Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/606

 598 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October to the army, for which it was itself in every way ill fitted. Lord Hood's attempt to defend Toulon is a most instructive episode, and it was well that an effort should be made to deal with it from the British point of view. Dr. Rose has been able to bring a good deal of new evidence to light, particularly in the shape of Hood's correspondence and some private letters to Pitt and Dundas written by Lord Mulgrave, who was the senior British military officer at Toulon during the earlier part of the occupation. The value of the volume is greatly enhanced by the seventy pages or so of appendixes which contain much of this evidence and enable the reader to some extent to check Dr. Rose's conclusions, for there are one or two points in which Dr. Rose does not seem to have fully brought out the bearings of the story. What stands out clearly from the narrative of the occupation is that if one of the main causes for the allies' failure was the want of vigorous and harmonious co-operation between the different members of the First Coalition, the other was just as certainly the fact that the British fleet had to be employed outside its proper sphere, that for want of adequate military force the fleet was tied down to Toulon and could not discharge its own proper tasks Dr. Rose shows this very clearly (see chapter iv) and that it was at a very great disadvantage when it tried to match the guns of its battleships against the land batteries of the French. These latter were easy to conceal and far harder for the ships to hit than were the ships for the shore guns : Sydney Smith hit the nail on the head when he wrote that ships of the line were little use against forts, and that ' small vessels with heavy artillery ' were ' the only species of force that can act with advantage on a coast ' (p. 66, cf. p. 88). But had an adequate military force been promptly forthcoming the opening of Toulon might have been turned to good account, might indeed have made a considerable change in- the military situation, which at the end of 1793 had by no means taken a decisive turn against the Coalition. Dr. Rose, perhaps, goes unduly far in saying that ' no event of that age was more fruitful in consequences ' (p. 90), but he seems well inside the bounds of probability when he declares that the scale might have been turned by the arrival of the two British battalions on their way from Gibraltar when Toulon fell, or of the 5,000 Austrians, whom Dundas seems to have reckoned as part of the garrison the moment their dispatch was promised. He shows that the narrowness of the margin by which the republicans achieved success ' ought to dispose of the oft-repeated assertion that the defence of Toulon was fore-doomed to failure ' (p. 86), and that the mere presence of Napoleon among the besiegers did not render the place untenable. Indeed Bonaparte's much- vaunted discovery that the La Grasse heights were the tactical key to Toulon is somewhat diminished in importance when it becomes clear that Hood and Lord Mulgrave had already anticipated the discovery and were only prevented from securing the position effectively by their want of men. Dr. Rose may claim to have proved that Toulon might under other circumstances have been successfully defended, and that Hood, if a little too optimistic in his views of the situation, displayed an energy and a spirit which were the mainstay of the defence and was far from quarrelling with the soldiers or adopting towards them the ' contemptuous attitude ' with which Mr. Fortescue has on somewhat inadequate evidence credited him