Читать книгу Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy - David Crane - Страница 7

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It would be impossible to exaggerate the dangers Greece faced over the winter of 1826–27. After a long and heroic resistance Missolonghi had at last fallen in April 1826, and with Athens under siege and Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptians well on their way to making good his promise to carry off ‘the ashes of the Peloponnese’, the rapidly shrinking enclave that was ‘Greece’ seemed to be facing extinction. ‘The Morea has been devastated by the troops of Ibrahim in almost every direction,’ one impassioned American philhellene wrote of the country:

All Messenia, part of Arcadia, Ellis and Achaia, presented a scene of utter devastation; it would seem as if the siroc had blown over it for years, destroying every vestige of vegetable, and had been followed by pestilence in its train, which swept away every living thing that had once inhabited it. Those delightful plains, which poets in all ages have sung … were now barren wastes, where the roofless and blackened walls of the houses, the scathed and leafless trunks of the olive trees, and here and there the whitening bones of human beings, remained to tell that fire had passed over and blasted them.

This was the situation of at least one-half of the Peloponnesus; of its inhabitants many had been slaughtered, others carried off into slavery in Egypt, and the rest, where are they? Oh God! It is an awful question to answer, but it is a question which must one day be answered to Thee by this generation, who left thousands and tens of thousands of their fellow beings to be hunted like wild beasts; to dwell in the caverns of the rocks; to wander about, year after year, seeking for the roots of the earth, giving to their ragged and emaciated children sorrel and snails for food, unable to get enough of even this, and pining and dying – ay! Absolutely perishing from want, while the rest of the earth was full of fatness.

Here was a vision – with all its biblical and classical echoes – to stir the conscience even of governments, but whether it would do so in time was another question. From the very beginning of the war Greece’s only real hope had rested with the Great Powers, but it was not until the summer of 1825 that a first cautious approach to London from the Tsar led in the following spring to negotiations at St Petersburg and a jointly signed protocol calling for mediation and an autonomous Greece under Turkish suzerainty.

Even the prospect of the ‘barbarization’ of the Peloponnese – Egypt’s own Islamic take on seventeenth-century England’s Irish solution – was never going to win over absolutist Austria or Prussia, but by the end of the summer France had joined the negotiations. Over the next twelve months the three powers would edge their way towards the document that would finally become the Treaty of London, but until that was signed and the original protocol had grown some real ‘teeth’, the problem facing them was always going to be in enforcing an agreement that was inimical to the ambitions of both warring parties.

The Greeks were in no position to argue with a protocol that offered more than they could ever win for themselves, but as Roumeli, the Morea and finally the town of Athens fell into Ottoman hands there seemed less and less reason for the Porte to tolerate any interference in its own internal affairs. A revolt of the Janissaries had given them problems of their own, but with only the beleaguered Acropolis in Athens standing between them, the isthmus and the last pocket of Greek resistance in the western Peloponnese, it was a fair gamble that they could finish off the war before the three signatories could muster the resolve or the unity to intervene.

As the Greeks and the Turks both knew, though, intervention was only a matter of time, and so by the end of 1826 the key to the whole war and the geographical scope of any future Greece had become the fortress at Athens. From the late summer of 1826 the insurgents had poured all their resources into her relief, though two abortive attempts in August and October, and a third in December under the command of that heroic relict of Napoleonic glories, Colonel Fabvier, had only succeeded in burdening a starving garrison with Fabvier himself and another five hundred Greek and French volunteers.

The failure of one philhellene never seemed to discourage the next for very long, however, and in the following February one of the most distinguished of all British volunteers agreed against his better judgement to try where the French had failed. Thomas Gordon had been among the first foreigners to join the Greek cause in the early months of the war, but, sickened by the horrors of Tripolis, had almost immediately quitted the country, driven out by that familiar combination of plague and moral disgust that had seen off so many romantic philhellenes in the opening days of the conflict.

But at that point the generalisations fail, because with his Eton and Oxford background, his experience with the British and Russian armies, his intelligence, linguistic abilities, independence and – above all – immense wealth, Gordon was made of very different stuff. In the years since he left Greece he had continued to play an influential role in European philhellenism, and even in absentia he remained one of the very few disinterested foreigners with the skills and the knowledge of both sides to make a genuine contribution to the war.

A sense of duty? The lure of Athens? A touch of philhellene vanity? It is unlikely that even Gordon knew what finally brought him back to Greece, but it certainly was not experience or judgement. During the five years since the fall of Tripolis he had successfully resisted every Greek blandishment, but for once his resolve failed him, and pressed again to give his services, he allowed the pleas of a desperate government to overcome every military and political instinct he had.

Gordon knew a direct assault on the enemy position made no strategic sense – he favoured attacks on the Turks’ long and vulnerable supply lines – but he agreed all the same to a twin-pronged February landing at Piraeus and Eleusis, to the south and west of Athens. The experience of Fabvier in the open before Athens should have demonstrated once and for all the folly of any such strategy, but this was a war in which judgement was always at the mercy of fantasy, strategy in hock to politics, vanity, ambition, and the endless rivalries that set Greek against Greek, Greek against philhellene and philhellenes against each other.

If nothing else, the attack offered Hastings the chance at last to satisfy the enormous expectations that had surrounded the Karteria since her arrival in Greece three months before. ‘All the world, men, women, children, old young, black and white, are coming on board to see the steamboat,’ Samuel Gridley Howe, the Karteria’s new American doctor and one of the nineteenth century’s greatest reforming philanthropists, had recorded in his November journal.

We have two Englishmen [officers], one German, one Frenchman, and one Greek; the Greek is the eldest son of Tombazi. Captain Hastings is a man who deserves the deepest gratitude and respect from the Greek nation. It is only through his exertion, his activity, and generosity, that this ship was ever got out. She was built under his own eye in London, and carries as much weight of metal as a thirty-six gun frigate; her engine, however, is not of the best. Captain Hastings, having on board about forty English and forty Greek sailors, is all ready to join the Greek fleet and engage the enemy. He sees the eyes of the whole people turned upon him – they are tired of waiting for Lord Cochrane and the rest of the vessels. Captain Hastings finds himself obliged to attempt something alone, and I doubt not, from his character, he will succeed or perish with the vessel. ‘Tell Captain Hastings,’ said Commodore Hamilton to me, ‘that I honour and envy him for what others pity him: his situation is perilous, nay almost desperate, yet so glorious is the attempt that were I without wife or children, I would give £1,000 to be in it.’ … How my spirit springs with joy at being on our way to meet the haughty Turk. And though our fate is uncertain, it cannot be an inglorious one. To be engaged in something active and important, in so glorious a cause, in such consecrated regions, makes my heart beat with a wild enthusiasm, which to my sober senses seems boyish and romantic.

Over the next two months an endless stream of mechanical problems with engine, paddles, boilers, leaks, coal, guns and shells – the shells would not explode and all but one of the cannon were damaged by the shock of the charge needed to throw a sixty-eight-pound ball – dampened Howe’s enthusiasm, but on 22 January 1827 the crew at last learned that the Karteria was to see action. ‘Even at this moment the Greeks are struggling to repel the attacks of the Turkish hordes which surround the sacred city,’ an excited Howe wrote as six days later the Karteria slipped unnoticed through the narrow western straits between Salamis and Megara – the first man-of-war since ancient times to effect the passage,

but doubtless the sight of our vessel comforted them, and let them know that assistance was at hand. About 11 A.M. our engine got completely out of order, and there being not a breath of wind to break the glassy smoothness of the sea, we lay motionless; but in what a spot, and with what objects around us! I could not regret the delay which afforded me such a scene. Behind lay Aegina, with its slope to the sea, richly cultivated and interspersed with olives, while farther back rose its hills, crowned by the temple of Jupiter Pluvious, whose still standing columns were plainly to be seen. To the right lay Attica, stretching south and terminating by Sunium; high up was Athens, its Acropolis and Parthenon rising above the mist which floated over the town; Salamis was before us; to the left the Isthmus of Corinth, above which rose the ragged, almost perpendicular Acro Corinth, crowned by its fortress.

The potential fly in the philhellene ointment was as ever the modern Greek soldier, and Gordon’s battle plan was peculiarly designed to bring out all his defects. He had already shown more than once what a different proposition he was among the mountains of the Morea, but as if no one had learned anything in the course of five years of war, the attack on Athens again required him to face the enemy infantry and cavalry out in the open.

At the beginning of February a force under the fat and bejewelled Cephalonian Bonapartist Colonel Bourbaki was landed at Eleusis, and two days later, on the afternoon of the fifth, Gordon’s troops began to embark in the small flotilla of boats that were to ship them across to the mainland. Colours were blessed, saints invoked, and on board the Karteria, Gordon, his second-in-command, the Bavarian Colonel Heideck and the Greek leaders met Hastings to finalise arrangements. ‘The moon shone bright and clear,’ Howe noted, and after all ‘the infernal delays of the Greeks’, everything at last

promised to favour our enterprise … About ten the vessels were all despatched in advance, and at eleven we got under way with steam, and moving on rapidly soon overtook the little fleet, which had but a light breeze. Off the Piraeus, having passed all the vessels, we took a turn backward, sailed around then, and again took the lead. The scene was exceedingly fine, – the night still and clear, a slight breeze filling the sails of our little fleet, which lay about us in every direction; the camp fires of the Greeks under Vashos and Bourbakis upon the sides of the mountains; while from time to time the launching of bombs from the enemy’s batteries into the Acropolis marked the horizon with a long streak of fire, and showed that the siege was still hotly pressed.

By three in the morning the moon had gone, and in a night black enough to mask her approach, the Karteria anchored at Phaleron and the first of Gordon’s 2,300 men were rowed silently ashore. The object of this first wave was the heights immediately above the landing place, but a sudden outbreak of musket fire and ‘wild shouting’ from the ridge – almost certainly a Greek feu de joie to celebrate that they still had their heads on their shoulders – was enough to panic a dubious Gordon into thinking they had been thwarted. ‘“The Turks are there! Our men will be cut to pieces! Back to the boats and take them off,”’ an indignant Howe wrote. ‘These were the words of Colonel Gordon, leader of the expedition, who seemed to be agitated and surprised. Others [were] more cool, particularly Captain Hastings and Colonel Heideck, who besought him calmly to consider whether he should not, instead of re-embarking, proceed to send more men to their assistance.’

The bolder counsel prevailed, and by the end of the night the heights of Munychia had been consolidated, with a traditional line of earth and stone tambouris stretching out over a distance of eleven or twelve hundred yards. In the early hours of the next morning the first of Gordon’s artillery pieces were dragged up from the beach, and to a ‘tremendous feu-de-joie of artillery and musketry’ from the Acropolis and an answering salvo from Gordon’s guns on the heights, the Karteria steamed around the headland and through the narrow harbour entrance of the Piraeus to engage the Turkish centre in the monastery of St Spiridon.

In half an hour the Karteria had dropped anchor, and from a distance of about four hundred yards, firing for the first time with the massive weight of her sixty-eight-pound guns, had soon reduced whole sections of the monastery to little more than rubble. ‘Two thousand men [had] stood regarding us with idle applause,’ Howe wrote, beside himself at the memory of the fancifully styled ‘300’ assault force staying firmly behind their tambouris when their time came,

but came down not. Such complete cowards are they that they will never attack an enemy who is sheltered in such a way as to make an attack in the least dangerous … No, not they! They expected our ship to march upon the land, enter the monastery, and drive out the enemy. Cowards I always knew them to be, and have often seen them show themselves, but never in a more shameful manner than to-day. In fact, my prediction will be accomplished: the country is too open for Greeks to fight in. At ten, we hoisted anchor and came just outside of the Piraeus, in order to prevent being caught by the enemy’s bringing down cannon and placing it upon the entrance of the port, which is not more than fifty yards across.

Howe was no more tolerant of Gordon’s generalship than he was of the Greeks, and the next day only reinforced his doubts. As soon as it was light the Karteria again steamed into the cauldron of the harbour, and boldly anchoring within musket range of the shore, resumed her solitary and futile small-arms and artillery duel with the heavily reinforced Turkish defenders. ‘The Turks would only poke out their heads, fire their musquets, and retire,’ Howe complained, vividly capturing the intense physical intimacy of Greek warfare, ‘but one of them held out his head long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle-ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall.’

After another two hours of shelling a signal came from Gordon to retire, and as Hastings ordered ‘up anchor’ the battle developed into a desperate race for the harbour mouth, with cannonballs ‘whizzing about and striking the ship in all directions’ and a force of cavalry dashing along the western shore of the port to cut off their retreat. ‘Soon we were moving,’ Howe recorded;

the enemy saw it, and galloping rapidly down to the narrow part of the port, awaited us. Among them were many Delhis, with their tremendous long caps, I should think at least two feet and a half high. I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to for one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel … Our retreat was necessary, because we could not possibly do any good by remaining, but I could not help feeling shame as we moved off from a pursuing enemy hooting at us, and this in plain sight of the Greeks in the Acropolis and upon the hills.

A small dent in philhellene pride was neither here nor there – jeers and insults were as ritual a part of Turko-Greek warfare as breaches of faith or severed heads – but elsewhere in the battle it was a different story. ‘The Turks from the monastery cried out to our men that the troops under Vashos and Bourbakis had been completely routed,’ Howe continued.

This I fear may be true. Vashos is an experienced Greek soldier and knows the paliikaris completely, and probably did not suffer much … But Bourbakis is fresh from France, full of French notions, and though born a Greek, knows them not. He talked confidently of what he would do; nothing less than taking Kiutahi alive would satisfy him – and such nonsense. He is brave, and probably ventured upon the plain; the cavalry came upon him, his men ran away, and he was killed or taken prisoner; this we fear, but know nothing certain.

The reports were true – Vashos’s ‘poltroons’ had fled, Bourbakis was captured and beheaded for his pains, more than four hundred of his regulars slaughtered – and with one army defeated the Turks were now free to unleash the full weight of their cavalry and infantry against the Greek-held heights of Phaleron. After the mauling the Karteria had received in the first exchanges Hastings might have done well to stay out of it, but these were precisely the kind of operations for which his vessel was designed, and as his men watched successive waves of Turkish attacks climb and break against the Greek defences, he again ordered her to drop anchor within ‘short musquet-shot’ of the Ottoman rear and open up with grape.

With the Karteria’s arrival the whole focus of the battle suddenly shifted from the heights to the shore. From her deck Howe watched a dozen men dragging a gun down to the water’s edge, and within moments a shell had ‘burst amid twenty of us. I expected at least four or five would have been killed, but my attention was drawn by the shrieks and cries of a drummer boy. I saw him fall, terror and despair in his countenance; seizing him in my arms, I carried him below …’

The whole of the Turkish artillery was now turned on the Karteria, and as ‘the balls … began to whiz about the ship, to strike her sides, cut her cordage etc’, their position became increasingly desperate. The ship’s guns had rapidly dealt with three of the enemy’s cannon, but two howitzers cleverly sited behind the walls of the monastery soon had their range. ‘I am told it was a rich scene to behold the mixture of dismay and gloom alternately reddening and whitening the cheeks of some of the Greek sailors,’ wrote the English philhellene Thomas Whitcombe, impotently ‘curling and twisting [his] mustaches’ and ‘biting [his] lips with vexation’ up on the heights,

as the worrying batteries’ pitiless storm pelted in every direction round their vessel; – the jolly reefers wishing themselves all the while in the territories of Prester John, or any other outlandish quarter of the globe, rather than where they had found themselves. The hair-breadth escapes on board the Karteria were … almost past belief, – flogging the doctrine of chances with unsparing thong … Our maledictions, loud and deep, were denounced on the heads of those Europeans [servicing the Turkish guns] – Christians they presumed to call themselves! – who could thus unshrinkingly stain their name and birth-place with the indelible disgrace of pocketing the Seraskier’s blood-steeped wages, in requital of tendering their arms and knowledge in aiding the suppression of the hallowed warfare of liberty and the blessed cross.

Up on the heights the battle was more or less won, and with the crew wilting and his boats shot to bits, Hastings’s only thought was to extricate the Karteria while he still had the chance. ‘To our dismay,’ though, wrote Howe, back on deck after tending to the drummer boy – only very slightly wounded, as it turned out,

on the word being given to start the engine it was found not to move. There was repetition of the order; it was shouted, but in vain; the engine would not start. Many a cheek blanched and many a lip quivered, for we were in a narrow port, exposed on every side to musquetry, and could see the enemy bringing down more cannon; to make it more dreadful, the anchor had been cut away, and it was whispered to me by the lieutenant that the ship’s head was aground, – and she only a pistol-shot from the shore. The enemy apparently perceived this, and shouting and waving their sabres, they began to rush down, expecting to have us in a few minutes. I must say that a feeling of bitterness and almost agony came over me for a moment at the sight of these barbarians, who I expected would soon be mercilessly hacking us to pieces.

The one man on board who seemed unmoved by the danger was Hastings, and with ‘much coolness and skill’ he brought his frightened crew to order. For a few endless moments the Karteria’s fate hung in the balance, and then – very slowly – the engine began to move, the wheels turned back, the ship’s head swung free and – ‘Thanks to Mr Aeolus,’ as the watching Whitcombe put it – the sails filled, and Karteria fought her way out through the narrow mouth of the port and into open water.

It had been touch and go, but the escape of the Karteria added the final touch to a day that had seen the Greeks put up their finest display in fixed battle of the whole war. It is arguable that only an Ottoman general could have ordered the attack on so formidable a position in the first place, but the casualty figures for the action – some three hundred Turkish dead to only fifteen Greek – had as much to do with the courage and defensive skill with which the Greeks fought behind their tambouris as it did with Ottoman obduracy and contempt.

In a sense, however, that was the problem – the Greeks had their bridgehead and the Turks had Athens – and faced with an inevitable stalemate and endless political dissensions, Gordon did what he should have done before the landings and resigned. He had at least kept his army intact, but that was all. The Acropolis, with Colonel Fabvier imprisoned inside it, was no nearer being saved; the Greek captains, euphoric at their ‘victory’, were no nearer to trusting Western tactics; and the Karteria no nearer to proving the decisive element in the war that Hastings had promised. It had not been a good campaign for philhellenism.

XI

If the winter of 1826–27 probably saw philhellene stock plummet to its lowest mark, there was one man whose absence through it all had only added to his reputation. Over the last months there had admittedly been a growing bitterness over Greece’s missing admiral, but when on 17 March, ‘after wandering about the Mediterranean in a fine English yacht, purchased for him out of the proceeds of the loan’, as Finlay acidly and unfairly put it, Thomas Cochrane and the Sauveur at last arrived at Poros, all was forgiven in a surge of hope that the long-awaited Messiah had come.

With stalemate at Phaleron, Athens on the brink of collapse, civil war in Nauplia, open conflict brewing between the islands and rival ‘governments’ multiplying by the week, there could never have been a time when Greece was more sorely in need of a Messiah. ‘This unhappy country is now divided by absurd and criminal dissensions,’ Sir Richard Church, another aspiring saviour who had been waiting in the wings of Greek history for even longer than Cochrane, wrote to him. ‘I hope, however, that your lordship’s arrival will have a happy effect, and that they will do everything in their power to be worthy of such a leader.’