STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 014
Preliminaries of the Calabrian Campaign
3. The Battle of Maida (1)
Preliminaries of the Calabrian Campaign
NOTA BENE: The Battle of Maida on 4 July 1806 was a battle between the British expeditionary force and a First French Empire division outside the town of Maida in Calabria, Italy during the Napoleonic Wars. John Stuart led 5,200 British troops to victory over about 6,000 French soldiers under Jean Reynier, inflicting significant losses while incurring relatively few casualties. Maida is located in the toe of Italy, about 19 miles west of Catanzaro.
The Battle of Maida is essentially of tactical and not of strategical importance. It was the forerunner of all the great battles of the Peninsular War so far as tactics go; it only differed from them in results because the British Army was commanded by Sir John Stuart and not Sir Arthur Wellesley. The troops and the tactics were the same if the generalship was different. The first clash of Kempt’s British light brigade and Compere’s heavy battalion columns, of which I have to tell in this screed, gives the key to the whole tactical superiority of the British infantry which lay at the base of Wellington’s victorious schemes during the years 1808–15. The battle passed without much notice at the time, because the Neapolitan campaign of 1806 forms a piece of by-play between the campaign of Austerlitz and the campaign of Jena; which few British and hardly a single continental commentator have cared to investigate. Its strategical and political results were nil; its moral results passed unperceived at the time, save among the handful of British officers of ready intelligence who laid to heart what they had seen and stored up its teaching for future use.
It is unfortunate that we have few independent narratives of the Battle of Maida either from the English or the French side. There are Peninsular fights of which the tale can be reconstructed from the evidence of a full score of eyewitnesses on the one side or the other, especially during the later years of the war. But at Maida the numbers engaged were small, only 5,200 on the side of the British and 6,400 on that of their adversaries. The latter were not so proud of the result that they should be eager to commit their experiences to paper. The former were so few that it is not surprising that few narratives survive—Bunbury’s is the only one which runs to great length, though de Watteville’s notes (sent me by his grandson, to my infinite gratitude), an invaluable letter from Colborne (later Lord Seaton), then a lieutenant in the 20th, and the interesting screed of Colonel Stewart in the regimental history of the 78th, with the diary of Charles Boothby of the Engineers, have helped me much. Reynier’s dispatch has never been published; it is of great length, and along with the complete set of “morning states”, and the headquarters correspondence of the army of Naples, all in the French archives, has enabled me to give the fight from the point of view of the vanquished side pretty fully. Especially I find that I can account for the exact numbers present under Reynier, a thing that was never certainly known before. Of maps there is only one available—the very pretty and rather too detailed one which I used as the base of that given on page 48. It is contemporary, and therefore invaluable.
Over the political preliminaries of the Calabrian campaign of 1806 I pass as lightly as possible. The imbecile King and the reckless, immoral Queen of Naples had resolved (too late to give help, but not too late to ruin themselves) to engage in the great coalition of Austria, Russia, and England against Napoleon, whose landmarks are Ulm, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz. The Queen of Naples summoned English and Russian auxiliaries to her kingdom, and defied the Emperor just four days before the disaster of Ulm. This small and miscellaneous army, hastily gathered, had not yet crossed the Neapolitan frontier when the news of Austerlitz came to hand. Almost with it came the tidings that Napoleon had decreed that the Bourbons of Naples should cease to reign, and, freed from the Austrian war, was about to launch a great army under Masséna into southern Italy. The Russians went home; the 7,000 British troops, who had been landed at Naples, were ordered by their Government to retire to Sicily, which was defensible because it was sea-girt and protected by our naval power. Thither, too, the King and Queen ultimately retired, but they left their army behind, to be smashed up by the oncoming French. The main body was utterly defeated and dispersed at the Battle of Campo Teñese in March 1806. Only 2,000 men out of 20,000 escaped to Sicily. The sole place in the kingdom that held out—the sea-girt fortress of Gaeta, far north of Naples—was maintained by the one capable general whom Queen Caroline owned, the hard-drinking, hard-fighting Prince of Hesse—Philipsthal. He held out against Masséna and the French main army from March to July, contrary to the expectation of both allies and enemies, for no one had believed that Neapolitan soldiers could fight, even behind stone walls.
Meanwhile Napoleon appointed his brother Joseph King of the Two Sicilies, and bade him complete the conquest of the kingdom given him. The French army, marching far and wide to receive the easily won submission of the Neapolitan towns, gradually got divided into three sections, connected with each other only by insignificant posts of communication. Masséna with 15,000 men was busy in the siege of Gaeta; near him were 3,000 more men, garrisoning Naples for the new king. But St-Cyr with 12,000 men was far off, busy in occupying Apulia and the Capitanata, while the third force of 10,000 men under Reynier and Verdier, who had won the Battle of Campo Teñese and overrun all the peninsula of Calabria as far as Messina, was still more distant from the capital and the commander-in-chief.
The Neapolitan bourgeoisie of the county towns had accepted the nomination of King Joseph and the annexation of the kingdom with apathy. Not so the peasants of the Apennines, and especially the Calabrese, who regarded the French as atheists and aliens, and remembered the final triumph of the Bourbons and their first restoration to their kingdom in 1799. Fifty thousand soldiers might overrun the whole kingdom of Naples and occupy its chief towns, but they could not occupy every village or guard every defile. Hence, when the first panic that followed Masséna’s invasion was over, insurgent bands began to show themselves in the hills, and the army of occupation found plenty of work in hunting them, and failed to extirpate them.
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