"Oh, who shall lightly say that Fame
Is nothing but an empty name!
Whilst in that sound there is a charm
The nerves to brace, the heart to warm.
As, thinking of the mighty dead,
The young from slothful couch will start,
And vow, with lifted hands outspread,
Like them to act a noble part?"
--JOANNA BAILLIE.
From March 18 to May 20, 1799--for more than sixty days and nights,
that is--a little, half-forgotten, and more than half-ruined Syrian
town was the scene of one of the fiercest and most dramatic sieges
recorded in military history. And rarely has there been a struggle so
apparently one-sided. A handful of British sailors and Turkish
irregulars were holding Acre, a town without regular defences, against
Napoleon, the most brilliant military genius of his generation, with an
army of 10,000 war-hardened veterans, the "Army of Italy"--soldiers who
had dared the snows of the Alps and conquered Italy, and to whom
victory was a familiar experience. In their ranks military daring had
reached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors inside
that ring of crumbling wall won! At the blood-stained trenches of Acre
Napoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena,
he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "That
man made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishman
thwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career in
the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated
most--Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney
Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny,"
and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in
the Atlantic.
Sidney Smith was a sailor of the school of Nelson and of Dundonald--a
man, that is, with a spark of that warlike genius which begins where
mechanical rules end. He was a man of singular physical beauty, with a
certain magnetism and fire about him which made men willing to die for
him, and women who had never spoken to him fall headlong in love with
him. His whole career is curiously picturesque. He became a middy at
the tender age of eleven years; went through fierce sea-fights, and was
actually mate of the watch when fourteen years old. He was a
fellow-middy with William IV. in the fight off Cape St. Vincent, became
commander when he was eighteen years of age, and captain before he was
quite nineteen. But the British marine, even in those tumultuous days,
scarcely yielded enough of the rapture of fighting to this post-captain
in his teens. He took service under the Swedish flag, saw hard
fighting against the Russians, became the close personal friend of the
King, and was knighted by him. One of the feats at this period of his
life with which tradition, with more or less of plausibility, credits
Sidney Smith, is that of swimming by night through the Russian fleet, a
distance of two miles, carrying a letter enclosed in a bladder to the
Swedish admiral.
Sidney Smith afterwards entered the Turkish service. When war broke
out betwixt France and England in 1790, he purchased a tiny craft at
Smyrna, picked up in that port a hybrid crew, and hurried to join Lord
Hood, who was then holding Toulon. When the British abandoned the
port--and it is curious to recollect that the duel between Sidney Smith
and Napoleon, which reached its climax at Acre, began here--Sidney
Smith volunteered to burn the French fleet, a task which he performed
with an audacity and skill worthy of Dundonald or Nelson, and for which
the French never forgave him.
Sidney Smith was given the command of an English frigate, and fought a
dozen brilliant fights in the Channel. He carried with his boats a
famous French privateer off Havre de Grace; but during the fight on the
deck of the captured ship it drifted into the mouth of the Seine above
the forts. The wind dropped, the tide was too strong to be stemmed,
and Sidney Smith himself was captured. He had so harried the French
coast that the French refused to treat him as an ordinary prisoner of
war, and threw him into that ill-omened prison, the Temple, from whose
iron-barred windows the unfortunate sailor watched for two years the
horrors of the Reign of Terror in its last stages, the tossing crowds,
the tumbrils rolling past, crowded with victims for the guillotine.
Sidney Smith escaped at last by a singularly audacious trick. Two
confederates, dressed in dashing uniform, one wearing the dress of an
adjutant, and the other that of an officer of still higher rank,
presented themselves at the Temple with forged orders for the transfer
of Sidney Smith.
The governor surrendered his prisoner, but insisted on sending a guard
of six men with him. The sham adjutant cheerfully acquiesced, but,
after a moment's pause, turned to Sidney Smith, and said, if he would
give his parole as an officer not to attempt to escape, they would
dispense with the escort. Sidney Smith, with due gravity, replied to
his confederate, "Sir, I swear on the faith of an officer to accompany
you wherever you choose to conduct me." The governor was satisfied,
and the two sham officers proceeded to "conduct" their friend with the
utmost possible despatch to the French coast. Another English officer
who had escaped--Captain Wright--joined Sidney Smith outside Rouen, and
the problem was how to get through the barriers without a passport.
Smith sent Wright on first, and he was duly challenged for his passport
by the sentinel; whereupon Sidney Smith, with a majestic air of
official authority, marched up and said in faultless Parisian French,
"I answer for this citizen, I know him;" whereupon the deluded sentinel
saluted and allowed them both to pass!
Sidney Smith's escape from the Temple made him a popular hero in
England. He was known to have great influence with the Turkish
authorities, and he was sent to the East in the double office of
envoy-extraordinary to the Porte, and commander of the squadron at
Alexandria. By one of the curious coincidences which marked Sidney
Smith's career, he became acquainted while in the Temple with a French
Royalist officer named Philippeaux, an engineer of signal ability, and
who had been a schoolfellow and a close chum of Napoleon himself at
Brienne. Smith took his French friend with him to the East, and he
played a great part in the defence of Acre. Napoleon had swept north
through the desert to Syria, had captured Gaza and Jaffa, and was about
to attack Acre, which lay between him and his ultimate goal,
Constantinople. Here Sidney Smith resolved to bar his way, and in his
flagship the _Tigre_, with the _Theseus_, under Captain Miller, and two
gunboats, he sailed to Acre to assist in its defence. Philippeaux took
charge of the fortifications, and thus, in the breaches of a remote
Syrian town, the quondam prisoner of the Temple and the ancient school
friend of Napoleon joined hands to wreck that dream of a great Eastern
empire which lurked in the cells of Napoleon's masterful intellect.
Acre represents a blunted arrow-head jutting out from a point in the
Syrian coast. Napoleon could only attack, so to speak, the neck of the
arrow, which was protected by a ditch and a weak wall, and flanked by
towers; but Sidney Smith, having command of the sea, could sweep the
four faces of the town with the fire of his guns, as well as command
all the sea-roads in its vicinity. He guessed, from the delay of the
French in opening fire, that they were waiting for their siege-train to
arrive by sea. He kept vigilant watch, pounced on the French flotilla
as it rounded the promontory of Mount Carmel, captured nine of the
vessels, carried them with their guns and warlike material to Acre, and
mounted his thirty-four captured pieces on the batteries of the town.
Thus the disgusted French saw the very guns which were intended to
batter down the defences of Acre--and which were glorious with the
memories of a dozen victories in Italy--frowning at them, loaded with
English powder and shot, and manned by English sailors.
It is needless to say that a siege directed by Napoleon--the siege of
what he looked upon as a contemptible and almost defenceless town, the
single barrier betwixt his ambition and its goal--was urged with
amazing fire and vehemence. The wall was battered day and night, a
breach fifty feet wide made, and more than twelve assaults delivered,
with all the fire and daring of which French soldiers, gallantly led,
are capable. So sustained was the fighting, that on one occasion the
combat raged in the ditch and on the breach for _twenty-five_
successive hours. So close and fierce was it that one half-ruined
tower was held by _both_ besiegers and besieged for twelve hours in
succession, and neither would yield. At the breach, again, the two
lines of desperately fighting men on repeated occasions clashed
bayonets together, and wrestled and stabbed and died, till the
survivors were parted by the barrier of the dead which grew beneath
their feet.
Sidney Smith, however, fought like a sailor, and with all the cool
ingenuity and resourcefulness of a sailor. His ships, drawn up on two
faces of the town, smote the French stormers on either flank till they
learned to build up a dreadful screen, made up partly of stones plucked
from the breach, and partly of the dead bodies of their comrades.
Smith, too, perched guns in all sorts of unexpected positions--a
24-pounder in the lighthouse, under the command of an exultant middy;
two 68-pounders under the charge of "old Bray," the carpenter of the
_Tigre_, and, as Sidney Smith himself reports, "one of the bravest and
most intelligent men I ever served with"; and yet a third gun, a French
brass 18-pounder, in one of the ravelins, under a master's mate. Bray
dropped his shells with the nicest accuracy in the centre of the French
columns as they swept up the breach, and the middy perched aloft, and
the master's mate from the ravelin, smote them on either flank with
case-shot, while the _Theseus_ and the _Tigre_ added to the tumult the
thunder of their broadsides, and the captured French gunboats
contributed the yelp of their lighter pieces.
The great feature of the siege, however, was the fierceness and the
number of the sorties. Sidney Smith's sorties actually exceeded in
number and vehemence Napoleon's assaults. He broke the strength of
Napoleon's attacks, that is, by anticipating them. A crowd of Turkish
irregulars, with a few naval officers leading them, and a solid mass of
Jack-tars in the centre, would break from a sally-port, or rush
vehemently down through the gap in the wall, and scour the French
trenches, overturn the gabions, spike the guns, and slay the guards.
The French reserves hurried fiercely up, always scourged, however, by
the flank fire of the ships, and drove back the sortie. But the
process was renewed the same night or the next day with unlessened fire
and daring. The French engineers, despairing of success on the
surface, betook themselves to mining; whereupon the besieged made a
desperate sortie and reached the mouth of the mine. Lieutenant Wright,
who led them, and who had already received two shots in his sword-arm,
leaped down the mine followed by his sailors, slew the miners,
destroyed their work, and safely regained the town.
The British sustained one startling disaster. Captain Miller of the
_Theseus_, whose ammunition ran short, carefully collected such French
shells as fell into the town without exploding, and duly returned them
alight, and supplied with better fuses, to their original senders. He
had collected some seventy shells on the _Theseus_, and was preparing
them for use against the French. The carpenter of the ship was
endeavouring to get the fuses out of the loaded shells with an auger,
and a middy undertook to assist him, in characteristic middy fashion,
with a mallet and a spike-nail. A huge shell under his treatment
suddenly exploded on the quarter-deck of the _Theseus_, and the other
sixty-nine shells followed suit. The too ingenious middy disappeared
into space; forty seamen, with Captain Miller himself, were killed; and
forty-seven, including the two lieutenants of the ship, the chaplain,
and the surgeon, were seriously wounded. The whole of the poop was
blown to pieces, and the ship was left a wreck with fire breaking out
at half-a-dozen points. The fire was subdued, and the _Theseus_
survived in a half-gutted condition, but the disaster was a severe blow
to Sir Sidney's resources.
As evening fell on May 7, the white sails of a fleet, became visible
over the sea rim, and all firing ceased while besiegers and besieged
watched the approaching ships. Was it a French fleet or a Turkish?
Did it bring succour to the besieged or a triumph to the besiegers?
The approaching ships flew the crescent. It was the Turkish fleet from
Rhodes bringing reinforcements. But the wind was sinking, and
Napoleon, who had watched the approach of the hostile ships with
feelings which may be guessed, calculated that there remained six hours
before they could cast anchor in the bay. Eleven assaults had been
already made, in which eight French generals and the best officers in
every branch of the service had perished. There remained time for a
twelfth assault. He might yet pluck victory from the very edge of
defeat. At ten o'clock that night the French artillery was brought up
close to the counterscarp to batter down the curtain, and a new breach
was made. Lannes led his division against the shot-wrecked tower, and
General Rimbaud took his grenadiers with a resistless rush through the
new breach. All night the combat raged, the men fighting desperately
hand to hand. When the rays of the level morning sun broke through the
pall of smoke which hung sullenly over the combatants, the tricolour
flew on the outer angle of the tower, and still the ships bringing
reinforcements had not reached the harbour! Sidney Smith, at this
crisis, landed every man from the English ships, and led them, pike in
hand, to the breach, and the shouting and madness of the conflict awoke
once more. To use Sidney Smith's own words, "the muzzles of the
muskets touched each other--the spear-heads were locked together." But
Sidney Smith's sailors, with the brave Turks who rallied to their help,
were not to be denied.
Lannes' grenadiers were tumbled headlong from the tower, Lannes himself
being wounded, while Rimbaud's brave men, who were actually past the
breach, were swept into ruin, their general killed, and the French
soldiers within the breach all captured or slain.
One of the dramatic incidents of the siege was the assault made by
Kleber's troops. They had not taken part in the siege hitherto, but
had won a brilliant victory over the Arabs at Mount Tabor. On reaching
the camp, flushed with their triumph, and seeing how slight were the
apparent defences of the town, they demanded clamorously to be led to
the assault. Napoleon consented. Kleber, who was of gigantic stature,
with a head of hair worthy of a German music-master or of a Soudan
dervish, led his grenadiers to the edge of the breach and stood there,
while with gesture and voice--a voice audible even above the fierce and
sustained crackle of the musketry--he urged his men on. Napoleon,
standing on a gun in the nearest French battery, watched the sight with
eager eyes--the French grenadiers running furiously up the breach, the
grim line of levelled muskets that barred it, the sudden roar of the
English guns as from every side they smote the staggering French
column. Vainly single officers struggled out of the torn mass, ran
gesticulating up the breach, and died at the muzzles of the British
muskets. The men could not follow, or only died as they leaped
forward. The French grenadiers, still fighting, swearing, and
screaming, were swept back past the point where Kleber stood, hoarse
with shouting, black with gunpowder, furious with rage. The last
assault on Acre had failed. The French sick, field artillery, and
baggage silently defiled that night to the rear. The heavy guns were
buried in the sand, and after sixty days of open trenches Napoleon, for
the first time in his life, though not for the last, ordered a retreat.
Napoleon buried in the breaches of Acre not merely 3000 of his bravest
troops, but the golden dream of his life. "In that miserable fort," as
he said, "lay the fate of the East." Napoleon expected to find in it
the pasha's treasures, and arms for 300,000 men. "When I have captured
it," he said to Bourrienne, "I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. I
shall arm the tribes; I shall reach Constantinople; I shall overturn
the Turkish Empire; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire.
Perhaps I shall return to Paris by Adrianople and Vienna!" Napoleon
was cheerfully willing to pay the price of what religion he had to
accomplish this dream. He was willing, that is, to turn Turk. Henri
IV. said "Paris was worth a mass," and was not the East, said Napoleon,
"worth a turban and a pair of trousers?" In his conversation at St.
Helena with Las Cases he seriously defended this policy. His army, he
added, would have shared his "conversion," and have taken their new
creed with a Parisian laugh. "Had I but captured Acre," Napoleon
added, "I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I would
have changed the face of the world. But that man made me miss my
destiny."
Las Cases dwells upon the curious correspondence which existed between
Philippeaux, who engineered the defences of Acre, and Napoleon, who
attacked it. "They were," he says, "of the same nation, of the same
age, of the same rank, of the same corps, and of the same school." But
if Philippeaux was in a sense the brains of the defence, Sidney Smith
was the sword. There was, perhaps, it may be regretfully confessed, a
streak of the charlatan in him. He shocked the judgment of more sober
men. Wellington's stern, sober sense was affronted by him, and he
described him as "a mere vaporiser." "Of all the men whom I ever knew
who have any reputation," Wellington told Croker "the man who least
deserved it is Sir Sidney Smith." Wellington's temperament made it
impossible for him to understand Sidney Smith's erratic and dazzling
genius. Napoleon's phrase is the best epitaph of the man who defended
Acre. It is true Napoleon himself describes Sidney Smith afterwards as
"a young fool," who was "capable of invading France with 800 men." But
such "young fools" are often the makers of history.