Various - Harper's New Monthly Magazine. No. XVI.—September, 1851—Vol. III

Though Little Gibraltar was thus taken, the conflict continued all around the city until morning. Shells were exploding, and hot shot falling in the thronged dwellings. Children in the cradle, and maidens in their chambers had limb torn from limb by the dreadful missiles. Conflagrations were continually bursting forth, burning the mangled and the dying, while piercing shrieks of dismay and of agony rose even above the thunders of the terrific cannonade. The wind howled in harmony with the awful scene, and a cold and drenching rain swept the streets. One can not contemplate such a conflict without wondering that a God of mercy could have allowed his children thus brutally to deform this fair creation with the spirit of the world of woe. For the anguish inflicted upon suffering humanity that night a dread responsibility must rest somewhere. A thousand houses were made desolate. Thousands of hearts were lacerated and crushed, with every hope of life blighted forever. The English government thought that they did right, under the circumstances of the case, to send their armies and take possession of Toulon. Napoleon deemed that he was nobly discharging his duty, in the Herculean and successful endeavors he made to drive the invaders from the soil of France. It is not easy for man, with his limited knowledge, to adjust the balance of right and wrong. But here was a crime of enormous magnitude committed – murder, and robbery, and arson, and violence – the breaking of every commandment of God upon the broadest scale; and a day of Judgment is yet to come in which the responsibility will be with precise and accurate justice awarded.

The direful tragedy was, however, not yet terminated. When the morning sun dawned dimly and coldly through the lurid clouds, an awful spectacle was revealed to the eye. The streets of Toulon were red with blood, while thousands of the mangled and the dead, in all the most hideous forms of mutilation, were strewed through the dwellings and along the streets. Fierce conflagrations were blazing in many parts of the city, while mouldering ruins and shattered dwellings attested the terrific power of the midnight storm of man's depravity. The cannonade was still continued, and shells were incessantly exploding among the terrified and shrieking inhabitants.

Napoleon, having accomplished the great object of his exertions, the capture of Little Gibraltar, allowed himself not one moment for triumph, or repose, or regret; but, as regardless of the carnage around him, as if he were contemplating a field over which the scythe of the mower had passed, immediately prepared his guns to throw their plunging balls into the English ships, and to harass them at every point of exposure. No sooner did Lord Howe see the tricolored flag floating from the parapets of Little Gibraltar, than, conscious that the city was no longer tenable, he made signal for the fleet to prepare for immediate evacuation. The day was passed by the English in filling their ships with stores from the French arsenals, they having determined to destroy all the munitions of war which they could not carry away. The victorious French were straining every nerve in the erection of new batteries, to cripple and, if possible, to destroy the retiring foe. Thus passed the day, when another wintry night settled gloomily over the beleaguered and woe-exhausted city. The terror of the royalists was dreadful. They saw, by the embarkation of the British sick and wounded, the indications that the English were to evacuate the city, and that they were to be left to their fate. And full well they knew what doom they, and their wives and their children, were to expect from republican fury in those days of unbridled violence. The English took as many of the French ships of the line as could be got ready for sea, to accompany them in their escape. The rest, consisting of fifteen ships of the line and eight frigates, were collected to be burned. A fire-ship, filled with every combustible substance, was towed into their midst, and at ten o'clock the torch was applied. The night was dark and still. The flames of the burning ships burst forth like a volcano from the centre of the harbor, illumining the scene with lurid and almost noonday brilliance. The water was covered with boats, crowded with fugitives, hurrying, frantic with despair, in the abandonment of homes and property, to the English and Spanish ships. More than twenty thousand loyalists, men, women, and children, of the highest rank, crowded the beach and the quays, in a state of indescribable consternation, imploring rescue from the infuriate army of the republicans howling like wolves around the walls of the city, eager to get at their prey. In increase of the horror of the scene, a most furious cannonade was in progress all the time from every ship and every battery. Cannon balls tore their way through family groups. Bombs exploded upon the thronged decks of the ships, and in the crowded boats. Many boats were thus sunk, and the shrieks of drowning women and children pierced through the heavy thunders of the cannonade. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters were separated from each other, and ran to and fro upon the shore in delirious agony. The daughter was left mangled and dying upon the beach; the father was borne by the rush into one boat, the wife into another, and no one knew who was living, and who, mercifully, was dead. The ships, the magazines, the arsenals were all now in flames. The Jacobins of Toulon began to emerge from garrets and cellars, and frenzied with intoxication, like demons of darkness, with torch and sword, rioted through the city, attacked the flying royalists, tore their garments from their backs, and inflicted upon maids and matrons every conceivable brutality. A little after midnight two frigates, each containing many thousand barrels of gunpowder, blew up, with an explosion so terrific, that it seemed to shake, like an earthquake, even the solid hills. As at last the rear-guard of the English abandoned the ramparts and hurried to their boats, the triumphant republican army, nearly forty thousand strong, came rushing into the city at all points. The allied fleet, with favoring winds, spread its sails, and soon disappeared beneath the horizon of the silent sea, bearing away nearly twenty thousand wretched exiles to homelessness, penury, and a life-long woe.

Dugommier, the commander of the republican army, notwithstanding all his exertions, found it utterly impossible to restrain the passions of his victorious soldiers, and for many days violence and crime ran rampant in the doomed city. The crime of having raised the flag of royalty, and of having surrendered the city and its stores to the foe, was one not to be forgiven. The Jacobin government in Paris sent orders for a bloody and a terrible vengeance, that the loyalists all over France might be intimidated from again conspiring with the enemy. Napoleon did every thing in his power to protect the inhabitants from the fury which was wreaked upon them. He witnessed, with anguish, scenes of cruelty which he could not repress. An old merchant, eighty-four years of age, deaf and almost blind, was guilty of the crime of being worth five millions of dollars. The Convention, coveting his wealth, sentenced him to the scaffold. "When I witnessed the inhuman execution of this old man," said Napoleon, "I felt as if the end of the world was at hand." He exposed his own life to imminent peril in his endeavors to save the helpless from Jacobin rage. One day a Spanish prize was brought into the harbor, on board of which had been taken the noble family of Chabrillant, well known loyalists, who were escaping from France. The mob, believing that they were fleeing to join the emigrants and the allied army in their march against Paris, rushed to seize the hated aristocrats, and to hang them, men and women, at the nearest lamp-posts. The guard came up for their rescue and were repulsed. Napoleon saw among the rioters several gunners who had served under him during the siege. He mounted a platform, and their respect for their general secured him a hearing. He induced them, by those powers of persuasion which he so eminently possessed, to intrust the emigrants to him, to be tried and sentenced the next morning. At midnight he placed them in an artillery wagon, concealed among barrels of powder and casks of bullets, and had them conveyed out of the city as a convoy of ammunition. He also provided a boat to be in waiting for them on the shore, and they embarked and were saved.