the political commissars that Dugommier's heart was not in the job. They
toyed with asking Napoleon himself to lead, but he quickly talked
Dugommier round into leading an attack by s,ooo men, arguing that
artillery and the bayonet were all that was needed. Advancing in heavy
rain and taking heavy casualties, Dugommier's troops hesitated in face of
a desperate defence. Then Napoleon led a charge with z,ooo more troops.
Despite having a horse shot from under him, he led his men to the walls.
Still ta king losses, the French swarmed over the timber-spiked parapets.
Two hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting ensued, with bayonet and
sabre playing a greater role than musketry. By 3 a.m. it was all over, and
the fort was in French hands.
Saliceti and Gasparin arrived after the fighting to confer their political
'imprimatur'. They found their favourite, Major Bonaparte, lying
wounded on the ground, having taken an English sergeant's pike in his
inner left thigh just above the knee. At first there was panic, and it was
thought amputation would be necessary to prevent gangrene. But a
military surgeon was brought in for a second opinion and pronounced the
wound not serious. Ever after, however, Napoleon bore a deep scar.
More seriously wounded in the final assault was a man who would
loom large in Napoleon's later life: Claude-Victor Perrin, the future
Marshal Victor. At that time, the twenty-nine-year-old Victor outranked
Napoleon, being a lieutenant-colonel, but after Toulon both men were
promoted together to the same rank of brigadier-general. Other future
marshals to make their mark at Toulon were Marmont, then a nineteen
year-old captain, and a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, Louis-Gabriel
Suchet. It was at Toulon also that Napoleon first met the greatest of all
soldiers whom ever commanded his armies, twenty-five-year-old Louis
Charles Desaix, and the man who would be his greatest friend, twenty
one-year-old Geraud Christophe Duroc.
But not all Napoleon's new acquaintances were of high calibre: one,
who would soon marry into his family, was the stupid and pretentious
blond-haired Victor Emmanuel Leclerc.
Napoleon's prediction about L'Eguillette was soon borne out: on the
r8th the British took the decision to abandon Toulon. The twenty-nine
year-old English sailor Sidney Smith, already knighted for feats of
gallantry, and Hood's right-hand man in Toulon, remarked that troops
'crowded to the water like the herd of swine that ran furiously into the sea
possessed of the devil'. Hood and Smith set fire to the military arsenal
and gutted all the ships they could not use, then put to sea under cover of
darkness. The terrific explosion when the arsenal finally blew up at 9 p.m.
marcin
(Marcin)
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