Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon Read online

  ‘The capture of Jaffa has been a brilliant affair,’ Bonaparte wrote to General Marmont, Governor of Alexandria. ‘4,000 of Djezzar’s best troops and the best gunners of Constantinople had to be put to the sword.’ And he wrote to Kléber, ‘The garrison of Jaffa consisted of nearly 4,000 men; 2,000 were killed in the town, and nearly 2,000 were shot between yesterday and today.’

  While the slaughter was going on, on 9th March, Bonaparte was writing to Djezzar trying to persuade him to surrender.

  I am about to march upon St. Jean D’Acre, but what reason have I to take away a few years of life from an old man whom I do not know? And because God gives me the victory, I wish, following his example, to be merciful and compassionate, not only towards the people, but towards its rulers...

  On the same day he wrote to the Ulema of Jerusalem:

  This is to inform you that I have driven the Mamelukes and the troops of Djezzar Pasha from the provinces of Gaza, Ramleh and Jaffa; that my intention is not to make war on the people, that I am the friend of the Musulman, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem can chose peace or war. If they chose the first, let them send deputies to the camp at Jaffa to promise that they will do nothing against me. If they are sufficiently stupid to prefer war, I shall bring it to them myself. The people must know that I am as terrible as the fire from heaven against my enemies, forgiving and merciful towards the people and towards those who wish to be my friends.

  Kléber had bypassed Jaffa with the advance guard; he was protecting the right flank of the army and driving the enemy’s skirmishers before him. He considered that the object of their campaign was to reach Acre and defeat Djezzar as quickly as possible. He had not expected Bonaparte to waste four or five days and the lives of his soldiers on an assault on Jaffa. When he heard the news he was stupefied for a moment, and then he exclaimed: ‘This is another blow of fate.’ He seems to have thought that the massacre intended to terrorise the garrison of Acre into submission might have the opposite effect. At any rate, being a master of ironic comment, he said in his reply to Bonaparte’s letter, leaving him to take it whichever way he pleased:

  You’ve made a fine breach in the ramparts of Acre, Citizen-General, by the brilliant manner in which you have just taken the town of Jaffa. Accept my congratulations.

  Vast quantities of provisions were captured in Jaffa, including 400,000 rations of biscuit, 2,000 quintals of rice, and much more that was looted by the soldiers. There were also more than sixty guns, some of them new, of French calibre, and a huge store of ammunition. Three Turkish ships carrying wheat and oil sailed unsuspectingly into the harbour and were captured also.

  Many French soldiers had fallen ill as a result of their privations, their fatigue, their marches in the burning sand and then in the pouring rain. Immediately after the capture of Jaffa, bubonic plague broke out in their ranks, as if it had been a judgement from Heaven, in a more virulent form than any they had seen in Egypt. So great was the panic that four soldiers, believing themselves to be infected, shot themselves. Bonaparte spent an hour and a half in the hospital talking to the plague victims, and he helped to carry out the body of a soldier who had just died. He was trying to show that the disease was not contagious, and his action did a great deal to restore morale.

  Peyrusse wrote in his journal:

  We left Jaffa the 24 Ventose [14th March] haunted by the sad recollection of our excesses, our minds shocked by the sight of so many bodies heaped up on the plain; we left this town, that under any other circumstances would have seemed so pleasant to us, without regret.

  They crossed the fertile gardens of Sharon, again in pouring rain, and came to Mount Carmel, a great mass of rock covered with sparse vegetation and broken by deep gorges made for ambuscade, but the gorges were not defended. Before them lay the great plain of Acre. At the far end of a long beach, curving gently like a scimitar, were the walls, strong towers and slender minarets of the ancient town; and closer to them, under Mount Carmel, the small town and port of Haifa. Two men-o’-war and four smaller vessels were lying in the roads outside it.

  On the 17th they occupied Haifa from which the enemy had withdrawn, taking his guns but leaving a store of corn and biscuit. Bonaparte reached it on the eighteenth. While the tents were being pitched outside the town he was surprised to hear gunfire to seaward which seemed rather heavy. He sent one of his secretaries, General Lavalette, running down to the beach to ascertain its cause — but the sea mist had come down and he could distinguish nothing. The sound receded into the distance.

  Four French djerms — sailing barges — taking advantage of the sea mist, slipped into Haifa with stores for the army. They brought the news that the French siege train had been captured.

  Sir Sidney sent a cutting-out expedition after the djerms, using boats from The Tigre and the Theseus, but here he met with a sharp reverse: the harbour buildings had been occupied by the French, and a concentrated fire was opened on the seamen and marines when they attempted to board. One of the boats was lost and the rest had to beat a hasty retreat. A number of men were killed or wounded, and twenty-two were taken prisoner. On the following day he sent his secretary, John Keith, under a flag of truce to propose an exchange of prisoners. Bonaparte agreed. In this exchange Sir Sidney included two Frenchmen he had rescued from the Turks, Lieutenant Delesalle of the Dragoons and the courier Ragé.

  On 19th March, Kléber and Bonaparte joined forces and began to invest the town of Acre. Their tents were pitched in orderly lines extending for two kilometres along a low hill parallel with the sea and just out of range of the walls. General Headquarters were in the centre surrounded by Bonaparte’s favourite regiment, The Guides; the artillery was on the right under Dommartin, and the engineers on the left under Caffarelli. The advance lines were held by Kléber’s division with Lannes and Reynier in support. Junot was stationed at Nazareth and Murat with the only cavalry was halfway between Nazareth and Acre, to give warning of the approach of any Turkish force that might come to Djezzar’s relief from the direction of Damascus.

  Chapter Eight – The Defence of Acre

  On 20th March General Caffarelli opened the first trenches. They were opposite the eastern wall of Acre. In spite of Phélippeaux’s efforts to get a clear field of fire, the ground was still strewn with the debris of the houses and ancient tombs they had demolished, and by bushes and hollows, so that the French found plenty of cover and were able to establish their front line within 400 yards of the defences. The aqueduct also afforded cover.

  Bonaparte decided to launch his attack against the Cursed Tower, which dominated both the eastern and the northern walls of the town, and he ordered it to be breached. He had with him twenty-five guns, eight of them howitzers, which had been brought up with enormous exertion. The greater part of this artillery was placed in a breach battery opposite the Cursed Tower. It consisted of three 12-pounders, five 8-pounders and two howitzers. A carronade captured in one of The Tigre’s boats at Haifa was added to this battery. The rest of the guns were placed so that they could be directed against other parts of the walls to keep down the enemy’s fire, or to throw shells and red-hot cannon balls against the ships.

  On the night of the 20th-21st, General Sanson of the Engineers carried out a reconnaissance. Because of Sir Sidney’s watch-fires and lanterns he was seen and fired upon and wounded in the hand; he withdrew without being able to get close to the walls, but he formed the opinion that there was no fosse, no surrounding ditch. Bonaparte had received an Arab report stating that there was a ditch all round the walls, but this was contradicted by an authority in whom he had great confidence, the French traveller Volney who had visited Syria in 1785. ‘Acre is a paltry shack,’ he had written. ‘It is not a strong place. A determined assailant could very easily capture it. There is no ditch...’ Volney had been right about Jaffa, so Bonaparte decided to trust him now; he assumed that he was right in saying that there was no ditch. It was unfortunate that one of his officers, Captain Mailly, whom he had sent on a
mission to Djezzar, and who was naturally expected to bring back a report on the defences, had been treated as a spy and thrown into a dungeon.

  On 26th March the Turks made a spirited sortie and drove the French out of some of their forward positions which they could not regain for three hours because of the enfilading fire from the ships. In spite of this evidence that the defenders were determined to resist him, Bonaparte expected to take Acre without much difficulty. As soon as a breach had been made in the Cursed Tower he summoned his generals to agree that it was practicable. They all remained silent except Kléber who spoke out with his usual sarcasm, ‘Of course the breach is practicable. A cat could easily get through it.’ He was equally scornful about the rest of the preparations for the assault: ‘What the devil have you provided here as trenches, General?’ he demanded. ‘They’re all right for you, but they don’t reach up to my waist.’

  And so, to satisfy Kléber, the digging and the bombarding had to go on, which was all the more galling, because the defenders, instead of firing noisily and at random, as at Jaffa, were finding the range and inflicting casualties.

  The Tigre had taken up her station on one side of the town and the Theseus on the other so that each commanded the approaches to one of the walls, and their fire converged in front of the Cursed Tower. Shoal water kept them two miles off shore, but the captured gunboats were stationed much closer in: they were La Négresse, La Foudre, La Dangereuse, La Marie-Rose, La Vierge de Grâce, les Deux Frères and La Torride. A captured brass 18-pounder was mounted in the lighthouse off the port and manned by seamen from The Tigre, and a 36-pounder carronade was mounted on a barge moored alongside the mole and manned by seamen from the Theseus.

  On the 24th, H.M.S. Alliance, ‘a small badly-armed storeship’, appeared off Acre, commanded by Captain Wilmot. She had orders from Troubridge not to delay her return. Sir Sidney, quoting the Articles of War, under which His Majesty’s ships are bound to go to the assistance of a known friend in need, took her under his command. Captain Wilmot enthusiastically concurred. As she was of shallow draft he stationed her inshore to support the gunboats. This practically closed to the French the easy approach along the beach.

  At dawn on 28th March concentrated fire was opened on the Cursed Tower. The defenders replied with such good effect that soon all the guns of the breach battery were out of action and the parapet in front of them had been thrown down. After five hours’ bombardment, although forty French gunners had been killed or wounded, the breach was larger and a good deal of masonry had fallen. Kléber was sent for, but he refused to look at it again or comment.

  At noon, standing on a small hill, known as Richard Coeur de Lion’s Mount, Bonaparte gave the order for the assault; an advance party of sappers and carbineers dashed towards the breach carrying ladders, some 12 and some 16 feet long. More sappers followed with more ladders, and twenty companies of Kléber’s grenadiers moved up to the attack.

  The British gunners suddenly found that they were alone on the walls. The Turks, their minds full of the horrors of Jaffa, could not face the French attack. Some of them were running towards their enemies in an ill-timed sortie so that the gunners could not fire without hitting friend and foe; the rest were running towards the port to get away. Djezzar bounded after them shouting ‘Stop! The French are running away!’ He headed some of them off and drove them back to the breach. It was true. The French advance guard were in a ditch 12 feet deep and 20 feet across, which they hadn’t expected to find, and their ladders were too short to reach up to the breach. Some of the reserves were still pressing forward while others, having reached the edge of the ditch and having no ladders to descend into it, were pushing back, seeing that the affair was hopeless, to try and escape from the enfilading fire of the ships.

  Djezzar stood in the breach defiantly firing his pistol. His men, plucking up courage, began dropping stones and grenades on the heads of the Frenchmen below until they had killed or disabled them all. There had been great confusion on both sides, but the assault was a total failure. Bonaparte sounded the retreat. The week spent at Jaffa proving that he was as terrible as the fire from heaven had enabled Sir Sidney and Phélippeaux to get to Acre just in time to rob him of an easy victory. ‘This was the day,’ General Montholon wrote, ‘upon which Acre should have fallen.’

  Almost immediately the French had another chance, given to them by the weather: an equinoctial gale forced the two line-of-battle ships to leave the exposed anchorage off Acre and shelter under Cape Carmel. For three days Sir Sidney in The Tigre could only watch from a distance while the Alliance and the gunboats tossed perilously in the shoal waters at the foot of the ancient walls which even in the fiercest light glowed rose and orange as if in perpetual sunset. A French storeship he had just taken, the Transport No. 1, was driven ashore and lost. Djezzar, taking advantage of his absence, tied thirty Christians in sacks, on 30th March, and threw them into the sea. Among the victims was Bonaparte’s emissary, Captain Mailly de Chateaurenaud whose brother had been killed while leading the unsuccessful attack of the 28th.

  Meanwhile the French engineers had tried without success to blow up the counterscarp — the outer wall of the ditch — but they did succeed in bringing down one arch of the aqueduct which, in falling, filled the ditch in front of the Cursed Tower with rubble. Bonaparte immediately attacked again, while the ships were still away. He failed this time because there was no breach to enter: Phélippeaux had sealed it with heavy baulks of timber protected by sandbags and bales of wet cotton: red-hot cannon balls and incendiary shells failed to set the timber alight.

  When Sir Sidney was able to return at last, on 3rd April, he found that the French had profited by the absence of the two ships of the line to push their forward trenches close to the north-east corner of the town wall, and from this advanced position they were driving a mine under the Cursed Tower. Countermining was impossible, in earth that was full of old foundations, because of the lack of picks, shovels or any kind of trenching tools. He decided that it would be necessary to attack the enemy lines, get into the entrance of the mine and destroy it.

  Accordingly, just before dawn on the 7th, a British force commanded by Major Oldfield of the Theseus, with a party of seamen led by Lieutenant Wright, sallied out of the fortress. At the same time Turkish troops made diversionary sorties to the left and right. They had been enjoined to keep strict silence, but they could not be so quickly trained to give up their immemorial custom of attacking with war cries and shouts of ‘Allah!’, so the element of surprise was lost. Nevertheless, Oldfield and Wright drove the enemy out of their forward positions and got into the entrance of the mine. They verified its direction, then pulled down the supports so that the tunnel collapsed, while the seamen collected the trenching tools and carried them off. The French counter-attacked. Both Oldfield and Wright fell; Major Douglas of the marines organised the retreat and brought most of the raiders back to the shelter of the walls.

  When the French saw the leader of the sortie fall, the rumour spread along their lines that Phélippeaux had been killed. Bonaparte ordered that the body was to be brought in for identification. The marines had come back to look for it, and they were already dragging it away by the neckcloth when a party of Grenadiers of the 9th demi-brigade harpooned it in the side with a halbert. A tug-of-war ensued during which the neckcloth parted and the French succeeded in dragging the body into their own lines. When they discovered from his papers that it was Major Oldfield, and that he had distinguished himself by his bravery on a number of occasions, notably at the capture of the Cape of Good Hope, they buried him with military honours.

  He advanced boldly towards the entrance of the mine [General Berthier wrote] at the head of some of his intrepid countrymen; they attacked like heroes, and were received by heroes; death only checked their bold career; the remainder retreated and took refuge in the fortress. The approaches to our parallels remained covered with the dead bodies of English and Turks. The corpse of Captain Thomas Oldfield
was carried off by our grenadiers; they brought him to our headquarters; he was at the point of death, and soon after his arrival was no more; he was buried among us, and he carried with him the esteem of the French army.

  When Sir Sidney learned that Oldfield and Wright had fallen, and that two of the men had been killed and twenty-three wounded, he was deeply moved. He asked for a volunteer to recover Wright’s body. A marine, Private David Close, walked coolly back to the scene of the action; the French, respecting his courage, refrained from firing. He found Wright, and carried him in; he was still alive, but, fainting from loss of blood caused by two bullet wounds in his right arm, he had not had the strength to pull himself out of the mine. Sir Sidney rewarded Close by making him one of his personal servants.

  On the following day Captain Wilmot of the Alliance was shot and killed while mounting a howitzer on the walls.

  It was obvious now to Bonaparte that he wouldn’t capture Acre by a coup de main, so he sent urgent orders to Egypt for more siege guns and more ammunition to be sent up. Sir Sidney sent urgent messages to Rhodes for the Turkish fleet and army assembling there to come to his assistance. He also ordered the Charon, which should have already arrived at Constantinople from England with his stores and ammunition, together with the guns to arm his Turkish gunboats, to join him at Acre.

  The Turks had accomplished little in their sorties, except occasionally spiking a gun, or cutting off a few Frenchmen’s heads. Sir Sidney remarked that ‘the bravest went on until they were killed, and the rest ran away’. He decided to take their training in hand. He selected a number from the garrison and trained them as ‘bush fighters’, as he called them. He taught them to make sudden attacks on enemy formations and then retire in good order until the next opportunity for a surprise attack presented itself. He led these sorties in person until they had learned the technique. His secretary John Keith wrote: