Forget visits and forget advisers: Lieutenant Nicholas Ramage is now a French admiral whose sole concern is to get at least 100,000 troops on shore and ready to fight. Where would be the best spot to land them?
Romney Marsh: somewhere along the dozen miles of flat coast between Dymchurch and Dungeness!
He reached for bis pen and began writing:
'1 Landing troops from flat-bottomed barges requires (ideally) a smooth, sand or pebble beach. The barges should arrive near high water so they dry out as the tide falls and their cargo can be unloaded on to the beach.
2 The beach should not have off-lying rocks or sandbanks on which barges could strand themselves, but must be reasonably well sheltered from prevailing westerly winds.
3 The countryside inshore of the beaches must be reasonably flat so that large numbers of cavalry and troops can deploy immediately.
4 The beaches must be readily identifiable from seaward because navigation in the barges will vary from poor to non-existent.
5 The stretch of coast from Dungeness to Dymchurch, about eight miles, fulfils all these requirements, and barges would need only to steer for the southernmost piece of land (Dungeness itself).
6 It also provides the shortest practical sea crossing for the Boulogne ships and adds only a small distance for those from Calais.'
He put down the pen and read over what he had written. As far as he was concerned, if the French troops managed to land, they would march first towards London. They would cross Romney Marsh, that strange, secretive part of Kent, absolutely flat for miles, much of it below sea-level and only saved from flooding by the sea wall, and laced with more canals and drainage ditches than there were hedgerows. They would find scattered hamlets built round squat, square-towered churches, and peopled by the dour Marsh folk, men who smuggled, fished, bred sheep and kept their own counsel. They would find few trees on the Marsh and those there were bent by the wind. The Marsh had precious little but mutton for an invader to plunder . . .
He put his notes in his pocket and replaced the papers in the portfolio. A day spent shut up in an airless room, poring over Le Moniteur's fine print, had left him with a headache and, for that matter, an empty feeling in his stomach as he contemplated the enormity of the task ahead. The whole thing seemed absurd until one realized that the Admiralty had no choice: their only chance of discovering the answers in good time was by sending a man to Boulogne, the port which was obviously the French headquarters. The Admiralty had nothing to lose and everything to gain; the man had nothing to gain and his life to lose. They needed to send that man at once, so although they might just have the man - fluent in French, with plenty of experience of working in France as an agent - obviously if he was not available they had to pick the least unsuitable man, and he happened to be called Ramage. The devil take the Duchess of Manston, he thought sourly; but for her damned ball I'd still be down at St Kew, out of sight and probably out of mind as far as the Admiralty, Lord Nelson and French invasion plans are concerned. . .
CHAPTER FOUR
As the carriage stopped at the top of Wrotham Hill to let the coachman push a metal shoe under each of the rear wheels, so that the drag would prevent the carriage careering down out of control, Ramage walked round to stretch his legs. Almost the whole of the Weald of Kent was laid out before him, the hop fields, meadows and orchards fading into the distance in geometric patterns that were softly-coloured exercises in perspective. The clouds threw fast moving shadows which, from this height, reminded him of wind shadows across a green sea, with the red-brick hop kilns and their stubby wooden spires looking like buoys marking roads and byways.
So far the war against France, fought for almost a dozen years, had left no marks or scars on the countryside of England. Prices were much higher in the shops and markets, and there was hardly a village which did not boast a son or husband away in the Army or at sea in one of the King's ships. But unlike the Low Countries, Spain and Italy, there were no ruined or burned-out houses, no empty hamlets and fields overgrown because people had fled or been killed or left impoverished by Bonaparte's invading troops, who reckoned to live off the land.
'Living off the land' was a polite way of describing how an army looted its way across a continent, stealing food for its stomach and valuables for its pockets. A hundredweight sack of grain, a pair of silver candlesticks from the church altar, a peasant's store of wine which was maturing before being sold in the autumn to pay all his bills, a woman's honour and her man's life if he tried to defend it - Bonaparte's Army took it all and thought nothing of it because it was done in the name of Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité. Ramage shivered when he thought of the Invasion Flotilla preparing for sea in Calais and Boulogne within sight of the English coast.
The coachman called and Ramage walked back to the carriage, reluctant to climb inside and settle back on the seat whose padding exuded a damp and musty smell with every movement he made. As the horses moved, the metal shoes began to grate and occasionally screech as one or other dragged over a sharp stone. The second coachman, now sitting behind ready to lean on the brake lever, shouted across the roof to the man at the reins.
How did the Men of Kent and the Kentish Men - the former living on the east side of the Stour, the latter to the west - regard the prospect of Boney coming? The innkeepers and potmen and porters on the road up to London from Cornwall seemed blissfully unaware or blithely unconcerned, and he guessed that most of the folk on the sixty-five miles of road from London to Dover had the same attitude. He was well over a quarter of the way to Dover and had yet to hear Bonaparte's name mentioned, and so far not a sign of soldier or volunteer on sentry duty; not an Army camp or field headquarters.
The journey was tedious enough, but everything about it felt unreal. At first he thought it was the effect of having spent so much time at sea: the rolling green countryside made such a contrast that it seemed separated from him by a pane of glass. But as the carriage arrived at the bottom of Wrotham Hill without mishap and the metal shoes were removed and hooked up under the axle, and the horses whipped up so that the carriage soon reached Maidstone, he began to have second thoughts.
By the time they arrived at Lenham, where the horses changed once again, he was feeling sleepy and numbed - the result of such an early start from Charing Cross and the drumming of the wheels - but still trying to analyse his feelings. Finally, when the carriage stopped for fifteen minutes at Ashford, giving him time to eat a hurried cold meat pie at the Saracen's Head while the coachmen changed horses in the yard, he realized that he had not felt the unreality on the journey up from Cornwalclass="underline" he first sensed it, he now remembered sheepishly, after the carriage left Charing Cross and clattered out of London on the Dover road.
Again the coachman was calling and Ramage, after paying his bill, had hardly settled comfortably in his seat before the carriage had left Willesborough behind and the horses were alternately galloping down one long hill and struggling up the next as the road rose and fell through Mersham, Brabourne, Smeeth and Sellindge. The hop fields were becoming scattered now; more frequently sheep were grazing and bare patches of soil sometimes showed whitish-grey chalk streaks, reminding him that the road ran parallel to the North Downs a few miles away on his left and which would reach the sea at the South Foreland between Folkstone and Dover.