A Flag of Truce Read Free Page B

would take his acting captain aboard the flagship.

Chapter Two
    Standing on the quarterdeck of HMS
Victory
, waiting to be summoned below, Pearce looked inland to the shore and beyond, the sound of continuous cannon fire louder now. There was fighting going on around Ollioules, at the head of a valley which provided the western gateway by which the port and town could be invested. There was another to the east, narrower and more difficult but it was Mont Faron and its companion hills, studded with forts, now being reinforced by hastily built redoubts, which provided the main defence to landward. Below the ring of hills lay the town, an old and jumbled mass of narrow alleys around the outer harbour, more up to date past the Vauban-designed fortifications, a star-shaped, moated bastion. Beyond that lay the newest buildings, which had housed the hub of a formidable part of what had been the MarineRoyal, the Arsenal and the Fleet Commander’s headquarters.
    Toulon had fallen, first to revolutionary fervour, and secondly, to fear. Again his mind went back to Paris, to the certainty of that place two years before, after the Battle of Valmy, the centre and driving force of all that had happened in France. No doubt existed in most Gallic minds regarding the rightness of the ’89 Revolution; the destruction of the Bastille had been an event waiting to happen in a bankrupt nation stuck in an outmoded monarchical system that saw the rich prosper while the poor starved. That it had been humbled was now seen as inevitable, though Pearce suspected few were so certain of the outcome at the time. What had happened since created enclaves like Toulon, where the citizens saw the strictures and actions of radical Parisian-based politicians in a less acquiescent way.
    In the capital, factions fought for control, and sought to outdo each other in the purity of their revolutionary ideals, using the mob to ratchet up the tone of revolution. Yet even at the epicentre many a mind was sceptical of the direction in which events were moving. Worse, it had become impossible to object; to do so risked at best incarceration – the fate of his own father, who had spoken out against excess – at worst the guillotine, the ultimate fate from which his son had beenunable to rescue him. In the countryside the actions of politicians constantly driven on by the excessive demands of a Paris mob were viewed with alarm; worse still, the penalties deemed necessary to keep the Revolution alive. Having got rid of a monarchical tyranny, the majority of Frenchmen, especially those of some education or property, were not keen to see the power of the Paris radicals extended to replace it.
    Lyon, the second city of France, was in full-scale revolt and there were rumours of a priest-led war going on in the Vendée. Marseilles too had risen, and had tried to act in concert with Toulon; they had even invited Lord Hood and his fleet to take over the protection of the city, but he had deemed it indefensible. The great port had fallen only weeks before, and the exactions of revolutionary revenge had begun as soon as it was captured: rape; murder, both judicial and spontaneous; robbery and arson; all the trials that since time immemorial had been the fate of a city under sack. Toulon, fearing a similar fate, had asked for protection and Hood, because of its topography easier to defend, had obliged and the task now was to hold the place. Pearce, before he left on his cruise, had heard both opinions advanced: that Toulon was impregnable, as well as the opposite; it could not be held without an army the defenders did not have. He had no idea who was right and who was wrong, lacking, as hedid, the knowledge to make a judgement.
    ‘Lieutenant Pearce.’
    He turned round to face Capitaine de Vaiseau, le baron d’Imbert, an English-speaking French officer he had come to know well in the period leading up to the British take-over. Pearce had been Hood’s emissary in the delicate