The Years of Endurance (18 page)

Yet underlying these divergent views England's aim was that which had inspired all her greater wars. She was answering a challenge. That challenge was the claim of violence to override law: the dominance of the unbridled will. The French were seeking to impose a new order on the world, not by reason and precept but by force. England was not, as Burke had wished, denying the validity of that new order: that was a matter for philosophers and orators to debate and future generations to decide. For three years, for all the great Irishman's eloquence, she had stolidly refused to do anything of the sort. She had even been dimly aware that there was something necessary and even good in the changes in France. What she was defying was not the Revolution but the right of Jacobin politicians to dictate what mankind should believe and do. England did not say that the ideas of Rousseau, Diderot and Tom Paine were wrong. What she did say, and with all her historic emphasis, was that there could be no peace or progress in the world until those who had seized power by appealing to those ideas had learnt an elementary lesson in decency and fair dealing. Again and again she had given warning that she would oppose unilateral breaches of international law. That warning had been disregarded by the headstrong men in Paris. Instinctively she was taking up arms against the most dangerous thing in the world: the lust for tyrannic power which grows on what it consumes.

That England was unprepared for war did not trouble her people at all. Neither they nor their Government had given a thought to the question of what was necessary to ensure success. The English

¹
Good Mrs. Drake of Hillingdon well expressed it in a letter of February 17th : " The horrid doings that have been going on for some time in France, and which does not even stop with the murder of the poor King, appears to me like a fabulous story, for one can hardly credit it possible for human beings to be so cruel as those Barbarians have been and still continue to be, but I hope now that they will soon be crushed, for never before was a war so much approved of by all ranks of people as this."—Bamford, 146.

never prepared for war. Yet they never doubted that they would be victorious.

As a land power Britain was contemptible. Compared with France with half a million out of her twenty-five millions in arms or learning to bear arms, the United Kingdom supported at home an effective strength of less than 15,000 troops. Its line regiments, long reduced by peace-time economy, were skeletons with a cadre of regular officers and a rank and file of ragged recruits. The rest of the Army—another 30,000—was scattered about the world, mostly in remote and unhealthy stations which constantly called for new drafts.

Though a force with fine fighting traditions which once under Marlborough had won a European reputation, this little Army typified
the
unmilitary character of libertarian and aristocratic Britain. Its officers were gentlemen who paid for their commissions and regarded them as their private property. Its rank and file were unemployed artisans, jailbirds and village bad-hats who had exhausted every other resource but enlistment in a despised calling. Many others were drawn, as the Duke of Wellington said later, from the scum of the earth and enlisted only for drink. They had no continuity of employment, no interest in their profession save regimental pride and
little
hope of gratitude from the community they served. For England still regarded
with
jealousy a force which might be used to increase the power of the Executive.
¹
It was always kept as small as possible and its existence only renewed from year to year by parliamentary vote.

In earlier times, before the menace of Louis XIV had wrung a standing army out of a reluctant people, England had relied for defence on a territorial levy of landowners and peasants who turned out annually for a few days' perfunctory training. Militia service had long ceased to be universal, but it survived for purposes of home defence. The force was commanded by the Lord-Lieutenants of the counties and officered by country
gentle
men. Every year, after Parliament had fixed the quota of men required from each county, a ballot was held of all capable of bearing arms. Those who were unlucky enough to be drawn enjoyed a freeman's option of paying a substitute.

This had the effect of deflecting recruits from the

¹
For this reason soldiers, until almost the end of the century, were billeted in alehouses instead of being concentrated in barracks.

regular Army since the private bounty money offered for Militia deputies tended to exceed the Government's more parsimonious rate.

On the outbreak of war Pitt introduced a Bill for raising 25,000 recruits for the Army and embodying 19,000 additional men in the Militia. But, as he shrank from compulsion, the former were easier to vote than to raise. And the Militia, being only liable to home service, failed wholly to meet the nation's need for a striking force. For this auxiliaries had to be sought from the smaller states of Germany. According to custom 14,000 troops from the King's hereditary Electorate of Hanover were therefore taken on the payroll and another 8000 hired, after much preliminary haggling, from the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt.

Had Britain had to rely on land power alone, her effort in a European war would have been negligible. But though in 1792 only twelve battleships were in actual commission and there was no ship of the line either in the Mediterranean or West Indies, the Navy remained what it had been since Pepys had made it so a century before—the first in the world. A
gainst France's seventy-six battl
e-ships with an aggregate broadside of 74,000 lbs., Britain had a hundred and thirteen with a broadside of 89,000 lbs. Schooled by the anxious memories of his youth when the fleets of all Europe had united against Britain, Pitt—peace-lover though he was—had never neglected the Navy. During the decade in which he was restoring the country's finances after the American war, he had still found money to build thirty-three new ships of the line and to repair sixty others. Advised by the great naval administrator, Sir Charles Middleton, he took particular care of the arsenals and dockyards. Fanny Burney, who visited Plymouth in 1789, where many of the great ships were laid up in harbour, paid a glowing tribute to their preparedness:
"a
noble and tremendous sight, it was a sort of sighing satisfaction to see such numerous stores of war's alarms! " A plan of Middleton's for allocating to each vessel a reserve of stores now proved remarkably effective in mobilisation. Within a few weeks fifty-four of the great ships were in commission, and thirty-nine more fit for immediate service.

The difficulty was to get the men to man them. It was the custom at the end of every war
for a Government dependent on a
Parliament of taxpayers to discharge the bulk of the seamen. Only the officers—a corps of the highest professional skill—were retained permanently. The lower deck was recruited, as occasion required, from the merchant and fishing fleets, whose hereditary craftsmen supported by their labours and simple virtues the nation's maritime wealth and strength.

The sailor's calling was not looked down upon like that of the private soldier. Britons were proud of their Navy and felt no jealousy of it, for they knew it could never be the instrument of arbitrary power. They loved to sing songs extolling the virtues of the honest, manly tars who served it. Dibdin's " Tom Bowling " was a national favourite. But he was not paid or treated like one. So long as he served on a merchantman he could earn good wages. In the King's Navy he got
little
but wounds and glory. Owing to the excessive conservatism of the race, the rate of naval pay remained what it had been in the days of Charles II. Discipline was stern and cruel, food conditions bad, leave almost non-existent.

Therefore, though British seamen were loyal and brave, they did not volunteer with alacrity. In time of war the nation resorted to a device which savoured more of some oriental despotism than a free constitution. By immemorial custom pressgangs roved the streets and waterways of the coastal towns and districts, seizing at will any young man bred to the sea or who looked like a sailor. Certain classes were exempted, and a gentleman stood in little danger of being " pressed.' But though liability to impress was theoretically limited to seafaring men, many a likely looking young landsman in London and the seaports found himself trepanned and hauled aboard one of His Majesty's tenders bound for the fleet. Smollett in
Roderick Random
has left a vivid picture of the press-gang's operations: the " squat tawny fellow with the hanger by his side and a cudgel in his hand " and his genial " Yo ho! brother, you must come along with* me! "; the gang with their drawn cutlasses, the stinking hold packed with weeping wretches, the stench of the tender; the undressed wounds of those who had made a fight fee liberty; the bumboat women and the gin, the brutal midshipman who squirted a mouthful of dissolved tobacco through the grating on the crowded captives. There was no appeal and no redress.

In 1792 the personnel of the Navy, which had been 110,000 at the end of the American war,
was only 16,000. Though an Act
for enlarging the fleet was passed in December, up to the outbreak of
the
war recruiting was conducted through normal channels. Certain cities like London and Rochester offered bounties to volunteers, which, joined to the knowledge that co
mpulsion must follow, speeded th
ings up a little. But it was not till the second half of February that the dreaded Press broke out on the River and several thousand seamen were dragged from incoming merchantmen and. colliers. After that the work of manning the King's ships went on sma
rtly
. Yet months elapsed before the battle fleet was ready.
¹
In the meantime the country had to rely on its frigates.

Fortunately, for the moment the enemy was not formidable at sea. A dozen years before the Royal Navy of France had proved a worthy adversary. But now, though eight of its ships mounted no guns or more to the 100 of the largest British class,
the
Revolutionary cant of " incivism " had deprived it of its best officers and reduced its crews to unruly mobs incapable of the intricate skill and unquestioning discipline needed to bring squadrons of large sailing vessels into action. Even the rank of sea-gunners—the old
corps d’
elite
of the French lower deck—was done away with by the Naval Committee of the Convention on the ground that it savoured of aristocracy. The rot which had begun in the dockyard towns soon spread to the magazines and ships: responsibility passed from the worker and the technician to the demagogue. By the second year of the Revolution mutiny was the only sure avenue to promotion. The ships were dirty and neglected: the men remained in port and never went to sea. When the Convention ordered them out to fight, it found that the " audacity " it shrilly demanded was a poor substitute for seamanship.

Such considerations caused Pitt to hope that the war he had striven so hard to avoid might not be so serious a matter after all. To the eye of reason the French were doing almost everything calculated to destroy their own country. They had slain or banished their leaders, alienated every friendly state in Europe, undermined the discipline of their defenders and neglected the arts of life for windy abstractions. Their frantic boasts that they were about to " dictate peace on the ruins of the Tower of London " and show up

¹
At the end of the first year of war only 56,337 men had been added to the establishment.—C.H.B.E., II, 39
.

the weakness of Britain's " corrupting wealth " did not impress Pitt. It was indeed on this very wealth that he relied. As the first financial statesman of the age, he had nothing but contempt for the reckless way in which the Jacobins were destroying France's credit and commerce. The Republic was already on the high road to bankruptcy. Britain, thanks to his prudent management, was richer than ever in her history. Despite the bad harvests revenue was again buoyant and trade expanding. An economic victory seemed assured.

It was the measure of Pitt's ignorance of war that he put his trust in such a consideration. He was a noble creature with all his father's courage and patriotism and rather more than his sincerity. But cast straight from Cambridge into the Commons and thence, with scarcely a pause, into Downing Street, he was still at 33, after nine years of supreme office, austerely ignorant of the world. A master of figures and blue books, he was not yet a master of men. Inexperienced and unread in warlike matters, he had to guide a Cabinet of rich and easy-going noblemen and country gentlemen— subject to every breath of parliamentary opinion—through the bewildering dilemmas of a world war. He had to bring them to prompt and clear-cut decisions on far-reaching issues. Above all he had to steel them to resist the constant temptation of the line of least resistance which gives initiative to the enemy.

In this task he could look for little help from his colleagues. His Foreign Minister and cousin, Lord Grenville, was even less fitted than he for the shocks of a revolutionary age. Proud, chilling and scholarly, he was more at home in a library than a Cabinet. He preferred to leave strategy alone and to concentrate on foreign policy. The chief Service member of the Government, Pitt's elder brother Chatham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had been a soldier and was a man of good brains. But he found it more restful not to use them. Owing to his unpunctuality, he was known as the
late
Lord Chatham. The Master of the Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, was a worthy country
gentle
man. The Secretary-at-War, Sir George Yonge, was not in the Cabinet at all.