Napoleonic Literature
The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot - Volume I
Chapter X
I CAN only speak very briefly of the operations of the siege, or rather blockade, which we sustained. At this period the fortifications of Genoa consisted on the land side merely of a wall flanked with towers; but what rendered the place capable of a good defence was the fact of its being surrounded at a short distance by hills whose summits and slopes were covered with forts and redoubts. The Austrians were always attacking these positions; as soon as they carried one we marched to retake it; the next day they tried again to get possession of it. If they succeeded we went to drive them out afresh--in short, it was a perpetual see-saw with varying chances, but on the whole we ended by remaining masters of the ground. These fights were often very brisk; in one of them General Soult, who was Masséna's right-hand man was climbing Monte Corona at the head of his columns to recapture the fort of the same name which we had lost the day before when a bullet smashed his knee just as the enemy, far outnumbering us, were charging down from the top of the hill. It was impossible with the few troops which we had at this point to resist such a torrent, and we had to beat a retreat. The soldiers carried Soult for some time on their muskets but the intolerable pain compelled him to order them to set him down at the foot of a tree, where his brother and one of his aides-de-camp remained alone with him to defend him from the fury of the first of the enemy who should reach him. Luckily, among these were some officers, who treated their illustrious prisoner with much respect. The capture of General Soult having stimulated the ardour of the Austrians, they drove us very smartly back to the wall, and were preparing to assault this, when a tremendous storm darkened the blue sky which we had had since the beginning of the siege. The rain fell in torrents. The Austrians halted, and the greater number of them sought shelter in cottages or under trees. Then Masséna, whose principal merit in war lay in profiting by all sorts of unforeseen circumstances, addressed his soldiers, rekindled their ardour, and, supporting them with troops brought up from the town, ordered a bayonet-charge, and led them, while the storm was at its height, against the Austrians; who, victorious so far, were taken aback by this audacity, and retired in disorder. Masséna pursued with such vigour that he cut off a force of 3,000 grenadiers, who laid down their arms.

This was not the first time that we had taken a good many prisoners. The total number of those captured since the beginning of the siege amounted to more than eight thousand; but, having no means of feeding them, the general had always sent them back on condition that they should not serve against us for six months. The officers kept their parole faithfully; but the unlucky soldiers, who did not know what their chiefs had undertaken on their behalf, were, on their return to the Austrian camp, distributed among other regiments, and compelled to fight again. If they again fell into our hands, which often happened, we gave them back again; they were again passed into other battalions, and so it happened that a great many men on their own admission were taken prisoners four or five times during the siege. Angry at this bad faith on the part of the Austrian generals, Masséna determined this time that the three thousand whom he had captured should be detained, officers and men. But in order that the task of guarding them should not be an additional duty for the troops, he placed the unhappy prisoners on board hulks in the harbour, and had some of the guns on the mole trained upon them. Then he sent a flag of truce to General Ott, commanding the Austrian troops before Genoa, to reproach him for his breach of good faith, and let him know that he did not feel bound to give the prisoners more than half the ration of a French soldier, but that he would agree to an arrangement between the Austrians and the English under which boats should bring provisions every day to the prisoners, and not leave them till they had seen the good eaten, lest it should be believed that he, Masséna, was availing himself of this pretext to get provisions in for his own troops. The Austrian general, in the hope that a refusal would induce Masséna to send back his three thousand men, of whom he probably thought again to make use against us, withheld his consent to this philanthropic proposal; so Masséna carried out his declared intention.

The ration of the French was composed of a quarter of a pound of horrible bread and an equal quantity of horseflesh; so the prisoners got only half that quantity of each commodity. The siege lasted fifteen days longer, and the poor wretches remained all that time on this diet. In vain did Masséna every two or three days renew his proposal. Either from obstinacy or because the English admiral, Lord Keith, was unwilling to supply boats for fear of introducing typhus into his fleet, it was never accepted. The unhappy Austrians were yelling with rage and hunger on board the hulks; at last, after having eaten their shoes, knapsacks, pouches, and even, according to rumour, the bodies of some of their comrades, they nearly all died of starvation. There remained no more than 700 or 800 when the place was surrendered. As soon as the Austrian soldiers entered Genoa, they hastened to the harbour and supplied food to their comrades, but with so little judgment that all the survivors died. I have thought fit to relate this horrible incident not only as a further example of the calamities which war brings in its train, but more especially to brand the bad faith of the Austrian general in compelling his soldiers who had been made prisoners and sent back on parole again to bear arms against us in spite of his undertaking to send them back to Germany.

Of my own perils during the siege I will confine myself to recounting the two principal. I have already said that the Austrians and the English took it in turns to keep us constantly on the alert. The former attacked us at daybreak on the landside, fought us all day long, and returned to rest at night. During the night Lord Keith's feet came and bombarded us, trying under cover of darkness to get possession of the port, and thus forcing the garrison to watch that side most carefully, and preventing them from getting the least rest. One night when the bombardment was more than ordinarily violent, Masséna, having been informed that, by the help of some Bengal lights which had been fired on the beach, many English craft, laden with troops, could be seen advancing towards the moles, mounted with all his staff and his regular escort of guides. We were in all some 150 to 200 horsemen. As we passed a little square named the Campetto, the commander-in-chief halted to speak to an officer who was returning from the port. All were thronging round him, when a cry was heard, 'Look out! a shell!' We all looked up and beheld a vast mass of red-hot iron descending on the group of men and horses who were packed in the narrow space. I happened to be close to the wall of a great house, above the door of which was a marble balcony. I urged my horse under this and several of my neighbours did the same. Precisely on this balcony the shell dropped; it smashed it to pieces, bounded off on to the pavement, and burst with a tremendous noise in the middle of the square, which for a moment was lighted up by the flash and then relapsed into deeper darkness. We thought the loss would have been great; the profound silence was broken by the voice of General Masséna asking if anyone was wounded; there was no answer, for by a really miraculous chance not one of the fragments of the shell had struck a man or a horse in the crowd. As for those who, like myself, were under the balcony, they were covered with dust and fragments of building materials, but no one was wounded.

I have said that as a rule the English only bombarded us at night; but one day when they were celebrating some festival or other, their fleet, dressed with flags, sailed up to the town in the middle of the day, and amused itself by showering projectiles on us. The one of our batteries which was in the best position for replying to this fire was near the mole, on a great tower-like bastion called the Lantern. The commander-in-chief ordered me to carry to the officer commanding this battery instructions to take good aim before firing, and to let all his fire converge upon an English brig which had impudently anchored a short distance from the Lantern. Our gunners aimed so well that one of our 500-lb. shells dropped on the English brig, smashing through from deck to keel and sinking it instantly. 1This enraged the English admiral so much that he ordered all his gunboats to advance upon the Lantern, on which they opened a furious fire. Having fulfilled my orders, my duty was to return to Masséna; but, as is often and rightly said, young soldiers, not realising danger, frequently face it more coolly than experienced veterans. The spectacle which I witnessed was highly interesting; the platform of the Lantern, paved with flag-stones, was about the area of an average courtyard, and was armed with twelve pieces of ordnance, the carriages of which were of great size. Difficult as it is for a vessel at sea to throw shells with accuracy at so small a mark as the platform of a tower, the English contrived to drop several on the Lantern. At the moments when they fell the gunners took refuge behind and beneath the massive wooden carriages. I followed their example, but our refuge was by no means secure, since the shells, being unable to break through the floor of the platform, rolled along the flags without our being able to foresee what direction they would take, and their fragments, spinning about from every point of the platform, flew beneath and behind the gun-carriages. It was, therefore, absurd for anyone to stay there, who, like me, was not obliged to do so; but I felt a fearful joy, if I may use the term, in rushing with the gunners to cover every time that a shell fell, and in returning with them as soon as it had burst and the fragments no longer flew. It was a sport for which I might have paid dear. One gunner had his legs broken; others were severely wounded, for the huge fragments of iron did frightful execution. One of them cut in two a great timber of one of the carriages behind which I was just going to take shelter. In spite of it, I stayed on the platform until Colonel Mouton (afterwards Marshal Count of Lobau), who had served under my father and took an interest in me, happened to pass near the Lantern, and ordered me peremptorily to come away and go back to my post with the commander-in-chief. 'You are a young fellow still,' he added, 'but you must learn that in war it is foolish to expose oneself to needless dangers. What good would it have done you if you had had a leg smashed, without any advantage to your country?' I never forgot this lesson, and long after thanked the Count of Lobau for it. It has often struck me what a difference there would have been in my fortunes if I had lost a leg at the age of seventeen.


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1. In the list given by James, of British ships lost during 1800, there is no mention of any at Genoa. The story told here bears a certain resemblance to that of the apocryphal destruction of another English brig off Boulogne. See chapter 19, this volume. Return to chapter text.