CHAPTER FIFTEENFor more than two years, from the outbreak of war in May 1803,
Napoleon was intermittently obsessed by the invasion of England. His
mood oscillated between euphoria and facile optimism on the one hand
and gloomy despair and defeatism on the other. His frequent journeyings
in these years are a good barometer of a restless soul, a man impatient
with the many logistical frustrations of the steady build-up of men and
materiel in the Channel ports. His day-to-day itinerary betrays the zigzag
pattern of a man temperamentally incapable of, as well as prevented by
circumstances from, concentrating on any single objective. A tour of
ports in the Pas de Calais in June 1803 was swiftly followed by a trip to
Belgium; he was back in Boulogne again for a fortnight in November
1803 and again for a further two weeks in January 1804. The d'Enghien
affair and the imperial coronation occupied most of that year, but in July
he was in the Channel ports for a month; then came two weeks in Aix-la
Chapelle at the beginning of September followed by a tour of the
Rhineland during the last two weeks of the month. The coronation and
its aftermath necessitated a lengthy stay in Paris, but in April 1805 the
Emperor was off again, this time on a fourteen-week trip to Italy for his
coronation in Milan. Scarcely pausing at St-Cloud, he was at Boulogne
again for the climax of the invasion attempt in August 1 8 05.
Since all gunboats and sloops prepared for the would-be descents on
England in 1798 and 1801 were by now in an advanced state of disrepair
or had simply rotted away, Napoleon had to start from scratch.
Undeterred by the fact that he had just thirteen ships of the line against
England's fifty-two, he took heart from the bold showing of his men
during Nelson's raids on Boulogne in August and September 1801, when
French marines repulsed a British commando assault on the port with
heavy loss. He now conceived an elaborate plan whereby two fleets would
be constructed secretly and simultaneously at Dunkirk and Cherbourg,
ready for a final rendezvous at Boulogne, which the Emperor decided was
the most feasible launching pad for an enterprise against England. Troops
would be assembled at Boulogne at the last moment and there would be