Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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a handful of men and five guns to sixty-four officers, 1,600 men and 194 guns or mortars.

      Meanwhile the commissioners removed – and threw into prison – General Carteaux, whose attacks ‘in column of three’ were proving ruinous, and replaced him by Doppet, a dentist. Doppet was a humble man conscious of his limitations, which included, surprisingly, a horror of blood. During an attack on an English fort he saw one of his aides killed at his side, sickened, panicked and gave the signal for retreat. Two days later he resigned.

      Napoleon viewed all this with the utmost frustration. But at last, on 17 November, a professional soldier arrived to take command, Jacques Coquille Dugommier, aged fifty-five, a former sugar-planter. He and Napoleon took to each other at once.

      Napoleon put to Dugommier a plan for capturing Toulon. The town was protected by mountains to the north, impregnable fortifications to the east, and by its port to the south. Carteaux had proposed to attack it by land from the north-east, under withering fire from English ships in the port. This was a mistake, said Napoleon. They should attack not the town but the fleet, and to do this they should seize the high ground south of the port, two miles from Toulon proper. This high ground was defended by a powerful English fort, Fort Mulgrave, known to the French as Little Gibraltar. Once Little Gibraltar fell, neighbouring forts would tumble, the fleet would come under murderous French gunfire and be forced to go, evacuating the allied troops. Toulon would then fall of itself.

      ‘There is only one possible plan – Buonaparte’s,’ Dugommier wrote to the Minister of War. He chose 17 December for the attack on Little Gibraltar and ordered Napoleon to pound the defences. Napoleon dug in a battery of cannon dangerously close to Little Gibraltar: ‘the battery of men without fear’, he proudly called it, and for forty-eight hours he and his men fought an artillery duel with the twenty guns and four mortars inside the Fort. Napoleon had his own staff now, including a young Burgundian sergeant, Andoche Junot, who wrote a clear hand, to pen orders. Nothing rattled Junot. Once when an English shell landed close to the battery, nearly killing Junot and covering his order-paper with earth, ‘Good,’ was all he said, ‘I shan’t need to sand the ink’ – a remark which pleased Napoleon. He himself was always at the point of danger and, as an eyewitness noted, ‘if he needed a rest, he took it lying on the ground wrapped in his cloak.’

      On the evening of the 17th 7,000 troops gathered for the attack. Heavy rain was falling and a high wind shook the pine trees: difficult conditions for accurate musket-fire and demoralizing also. Dugommier, who reckoned that even in fair weather one half of his troops were unreliable, told his staff he wanted to postpone the attack twenty-four hours. The commissioners, led by Saliceti, got to hear of this. They were already suspicious of Dugommier’s ‘purity’ because he had allowed an English surgeon through the lines to dress the wounds of a captured English general. They came to Napoleon, therefore, told him they wanted an immediate attack and offered him the command.

      It was a key moment for the young artillery major: one of those testing situations he had described in his essay and stories when a man must choose between personal glory and esprit de corps. Napoleon did not hesitate. He replied that he had complete confidence in Dugommier and wouldn’t accept the command. Then he went to talk to Dugommier himself, argued that rain wouldn’t prevent victory, which depended on cannon and bayonets, and convinced him that only an immediate attack could save the Revolution.

      Dugommier placed himself at the head of 5,000 men in two columns, leaving Napoleon in reserve with 2,000. While Napoleon’s guns battered the enemy – his 4-pounders could fire four rounds a minute – the French advanced with fixed bayonets and quickly captured two outworks. Then they came under heavy gun- and musket-fire from Little Gibraltar. Dozens of French troops fell and the rest took fright. ‘Sauve qui pent,’ they cried and began to turn back. Dugommier managed to rally them and they charged the double-walled fort. Twice they hurled themselves against the spiked outer palisades, twice they were driven back. Then Dugommier ordered Napoleon to attack.

      Mounting his horse, Napoleon led his 2,000 men through the lashing rain towards the Fort. Almost at once his horse was shot from under him, and he continued on foot. He felt calm: his theory was, ‘If your number is up, no point in worrying.’ As he approached the fort, he detached a battalion of light infantry under his chief of staff, Muiron, to launch a flanking attack at the same time as his own.

      Napoleon arrived at the fort walls. Muskets slung, sabres between their teeth, he and his men clambered over the spiked timber and parapets, climbing on one another’s shoulders, and slithered through the gun recesses. Muiron was the first officer in, then Dugommier, then Napoleon. They went for the English and Piedmontese with bayonet and sabre, pike and ramrod. After a couple of hours’ bitter fighting, at three in the morning the fort fell, and at dawn Saliceti and the other commissioners arrived pompously with drawn swords, to offer solemn congratulations to the victors.

      Napoleon lay wounded. He had received a deep thrust from an English sergeant’s half-pike in the inner side of his left thigh just above the knee. At first the surgeon wanted to amputate. This was usual practice with bad wounds, to prevent gangrene. But after a second examination he changed his mind. The wound became slightly septic, and when it healed was to leave a deep scar.

      On the 18th, just as Napoleon had foreseen, the neighbouring forts were evacuated; in the words of Sidney Smith, troops ‘crowded to the water like the herd of swine that ran furiously into the sea possessed of the devil’. Napoleon’s guns pounded the English fleet into flight. That evening Admiral Lord Hood set fire to the arsenal and all French ships he could not use, embarked the allied troops, and under cover of night slipped out to sea. Next day the French entered Toulon.

      The Government commissioners, who now included Stanislas Fréron and an ex-nobleman named Paul Barras, had orders from the Committee of Public Safety ‘to wreak national vengeance’ on those suspected of bringing in the English. So after the night of courage came days of cruelty. On 20 December, they shot 200 officers and men of the naval artillery. Two days later they shot 200 men and women without trial. A Government official named Fouché wrote to Collot d’Herbois of the Committee of Public Safety: ‘We have only one way of celebrating this victory; this evening 213 insurgents fall under our thunderbolt. Adieu, my friend, tears of joy flood my soul’; and, a few days later, ‘we are shedding much impure blood, but for humanity and for duty.’

      Dugommier tried to stop the bloodshed, got a bad name with the commissioners and resigned his command. Napoleon, able to hobble about, also did what he could to save innocent lives in the town which had been renamed Port de la Montagne. Learning that the de Chabrillan family had been thrown into prison for no other reason than their noble birth, Napoleon arranged to have them hidden in empty ammunition boxes, which he then dispatched to Hyères, where the Chabrillans were able to catch a ship and emigrate.

      The capture of Toulon was a very important victory. It expelled the combined forces of four nations from French soil; it ended rebellion in the South. As such it became the subject of patriotic songs and of ‘a heroic and historical drama’ by Pellet Desbarreaux, which was performed in Toulouse. Napoleon does not appear, but Saliceti does, exhorting the troops: ‘You are free; over there are the Spaniards and English – slaves. Liberty is watching you!’ Other characters are an American named Williams, who has been pressed into the English navy and deserts to the French: ‘I’ve thrown down my weapons in order to rush into the arms of my brothers,’ and a convict who has been shackled for defying ‘the tyranny of the nobles’; he is hailed by Saliceti as a ‘virtuous being’. No whisper of the shootings; in fact Saliceti proclaims ‘humanity towards our defeated enemies’.

      For Napoleon also Toulon was a milestone. He had had his first taste of real battle; and it is noteworthy that it was fought to drive the English off French soil. He had shown powers of quick decision, judgment and boldness. Whereas the carnage at the Tuileries had sickened him, here he had kept his sensibility in check, and even given proof of toughness, that essential quality in a first-rate officer. His role had been a limited one, but he had played it well, and Dugommier wrote to the Minister of War: ‘I have no words to describe Buonaparte’s merit: much technical skill, an equal degree of intelligence and too much gallantry, there you have a poor sketch of this rare officer …’

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