BRITISH TROOPS IN ITALY.
Even if limited to Italy north of the Apennines, which disputes with the Netherlands the doubtful distinction of being the "cockpit of Europe," the statement is not absolutely true. That theatre of so many great actions from the days of Hannibal to those of Napoleon was familiar enough to English soldiers in the days of stout old John Hawkweed, but in the annals of the British Army it has only once figured, and that on a most obscure page and by the strangest of accidents. But the Italian islands have often afforded opportunities for the activities of our troops, and oven the main- land has seen more than one British expedition within its confines. It does not need any very recondite topographical knowledge to locate Maids Vale, but it is to be feared that even Macaulay and his schoolboy might be at a loss to tell off-hand the story of the brilliant little action in Calabria from which that salubrious district derives its name, and for which some half-dozen of our regiments boar a well-earned battle honour on their colours. Yet was it not on that campaign that the Lancashire. Fusiliers antioi. patod the parade order of the takers of Lung-tong-pent The per- sonality of its defender, Sir Hudson Lawn, may make the British occupation and defence of Capri rather more familiar, but the opera- tion in which Maids and Capri are the most outstanding episodes was one of real importance, even more for whet it prevented than for what it accomplished. For eight years and more a substantial portion of the modem Kingdom of Italy was preserved from Napoleon by a British force, which. at times mustered as many as twenty thousand men, and to these troops and to the British Navy it was due that the Napoleonic occupation-of Italy never extended to the island portion of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilia'. For years Murat's troops on the mainland shore of the Straits of -Messina watched the Redcoats who faced them on the Sicilian aide. Once, and once only, they made the venture of a crossing, tempted to try their fortune by a dead calm which crippled our ships and seemed to give their flotilla a chance. But though the leading detachments managed to set foot on Sicilian soil, they were met and hurled back into the water by the old 21st, the Scots Fusiliers of to-day, and the venture ended in complete failure, and heavy lessee to the daring Frenchmen who had tried it.
The British occupation of Sicily, the pivot to a large extent of our Mediterranean policy and strategy in the Napoleonic Wa, arose out of the collapse of an Anglo-Russian expedition to Naples in the autumn of 1805. This expedition was intended to unite with the army of our ally, the Bourbon ruler of the Two Siciliee, and to advance northward from Naples to co-operate with the Arch- duke Charles of Austria, who was proposing to drive the French out of Northern Italy. But this dream was shattered by Napoleon at Ulm, the Archduke hurried back to try to save Vienna, and the Anglo-Russians had to betake themselves to their ships in igno- minious haste. Naples was evacuated, the King fled to Sicily. and shortly afterwards invited the British to land at Messina and defend the island part of his kingdom against the French who had overrun his mainland dominions. From the very beginning of 1808 down to Napoleon's overthrow the British troops remained in Sicily, and it was in a sortie from the island into Calabria that they met and overthrew at Maids a French force which outnumbered them by twenty per cent. Students of tactics know Maids mainly
because here the French and English tactical systems met in a con- flict which was a prelude to the Peninsula, but the battle has real importance in the story of our struggle against Napoleon. The victory was not followed up, yet had the chance it gave been taken its consequences might have been far-reaching. But the story of the British in Sicily is an unduly neglected chapter in the Napoleonic Wars, one of the " might-have-been " of history which are none the less worth studying although they were never developed.
In the spring of 1814 that many-aided personality Lord William Bentinck left Sicily for Leghorn with the bulk of the army of occupation, fourteen thousand in all, partly British, the rest a polyglot collection of foreigners in British pay—King's German Legion, Anglo-Italian Levy, Corsican Rangers, Greek and Calabrian Light Infantry. After landing unopposed, he pushed forward along the Eastern Riviera, and on April 18th, after some sharp fighting, captured Genoa from the French. The episode has remained all the more obscure because Bentinck's hopes of restoring the independence of the Genoese Republic were brought to naught : at the Congress of Vienna the diplomats of Europe insisted on handing the city over to the King of Sardinia. But the capture was a well-managed expedition, hardly deserving of complete oblivion, and certainly well worth a battle honour to the British battalions engaged in it— the present West Yorkshires, Scots Fusiliers, 1st East Surreys, 1st Wiltshires.
But Genoa and Maida do not exhaust the occasions on which British troops have fought in Italy. It is true that Marlborough's project for the campaign of 1708 was never carried out : he had planned a march even more spectacular and daring than the move to the Danube which culminated gloriously at Blenheim, a move which would have taken him and the British cavalry far away from obstructive Dutch Deputies to carry help to our hard-pressed ally the Duke of Savoy in Piedmont. It was left to Marlborough's great colleague Eugene to relieve Turin, but history is the poorer for a dramatic might-have-been. About a hundred years later a British force went out to the Mediterranean intended for service in Italy, the army with which in March, 1801, gallant old Ralph Abercromby landed in Egypt to find victory and a soldier's grave outside Alexandria. The plan was that Abercromby should co-operate with the Austrians in an invasion of Southern France, but before his transports could even reach Minorca Napoleon had overthrown Melas at Marengo and Abercromby's opportunity was snatched from him.
Twice, then, British forces just missed making history in the plains of Northern Italy. When they were seen there it was in sufficiently strange circumstances. In the autumn of 1813 a small detachment of the British troops who had occupied the Ionian Islands had an active and amphibious time in the Adriatic, helping our Fleet to clear the Dalmatian islands of their French garrisons, and finally arriving off Trieste just in time to assist the Austrians to capture that port. When in January, 1814, the Austrians under Nugent were shipped across the Adriatic and landed at the mouth of the Po, this little party, a few hundreds of the 35th Foot, now the 1st Royal Sussex, and of de Roll's Swiss regiment in our service, went with him. Nugent moved forward by way of Reggio on Piacenza and saw some sharp fighting, but unfortunately no account of the part played by his little British contingent is available. None of the officers who took part in this strange experience has left diary or letters, and one must merely picture this little party of Bed- posts marching and fighting aide by side with the Austrian White- coats. That their presence in Nugent's ranks contributed anything appreciable to the liberation of Italy from Napoleon in 1814 no one would attempt to assert, but there undoubtedly they were. Their khaki-clad successors of 1917 have come to Italy in a sterner hour and with a greater part to play, but among the distinctions and honours one hopes to see them gain they cannot set the title "Primus in Italia."
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