CHAPTER XVIII.--How the Neapolitans declared War, and how they waged

it.

Some Roman remarked of something, _Fuit_, which means "it has been," and that correctly described the Kingdom of Naples at the time of which I am writing. The Admiral was grievously disappointed; the mischief came of the fact, so I have heard him say, that none of the people principally responsible for the movement were natives of the kingdom with whose forces they were acting. This does not, as he remarked, signify so much when the war is being carried on with money and mercenaries; but when a kingdom has to rely on an army which is no army in a Great Power's sense of the word, and has no money to pay it, the result is deplorable. For carrying out the operations in which the Admiral delighted, such as his celebrated movement inside the French line at our great battle--an advantage snatched by discipline and daring from the teeth of destruction--Neapolitans are worse than useless, for they are braggarts and traitors, as well as cowards, and therefore one makes a mistake in employing them. Qualities of enduring fatigue and hardship, and managing to subsist upon a minimum of food and money, they have in a high degree, as they afterwards showed when they had no army to speak of, and no general, and no campaign, but were a nation in arms resisting an invader whose presence was always marked by rapine. The persons principally responsible for the ill-starred campaign to extirpate the French from Papal territory were a pair of Austrians--the Queen and her fine general, Mack; and three English--the Admiral, my Lady, and Sir John Acton. The root of it all was the Queen, who was in reality the King of the Two Sicilies. She, as the physicians say, had diagnosed the evil correctly; and because her diagnosis agreed with the Admiral's, he had thrown his great influence into the scale to impress her very sensible views upon the Emperor, who was her nephew and son-in-law.

The Admiral, who was almost as far-seeing in politics as he was in sea-strategy, had recognised that Buonaparte was France, and that the policy of Buonaparte was to swallow the weak nations in order to use their resources against the Great Powers. Undoubtedly he had his eye on Naples, and undoubtedly Naples had resources as well as a position which would render her a very dangerous tool in his capable hands. The Queen did not think so much about Naples being a tool in his hands as about the prior evil of losing her kingdom; but she had a presentiment of this; and, besides, she hated the French worse than hell for the murder of her beautiful, innocent sister, Marie Antoinette. She was a masterful woman, of not a little capacity, and saw as clearly as the Admiral that France was only biding a favourable opportunity to seize her kingdom. The Admiral also believed it suicidal for Naples to leave the declaration of war to the French; but he had at the outset more correct views as to entering upon the contest. Before our Battle of the Nile it would have removed our principal difficulties to have the freedom of the Sicilian ports and the co-operation of the Sicilian Navy. Not that their ships counted in the fighting line. In the Admiral's opinion neither the Sicilians, nor the Venetians, nor the Portuguese--hardly even the Spanish--signified in an action between two fleets. But we were obliged to waste a good deal of time owing to their fear of supplying us, and their treaty with the French that only two or four of our ships should enter a Sicilian port at one time. And had we had frigates, which they could have supplied us, for spying out the movements of the enemy, we should never have missed the French on our first voyage to Alexandria, and should in consequence have destroyed their transports, and their army, and Buonaparte, as well as their fleet. His first view, therefore, was that the Two Sicilies should wage their quarrel with the French by forming a base for the British, the only one of the great Powers left uncrippled in the war with the all-devouring Republic. He was right, moreover, in judging that the only immediate danger to be apprehended from the presence of the French force in the Papal States was the spread of their pernicious doctrines, and the formation of a base for the insurrection of the numerous disaffected persons in the Two Sicilies. The only person who had the power of driving the French out of Italy was the Emperor, who feared retaliation by a blow nearer home.

Now, the Admiral was strongly of the opinion that with Buonaparte locked up in Egypt the time had come for the resisters of French aggression to act, and therefore he listened to a plot the Queen had for forcing the hand of the Emperor, which was forwarded and frustrated by the indecision of the Emperor and his minister--Thugut. The Admiral's part of the work was to volunteer, as coming from himself, the advice carefully concocted by the Queen, to the effect that her forces must drive out the French forces in the Papal States. Fortified with her advice to herself, she overcame the timidity of her Prime Minister, General Acton; though her War Minister, the Marquis de Gallo, proved either too timid, too full of moral courage, too treacherous, or too honest. Thus further fortified, she wrote to her nephew the Emperor, telling him just so much of her plans as might induce him to move, and asking for a general to command her forces. The Empire had enjoyed a great name as a school for strategy, but the sending her a general was intended to commit him. He sent her the evil star of his reign, General Mack, who brought with him certain highly sensible advice which he had not the courage to deliver, either because he quailed before the eagerness of the Queen, or because he sought the opportunity for distinguishing himself. The advice he brought in reality was that, until the Allies were ready to strike together, the Two Sicilies should only wage war upon the French in Malta and Gozo, of which the King was suzerain, but which had been seized by the French. Here there was clearly no aggression: he was only attempting to repossess his own. It suited Mack better, however, to march on Rome with a flourish of trumpets, and to play at preserving the peace only where it concerned the withholding of facilities from our fleet.

Well, to cut a long story short, Mack and the King marched on Rome with thirty thousand of what he flattered Neapolitan susceptibilities by declaring the finest troops in the world, and forty thousand recruits; while we, for our part, transported another five thousand of these "veterans" to Leghorn to cut off the French base.

Everything, as the Admiral said, was as bad as possible from the first. Half the troops had to be carried in the Marquis de Niza's Portuguese squadron. The Portuguese ships, which were incapable of fighting, were all commanded by flag-officers who could only accept orders from the Admiral himself. And the legion was commanded by the pretentious General Naselli, who persisted in regarding the Admiral as merely an agent for transporting his troops; and sent his Summons as he pleased, without even consulting the British officers; and neglected to act until Captain Troubridge saw that a catastrophe threatened, and gave him to understand that the mole would be destroyed by a fire, and probably the town--of course by nobody's fault.

General Naselli was apparently only arrogant and incapable. The King and Mack were not so fortunate as we; for half their officers were traitors, one general going over to the enemy in action and being shot by one of his own men in so doing. The French were not in force in Rome, though five hundred of them contrived to throw themselves into the strong castle of St. Angelo, which the Neapolitan army was quite incapable of taking. So there was more blowing of trumpets while the King made his triumphal entry, and Mack, flushed with his bloodless victory, went off after the main body of the French, thirteen thousand strong, who were in the fortress of Castellana. Whatever _morale_ his army had he ruined by his ignorance of the first principles of war. He made them march double the distance over heavy roads in wet weather which, good marchers as they were, they should have been asked to do in fine weather; and, thus demoralised, he brought them face to face with an army who were veteran soldiers, while they were mere citizens in uniform. They hardly made any show of fighting. The Admiral has placed it on record in one of his letters that the Neapolitan soldier never contemplates fighting, and begins to think of severing his connection with the army whenever the guns are loaded. Still Mack's force did all the fighting there was in the campaign. Out of twenty thousand, a thousand were killed, and nine hundred wounded, not to mention ten thousand prisoners. The Admiral wrote to Captain Troubridge: "It is reported that the Neapolitan officers and many of their men are run away even at sight of the enemy." Another body of nineteen thousand were put to flight by a French corps of three thousand after they had lost but forty men; and the French, proclaiming them beneath pursuit, contented themselves with taking possession of their camp and cannon and treasure chest. The fugitives poured back to Naples, and the Royal Family prepared for the worst.

Now, with its army and artillery intact, Naples might have defied the French, for it had vast numbers of fierce _lazzaroni_--the rough people of the street--passionately attached to their King, capable in their steep narrow alleys, and in the extremely rugged districts round Naples, of maintaining a most formidable guerilla warfare. It should have been the Queen's policy to tempt the French to invade, and to have kept her regular army in reserve while the enemy were harassed by irregulars. But without a regular army to keep the French at bay while the guerillas were doing their work, even a fearless commander like the Admiral saw that nothing could prevent the capital falling, in spite of the English ships in the harbour.

The King behaved better than usual. That he had a certain manliness in him was proved by his fondness for hunting; and he now declared that, if his kingdom and his capital were to fall, he would fall fighting at the head of his faithful _lazzaroni_. And I think he meant it: life in exile without means for debauchery had no attraction for him, though his great-souled wife would have gone through anything for ultimate triumph.

But some one--possibly Sir William, who was of a philosophical turn of mind--put it before him that there was no necessity for his kingdom to fall. There were two Sicilies; and though one of them must instantly be conquered by the French, the other, now that their fleet had been destroyed by the English, was as safe from the French as England itself.

Ferdinand still demurred; he did not pay a great deal of attention to business, but he knew how small an income he derived from the island. The same voice reminded him that he had a vast amount of treasure readily transportable, and that there was plenty of hunting in Sicily if there was nothing else.

Ferdinand would go, if his money went. He was as willing to have his last of eating, drinking, and merriment, before he died, at Palermo as at Naples. Only he suggested that the _lazzaroni_ must be kept in the dark, or they might turn and rend, and the guillotine remove royal heads in Naples as it had in Paris. Having taken this unusual amount of interest in his kingdom, the King fell back into his wonted habits, and the business passed into more capable hands.

Of what followed, Will and I, even more than our other officers, had pretty close personal cognisance. It was of course of the first importance that suspicions should not be aroused; and when, about December 13th, it became known that the armies of the Queen were irretrievably beaten, and that General Championnet must be at the gates in a week or ten days, any increased intercourse between the Queen and the Ambassador and the Admiral must have excited the gravest suspicion.

At this moment certain things counted in the Queen's favour. She had lived in such close and reprobated intimacy, for example, with My Lady, that a breaking off of their intercourse would have provoked rather than allayed comment. Then again, as the Admiral had lived at the Embassy ever since he had come to Naples, his continued presence there, instead of on board his flagship, went rather to reassure people, by showing that he had no fears of personal injury from a sudden outbreak or incursion. And Will and I, being in a way his personal attendants, had enjoyed the run of the Palace so much, that our constant presence there went rather to show that nothing particular was happening. Even Will's attachment to Donna Rusidda, and the unparalleled liberty she allowed herself for an unmarried Sicilian lady of her rank, had its use, though I do not think that Will was aware of the extent to which he played catspaw. I am sure that I was completely in the dark for some days; and it was not until we were lying in the Bay, out of reach of the fort guns, giving fugitives from the wrath to come two days' grace that I came near knowing the whole of the truth.