End of a Nightmare (1)
Lycaon pictus
Donor
For the campaign in the fall of 1818, the Emperor of Austria had provided Field Marshal Bianchi with the largest army that could possibly be assembled in the time available. Nonetheless, the campaign was a desperate gamble. To succeed, Bianchi would have to defeat first the French army under Ney, then Gioacchino’s Italian army. If they were able to join forces, they could bottle up the Austrians in the mountain passes of the Alps indefinitely.
And no sooner was Bianchi’s army in northern Italy than Italian partisans and skirmishers set about distracting and delaying him. The attacks were small-scale, involving no more than a few squads shooting from cover, and then fleeing. But they came once or twice a day and two or three times a night, from any direction, and were sometimes unexpectedly large and aggressive. One attack in particular overran an exposed company of horse artillery and spiked or otherwise sabotaged a dozen guns before being forced to withdraw.
As Bianchi pushed further into Italy, the attacks came less often on his army and more often on his logistics train. By the time he had reached the Po, he had found it necessary to split his army (once roughly twice the size of Ney’s) in two and use half of it to guard his supply lines. As for the attacks on the army itself, he had long since learned to use his cavalry to fight them off without his infantry breaking stride.
It was this that proved his ruin. On the morning of October 13, about an hour before dawn on the fields east of Marcaria, he knew that the French army was not far away, but did not know exactly where they were — and searching for them would be a hopeless task, with the ground swathed in heavy fog that cut visibility down to less than twenty meters. When he heard reports of a company of partisans shouting in Italian as they shot at the soldiers in the vanguard of his army, he casually ordered his hussars to deal with the matter and went back to plotting the day’s maneuvers.
Through the mist the hussars charged, sabers at the ready, preparing to plunge them into the backs of fleeing partisans. Perhaps, for a moment, they caught a glimpse of the indistinct but ominous shapes emerging from the gray darkness ahead as they advanced.
Then the fog filled with the yellow light of twenty thousand muzzle flares and a terrible thunder. Musket-balls and canister plunged into the hussars and their horses at a range of fifteen meters.
They had just found the French army. The partisans — whether they were real Italian partisans, or French scouts speaking Italian — had led them right onto the tips of their enemies’ bayonets. Those who survived the first volley realized at once that they were hopelessly outgunned, and turned to retreat.
A few miles away, Bianchi heard the volley, and knew at once what it meant. He immediately began giving the orders to ready his army for battle.
But this was not the army that had fought in the Juillet Lorrain or at Nancy. Its ranks had been hastily swelled by underequipped conscripts from all over the empire, not all of whom spoke German or had more than a vague sense of what was going on. Their training had consisted of one or two weeks of marching and weapons drill, and six to eight weeks of listening to their more experienced comrades tell them terrifying stories about the Italian front. These recruits reacted badly to surprise.
This was shown when the hussars returned and crossed the path of several particularly inexperienced units on Bianchi’s right wing. Seeing a horde of cavalrymen charging out of the fog, screaming in Hungarian and in many cases still holding their sabers, some of them thought they were under attack by Ney’s famous cavalry and opened fire. Others simply fled. Seeing their comrades fleeing caused others in turn to flee, and the effect snowballed. Only a quick series of orders by Bianchi kept his army from disintegrating entirely. Even so, three regiments of his infantry had just been routed from the battlefield by his own retreating cavalry… and Ney hadn’t even attacked yet.
When the fog lifted and Ney did attack, he was relentless. Seeing that Bianchi no longer had the strength to take the offensive, he ordered his center to hold while his left and right flanks tried again and again to roll up the Austrian line.
If he had chosen to retreat at this point, Bianchi might have been able to return to Trent. As it was, by the time he acknowledged that the battle was lost, Ney’s own cavalry had cut off his avenue of escape. By noon, he had already surrendered…
The end of October saw General Beresford engaged in a desperate war of maneuver. At Ceccano he had narrowly escaped a trap, with artillery units and riflemen loyal to the Pope holding the heights across the Sacco and the king attacking from the northeast, attempting to drive his Anglo-Sicilian force into the river. But now events in Naples would render his best efforts irrelevant.
Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies arrived in Naples on October 30. Most historians believe that it was Ferdinand’s intention to dismiss Morisset as city governor, take charge of Naples himself and thereby incur the gratitude of the populace. The city already appeared to have been pacified, or at least terrified into submission. And well it might have been — out of a population of nearly 315,000 (as of an 1814 census), Morisset hanged 4,154 over the course of 1818. (This compares with 99 who were executed in the aftermath of the fall of the Parthenopean Republic. It does not include those killed in street battles with the occupying army.) It is quite likely that everyone in Naples knew someone who had been killed by the “Monster.”
But before Ferdinand could make any announcements or set any of his plans in motion, someone else would seize the initiative. As Ferdinand stepped onto the dock, he was shot. The bullet grazed the top of his right ear. The would-be assassin fled, Ferdinand’s guards in hot pursuit. The assassin made it into the San Lorenzo area and disappeared into a tavern.
(Several taverns in the area now claim to be the one where the assassin took cover, but none of their claims have been substantiated. It is quite possible that the guards ran into the wrong one. For that matter, at least fifteen different men, including the British adventurer Lord Byron, have claimed to be the one who attempted to kill the Bourbon king.)
Unable to find the assassin, the guards pulled fifteen men whom they believed to be witnesses out of the tavern and detained them for questioning. At this point, two important facts come into play.
First, under Morisset’s regime arrest (or even “detention for questioning”) had come to be thought of as a prelude to execution. Second, a number of his underlings (whether Morisset himself even knew of this is a point of debate) had developed the ugly habit of extorting regular sexual favors from Neapolitan women who caught their eye by threatening to have their fathers, brothers or husbands taken and hanged as rebels. Several of the men that Ferdinand’s officers were now attempting to arrest were men whose lives had been used to threaten women in this way. The officers performing the arrests, who had only just been transferred from Palermo, first learned of this problem when two or three young women charged out of the assembled crowd and attacked them with kitchen knives.
Then, the crowd joined in the attack. The unrest spread from street to street, from plaza to plaza. By midnight Ferdinand’s men, and Morisset’s, found themselves fighting for their lives on the docks and in the Vicaria, the only parts of the city they had any control over.
On Saturday, two leaders emerged — the carbonari Michele Morelli and Giuseppe Silvati, who had been in hiding throughout Morisset’s reign. They stepped into the vacuum of leadership and took command of the uprising. When Ferdinand set up his cannons in the streets, they led flanking attacks through buildings, finding the owners or tenants and consulting them for the quickest routes, smashing through interior walls when necessary. Nails and broken glass scattered over the streets thwarted cavalry charges. By Monday morning, the Bourbon king had been driven back to his ships, and his ships back to sea.
As for Morisset, some have claimed that he tried to flee with Ferdinand, while others have claimed that he fought like a cornered rat until his capture. The truth is quite unromantic. The rebels found him in his quarters on the night of October 31, lying in bed with a migraine (an affliction he had suffered from, off and on, since his injury). He was dragged out of bed, shown before the screaming mob and hanged in front of a full-length mirror to general applause — the last victim of “death in the mirror.” (Visitors to Naples today, who visit the Duomo di Napoli and see the screaming, half-swollen, wildly asymmetric gargoyles on the western façade, are astounded to learn that the sculptures are modeled after a real human face.)
Arrigo Gillio, The War of Italian Unification
“To the Staffordshire Volunteers, I regret to inform you of the passing of Lieutenant Colonel James Thomas Morriset, lately of your regiment. Whatever else may be said of him, he was one of the bravest officers I ever had serving under me, and a man who suffered as few others have in the service of king and country.
“And now for an announcement that concerns us all — Naples has fallen. The city is in the hands of insurrectionists. Our supply line has been cut off.
“Furthermore, I have received an offer of cease-fire from Monsieur Murat — or, as I suppose we must now learn to call him, His Most Italian Majesty Gioacchino the First of the Murati Dynasty. Moreover, he has offered to permit the British army on Italian soil to retreat in arms to Terracina on the coast, there to await further orders from London. He seems quite confident that we will be withdrawn from this country rather than ordered to continue fighting him.
“Given recent events in the north, and now in Naples, he may well be right. Any road, I have accepted the cease-fire, and we march for Terracina today. God willing, we'll all be back on British shores before too long.
“To the soldiers of Naples and Sicily, it has been an honor serving with you. Your king may have failed you, but you did not fail him. Goodbye and good luck.”
And no sooner was Bianchi’s army in northern Italy than Italian partisans and skirmishers set about distracting and delaying him. The attacks were small-scale, involving no more than a few squads shooting from cover, and then fleeing. But they came once or twice a day and two or three times a night, from any direction, and were sometimes unexpectedly large and aggressive. One attack in particular overran an exposed company of horse artillery and spiked or otherwise sabotaged a dozen guns before being forced to withdraw.
As Bianchi pushed further into Italy, the attacks came less often on his army and more often on his logistics train. By the time he had reached the Po, he had found it necessary to split his army (once roughly twice the size of Ney’s) in two and use half of it to guard his supply lines. As for the attacks on the army itself, he had long since learned to use his cavalry to fight them off without his infantry breaking stride.
It was this that proved his ruin. On the morning of October 13, about an hour before dawn on the fields east of Marcaria, he knew that the French army was not far away, but did not know exactly where they were — and searching for them would be a hopeless task, with the ground swathed in heavy fog that cut visibility down to less than twenty meters. When he heard reports of a company of partisans shouting in Italian as they shot at the soldiers in the vanguard of his army, he casually ordered his hussars to deal with the matter and went back to plotting the day’s maneuvers.
Through the mist the hussars charged, sabers at the ready, preparing to plunge them into the backs of fleeing partisans. Perhaps, for a moment, they caught a glimpse of the indistinct but ominous shapes emerging from the gray darkness ahead as they advanced.
Then the fog filled with the yellow light of twenty thousand muzzle flares and a terrible thunder. Musket-balls and canister plunged into the hussars and their horses at a range of fifteen meters.
They had just found the French army. The partisans — whether they were real Italian partisans, or French scouts speaking Italian — had led them right onto the tips of their enemies’ bayonets. Those who survived the first volley realized at once that they were hopelessly outgunned, and turned to retreat.
A few miles away, Bianchi heard the volley, and knew at once what it meant. He immediately began giving the orders to ready his army for battle.
But this was not the army that had fought in the Juillet Lorrain or at Nancy. Its ranks had been hastily swelled by underequipped conscripts from all over the empire, not all of whom spoke German or had more than a vague sense of what was going on. Their training had consisted of one or two weeks of marching and weapons drill, and six to eight weeks of listening to their more experienced comrades tell them terrifying stories about the Italian front. These recruits reacted badly to surprise.
This was shown when the hussars returned and crossed the path of several particularly inexperienced units on Bianchi’s right wing. Seeing a horde of cavalrymen charging out of the fog, screaming in Hungarian and in many cases still holding their sabers, some of them thought they were under attack by Ney’s famous cavalry and opened fire. Others simply fled. Seeing their comrades fleeing caused others in turn to flee, and the effect snowballed. Only a quick series of orders by Bianchi kept his army from disintegrating entirely. Even so, three regiments of his infantry had just been routed from the battlefield by his own retreating cavalry… and Ney hadn’t even attacked yet.
When the fog lifted and Ney did attack, he was relentless. Seeing that Bianchi no longer had the strength to take the offensive, he ordered his center to hold while his left and right flanks tried again and again to roll up the Austrian line.
If he had chosen to retreat at this point, Bianchi might have been able to return to Trent. As it was, by the time he acknowledged that the battle was lost, Ney’s own cavalry had cut off his avenue of escape. By noon, he had already surrendered…
The end of October saw General Beresford engaged in a desperate war of maneuver. At Ceccano he had narrowly escaped a trap, with artillery units and riflemen loyal to the Pope holding the heights across the Sacco and the king attacking from the northeast, attempting to drive his Anglo-Sicilian force into the river. But now events in Naples would render his best efforts irrelevant.
Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies arrived in Naples on October 30. Most historians believe that it was Ferdinand’s intention to dismiss Morisset as city governor, take charge of Naples himself and thereby incur the gratitude of the populace. The city already appeared to have been pacified, or at least terrified into submission. And well it might have been — out of a population of nearly 315,000 (as of an 1814 census), Morisset hanged 4,154 over the course of 1818. (This compares with 99 who were executed in the aftermath of the fall of the Parthenopean Republic. It does not include those killed in street battles with the occupying army.) It is quite likely that everyone in Naples knew someone who had been killed by the “Monster.”
But before Ferdinand could make any announcements or set any of his plans in motion, someone else would seize the initiative. As Ferdinand stepped onto the dock, he was shot. The bullet grazed the top of his right ear. The would-be assassin fled, Ferdinand’s guards in hot pursuit. The assassin made it into the San Lorenzo area and disappeared into a tavern.
(Several taverns in the area now claim to be the one where the assassin took cover, but none of their claims have been substantiated. It is quite possible that the guards ran into the wrong one. For that matter, at least fifteen different men, including the British adventurer Lord Byron, have claimed to be the one who attempted to kill the Bourbon king.)
Unable to find the assassin, the guards pulled fifteen men whom they believed to be witnesses out of the tavern and detained them for questioning. At this point, two important facts come into play.
First, under Morisset’s regime arrest (or even “detention for questioning”) had come to be thought of as a prelude to execution. Second, a number of his underlings (whether Morisset himself even knew of this is a point of debate) had developed the ugly habit of extorting regular sexual favors from Neapolitan women who caught their eye by threatening to have their fathers, brothers or husbands taken and hanged as rebels. Several of the men that Ferdinand’s officers were now attempting to arrest were men whose lives had been used to threaten women in this way. The officers performing the arrests, who had only just been transferred from Palermo, first learned of this problem when two or three young women charged out of the assembled crowd and attacked them with kitchen knives.
Then, the crowd joined in the attack. The unrest spread from street to street, from plaza to plaza. By midnight Ferdinand’s men, and Morisset’s, found themselves fighting for their lives on the docks and in the Vicaria, the only parts of the city they had any control over.
On Saturday, two leaders emerged — the carbonari Michele Morelli and Giuseppe Silvati, who had been in hiding throughout Morisset’s reign. They stepped into the vacuum of leadership and took command of the uprising. When Ferdinand set up his cannons in the streets, they led flanking attacks through buildings, finding the owners or tenants and consulting them for the quickest routes, smashing through interior walls when necessary. Nails and broken glass scattered over the streets thwarted cavalry charges. By Monday morning, the Bourbon king had been driven back to his ships, and his ships back to sea.
As for Morisset, some have claimed that he tried to flee with Ferdinand, while others have claimed that he fought like a cornered rat until his capture. The truth is quite unromantic. The rebels found him in his quarters on the night of October 31, lying in bed with a migraine (an affliction he had suffered from, off and on, since his injury). He was dragged out of bed, shown before the screaming mob and hanged in front of a full-length mirror to general applause — the last victim of “death in the mirror.” (Visitors to Naples today, who visit the Duomo di Napoli and see the screaming, half-swollen, wildly asymmetric gargoyles on the western façade, are astounded to learn that the sculptures are modeled after a real human face.)
Arrigo Gillio, The War of Italian Unification
“To the Staffordshire Volunteers, I regret to inform you of the passing of Lieutenant Colonel James Thomas Morriset, lately of your regiment. Whatever else may be said of him, he was one of the bravest officers I ever had serving under me, and a man who suffered as few others have in the service of king and country.
“And now for an announcement that concerns us all — Naples has fallen. The city is in the hands of insurrectionists. Our supply line has been cut off.
“Furthermore, I have received an offer of cease-fire from Monsieur Murat — or, as I suppose we must now learn to call him, His Most Italian Majesty Gioacchino the First of the Murati Dynasty. Moreover, he has offered to permit the British army on Italian soil to retreat in arms to Terracina on the coast, there to await further orders from London. He seems quite confident that we will be withdrawn from this country rather than ordered to continue fighting him.
“Given recent events in the north, and now in Naples, he may well be right. Any road, I have accepted the cease-fire, and we march for Terracina today. God willing, we'll all be back on British shores before too long.
“To the soldiers of Naples and Sicily, it has been an honor serving with you. Your king may have failed you, but you did not fail him. Goodbye and good luck.”
-General William Carr Beresford, November 3, 1818
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