papers rarely reached the island, and even the Ministry, apparently forgetful of the existence of their new possession, often allowed months to pass without communicating with Elliot. Some amount of cynical amusement, however, was to be derived from studying the mental attitude of the population, who, at first delighted to find themselves British subjects, soon grew weary of the restraints of law and order enforced upon them by their new rulers. The Corsicans watched with ever increasing pride the victories in Italy of their young compatriot, Napoleon Bonaparte; they realised that the English and their Allies made no headway against France on land, and they appreciated the importance of Spain’s change of policy, when after deserting the coalition against the Republic she placed her Mediterranean fleet at the disposal of our enemy. They gradually came to the conclusion that in annexing themselves to the British they had joined the losing side, and when the French troops overran Tuscany and seized upon Leghorn, the Corsicans began to give Elliot broad hints that they wished to see the last of him and his garrison of red-coats. The presence of the French in Leghorn, the principal port of Tuscany, was a direct menace to us in Corsica; and as a counterstroke Elliot threw troops into Porto Ferraio, the capital of the little island of Elba, half way between Bastia and Leghorn. To the Duke of Tuscany, part of whose dominions Elliot had thus occupied, the Viceroy justified himself by pointing out that as Tuscany had been unable to defend her territory on the mainland she would have been equally impotent to keep the French out of Elba.

In the autumn of 1796, the British Government, alarmed at the combination of the French and Spanish fleets, determined to recall their forces from the Mediterranean, and the order for the evacuation of Corsica was conveyed to Elliot by a despatch, wherein the abandonment of the island was described in the stilted language of the period as “the withdrawal of the blessing of the British Constitution from the people of Corsica.” As a preliminary to the general retirement the troops had to be concentrated at Elba; and the embarkation of the garrison of Bastia, which included some, if not all, of the Royal Irish, was effected in very dramatic circumstances. When Nelson arrived off the port on October 14, he found the town in wild confusion: a committee of virulent Anglophobists had seized the reins of power, and their adherents were virtually masters of the place; British property had been confiscated; British merchant ships were forcibly detained in harbour; a plot was on foot to make the Viceroy a prisoner, and the General, de Burgh, had withdrawn the garrison into the citadel, where they had been followed by large numbers of armed men who insisted on falling in with the guards and sentries at every post. By threatening to blow the town to pieces, Nelson succeeded in releasing the captured shipping and in saving public and private property valued at two hundred thousand pounds; but though the soldiers and sailors slaved night and day their work was by no means finished when, on the night of the 18th, news arrived that French troops had landed and were marching rapidly on Bastia, while the Spanish fleet was reported to be only sixty miles distant. Even Nelson realised that nothing more could be done: the troops began to move down to the boats, while the guns were spiked by Mawby, an officer of the XVIIIth, who with the grenadier company of the regiment had just been brought back from detachment on the neighbouring islet of Capreja. Though a heavy gale of wind was blowing and the sea was very high every soldier was safely embarked; and not too soon, for as the last boat pushed off from the shore the French advance-guard began to enter the citadel.

The resources of Elba were insufficient to meet the requirements of her suddenly increased population, and at first she drew largely from Piombino, the port of the district known as the Maremma of Tuscany. By garrisoning the town of Piombino and the villages in its neighbourhood, the French so effectually cut off this source of supply that at the beginning of November Elliot and de Burgh determined to make an effort to reopen communication with the mainland of Italy, and sent a column, chiefly composed of the Royal Irish, to drive the enemy from Piombino and the surrounding country.[96] The expedition is briefly mentioned by the Viceroy in a letter of November 6, 1796, where he says, “We take Piombino this evening. This will be the last act of my reign, and in truth the measure of Porto Ferraio was not complete without it. I shall then feel very happy about our supplies.”[97] No account of the operations is to be found in the printed bulletins or among the documents at the Record Office; but fortunately some details have been preserved in the Royal Military Calendar, in a précis of the services of General Montresor. Brevet-Colonel D. D. Wemyss, XVIIIth, was in command of the column which was composed of the Royal Irish,[98] under Montresor, then a lieutenant-colonel; two companies of de Roll’s Swiss regiment, one of the many corps of continental mercenaries raised at that time by Great Britain, and a detachment of artillery. These troops were embarked on three frigates, which anchored off Piombino early on November 7; Montresor was at once sent on shore to summon the Governor, who after some hesitation agreed to surrender, and without loss of time the soldiers landed. While Wemyss was taking measures to secure Piombino and to improvise transport for his men his heart must have sunk within him. Outside the walls of the town there were hardly any signs of life; autumnal rains had flooded the country in every direction; a few stone buildings, half farm, half fortress, rose like islands out of the water; thick woods concealed the villages on the neighbouring hills, whither for centuries the inhabitants of the Maremma have betaken themselves at night to avoid sleeping on the fever-stricken plain. After a few hours’ hard work Montresor, with a detachment of five hundred men and three field-guns, marched to attack the garrison of Campiglia, a village ten miles off. The country was inundated for three miles, but

“the hedges and trees on either side of the road being their guide the British waded through, though the buffalos attached to their guns had twice knocked up. On approaching the town the Lieutenant-Colonel sent his light company under Captain Dunlop by another road to cut off the enemy’s picquets from the town, and to enter it by the Leghorn road, both of which were executed; after exchanging a few shots with the enemy’s outposts, finding the British in their rear, they were compelled to disperse in the woods, which left the town open to complete surprise, inasmuch, that in front of his advance guard, at one o’clock after midnight, Lieut.-Colonel Montresor got into the town with a confidential servant unperceived, and personally seized an orderly French dragoon going with despatches to the garrison of Castiglione from the Commandant of Campiglia to announce the British having landed at Piombino: the entrance to the town was conducted with so much silence and arrangement that the Royal Irish Grenadiers reached the French main guard just as the enemy were turning out under arms, and rushing on them compelled them to lay down their arms, while the Commandant, (whose quarters were over the main guard), escaped by dropping out of his window over the town walls, leaving his supper, (which he had deferred to this late hour) on the table, and which was finished by the British officers when the prisoners were secured and the British patrols and picquets had been placed.

“Colonel Wemyss having proceeded to attack Castiglione, Lieut.-Colonel Montresor secured his post so effectually that during three months the strong garrison of Leghorn never molested them. This little expedition being effectually accomplished, and the troops of Elba having formed their depôts, the British force was ordered back to Elba.”

Much had happened while the Royal Irish were on the mainland of Italy. In November the fleet had been obliged to go to Gibraltar for stores, and at the end of the year Nelson had reappeared at Elba with orders from the Admiral, Sir John Jervis (afterwards Lord St Vincent), to embark the naval establishment and rejoin him in the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson, however, brought no instructions for de Burgh, and when he suggested that as the Navy had abandoned the Mediterranean it was useless for the troops to remain in Elba, the brave old general, though much perplexed at the situation, decided not to quit his post without orders from his military superiors. Nelson therefore had no option but to abandon de Burgh and his three thousand troops to their fate, and leaving transports enough for the whole of the garrison, and a few vessels with which to keep up communication with the mainland, he rejoined Jervis early in February, 1797. But neither Jervis nor Nelson forgot that a detachment of the British army was marooned in a little island off the coast of Tuscany in imminent danger of capture by the French, and soon after the great naval victory of Cape St Vincent, Nelson dashed back into the Mediterranean, ascertained that de Burgh and his troops were safe, and convoyed them safely to Gibraltar. The Royal Irish landed at the end of April or the beginning of May,[99] and formed part of the garrison of the Rock until, two years later, they again were embarked for active service.

Though the failure of the expedition to Holland in the winter of 1799 had added one more to the list of our unsuccessful enterprises against the French on the continent of Europe, the spring of 1800 found preparations on foot in England for another effort on land against the Republic. Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby, with twenty thousand men, was to disembark on the coast of Italy near Genoa, occupy the maritime Alps, and by cutting the lines of communication between Italy and France relieve the pressure on the Austrians, who faced the French on the plains of Lombardy. Owing, however, to the fear of a Franco-Spanish invasion of Portugal and the consequent loss of the Tagus as a friendly port, a large proportion of Abercromby’s force was kept back to defend Lisbon in case of need, and when Sir Ralph reached Port Mahon, the capital of Minorca, which since its recapture in 1798 had become our advanced post in the Mediterranean, he had only six thousand men available for active operations. He found despatches awaiting him from General Melas, the Austrian Commander-in-Chief in Italy, begging that British troops might be sent to Genoa, which, after a heroic defence by the French under Massena, had recently surrendered to the Austrians. Melas himself was unable to garrison it adequately: would Abercromby therefore do so? Ordering four thousand men, among whom were the XVIIIth Royal Irish, 571 strong, to follow him, Abercromby sailed at once, but on the voyage learned that at Marengo Napoleon had defeated the Austrians, who were retreating all along their line, and had evacuated Genoa. After definitely ascertaining that co-operation with Melas had become impossible, he returned to Minorca, where for many weeks the expedition awaited fresh orders from home. During the halt Abercromby, with the help of Moore who commanded one of his brigades, devoted himself to the improvement of the troops. He strengthened their discipline, made their equipment suitable for active service, and cut down the personal baggage of officers and men to the articles absolutely necessary for a campaign. While he was at Minorca reinforcements gradually reached him, including a body of three thousand eight hundred men who had been on the point of attacking Belle Isle, off the western coast of France, when they were hurriedly diverted to the Mediterranean. Thus, when at the end of August instructions reached him to make a raid against the Spanish port of Cadiz, Abercromby, after providing an adequate garrison for Minorca, was able to embark between ten and eleven thousand men.

A fortnight was spent on the voyage to Gibraltar, where on September 19, he was joined by a large number of troops under Lieutenant-General Sir James Pulteney, the Colonel of the Royal Irish regiment.[100] Pulteney had been sent from England to destroy Ferrol, a naval station on the north-west coast of Spain. He had landed, driven the Spaniards back to the shelter of their works, and then discovered that the Government had sent him on a fool’s errand. Ferrol was well armed and fortified, and as he was not nearly strong enough to attack it, he wisely abandoned the enterprise, re-embarked his men, and made sail for the Rock of Gibraltar.[101] Thanks to Pulteney’s arrival, Abercromby’s command now consisted of about twenty thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry and artillerymen, and in a few days a fleet of a hundred and thirty British men-of-war and troop-ships appeared before Cadiz, the most important naval harbour in the south of Spain. In the conduct of this expedition the General had by no means a free hand, for the Ministry, while ordering him to attack Cadiz, seize the arsenal, and destroy its docks and shipping, emphatically enjoined upon him not to run much risk, and not to land his troops unless he was confident that he could re-embark them safely. Operations conducted on such lines were doomed to failure. After much discussion with the naval authorities, a few thousand troops, including the XVIIIth, were crowded into boats and started for the shore, only to be recalled in a few minutes to their respective vessels, for the Admiral finally declined to guarantee their safe return to the ships if once they landed. After a fruitless paper war between Abercromby and his naval colleague the whole fleet made sail, successful only in having covered itself with ridicule. In a few hours a great storm arose: the ships were driven in every direction along the coast of Morocco, where for many days they tossed and rolled in a tempestuous sea until the weather moderated and they reached Gibraltar.

During this storm, and indeed during the whole of the many months that Abercromby’s command spent on board ship, the sufferings of the troops were great. The transports were so leaky that when it rained the men were constantly wet; so crowded that there was often not room on the decks for all to lie down at the same time; so ill-provided that the soldiers had no bedding, no covering other than their regimental blankets if, indeed, they were lucky enough to possess such articles. The food was not only indifferent, but inadequate, for an idea prevailed that the ration issued on shore was enough for a man who was taking hard exercise, and therefore on board ship, where the soldier theoretically was a passenger with nothing to do, he required less to eat than on land. In practice the soldier on board a transport had to work as hard as a sailor, and consequently was underfed. His diet of salt pork and biscuit, his ration of water, often scanty and generally tasting strongly of the barrels in which it was stored, and the absence of vegetables all combined to reduce his strength, and he often fell a prey to the scurvy which in those days devastated the fleet.

While the soldiers were still in the Straits of Gibraltar, where, as a sea-sick officer wrote, “the tossing of the ship rendered our situation as landsmen at once inconvenient and ridiculous,” Abercromby received despatches of great importance. Dundas, the War Minister of England, had become inspired with a great idea--to abandon the “policy of pin-pricks” by which the conduct of our campaigns in Europe had been hitherto regulated, and strike a blow in defence of the Empire as a whole. The year after we had abandoned Elba Napoleon had embarked in the south of France with forty thousand men, and after seizing Malta made himself master of Egypt and sent emissaries to India, whose intrigues among the native princes complicated our situation in the East.[102] When he returned to France in 1799 he left behind him an army of occupation, whose presence was a continual danger to our power in Hindustan. This army Dundas determined to drive out, and with the reluctant assent of the other members of the Cabinet he now ordered Abercromby to prepare for a campaign in Lower Egypt, while a column, formed of a regiment from Cape Colony[103] and of British and native troops from India, was to land at Kosseir on the Red Sea, strike across the desert to Upper Egypt, descend the Nile, and fall upon the enemy from the rear.[104]

The surrender of the French garrison in Malta on September 5, 1800, placed the island at our disposal, and this, our latest conquest, was fixed as the rendezvous of the fleet, which arrived there in detachments from Gibraltar throughout November. While his troops rested the General strove, though with poor results, to supplement the scanty information about the topography and resources of Egypt vouchsafed to him by Dundas, who had provided him with nothing but an indifferent map of the country and copies of correspondence of doubtful value, intercepted between the French generals at Cairo and their official superiors in Paris. Abercromby, however, learned enough to convince him that without plenty of small craft of light draught he could not land anywhere in Egypt, and on the 20th of December he weighed anchor for the Bay of Marmorice--a deep inlet on the coast of Caramania, one of the provinces of Asia Minor belonging to the Sultan, who was co-operating with England in the Egyptian expedition. Here the General expected to obtain shipping, and the horses with which his cavalry and artillery were still unprovided, but when after a tempestuous voyage he reached his destination on January 2, 1801, he found the Turkish officials so dilatory that he was forced to spend six weeks at Marmorice. Never was time more usefully employed, however, than during this long halt. The troops landed, drilled, collected a great store of firewood for use in Egypt, and prepared gabions and fascines for siege operations. The ships’ carpenters were occupied in making small water-kegs and canteens, and light wooden sleighs to be drawn by hand across the desert. Both services were constantly practised in the art of disembarkation, and before the fleet again put to sea the soldiers could swarm down the sides of the transports and take their places in the boats without confusion; while the sailors who rowed the flotilla had learned to keep station and to reach the shore in the prescribed order.

In conceiving the idea of the expedition to Egypt Dundas apparently thought he had done all that could be expected from him, and took no trouble about details. He failed to comply with Abercromby’s requisitions for stores and matériel. He did not even send him the bullion for which Sir Ralph frequently petitioned, and left him so short of actual cash that for three months the army was unpaid, and the only way by which cavalry horses could be bought at Marmorice was with specie produced by well-to-do officers. It is not surprising, therefore, that Abercromby wrote, “We are now on the point of sailing for the coast of Egypt with very slender means for executing the orders we have received. I never went on any service entertaining greater doubt of success, at the same time with more determination to encounter difficulties.... The Dutch expedition was walking on velvet compared to this.”[105] On February 22, he put to sea, and after a stormy passage of eight days reached Aboukir Bay--a wide indentation on the western coast of the delta of the Nile, where in August, 1798, Nelson had destroyed the fleet which had convoyed Napoleon’s army to Egypt. Though for several days the waves were too high to admit of disembarkation, small ships were able to reconnoitre the coast closely, and their reports determined Abercromby to land on a narrow promontory which, running north-east from Alexandria for eight or nine miles, separates the waters of the Mediterranean from those of Lake Aboukir, or Lake Madie as it is sometimes called.[106]

Sir Ralph’s effective strength consisted of about 16,000 men,[107] including the live hundred cavalry for whom horses had been obtained, and the gunners with sixteen field-pieces. The infantry were formed into six brigades and a reserve; the latter, a unit double the strength of any of the other brigades, was commanded by Major-General (afterwards Sir John) Moore. The XVIIIth doubtless wished to serve under the orders of Moore, whose worth they had learned at Calvi, but, with the 8th, 13th, and 90th regiments, found themselves under Major-General Cradock, whose brigade (the second) was composed of battalions of very unequal strength; the 90th had 850 officers and men; the 13th were weaker by a hundred; the 8th had 538 of all ranks, while the roll of the XVIIIth only bore 523 names.[108] Not all the men in Abercromby’s little army were British born. About 2700 were foreigners: Stuart’s Minorca regiment was a collection of ne’er-do-weels from every country in Europe; De Roll’s was composed of Swiss; Dillon’s of French Royalists; Hompesch’s dragoons were Germans, while the Corsican Rangers probably contained some of the men first raised and disciplined by Montresor of the XVIIIth. To meet this expedition Menou, the French Commander-in-Chief, had under his orders about 21,500 combatants; his cavalry was superb; he possessed sixty-six field-guns; many of his infantry were veterans whom Napoleon had led from victory to victory in the plains of Lombardy. Eleven thousand troops were concentrated at Cairo, 6000 were allotted to the defence of Alexandria and of the coast from that city to Rosetta; 1800 held the country round Damietta; 1000 were absorbed by the garrisons of Suez, Balbeis, and Salalieh; the remainder were stationed in Upper Egypt. The news of Abercromby’s appearance off the Delta reached Cairo about the same time as a report that a Turkish force was advancing slowly through Syria upon Egypt. Menou, puzzled by the situation, frittered away his strength by sending detachments to unimportant points; he did not at once reinforce Alexandria, and thus when Abercromby disembarked he was met by only two thousand men with fifteen pieces of field artillery.

Until March 7, no landing was possible, but then the weather moderated, and at 2 A.M. on the 8th, a rocket from the Admiral’s ship gave the signal to put into execution the scheme which had been repeatedly explained to the officers of both services. The boats were to form up in three lines at a place of assembly, marked by three small craft anchored out of gun-shot from the shore. The first line consisted of large flat-bottom row-boats, each containing fifty soldiers, and of launches carrying field-guns ready for instant use: these boats and launches were to be fifty feet apart, and to keep “interval” and “dressing” accurately. In second line were ships’ boats, to help the first line in case of need. Behind them followed the third line--cutters towing launches, full of men of the same regiment as that directly in front of them. These supporting troops were to land in the fifty-feet interval between the boats of the first line. The Reserve, the brigade of Guards, and part of the first brigade were the units named in orders to lead the way, and by 3.30 A.M. they were in the boats; but owing to the extreme shallowness of the water many of the transports were anchored so far from the shore that it was not until 9 o’clock that the last of the troops had reached the rendezvous. Then on the signal of the naval captain in charge the sailors gave way, and in silence, only broken by the regular dip of hundreds of oars into the water, rowed steadily towards the yellow sandhills where the soldiers were to land. Until the first line was well within their range, the French gave no sign of life; then they poured a perfect hurricane of round-shot, grape, and musketry upon the leading boats, several of which were sunk. As soon as the first shot came whistling round their ears, the sailors rowed harder than ever; the soldiers, packed like herrings in a tub, could do nothing but cheer until the bluejackets ran into shallow water, when their turn came; springing overboard, they waded to the shore and fought hand to hand with the French, who lunged fiercely at them with their bayonets as they struggled up the slippery beach. After a short but sharp engagement the French fell back, but not until they had inflicted upon us a loss heavy in comparison to the number of men actually engaged. Among the sailors there were ninety-seven casualties; of the soldiers a hundred and two were killed, five hundred and fifteen wounded, and thirty-five missing, or a total in the two services of seven hundred and forty-nine. The Royal Irish and the remainder of the second brigade had been transferred to small Greek ships of light draft, which moved close inshore to support the advance-guard, but before Cradock could land his troops, the French were in retreat, and thus on this memorable day the XVIIIth did not come into action.[109]

Thanks to the success of this thoughtfully planned, carefully rehearsed, and brilliantly executed stroke, the remainder of the troops disembarked without difficulty, and began to move towards Alexandria. Their progress, however, was very slow, for Abercromby was crippled by want of land transport, and until, by a second victory, he could win the Egyptians to his side and obtain from them camels and oxen, he was forced to rely for his supplies on the service of small craft by which the Navy landed food and stores on the shores of Lake Aboukir, where his left flank rested. The army halted on the 12th in front of a line of sandhills strongly held by the enemy, against whose possible night attack were taken the precautions thus described in Moore’s diary: “The 90th and 92nd were put under my command. I divided these two regiments each into three bodies, separated at such distances as to cover the front of the army, and I ordered each body to throw forward one-third of their numbers, with the officers belonging to it, as sentries in front. This formed a strong chain, which was relieved every hour by one of the thirds in reserve. The enemy was so close to us that it was evident that neither army could move without bringing on an action.” From this position Abercromby determined to drive the French by a frontal attack combined with a turning movement on their right; and early on the 13th he moved from his bivouac in three huge columns, with the 90th regiment covering the front as advance-guard. The undulations of the ground hid the centre column from the French General, who, thinking that our right and left columns were too far apart to be able to support each other, determined to crush them in detail, and covering his advance by a vigorous and well-aimed artillery fire descended into the plain. Cradock’s brigade deployed into line “with great quickness and precision,” and pressed on to meet the foe, whose cavalry, after a fruitless attack upon the advance-guard, charged the main body with great determination, but were so hotly received with well-aimed musketry that they were driven back in confusion. Of the part played by the XVIIIth in this episode the regimental record of service contains a spirited, though somewhat breathless description.

“A strong body of cavalry having meanwhile charged the two regiments supporting the left of the front line, but being repulsed, rode in towards the 2nd brigade under cover of some sand hills; and observing an interval between our regiment and that on its left, immediately advanced to charge through it, in which they must have succeeded had they not been checked by a prompt and well-directed fire from our Light company, for, unfortunately, the left battalion of the brigade having mistaken them, from their green uniforms for Hompesch’s Hussars (attached to our army) not only suffered them to ride quietly along their front, but kept calling out to us not to fire upon them; this error having, however, been fortunately discovered when the cavalry were within a hundred paces of us, and in the act of wheeling up to charge, the regiment halted, and opening a steady and rapid platoon fire immediately after that of the Light company, brought down a great number of men and horses, threw them into complete disorder and compelled them to a precipitate retreat, though many of them had even arrived within a few paces of the interval on our left. Had not the Royal Irish so timely opened its fire, the brigade must have been broken through, and the enemy penetrated to the second line, which in firing on them must at the same time have fired upon us. This cavalry, by a strange coincidence, happened to be the 18th regiment of heavy dragoons, and afterwards (when a troop of this corps was taken in the desert) they said, pointing to us, ‘had it not been for that regiment it was all over with your expedition.’”

The action raged along nearly the whole line till the French, staggered by the warmth of their reception and overborne by superior numbers, gave way, and retired to the works of Nicopolis, where a series of redoubts stretching across the peninsula barred the way to Alexandria. The enemy covered his retreat with sharpshooters, supported by artillery so mobile and so well-handled that the British were filled with admiration, contrasting its quick movements to those of our field-guns which, from want of horses, had to be dragged laboriously by hand. Abercromby hoped to carry the lines of Nicopolis with a rush, and followed the French across the plain between their first and second positions until he had to halt to make dispositions for the assault. For several hours the troops remained stationary under a murderous fire from the enemy’s batteries, waiting to be let loose upon the French; but when a careful reconnaissance had convinced Abercromby that the second position was too strong to be carried until its defenders had been shaken by a heavy bombardment, he reluctantly ordered his little army to retire, and in perfect order it marched back to the ground from which the enemy had been driven in the morning, and settled down into bivouac. The General was not unmindful of the good work done by Cradock’s command; in a general order thanking the troops for “their soldier-like and intrepid conduct, he felt it incumbent on him particularly to express his most perfect satisfaction with the steady and gallant conduct of Major-General Cradock’s brigade;” and in his despatch to the Secretary of State for War, when describing the events of the early part of the battle, he stated: “Major-General Cradock immediately formed his brigade to meet the attack made by the enemy; and the troops[110] changed their position with a quickness and precision which did them the greatest honour. The remainder of the army followed so good an example, and immediately were in a situation not only to face but to repel the enemy.”

This action cost the lives of six officers and a hundred and fifty of the other ranks; sixty-seven officers and a thousand and two non-commissioned officers and men were wounded; the sailors and marines together lost eighty-four of all ranks; thus the casualties in both services amounted to thirteen hundred and nine killed and wounded. Though the regiments under Cradock’s command suffered more than those in the other brigades, losing upwards of five hundred officers and men, the XVIIIth escaped comparatively lightly. Captain George Jones was killed, and three officers, whose names are not mentioned in the despatch, were wounded; among the other ranks a sergeant and forty-five rank and file were wounded.[111] The French did not lose as heavily as we did--not more than five hundred of their troops were put out of action; but they left in our hands four guns and a large quantity of ammunition.

The position that Abercromby now held was about a mile and a half long, stretching from the Mediterranean on the right to Lake Aboukir on the left. In front of the right and centre rose a chain of sandhills; on the left the ground was level. While the heavy artillery and ordnance stores were being slowly moved over the nine miles of sandy track between Aboukir Bay and the bivouac, the General entrenched himself, posting Cradock’s brigade on the extreme left of the front line. On the 19th the big guns began to arrive, accompanied by a recently landed detachment of Turks, of such doubtful military value that they were ordered to halt three miles in rear of the British troops. Next day a friendly Arab chief sent word that Alexandria had been largely reinforced, thus confirming the reports from the men on outpost who, through the mists of early morning, had seen long strings of camels moving towards the town. The Arab added that the French proposed to attack us at dawn on the 21st. Though not fully convinced of the truth of this intelligence, Abercromby pressed on his field-works and ordered his troops to stand to arms before dawn--a wise precaution, for the Arab’s information proved correct. Menou had accompanied the reinforcements, and after providing an adequate garrison for Alexandria, could dispose of 10,000 men with whom he proposed to surprise the English before daybreak. A feint was to be made against our left, our centre was to be vigorously engaged, while the full force of the attack was to fall upon the right. As soon as it was crumpled up a general movement along the line was to drive us into the waters of the lake, where we should have to surrender or to drown.

While it was still black night on the 21st, the French began the action by demonstrating against our left, and though the false attack was not pressed home, it was successful in so far that troops, urgently required on other parts of the field, were diverted to the help of Cradock’s brigade. In the centre the enemy made no headway against the steady volleys of the regiments facing him; the danger was in his onslaught on our right, where for a long time there raged a series of fierce and confused fights. The piquets were driven in, and the supports surprised by columns suddenly looming out of the murky darkness; reinforcements on either side hurried up, guided by the flash of the muskets and the shouts of the combatants--prisoners and Colours were taken and recaptured, posts lost and regained. At one moment the French slipped unperceived between two corps, which in the very nick of time discovered and routed them with the bayonet: a little later a regiment, while hotly engaged in front, was surrounded by a body of the enemy whose presence was revealed by the sound of a French word of command. The rear rank turned about, and fighting back to back, drove off their foes. Episodes such as these marked the progress of the action until the morning light showed Menou that all his efforts had been unavailing, and that the British line, shattered but unconquered, still held its ground. Mad with rage at his want of success the French General, against the advice of his subordinates, hurled his cavalry, 1200 strong, into the fray. They crashed through a regiment whose formation they broke, though not its spirit, and swept like a torrent over the battlefield until they reached the camp, where the horses stumbled over the tent-ropes and fell into the burrows, scratched in the sand as sleeping places by a corps whose tents had not arrived. The confusion thus caused was increased by the cross-fire of the infantry who had been left in charge of the baggage, and the French cavalry wheeled about and retired at full speed, leaving the ground behind them covered with their dead. After several more desperate efforts, in which assailants and assailed displayed equal courage, Menou realised that he was defeated, and fell back slowly and in good order. His solid columns offered a splendid target to our artillerymen; but the guns were silent, to the intense surprise of the French who expected to be pursued by a hail of projectiles, and to the mortification of the British infantry, who looked to the gunners to avenge their losses. But the gunners could not fire; they were as short of ammunition as the foot soldiers themselves, many of whom had been forced to rely exclusively on their bayonets in the later phases of the battle. It was not that ammunition was lacking in the camp, but owing to a staff blunder there was no means of getting it up to the fighting line. Had our gunners been able to do their duty the French loss would have been enormous, but they escaped with 2000 casualties.[112] On our side the gallant Abercromby was mortally wounded; and of the 11,500 men engaged, 10 officers and 233 other ranks were killed; 60 officers and 1133 other ranks wounded; 3 officers and 29 men missing. The Royal Irish, who were on the left flank of Cradock’s brigade, and therefore far away from the scene of the serious fighting, were almost untouched, only two private soldiers being wounded.

Some days were spent in the work of reorganisation. Stores and ammunition had to be brought up from Aboukir, and arrangements made with the natives for the hire of transport of various kinds. Before the army was ready to move Sir Ralph Abercromby died, deeply regretted by all who had been privileged to serve under him. He was succeeded by a future Colonel of the XVIIIth, Major-General the Hon. John Hely-Hutchinson,[113] who decided to leave Major-General Coote to invest Alexandria with 6000 men, while he himself led the main column to Cairo. As a first step he sent a mixed force of British and Turks across the desert to seize Rosetta, a town important from its position at the mouth of the western branch of the Nile, and a few days later reinforced it with the XVIIIth and the 90th regiments. Rosetta was occupied without trouble; our gunboats entered the Nile; a large amount of river craft was collected, and on May 4, 9500 British and Turkish troops began to move upon Cairo.[114] The march proved a very trying one, for the heat was great, the climate exhausting, and as there were no roads and practically no land transport, the army had to depend for its supplies on the flotilla of boats which accompanied its progress towards the capital of Egypt. Sending a strong detachment to the right bank of the river to connect him with the Turkish contingent from Syria, Hely-Hutchinson worked up the left bank with the main body, gradually capturing or driving away the garrisons of the fortified posts along the Nile. In these small affairs the Royal Irish had no opportunity of distinguishing themselves.

After joining forces with the Turks, the General pushed on towards Cairo, and halting on the 16th of June within a few miles of the city, found the French much more disposed to treat for surrender than to fight. The perimeter of the crumbling fortifications was far too large to be adequately defended by the 9000 effective men to whom the garrison was reduced; outside the walls was encamped an Anglo-Turkish army of 30,000 men, and Baird’s contingent from India and the Cape might any day bring an important accession to its strength; the civil population was disaffected; the morale of the soldiers was shaken by the events of the campaign; all ranks were anxious to return to France, and it was well known that the English were prepared to give them very favourable terms. In such circumstances negotiations proved swift and easy, and on June 27 a convention was signed, by which Hely-Hutchinson undertook to escort the French garrison with its baggage, field-guns and ammunition to Rosetta, and there embark it for the French ports on the Mediterranean. The march from Cairo to the sea, organised and commanded by Moore, was a very delicate operation, brilliantly carried out. It began on July 15: the Turks led the column; then, after a long interval, followed the French infantry and guns, their cavalry abreast of them, but on the left flank, farthest from the river; some distance behind came the British column, with a detachment of dragoons and Turkish cavalry bringing up the rear. Three hundred river craft, filled with sick and baggage, slowly dropped down the Nile under the escort of our gunboats, and kept up constant communication between the French and English columns. The embarkation was completed on the 7th of August, when 13,672 soldiers and 82 civilians sailed for France, in transports convoyed by British men-of-war. Everything passed off smoothly, but of all the British officers at Rosetta none can have been more heartily thankful when the last of our enemies was safely on board ship than Colonel Montresor, who, as governor, was responsible for the safety of the persons and the property of the inhabitants while the French troops were marching through the town.

Hely-Hutchinson now turned his attention to Alexandria, which he had left invested by General Coote when the main body advanced upon Cairo. Thanks to the arrival of large reinforcements from England, he was now able to besiege it in due form, and pushed on his works so fast that on the 31st of August the garrison, 10,528 strong, surrendered on terms identical with those granted at Cairo. The Royal Irish were present at the operations, and with other picked troops their grenadier company, with drums beating and Colours flying, marched into Alexandria to take formal possession of the town. Their triumphal entry marked the end of the Egyptian campaign, in which 500 officers and men were killed and 3058 were wounded: how many died from sickness is not known, but the mortality must have been considerable. In the regiment Captain-Lieutenant G. Jones was killed, and Captain W. Morgue, Ensign H. Bruley, Ensign W. Brand, Quartermaster M. M‘Dermott, and fifty-six of the other ranks died from wounds, accident, or disease.[115] During the summer the Royal Irish suffered much from sickness, and in the month of July more than two hundred men were in hospital, chiefly from ophthalmia, which was then raging among the troops.

The thanks of Parliament were voted to both services; the XVIIIth Royal Irish were authorised to carry on the Colours the emblem of a Sphinx and the word “Egypt,” and gold medals were presented by the Sultan to all the officers of the regiment. It was not until the year 1847 that a British medal was issued for this campaign, when only three officers--Hill, Beavan, and Deane--were still alive to claim the decoration.

As soon as the last of the French were shipped off to France, Hely-Hutchinson’s army was broken up. Some of the troops remained to share with Baird’s contingent the duty of holding Egypt for a few months; the remainder returned to various parts of the Mediterranean to await the results of the negotiations for peace then going on between the Governments of England and France. The Royal Irish were sent first to Malta, and then on to Elba, where Montresor was appointed military governor of Porto Ferraio for the second time: and when peace was declared the regiment was ordered home, and landed at Cork at the end of August, 1802.

Though there were many signs that France looked upon the Peace of Amiens more as a truce than as the end of her struggle with Britain, our Government soon began to cut down all military expenditure with unreasoning haste. Wholesale discharges from the army left only 40,000 regular troops in the United Kingdom; the militia, after an embodiment of nine years, were sent to their homes; the “fencible” regiments of horse and foot, raised for purposes of local defence, were disbanded. Thus the renewal of the war in 1803 found us almost disarmed; and when Napoleon collected an army for the invasion of England the Government was hard pressed to raise a garrison sufficient for the needs of the United Kingdom. By paying huge bounties to recruits the numbers of the regular army were increased to 12,000 cavalry and 75,000 infantry; bounties nearly as large attracted 80,000 men to the militia; while to escape a mitigated form of compulsory service, introduced to catch those who would not serve of their own free will, 343,000 men joined corps of Yeomanry or regiments of Volunteers. How far this mass of armed men would have been able to face veterans who had won innumerable victories in western and central Europe is a matter of speculation. Happily for England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though perhaps unhappily for the British Empire of the present day, the threatened invasion did not take place, and our race had no opportunity to ascertain by practical experience whether Britons, very imperfectly trained to war, are as good fighting men as foreigners who have thoroughly mastered the soldier’s trade before they meet their enemy on the battlefield.

Among the steps taken to increase the regular army was the formation of additional battalions of infantry, one or two of which were allotted to existing regiments. The second battalion of the XVIIIth was raised in Ireland in 1803, and, like the first, served in Scotland until the summer of 1804, when both were sent to Barham Downs, one of the many camps in the south of England where large numbers of troops stood ready to march towards the coast. After a few months the first battalion was ordered to the West Indies, and sailing in January, 1805, with other corps, reached Jamaica at the end of April, 935 strong.[116] The second battalion remained at Barham Downs until the destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar put an end to Napoleon’s hope of obtaining the temporary command of the Channel necessary to pass his troops across the Straits of Dover. As soon as all danger of invasion was over the encampment was broken up, and the second battalion was sent to garrison Jersey.

When the first battalion of the Royal Irish landed at Kingston, the island was in a fever of anxiety, for the attitude of the black population, who had been thoroughly unsettled by the French Revolution, was disquieting not only in Jamaica but throughout the British West Indies; the coasts were infested by privateers who captured many trading ships; and a great fleet of the enemy’s men-of-war was reported to be cruising among the neighbouring islands. These French ships, however, were part of the squadrons sent by Napoleon to decoy Nelson and his brother admirals from their blockade of the seaports on the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay: their business was to evade the British fleet, to return to Europe, and joining forces with the remainder of the Franco-Spanish fleet, to sweep all British men-of-war from the Channel before our admirals had discovered that they had quitted the West Indies. Thus Jamaica was not attacked; in a few months the excitement died down, and the Royal Irish fell into the routine of the station where they were destined to spend twelve long and dreary years. Once there seemed a prospect of active service: in 1809 they were ordered to form part of an expedition to the island of San Domingo,[117] where the Spaniards, who had again become our allies, were waging war against the French garrison. Major-General Sir Hugh Carmichael sailed from Jamaica on the 7th of June, and landed three weeks later at Polingue, a port thirty miles from the city of San Domingo, where the Spaniards were besieging the common enemy. As soon as his troops were safe on shore the General hurried up to the front, and after a reconnaissance decided that, as the French had already held out for eight months, the best way to deal with them would be by a sudden and vigorous attack. At nightfall on the 1st of July his men struggled up from the coast, tired out by heavy marches in pouring rain, over bad roads, through unbridged rivers, and without horses for the guns, which had to be dragged by hand. Next day the French opened negotiations for surrender, but asked for such impossible terms that Carmichael made his plans to storm the works, and allotted to the Royal Irish an important part in the operations; but before the assault could be delivered the garrison of the town capitulated. As the tricolor still flew over an outlying fort, Major E. Walker, XVIIIth regiment, was sent to reduce it with the Light companies of his own and two other battalions: but on the approach of the little column, the officer in command laid down his arms, and with the lowering of his flag passed away the last chance of the Royal Irish of distinguishing themselves in the second phase of the great war with France. The terms of the capitulation were much the same as those granted in Corsica and Egypt: the French were to be sent back to their own country, and after the Royal Irish had seen their enemies safely embarked for France, they returned to Jamaica. At the taking of San Domingo none of the British were injured, while few if any died of sickness in the island. In this respect they were infinitely more fortunate than the troops who served in the campaign in San Domingo between 1793 and 1795, when in a few weeks whole regiments were virtually annihilated by yellow fever, which in those three years claimed 40,000 victims from the army and the fleet in West Indian waters.

As the news of Wellington’s successive victories in the Peninsula slowly made its way to Jamaica the hearts of the Royal Irish must have sunk very low, when they realised that they were stationed in a part of the world where there was no prospect of adding to the laurels of the regiment. Yet their lot was common to the greater part of the British army, scattered over the whole face of the globe, in places where the prospect of active service seemed most improbable. In 1809, England had about 218,000 regular soldiers, of whom only 22,000 were fighting in the Peninsula. A hundred and eight thousand were locked up in the United Kingdom, to give solidity to the 450,000 Militia and Volunteers then under arms; the Mediterranean fortresses and Sicily absorbed 22,000; the West Indies nearly as many; 8000 guarded the Canadian frontier; the communication with the East was kept open by 900 at Madeira, and nearly 6000 at the Cape; 4000 held the Island of Ceylon; in India were 24,000 white troops, of whom only 4000 were in the pay of the East India Company, while 1300 were employed in keeping order in the penal settlement of New South Wales. The corps of artillery and engineers and troops at sea accounted for the remainder of the army.

The second battalion was no more fortunate than the first, for in 1807 it was ordered to a recently acquired British possession in the West Indies, the island of Curaçoa. In December, 1806, a gallant sailor, Captain Sir Charles Brisbane, was ordered to reconnoitre the island, then belonging to Holland; converting his reconnaissance into an attack, he led his four frigates into the harbour, and boarded two Dutch men-of-war lying at anchor; then sending landing parties on shore he captured the forts, and made himself master of Curaçoa. The battalion arrived in June, 726 strong,[118] and remained stationary until 1810, when, worn down to a mere skeleton by sickness, and by large drafts to the sister battalion in Jamaica, it was ordered home to recruit. Beyond the fact that in 1808 the officers presented a handsome sword of honour to Brisbane, whom they found installed at Curaçoa as Governor, nothing is known of the doings of the second battalion during its short existence, which ended in 1814, when, like nearly all the other second battalions of the army, it was disbanded. The story of its resuscitation will be found in Chapter IX.

Though neither battalion was on active service in the West Indies, for the expedition to San Domingo cannot be counted as a campaign, the regiment was exposed during this tour of duty in the colonies to dangers greater and far more trying than those of pitched battles. Tropical diseases played havoc among the Royal Irish: between the arrival of the first battalion in the middle of 1805, and its return to England in the spring of 1817, the loss of both battalions from sickness was fifty-two officers and seventeen hundred and seventy-seven non-commissioned officers and men.[119] The heaviest mortality appears to have occurred during the two months ending January 25, 1806, when a hundred and forty names were added to the list of dead. Nor was disease the only peril to which the Royal Irish were exposed. While they were stationed in Jamaica the island was scourged by earthquakes and tidal waves, by fires that destroyed flourishing towns, by floods that laid waste great tracts of cultivated land. There were mutinies among the regiments raised from the slaves; conspiracies among the negroes to murder the white men, and widespread disaffection and unrest throughout all the coloured population. After such grim experiences of West Indian life it was with feelings of great joy that in January, 1817, the regiment bade farewell to the land where so many hundreds of their comrades had perished.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter V

1817-1848.

THE FIRST WAR WITH CHINA.

The XVIIIth Royal Irish regiment landed at Portsmouth in March, 1817. Since 1783, the Royal Irish had only served three years in the United Kingdom, and they looked forward to a long tour of duty at home, but the fates were against them. Almost as soon as Napoleon surrendered himself to the captain of the Bellerophon the economists in the House of Commons began to demand retrenchment in the army, and with such success that in 1821 only 101,000 men, exclusive of the troops in the East India Company’s service, were left to protect the whole of the British possessions throughout the world. The garrison of the United Kingdom absorbed about half the army, the remainder being stationed in India and the colonies, where, it is said, Wellington hid them to be out of sight of the anti-military politicians. Among the regiments ordered abroad was the XVIIIth, which in February, 1821, left Cork for the Mediterranean; it spent three years at Malta and eight in the Ionian Isles,[120] and in March, 1832, returned to England.

In the autumn of 1832, the Royal Irish were quartered in detachments in various towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire; during the general election at the end of the year several companies were called upon to help the civil power in quelling serious riots at Sheffield, Bolton, and Preston, where officers and men won high praise for the combination of forbearance and determination which they showed in dealing with excited mobs. Towards the end of 1833 the regiment was concentrated at Manchester, whence on May 8, 1834, to quote the words in which the Digest of Service records the first train journey of the XVIIIth, it “proceeded by railway conveyance” to Liverpool to embark for Dublin. In September the regiment moved to Cork; a few months later it was at Birr, and early in 1836, while at Athlone, it was warned for foreign service in Ceylon. Throughout their tour of duty in the United Kingdom the Royal Irish received warm commendation from all the generals under whom they had served, and these favourable opinions were fully endorsed in a letter from the Adjutant-General, who on December 20, 1834, wrote that “the report of the XVIIIth Royal Irish regiment is considered most satisfactory. The excellent state of its discipline is highly creditable to Colonel Burrell, and Lord Hill cannot be but more disposed to attachment (sic) to that officer’s exertions when he finds that discipline has been so effectually maintained without having had recourse to corporal punishment for a period exceeding two years.”

Two companies under Major Pratt sailed from Cork in the transport Numa on November 15, 1836, and arrived at Colombo towards the end of April, 1837. The remainder of the corps, under Colonel Burrell, embarked in the transport Barossa, touched at Teneriffe and Rio de Janeiro, and reached its destination at the end of May. After serving for some time at Colombo, where new colours were presented by Lieutenant-General Sir John Wilson, K.C.B., the headquarters and a wing of the regiment were stationed at Trincomalee, where in 1840 welcome news reached them. Trouble had arisen with China, and the regiment was to form part of an expedition against the Celestial Empire. The causes of our quarrel with the Emperor of China, very shortly stated, were that the Chinese had not kept to the treaties of commerce which they had entered into with England; they had attacked and robbed British merchants, fired upon English ships, and grossly insulted the representative of the Queen. The Mandarins, or high officials of Canton, were the chief offenders; to punish them a naval blockade of that port was established; ships of war were ordered up from the Indian station, and a small body of troops was collected to co-operate with the Navy in bringing the Chinese to their senses. The six companies of the Royal Irish in Ceylon sailed eastwards in May and June, 1840, and the three depôt companies, recently landed at Bombay from England, joined headquarters soon after the regiment arrived in China, raising it to a total strength of 667 of all ranks.[121] The other British regiments were the 26th and the 49th; the Native army of India contributed detachments of Madras Artillery and Sappers and Miners, a corps known as the Bengal Volunteers, and the 37th regiment of Madras Native Infantry, while the Navy was represented by three line-of-battle ships, two frigates, fourteen smaller men-of-war, four armed steamers, and twenty-seven transports. With this small force England was about to go to war with a country of three hundred and sixty millions of inhabitants, whose seaport towns were defended by forts bristling with ordnance varying in calibre from 68-pr. to 18-pr. guns, and whose army immeasurably exceeded in number the British fighting men. Fortunately for us the Chinese artillerymen, though not wanting in courage, were ill-trained; their forts, though massive, were badly planned; and the infantry, though they often fought well and showed much courage as individuals, were poorly disciplined, badly armed, and as a rule very badly commanded. Though the government of Pekin had spent much money in making cannon on European models, they had neglected to reproduce the muskets with which the troops of the white races were equipped. Thus the Chinese foot soldiers did not possess the equivalent of our flint-lock smooth-bore muskets; their firearms were matchlocks and gingals or portable wall pieces, worked on tripods by a crew of three men, and throwing two-ounce balls. Their other weapons varied; the Tartars, the picked troops of the Empire, used the bow; other corps had spears and swords, while others again carried battle-axes and very unpleasant cutting instruments like bill-hooks, fastened to the end of long poles.

The policy and general conduct of our expedition was entrusted to two Plenipotentiaries. One of these officials soon broke down in health and disappeared from the scene; the other, who was credited with some knowledge of the Chinese character, proved to be amiable and well-intentioned, but vacillating, credulous, and incompetent to meet the wiles of Eastern diplomacy. His gullibility and want of backbone cruelly hampered the movements of the sailors and soldiers until, many months after the beginning of the war, he was replaced by Sir Henry Pottinger, an Indian officer of large experience in dealing with Oriental races.

After assembling at Singapore, the point fixed for the general rendezvous, the fleet sailed for China, and, contrary to the universal expectation, did not stop at the mouth of the Canton river, but followed the coast upwards to the island of Chusan.[122] From its position near the mouth of the Yang-Tse-Kiang river this island was of great strategic importance, and was required as a base of operations. Tinghae, its principal town, was weakly held, but when the Mandarins were summoned to surrender they replied that, though they had no hope of making a successful resistance, they were in honour bound to defend their post. After a short bombardment by the men-of-war on July 5, 1840, the troops were landed, the XVIIIth leading the attack, and the place fell into our hands. Our casualties were very few; the Chinese, on the contrary, lost very heavily, but the climate quickly avenged them. For several months the troops were kept inactive in Chusan, which proved to be a hot-bed of disease. In the hope of conciliating the inhabitants the soldiers at first were ordered to live under canvas, though there were hundreds of houses in which they could have been quartered. The camping grounds were selected without reference to the doctors, who protested in vain when they saw the “tents pitched on low paddy-fields, surrounded by stagnant water, putrid and stinking from quantities of dead animal and vegetable matter. Under a sun hotter than was ever experienced in India,” wrote a Madras army surgeon, “the men on duty were buckled up to the throat in their full-dress coatees, and in consequence of there being so few camp followers, fatigue-parties of Europeans were daily detailed to carry provisions and stores from the ships to the tents, and to perform all menial employments, which experience has long taught us they cannot stand in a tropical climate.”[123] The troops were fed on rations not only unsuited to the climate but of bad quality; much of the biscuit was bad, and the meat salted in India proved uneatable. Small wonder that in such circumstances intermittent fever, diarrhœa, and dysentery raged among all ranks; and though after a time the troops were moved into the houses of the natives, disease had taken such hold upon all ranks that in November there were not more than five hundred effectives at Chusan. The Royal Irish fared better than the other regiments, as the ships from which they drew most of their supplies were laden with stores prepared not in India, but in England; but still they suffered severely--two officers, Major R. Hammill and Lieutenant H. F. Vavasour, and about fifty of the other ranks died between July 5th and the end of the year.[124] Yet these losses were insignificant compared to those of the 26th, which from nine hundred was reduced to a strength, all told, of two hundred and ninety-one.

In January, 1841, there were combined naval and military operations against the forts at the mouth of the Canton river, in which the Royal Irish took no part as they had been left to garrison Chusan; a few of the regiment, however, were present, probably invalids serving on board ship for change of air. After several batteries had been dismantled and many heavy guns spiked or otherwise disabled, the Mandarins made a treaty with the Plenipotentiary, by which they agreed to cede to us the island of Hong Kong, to pay a considerable indemnity, and to allow trade to be reopened at Canton, while on our side we undertook to restore Chusan to the Chinese. No time was lost in occupying Hong Kong, of which formal possession was taken on February 26, 1841, two days after the Royal Irish arrived there. Colonel Burrell, XVIIIth, had been the senior military officer throughout the occupation of Chusan, and very thankful must he have been when, after seeing the last of the garrison safely on board ship, he turned his back on the island which proved fatal to such numbers of his men.[125] Very soon after the expedition had been concentrated at Hong Kong it became evident that the treaty was not worth the paper it was written upon. Far from being anxious for peace, the Chinese had only sought to gain time to prepare for war. An army of labourers was strengthening the defences of Canton; an army of soldiers was being collected in the interior of China to man them; large rewards were offered for the capture of British ships and British fighting men; for a battleship a hundred thousand dollars were promised; the Admiral and the Plenipotentiary were worth fifty thousand dollars each; the other officers were rated on a descending scale, while the price of a Madras Sepoy was only fifty dollars. On the 24th of February the fleet bombarded the celebrated Bogue forts in the Canton river; five hundred guns were taken, and everyone hoped that the ships would now be allowed to push up the river and capture Canton, when all movements were temporarily arrested by the announcement that the Plenipotentiary had entered into a truce. As, however, the Chinese did not fulfil its terms, the men-of-war engaged, silenced and destroyed such of the batteries as they had not yet attacked; made their way up the reaches of the river, and anchored close to Canton. The city lay almost defenceless under their guns, when the Plenipotentiary agreed to a suspension of hostilities on condition that the port should be reopened to British trade. This arrangement suited the Chinese admirably: the civil population would be enriched by the money paid by the merchants for the tea crop, then ready for delivery; while the military Mandarins gained time to cast new ordnance, to rebuild their ruined forts, and to reinforce the garrison before again defying the “Barbarians.”[126] The troops were ordered back to the harbour of Hong Kong, where Major-General Sir Hugh Gough, who had recently arrived from Madras to take command of the land forces, reorganised his little army, and attempted, though with small success, to infuse his own spirit of determination into the weak-kneed Plenipotentiary, whom Gough in a private letter described as “whimsical as a shuttle-cock.”

It was not long before the position of affairs at Canton once more became most serious. The gun factories had been working night and day; the forts had been repaired and re-armed; large numbers of soldiers had arrived; and in May the extermination was decreed of the European merchants, who on the faith of the truce had now returned to their counting-houses. This roused the Plenipotentiary into temporary activity; he arranged with Gough and the senior naval officer for a combined assault on Canton, and warned all Europeans to leave the place forthwith. By the evening of the 23rd of May the navy, after hard work in bombarding the river forts by day and warding off the approach of fire-rafts by night, had prepared the way for the execution of Sir Hugh Gough’s plan for the capture of Canton. This city of a million inhabitants was surrounded by walls of great thickness, and from twenty-five to twenty-eight feet in height; its ramparts, bristling with guns, were manned by forty-five thousand regular soldiers and an equal number of militia. To the west, south, and east of the town were large and prosperous suburbs, but on the north this expansion had been checked by a range of heights which, running parallel with the northern wall, completely dominated Canton and its defences. The Chinese had realised that if these heights passed into the hands of the British the town would become untenable: not only had they defended them with four strong forts, armed with forty-two heavy guns, but they had formed a large entrenched camp outside the north-eastern corner of the city, in order further to secure the safety of the heights which they rightly anticipated would be the point of our attack. Such was the position against which Gough, with less than 2800 soldiers, sailors, and marines, was about to try his strength. He divided his little force into two columns of very unequal size.[127] The right, or smaller detachment, was to force its way through the western suburb as far as the European settlement, or, as it was locally termed, “the factories”; occupy it, and place it in a state of defence. General Gough took personal command of the left or larger column, which consisted of four so-called brigades, the largest of which had in the ranks less than 900 officers and men. When the left column had been transhipped into all kinds of craft, from smart men-of-war’s gigs to lumbering native tea junks, it was towed in a motley procession of about eighty boats for five miles up a creek of the river to Tingpoo, a village about three miles and a half from the western base of the northern heights. Here the fourth brigade landed without opposition, just as the guns of the fleet were thundering out a royal salute in honour of the birthday of Queen Victoria. With the 49th regiment Sir Hugh Gough made a rapid reconnaissance inland, and then, leaving outposts behind him, returned to superintend the disembarkation of the main body.

Daylight on the 25th saw the whole column in motion, slowly threading its way, often in single file, over the densely cultivated rice-fields which lay between Tingpoo and their objective. The XVIIIth was ordered to leave an officer and thirty men at the landing-place to keep open the communications and to protect stores; the duty fell to Lieutenant W. P. Cockburn, who distinguished himself by the skill he displayed a few hours later in beating off an attack by a considerable body of the enemy. Until the infantry were within range of the western pair of forts the Chinese remained silent; then a heavy fire from their guns forced Gough to halt until his artillery could be brought into action. By eight A.M. the gunners had succeeded in dragging two 5½-in. mortars, two 12-pr. howitzers, two 12-pr. field-pieces, and a rocket battery to within 600 yards of the two western forts. These they bombarded vigorously, while the General reconnoitred and issued his orders for the assault: the Naval brigade was to storm the western forts, while the 1st and 4th brigades were to drive the Chinese from the hills close to the eastern forts. Under cover of our guns the troops advanced, exposed to a heavy but fortunately ill-directed fire: with great dash the sailors wrested the western forts from the enemy, who fought with stubbornness though without skill; the infantry swept over the heights with such vigour that the Chinese deserted the eastern forts before the troops had time to close upon them; and the Marines, who had been detached from Burrell to cope with a demonstration against our right flank and rear, disposed of their antagonists with little trouble. In the charge of the XVIIIth upon the forts the grenadier company led in extended order, accompanied by the General, who in his despatch reported that it had seldom fallen to his lot to “witness a more soldier-like and steady advance, or a more animated attack. Every individual steadily and gallantly did his duty. The XVIIIth and 49th were emulous which should first reach the appointed goals; but under the impulse of this feeling they did not lose sight of that discipline which could alone ensure success.”

Though the ridge had been won with such ease, the day’s work was by no means over. As soon as the Chinese realised that the forts were lost, they opened from the city walls so heavy a fire of guns, gingals, and matchlocks that it became necessary to keep the British troops well under cover, and part of the garrison of the entrenched camp advanced into a village, threatening our left flank. The 49th dislodged them, but later in the day there was such animation in the camp that Gough ordered Burrell to storm it with the Royal Irish, under Lieutenant-Colonel H. Adams, and a company of Marines. Between the foot of the heights held by the British and the enemy’s entrenchments stretched a great expanse of rice-fields deep in water; a narrow causeway bridged this inundation, and along it, under a galling fire, the XVIIIth advanced at the double, scattered the enemy in every direction, set fire to the tents, and blew up the magazines. This success was not a bloodless one--three officers were wounded, and there were some casualties in the other ranks. The assault was led by Captain Grattan, whose “spirited conduct” on this occasion led Gough to select him to carry despatches to the Governor-General of India.[128] With the capture of the village the operations ended, for though Gough was burning to assault the northern wall of the town, his heavy guns were not yet in position, and his infantry, out of training from their long detention on board ship, were completely exhausted by the abnormal heat of the day. To this exhaustion the unsuitable dress of the soldiers doubtless contributed not a little. Notwithstanding the protests of the doctors the men still wore tightly buttoned red coatees or shell jackets, stocks, and blue Nankin trousers; and their headgear was a huge shako or a small forage cap, both useless in an almost tropical climate.

Gough’s little force bivouacked on the heights they had won, elated at their own success and at that of the right column, which had made good its position in “the factories.” Early on the 26th, before our artillery was ready to open fire, the Chinese sent a messenger to say that they desired peace; Gough replied that before entering into any negotiations he must see the Chinese General, and in waiting for this elusive personage, who never appeared, several hours were wasted; then torrents of rain rendered any movements impossible, and Gough had to content himself with completing his preparations for the storming of the city wall on the 27th. But in his plans he had not reckoned with the Plenipotentiary, who, without consulting the officers commanding the naval and military forces, agreed with the Chinese to accept an indemnity of six millions of dollars, to be paid within six days, when the whole expedition was to retire from the Canton river. Remonstrances were useless, for the Plenipotentiary was supreme, and after several anxious days spent in skirmishing with the local irregular troops, the soldiers re-embarked and the fleet once more returned to Hong Kong, leaving the Chinese more firmly convinced than ever that the English were as easy to hoodwink in diplomacy as they were difficult to fight in battle. These operations cost fourteen killed and ninety-one wounded. The casualties in the Royal Irish were Captain J. J. Sargent, Lieutenants D. Edwardes and G. Hilliard wounded, and five men killed or wounded.[129]

Owing to a combination of adverse circumstances nothing was accomplished by sea or land for some months. The Plenipotentiary, ever engaged in futile negotiations with the Chinese, could not bring himself to accept the active policy pressed upon him by Sir Hugh Gough, who pointed out that the Emperor of China would never respect us until the expedition had forced a passage up the great waterway of the Yang-Tse-Kiang, and struck a vigorous blow at the heart of the Celestial Empire. A great typhoon drove many ships ashore, dismasted others, and blew down part of the settlement at Hong Kong. Malarial fever, caught in the rice grounds around Canton, became so prevalent that at one time two-thirds of the troops were unfit for duty. The Royal Irish did not suffer more than other corps, yet on August 1, six weeks after a draft had raised their strength to 747 all told, 136 of the regiment were in hospital, and three officers died.[130] With the arrival of Sir Henry Pottinger, the new Plenipotentiary, the aspect of affairs changed; and on the 21st of August the regiment formed part of the column embarked for the attack of Amoy--a seaport three hundred miles up the coast towards the mouth of the Yang-Tse-Kiang. The position of Amoy is naturally strong, and since the beginning of the war it had been so greatly fortified that, after it was taken, soldiers and sailors agreed that it would have proved impregnable had it been defended by Europeans. Amoy stands at the head of a bay studded with islands, the most considerable of which, Kulangsu, commands both the city and the strait or channel, only six hundred yards in width, by which the inner harbour is entered. From every island and from every headland guns frowned upon the bay, and, to quote Gough’s biographer--

“immediately in front of the outer town stood a succession of batteries, and from these there extended a solid rampart, facing the sea, about a mile in length. It was, says an eye-witness, ‘well built of granite, faced with earth, extending along the shore nearly up to the suburbs of the city, and designed to command the passage to the harbour. It presented a line of guns, a full mile in length, the embrasures being covered with large slabs of stone protected by earth heaped upon them, and mounting no less than ninety-six guns.’ The end of this rampart was connected by a castellated wall with a range of rocky heights running parallel to the beach and the rampart, which was thus protected from a flanking attack.... On the island of Kulangsu there were several strong batteries, mounting altogether seventy-six guns, and some of these faced the long stone rampart on the opposite side of the strait, thus exposing the assailants to a cross-fire.”[131]

The naval and military commanders decided that the works of Amoy and Kulangsu should be attacked at the same time; the ships were to bombard them in front, while the troops took them in reverse. The morning of the 26th of August saw the plan carried into effect: the batteries at Kulangsu fell easily into our hands: those at Amoy were so strongly built that though two line-of-battle ships poured many thousands of projectiles into them at 400 yards’ range, the masonry was practically uninjured. The cannonade, however, served its purpose in preventing the Chinese gunners from sinking the boats in which the XVIIIth and 49th were carried to their appointed landing-place at the foot of the castellated wall. While the Royal Irish, scaling this wall, turned the flank of the works on the sea front, the 49th rushed along the shore and scrambled over the parapet of the great battery; both regiments swept the work from end to end, driving the Chinese before them, and then joined the Marines, who had occupied the heights. Here they commanded the “outer city”; but the “inner city” was protected by a range of hills occupied by a large number of the enemy. Gough ordered the 49th to turn these hills, and sent the XVIIIth straight at the Chinese, up a steep gorge where a few men could have checked a regiment. The Chinese, however, made a very poor resistance; the troops bivouacked on the heights, and next morning occupied the citadel and “inner city” of Amoy. The total British loss was seventeen killed and wounded; among the latter were two men of the Royal Irish. The Chinese suffered severely, and several of their leaders committed suicide rather than accept defeat.

The adventures of the XVIIIth on this occasion are amusingly described by Lieutenant A. Murray, the officer in command of the picked shots of the regiment, who throughout the campaign worked together under his orders--

“We got into boats about 12 o’clock, and were taken in tow by the steamer Nemesis,[132] and as we had to go to the different ships to collect the men, we were towed about the harbour for a long time, at the imminent risk of being capsized, as the string of boats increased every minute, and consequently threading our way through the fleet became more dangerous. I cut one boat adrift to prevent her sinking us, as she was twice our size and was pounding us to pieces, the Colours of the regiment being in the boat with me.... The steamer stood pretty closely into the shore, and the boats cast off, the Nemesis covering our landing with her guns and rockets. Our Grenadier and Light companies, and marksmen, under the command of Major Tomlinson, were ordered to move to the front to take the flanking wall of the battery, which was done very easily, and they (i.e., the Chinese) only fired a few shots and a volley of rockets. We got over the wall by stepping on each others’ backs. On seeing us come over the wall the Chinese, who till then had stood to their guns, ... now ran in all directions, throwing their large shields over their backs.”

After capturing a Mandarin’s flag Murray followed the grenadier and light companies along the rear of the batteries, where a number of the enemy came at them boldly; the Chinese were soon dispersed, however, and fell back to a clump of aloe bushes, from which they were driven by a second charge. Of the bivouac Murray writes--

“It was almost night when we reached the summit of the heights and there were ordered to halt for the night. This was rather a pleasant look-out for tired and hungry men, without anything to eat or a house to sleep in, with a bitter cold wind blowing; however there was nothing for it but to choose the softest possible rock, light a cheroot and fancy yourself comfortable for the night.... There was great picking and choosing among us for soft rocks; but I believe we all came to the conclusion that one rock is as hard a pillow as another.”[133]

After destroying the batteries and securing the five hundred guns captured at Amoy, the expeditionary force put to sea, leaving as garrison of Kulangsu 361 officers and men of the XVIIIth under Major J. Cowper, part of the 26th, and a detachment of artillery--a total of 550 of all ranks. The intention was to attack the towns of Chinhai and Ningpo, and then, in order to efface the bad impression produced by our evacuation of Chusan at the beginning of the year, to re-occupy that island. Bad weather, however, scattered the ships, and, when at length they were reassembled it was decided at once to seize Tinghae, the capital of Chusan, before the Chinese had finished their preparations for its defence. Since we had abandoned it our enemy had fortified the town assiduously. On the sea wall facing the harbour a battery of eighty guns had been thrown up. On the west it ended at the base of an eminence, in our previous occupation known as Pagoda Hill, where cannon were now mounted; to the eastward it stretched almost to the foot of a line of heights, entrenched but not yet armed. Gough decided to land at the foot of these heights, and after carrying them to push some of the troops against the town, while others attacked the long battery from flank and rear. The ships were to avoid the fire of the guns on the sea front by taking up their stations on the outer flanks of Pagoda Hill and the eastern heights. The fleet came into action on October 1, 1841, and covered by their bombardment three hundred of the Royal Irish under Lieutenant-Colonel Adams, the newly arrived 55th regiment, and eight guns of the Madras Artillery disembarked under a heavy though ill-aimed fire of matchlocks and gingals. The 55th won the eastern heights, though not without difficulty, for the garrison of Tinghae were soldiers of a better stamp than the defenders of Amoy. The Royal Irish were sent off to the right, marching in quarter column and covered by the flank companies and picked marksmen, who ran into the enemy at an encampment near the long battery. Here the Chinese showed fight, and lost considerably in hand-to-hand work. Murray relates that a “white-buttoned” Mandarin,[134] after wounding one of the marksmen in the chest with a spear, “closed with him and got his forage cap off, another man came up and thrust at him with a bayonet, which he wrenched off, but was shot by a third.” While the sharpshooters were thus employed the grenadier company had made its way into the long battery, where there was a sharp skirmish at close quarters round a gun. The Chinese stood bravely, and were not dislodged until another company of the regiment came up at the double, when they fell back, leaving the ground covered with their own wounded and a few of the XVIIIth. In this little fight pistols were used with effect. A Chinaman ran at Murray, sword in hand, but as the hero of the adventure writes, “having no particular confidence in my regulation spit, or perhaps in my own skill as a swordsman, I stuck my sword in the mud beside me, took a steady aim, and shot him.” As soon as the Royal Irish had cleared the long battery of the enemy they climbed Pagoda Hill, to find that its garrison had been driven away by the shot and shell of the men-of-war and the artillery. As the Colours of the XVIIIth were raised on the top of the hill, those of the 55th began to float over the walls of Tinghae, and the capital of Chusan once more passed into our hands at the cost of some thirty killed and wounded. In the XVIIIth the casualties were a sergeant and six rank and file wounded. The loss of Chusan greatly annoyed the Chinese, who complained that we had not fought them fairly. Instead of anchoring our ships right under the cannon of the long battery and making a frontal attack by sea and land, as they expected, we had meanly bombarded the extreme ends of their line of defence, landed where their guns could not play upon us, and taken the battery in flank. Had cricket been one of the national institutions of China, the beaten troops would doubtless have said that we had not played the game!

Leaving an adequate garrison in Chusan General Gough next attacked Chinhai, a seaport at the mouth of the Ningpo river, twelve miles from the important city of Ningpo. Its fortifications, though strong, were easily turned on the 10th of October, when the place was taken with a total loss of four killed and sixteen wounded. One man in the Royal Irish was killed[135] and four wounded. The Chinese suffered very heavily, for here, as elsewhere in the campaign, their arms were as indifferent as their shooting, and after standing well for a time they broke before a charge, and were then mowed down in every direction. The slaughter of the fugitives was a hideous necessity: we were but a handful in an enormous country, and our enemies were so numerous that we should have been overwhelmed by numbers had we not inflicted severe punishment upon them in every engagement. To the bad marksmanship of the Chinese must be attributed the XVIIIth’s good luck on this occasion. As the Royal Irish approached the range of strongly held hills which they were to seize, they found themselves on the bank of an unfordable canal, well under the enemy’s fire. This canal was spanned by a bridge, narrow in itself, and made still narrower by an arch across it; the archway was blocked by a large stone, and even after this obstruction had been removed the passage was so small that the men had to take off their great-coats in order to squeeze through it one by one. “We had one or two very stout fellows,” wrote one of the officers present, “whom we had great difficulty in pushing through, but when we came to the big drum we were in a fix. However, we got a little boat, and put McGiff, the big drummer, and his drum into it, with a pole to shove himself across. The Chinese thought the big drum was some new form of infernal machine, and opened a tremendous fire upon it, much to our amusement, but it was anything but fun for McGiff. He and the drum, however, got over safe and sound, except the drum heads, which were much damaged by bullets.”

Three days later Ningpo fell without a shot being fired, and the little army was played into the town by the band of the XVIIIth. Here Gough was obliged to halt: much as he desired to push on to the banks of the Yang-Tse-Kiang he could not do so without troops, and sickness, casualties, and the drain of the garrisons of Hong Kong, Kulangsu, Tinghae, and Chinhai had left him with only about seven hundred and fifty men in hand. With so slender a force he could do nothing but await reinforcements; and for several months the headquarters of the XVIIIth and 49th remained at Ningpo, occasionally employed in demonstrations to postpone the attack which, as he rightly anticipated, could not be long delayed. Beyond these demonstrations there was little to break the monotony of existence in this Chinese city. The duty was heavy. Nearly five miles of continuous wall, twenty-seven feet high, twenty feet broad, and broken only by six gates, surrounded the town: each of these entrances required a strong guard; the town was patrolled several times during the twenty-four hours; and the field officer and captain of the day, mounted on sure-footed Chinese ponies, rode frequently round the ramparts to visit ground which could not be watched by the sentries on the gates. Once a week the Colours were trooped in the presence of the General, who insisted on the attendance of all officers not otherwise employed. When troops were available there was drill in a large square, to the great delight of a number of little native boys who had attached themselves to the Royal Irish. These children hung about the temple, which had been converted into a barrack, and did odd jobs for the men, helping them to cook and to carry dinners to the guards. In return for these kind offices the soldiers made pets of the boys, and taught them military expressions with such assiduity that in a short time “almost all the young blackguards about the place could swear in very good English.” These youngsters proved their friendship with the XVIIIth by confirming the rumours, already current, that during the absence of Sir Hugh Gough, who had been summoned to a conference at Chusan with Sir Henry Pottinger, a great army was about to attack Ningpo; and after warning their soldier friends that next day there was going to be a great fight, they disappeared. This warning was repeated by the traders in the market, who drew their hands across their throats to give their British customers to understand that all the “Barbarians” would soon be killed. In the night of March 9-10, 1842, large bodies of the enemy simultaneously assaulted the south and west gates. The attack on the former was successful; the Chinese forced it open, routed the guard, and were making their way into the centre of the town when they were met by part of the 49th, who drove them through the gate and back into the suburbs with heavy loss. The west gate was held by Lieutenant A. W. S. F. Armstrong and twenty-eight men of the XVIIIth, carefully picked among the best soldiers of the regiment by the adjutant, Lieutenant Graves, who, like every one of the garrison at Ningpo except the officer in temporary command, had realised that there was trouble in the air. Five minutes after the bugles had sounded the alarm the Royal Irish were on parade, and two companies went off at the double to reinforce Armstrong’s guard, who, owing to the construction of the parapet, were unable to fire down upon the Tartars as they strove to lever the gate off its hinges with crowbars and axes. Suddenly among the defenders appeared a private, Michael Cushin, described as a first-class soldier with only one failing, who seems to have been the hero of the defence. He had been imprisoned for drunkenness at the west gate, and when the attack began, begged to be released. As soon as his cell was opened, he wrenched the bar off the door and began to use it on the Tartars’ heads: next he killed the officer commanding a party of the enemy on the point of clambering over the parapet: then his quick wits solved the problem of the ill-planned rampart. Collecting ten or twelve men, they put their shoulders to the part of it which overhung the gate, and with a few great heaves topped the mass of masonry into the crowd below.[136] Through the gap thus made the guard began to ply their muskets, and when the supports arrived with a light gun, a murderous fire was opened upon the Tartars, who sullenly abandoned the assault and retired, leaving two silk banners as trophies in the hands of the XVIIIth. After the south gate had been re-occupied a handful of British soldiers, among whom were some of the Royal Irish, pushed their way through the town, and near one of the gates found a great number of the enemy drawn up across the street. The infantry reserved their volley until twenty yards from the Tartars, the guns fired canister at fifty yards’ range, and a party of the regiment, under Lieutenant Murray, after breaking through a house and fording a canal, occupied the side streets of the thoroughfare down which the enemy was driven, and by their musketry contributed much to his great losses. For six miles the Tartars were hunted, first through the suburb and then in the open country, but there was no fight left in them, and the civilian inhabitants who crowded the streets and roads gave them no help, and appeared to regard the fighting as a spectacle arranged for their own amusement. The attitude of most of the Chinese throughout the campaign, indeed, was one of complete apathy: they looked upon the war as an annoying but unavoidable interruption to their daily life, and finding that their conquerors treated them well, acquiesced in their presence, and made as much money out of them as possible.

The enemy attacked Chinhai about the same time that he attempted to wrest Ningpo from us, but was beaten off with ease by the garrison, largely composed of a detachment of the Royal Irish under Brevet-Major Grattan. A few days after these exciting little episodes, the XVIIIth was present at successful raids against the town of Tze-Ke and other places near Ningpo; but as those of the Royal Irish who were in the column hardly came into action it is unnecessary to describe these skirmishes. About this time Colonel Adams, being invalided home, was succeeded in command by Lieutenant-Colonel N. R. Tomlinson; and in the month of April three companies of the detachment at Kulangsu rejoined headquarters.

It has already been mentioned that ever since Sir Hugh Gough’s arrival he had pointed out that the war would never be brought to a satisfactory conclusion until, abandoning the policy of attacking only the towns on the sea-coast, we pushed our way into the heart of the country, and threatened the Emperor in his palace at Pekin. After much correspondence between the Ministry at home and the Governor-General of India at Calcutta, Gough’s strategy was adopted, and in May, 1842, the XVIIIth was afloat again, this time bound for Chapoo, where a naval arsenal was to be destroyed before the fleet entered the river Yang-Tse-Kiang. The place was strongly fortified, but, as usual, the enemy proved unprepared for anything but a frontal attack, and as soon as his works were turned on the 18th of May he was easily routed, except at one point, where the stubborn valour of the Tartar soldiery cost the regiment dear. Finding their retreat cut off, three hundred of these men flung themselves into a large stone house, and determined to take no quarter but to fight to the bitter end. The building was quickly and skilfully prepared for defence. The outer windows were manned by picked shots; the interior passages and the central hall were loopholed; mats were hung to exclude the light, so that if the British succeeded in making their way across the threshold they would plunge into semi-darkness, and not see the loopholes from which they would be shot down by a cross fire. A party of the Royal Irish tried to force their way into this death-trap, but were so warmly received that Lieutenant Murray, who was in command, drew off his men to wait for reinforcements; and after a similar attempt by some of the 49th had been repulsed, the house was surrounded by skirmishers to prevent the escape of any of the enemy. Before long, more companies of the XVIIIth and 49th came on the scene, and the officer in command of the latter corps, who was the senior officer present, decided not to press the attack until the Tartars had been shaken by artillery. The decision was a wise one, but unfortunately Lieutenant-Colonel Tomlinson overheard some expressions which he considered a reflection either upon his regiment or himself, and instantly led a headlong charge towards the entrance of the house. At the door he fell, so desperately injured that in five minutes he had ceased to breathe, while every man who tried to enter with him was killed or wounded. After he was shot down it became almost impossible to prevent the XVIIIth from rushing madly at the building, for the men burned to avenge their Colonel, whom they described as “the best officer who ever said ‘Come on’ to a grenadier company.” In more formal language General Gough recorded the same opinion, saying in his despatch that Tomlinson fell “in full career of renown, honoured by the corps, and lamented by all.”

When a few artillerymen came up with a light gun and some rockets they opened on the house, but without result; equally fruitless were the efforts of a party of sailors to set fire to the woodwork of the upper storeys; then the explosion of a powder-bag made a small breach in a wall through which a few of the Royal Irish tried to force their way, only to be driven back with loss. A second attempt to set fire to the woodwork, however, was more successful, and the explosion of another powder-bag brought down more of the wall, and thus exposed many of the Tartars to our musketry. Soon the whole place was in a blaze, and when at last our men rushed through the doorway from which they had been so often repulsed, they found themselves in a hell on Earth. Three hundred Tartars had defended the building; now all but fifty-three lay dead upon the floor; and of the survivors nearly all were wounded. Many of their wadded cotton uniforms had taken fire, and to the horrors of the reek of blood and the stench of singeing flesh were added the cries of the wounded, as they feebly strove to beat out the sparks which fell from the roof upon their clothing. In the midst of this scene of carnage sat an old Tartar colonel, who, when the red-coats began to show through the smoke, laid down his pipe, snatched up his sword, and cut his throat. This stout old warrior failed to kill himself, and with the rest of the wounded was tended by our doctors, and then released--a chivalrous recognition of their bravery which greatly astonished the prisoners and convinced them that the “foreign devils” were not as black as the Mandarins had painted them. The discovery, unfortunately, came too late to prevent an epidemic of suicide among the population of Chapoo. When our men entered the town it was full of dead: “men, women, and children were found drowned or hanged; whole families seemed to have destroyed themselves, and some, from the positions they were in, must have had difficulty and most desperate resolution to effect their purpose. The wells and every place where they could find water enough were full of bodies.”[137]

The Chinese are believed to have fought Gough’s little army of 2200 men[138] at Chapoo with 8000 regular troops, 1700 of whom were Tartars. Their losses were, as usual, enormous--from 1200 to 1500--while those of the British were two officers and eleven other ranks killed, six officers and forty-six other ranks wounded. The casualties among the XVIIIth were heavy: Colonel Tomlinson, a sergeant, and three privates were killed;[139] Lieutenants A. Murray and E. Jodrell, a sergeant, a drummer, and twenty-seven rank and file were wounded. One of the pay-sergeants had a very narrow escape: he was in the habit of carrying the company roll in his forage cap, and when at nightfall he wanted to make entries in it he found it cut to pieces by bullets.

As soon as the arsenal, guns, and other munitions of war at Chapoo were destroyed, the expedition made sail for the Yang-Tse-Kiang, where we bombarded Woosung, a town at the mouth of the river of the same name. Though small, the place was heavily fortified, for the Chinese trusted to its guns for the protection of the lower reaches of the river. In the capture of Woosung the army played no part, for the troopships were aground on mud-banks when the sailors and marines, after knocking the batteries to pieces, landed to take possession of the town. Two days later, on the 19th of June, the Royal Irish formed part of a column which marched fourteen miles inland to Shanghai, destroyed the warlike stores at this great centre of trade, and then returned to Woosung, to find that during their short absence some batteries of Royal Artillery, the 98th, and several Madras regiments had joined the force, and that Major J. Cowper had come up from Kulangsu to take command of the XVIIIth, bringing with him the company which had been left to garrison Chinhai. The fleet remained storm-bound at Woosung until the 7th of July: then the weather moderated, and the Admiral, Sir William Parker, ordered his seventy vessels--men-of-war, transports, and store ships--to weigh anchor for Nankin, now the object of our operations. This enormous city was the commercial capital of China, and the centre of a great network of canals connecting Pekin with the Yang-Tse-Kiang and the southern provinces of the Empire. Once masters of Nankin, we could stop all inland traffic on the canals, and by paralysing the commerce of the country bring irresistible pressure on the Emperor, six hundred miles away in his Court at Pekin. The task before the Navy was a heavy one. In peace time the mere passage of so large a number of ships over a hundred and seventy miles of an almost unknown river would have presented difficulties. Now these difficulties were increased by the necessity of guarding against attack, and by the knowledge that before the guns of the fleet could be trained upon the walls of Nankin we would have to fight the garrison of at least one large town on the banks of the river. The steamers scouted upstream, sounding and surveying as they went: the sailing ships followed in a stately procession many miles in length, watched by crowds of peasants who gazed in wonder at the “war junks” of the Barbarians. On the 20th of July, the rearmost of the fleet reached Chinkiangfu, a walled city fifty miles below Nankin; and next day Gough landed his troops, now numbering 6664 men. The first brigade (Major-General Lord Saltoun) was to clear the enemy from a camp south-west of the town; with the second, Major-General Schoedde was to attack the northern wall of the town; to Bartley’s brigade (the third) was entrusted the storming of the western wall. The first brigade did its work easily; the second had hard fighting before its bayonets glittered on the northern wall; the third brigade, and especially the XVIIIth regiment, had exciting adventures in carrying out the duty assigned to them.

The Royal Irish were the last troops to disembark. They did not land till seven A.M., when the heat was already so oppressive that the Adjutant, Lieutenant Graves, persuaded Major Cowper to leave the men’s great-coats behind, undertaking to provide the entire regiment with furs from the shops of the pawnbrokers, with whom the wealthy Chinese regularly stored their winter clothing. To go into action without great-coats was quite a new departure, but even more daring was the next order: the men were told to take off their stocks, sling them over the left shoulder, and unfasten three buttons of their jackets and three buttons of their collars! These precautions, though to our ideas not very far-reaching, served their purpose, for while in other corps numbers of men were knocked over by the heat, not a man in the XVIIIth suffered from sunstroke. The regiment was making its way through the suburbs to the western face of the wall, when an A.D.C. arrived with orders for the Royal Irish to come up at the double to the western gate, where the General was anxiously awaiting them. The troops around General Gough were in bad case: many lay senseless from sun apoplexy; the remainder were so exhausted that they could only keep up a feeble fire on its defenders. As soon as the XVIIIth appeared Gough welcomed them with the order “Go on, Royal Irish, and storm.” “We halted,” writes an officer who was present, “to tell off a storming party of fifty men, and then with arms at the trail and bending low, the stormers made a dash down a cross-street within about twenty yards of the gate, and from the windows of the houses which ran parallel to the wall, we opened fire on the Chinese gunners and soon silenced them. The engineers then advanced and placed a powder-bag against the gate (a very strong one and, as we afterwards found, strengthened by four or five tiers of sand-bags piled against it from inside); we were ordered to lie down; the fuse was lit, and in about ten seconds everything was flying about our heads. This brought us to our feet in a hurry; we gave a cheer and dashed into the archway, which was densely filled with smoke; those who got in first were soon brought to their knees by kicking against the sand-bags which we could not see, but we had to scramble on as quick as possible as there was danger of receiving a poke from a friendly bayonet behind! We got out as black as monkeys, to find ourselves in a sort of yard, surrounded by high walls, with a second gate leading from it into the city. We had just started breaking this second gate down, when we heard a friendly voice behind it shouting ‘Hold on, we’ll open it for you!’” It turned out that the 55th, after escalading their own wall, had worked round to the western gate, which the Chinese abandoned when they saw their flank in danger.

The Royal Irish were at once sent to drive the Tartars from the western wall. They moved off left in front,[140] and as there was not room on the rampart for four men abreast they marched in threes. The grenadier company were soon dropped to hold a commanding building close to the wall; the remainder of the regiment pushed on without seeing any of the enemy, until a keen-eyed officer noticed a large number of Tartars emerging from the shelter of some houses on the town side of the wall. The commanding officer, insisting that they were not fighting men but harmless coolies, refused to send out skirmishers to protect the head and right flank of his straggling column, and the Tartars were allowed to establish themselves in gardens surrounded by high walls, which made excellent rests for matchlocks and gingals. As soon as the regiment was within range they opened a heavy fire upon the leading company, killing Captain C. J. R. Collinson, wounding Lieutenant S. Bernard, and causing several casualties in the ranks. The rampart along which the XVIIIth was marching was so narrow that it was difficult for messengers to pass rapidly from company to company, and as no orders were received the men halted for directions: but by the time the enemy had discharged a second volley, an officer had called upon the Light company to avenge their captain. Collinson’s “Light Bobs” dashed down the slope of the rampart, scaled the mud walls and, followed by the remainder of the regiment, fell furiously on the Tartars, who, after a stout resistance, broke and fled. Not all, however, of the enemy had lost heart. Just as the regiment had re-formed after the charge, a gigantic Tartar rushed towards the line, brandishing a sword in each hand; the officers, unwilling to send so brave a man to his death, made signs to him to retire, but in vain, and he was almost amongst the men when a well-aimed bullet laid him low. The grenadier company came in for a full share of the excitements of the day. Their captain, Wigston, noticed some of the Tartars drawn up across a narrow street leading to his post, and sent a subaltern, Lieutenant W. Venour, and twelve men to dislodge them. The Tartars held their fire until the party of grenadiers were close to them, and then let fly with some effect. Lieutenant I. H. Hewitt with fourteen men hurried up to reinforce Venour’s detachment, and the street was cleared after sharp hand-to-hand fighting. Hewitt had a narrow escape: a Tartar cut at him with his sword, and the blow would have been fatal had not Private M‘Carthy “raised his musket and parried it, though unfortunately with the loss of his thumb, the sword cutting right through the bone, and also through Hewitt’s forage cap, slightly raising the skin of his head. We left a picket there,” continues Lieutenant Murray, “as occasional shots were still fired from the houses. A short time afterwards a Tartar soldier rushed in amongst the men and stabbed one of them in the side with his knife: he was shot instantly. We were obliged to set fire to the houses to drive the Tartars out of them, for we would not let the men follow them into the buildings.”

Although the troops did their best to stop the frenzy of rage and terror which seized upon the population after we had captured the town, the number of people who committed suicide at Chinkiangfu was as great or even greater than at Chapoo. One instance among hundreds will prove how determined the Tartars were not to survive the disgrace of a defeat. When their General realised that the day was lost he retired to his house, ordered his servants to set fire to the building, and allowed himself to be burned to death. It was fortunate for the success of Gough’s little army that the overweening contempt of the Chinese for foreigners had prevented the employment of European adventurers to mould and lead their armies. Had the Tartar troops been trained and disciplined by Continental soldiers of fortune, as were the Sikhs, the enemies whom Gough was to encounter in a few years, a great array of British soldiers would have been required to win on the banks of the Yang-Tse-Kiang victories as decisive as those of Sobraon and Goozerat.[141] In the capture of Chinkiangfu two officers and thirty of the other ranks were killed, eleven officers and ninety-eight other ranks wounded, and three privates missing. The casualties among the small Naval landing party were three killed and twenty-one wounded. The XVIIIth lost one officer, Captain Collinson, and two private soldiers killed; one officer, Lieutenant S. Bernard, two sergeants, and fifteen privates wounded.

While the soldiers were fighting on shore, the sailors were doing invaluable work on their own element by blockading the chief waterways to Pekin; and in a few days the result of the stoppage of trade with the capital was so disastrous to the merchants of China that the Emperor was obliged to sue for peace. But before negotiations had been opened, Pottinger, Gough, and Parker realised that the presence of British troops and British ships at Nankin would greatly stimulate the tardy movements of the Chinese diplomatists, and on August 9, 1842, the whole force, less a small garrison left to hold Chinkiangfu, was ready to assault the walls of the commercial capital of China. But no assault was necessary, as twenty days later a treaty of peace, this time a genuine one on the part of the Chinese, was signed on board a British man-of-war. Its terms were satisfactory: every point on which England had gone to war was ceded by the Emperor; our national honour was vindicated, and the rights of our traders secured. During the negotiations dignified courtesies were exchanged between the Mandarins and the Plenipotentiary. On one of these occasions the grenadier company of the Royal Irish acted as guard of honour to Sir Henry Pottinger while he solemnly dined with the Chinese officials: our late enemies turned out their best soldiers to receive the English guests, but though Lieutenant Murray admits that among them were many tall, fine-looking fellows, he insists that they were “nothing in appearance to our company, who looked remarkably well, and must have astonished the Chinese much.” Though the spectators doubtless admired the physique and martial bearing of the Irishmen who had so often routed the picked troops of China, they must have smiled at the contrast between the comfortable dress of the Tartars, who wore long loose coats and boots coming well up the leg, and the stocks, tightly buttoned shell-jackets and equally tight white trousers of the British army.[142] The spies among the crowd, for the Chinese had many very observant secret service agents in their employ, must have wondered why the infantry who served on board ship were armed with percussion muskets, while those who fought on land carried flint-locks.

No sooner had the treaty of peace been officially ratified by the Emperor of China than the expedition began to descend the Yang-Tse-Kiang with all speed, for the climate had begun to tell heavily upon the health of soldiers and sailors alike. So short-handed from sickness was the crew of H.M.S. Rattlesnake that the Royal Irish, by this time nearly as much at home on a ship as in a barrack, helped largely in working her successfully down the river. At the mouth of the Yang-Tse-Kiang the expedition broke up: some of Gough’s units sailed for India; others went home, while the corps ordered to remain in Chinese waters proceeded to their several destinations. Among the latter was the XVIIIth, which was sent to Chusan, where its various detachments were assembled by the end of October, 1842. When the casualty returns were prepared it was found that though the losses in action had been small, those caused by dysentery, malaria, and cholera had been very heavy. Lieutenant-Colonel N. R. Tomlinson and Captain C. J. R. Collinson had been killed; Major R. Hammill, Lieutenants H. Vavasour, A. Wilson, F. Swinburn, D. Edwardes, J. Cochrane, G. W. Davis, S. Haly, Hon. C. H. Stratford, Ensign M. Humphreys, and Assistant-Surgeon J. Baker had died from disease; six officers had been wounded but had recovered from their injuries. Among the other ranks nine non-commissioned officers and men had been killed, seventy-seven wounded, and two hundred and fourteen had died from illness, accident, or the effect of wounds.[143] In honour of those who perished a monument was erected in St Patrick’s Cathedral. It stands in the north transept--the Walhalla of the regiment, where the old Colours, faded by the sun in many climes and pierced by bullets in many battles, overhang the stately memorials by which the Royal Irish regiment has sought to keep green the memory of its illustrious dead. The numerous monuments are described fully in Appendix 10, and photographs of them are reproduced in various parts of the book.

At the opening of Parliament in 1843, the House of Lords passed the usual vote of thanks to the troops which had taken part in the campaign. A medal was issued to the officers and men who had served in the Chinese war; leave was granted to the XVIIIth to add to its other battle honours the word “China” and the device of the Dragon, and Colonel G. Burrell, Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Adams, and Majors J. Cowper and J. Grattan were awarded the C.B.

Very disagreeable orders awaited the regiment on its arrival at Chusan. Four companies were to remain there as part of its garrison until the Chinese had fulfilled all the obligations of the treaty, while headquarters and the greater part of the regiment were to occupy the island of Kulangsu, which our Government also held as a pledge of Chinese good faith. Kulangsu had already acquired the reputation of being one of the most unhealthy stations in China, and the Royal Irish soon discovered that its evil reputation was but too well deserved. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Graves’s statement, when the headquarters companies landed they found the detachment of the regiment which had been there for some months in a deplorable condition. There had been many deaths among all ranks; every one of the surviving officers was down with fever,

“and there were not thirty men under command of a sergeant who were fit for duty or could shoulder a firelock.... When the Headquarter companies landed from Chusan the men were healthy and well seasoned, but they very soon began to feel the climate, and before long half the men were on the sick list, and we began to bury them very fast. I had been appointed Staff Officer for the island, and at first found much difficulty in getting coffins quick enough, so I ordered twenty at a time to be supplied by a contractor at Amoy. Several of our officers died, and at last I found much difficulty in getting men enough to relieve the guards. I went to our Colonel, Cowper--who was the Commandant of the island--and represented that if we did not get a ship sent up from Hong Kong for the invalids we should very soon have no men for guard. We got a ship and found her of the greatest benefit; she was anchored half a mile out of the harbour, and the invalids sent on board her came back in a week fit for duty.

“A large draft joined from England, about three hundred strong, together with the women and children. This caused a little stir, but it was a short-lived happiness: they went down almost as fast as we could provide coffins for them. We pitched tents and moved our camp daily about the island, but it was no use--cholera and fever still continued. The men began to drink to drown dull care; the officers off the sick list were constantly on Court-Martial duty, and the Colonel received an official letter from Headquarters drawing his attention to the number of Courts-Martial for drunkenness, and directing him to parade the regiment and reprimand the men for their conduct, which was alleged to be the principal cause of the severe mortality. As Staff Officer and adjutant of the regiment I was ordered to read this letter to the men, which I began to do, but I must acknowledge I fairly broke down and had to hand it to another officer to finish. I felt so keenly how our gallant poor fellows were being sacrificed, after their long, hard services, to a climate no one could live in, and how they bore it!”

In April 1844, after a hundred and thirty-six officers and men had fallen victims to the climate of Kulangsu,[144] the regiment was reunited at Chusan. The next station was Hong Kong, where the ordinary routine of garrison life in the East was suddenly broken by an urgent and wholly unexpected call to arms. The people of Canton, always overbearing and offensive towards Europeans, had recently insulted and ill-treated British subjects, and their Mandarins had refused to make redress for the outrages. The British Plenipotentiary, Sir John Davis, was a believer in the saying “A word and a blow, and the blow first,” and he determined to teach the mob of Canton a lesson they would not soon forget. During the night of the 1st of April, 1847, the Royal Irish, under Lieutenant-Colonel Cowper, with 23 officers and 509 other ranks, and the 42nd regiment of Madras Native Infantry, 399 strong, were packed into a couple of small men-of-war and an armed steamer. Early on the following morning the flotilla was off the entrance to the Canton river; the troops were landed, and driving the Chinese artillerymen from the batteries, spiked the guns. The works higher up the stream were then treated in the same way, but not without vigorous opposition from the enemy, whose aim, however, was much distracted by the steady fire of a party of the Royal Irish, described in the despatches as the “acting gunners of the XVIIIth, who replied to the batteries in a style which would have done credit to experienced artillerymen.” As soon as the ships were off Canton the soldiers occupied the “factories”; placed them in a state of defence, and made plans for storming the town. The Royal Irish were looking forward to winning much glory (and much prize money too!) in the capture of Canton, when the Mandarins, greatly perturbed by Sir John Davis’s prompt reprisals, hastily made full atonement for their misdeeds, and the expedition returned to Hong Kong. They had done a good week’s work: 879 guns, many of great calibre, had been spiked, much ammunition destroyed, and a greatly needed lesson given to the Canton roughs--and all without the loss of a soldier, bluejacket, or marine.

General D’Aguilar, who was in command, mentioned in his despatch the following officers of the regiment, viz., Lieutenant-Colonel Cowper; Captain J. Bruce, A.A.G.; Captain Clark Kennedy, Acting A.Q.M.; Captain J. W. Graves; Captain A. N. Campbell, and Lieutenant E. W. Sargent, Acting A.D.C.

Before the troops left Canton the British merchants asked for an officer to train their newly formed Volunteer corps. Captain J. W. Graves was selected, and with part of the Light company spent two months in “the factories,” where between drilling his civilian recruits, drawing up plans for the defence of the settlement against a sudden rush, and eating the good dinners to which the merchants invited him, his time was fully occupied. Soon after this detachment rejoined headquarters the regiment was warned to prepare to sail for India, and on November 20, 1847, embarked for Bengal on the transport ship Balcarres. Major W. F. Dillon was in command; with him were 24 officers, 42 sergeants, 15 drummers, and 595 rank and file, and when he arrived at Fort William on January 10, 1848, he found awaiting him drafts from England amounting to 7 officers, 1 drummer, and 334 rank and file. Thus the XVIIIth began its tour of duty in India with a total strength of one thousand and eighteen of all ranks.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us