Up to the time of the arrival of the XVIIIth there had not been much fighting, for the French were engaged in mounting guns, and were not yet in strength to attempt a _coup-de-main_. When the Royal Irish landed they were marched up to the front, but were engaged in no affair of importance until the 30th of November, when they took part in a sortie against a large battery placed by Napoleon himself on the Aresnes heights, from which one of our principal works was commanded. The assaulting column, formed of 400 British, 300 Piedmontese, 600 Neapolitans, 600 Spaniards, and 400 French Royalists, was commanded by General O’Hara, one of the staff at Gibraltar, who had landed at Toulon with the XVIIIth. The instructions he issued were explicit. When the troops reached the plain at the foot of the heights, the column was to break into four detachments, the British on the left, and on reaching the summit they were to capture the battery, occupy the heights, and then stand fast; on no account whatever were they to follow the enemy in pursuit. After making their way, first through a belt of olive-trees intersected by stone walls, and then up a steep mountain cut into terraces of vineyards, the Allies gained the crest, surprised the French, and drove them headlong out of the battery. Had they remembered their orders the success would have been complete, for the guns could have been rolled down the height and carried back to Toulon; but unfortunately the men got out of hand, and dashed madly after the retreating French down a valley and up a hill on the other side, scattering in all directions as they pursued their flying foes. They had lost all vestige of cohesion when they were charged by formed bodies of the enemy, whose counter-stroke changed our victory into a defeat. General O’Hara was wounded and captured; and of the four hundred British engaged, twelve officers and about two hundred other ranks were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The survivors fell back to the battery and attempted to hold it, but being unsupported by their Continental comrades had finally to retreat into Toulon, though not before they had spiked six guns.
During the next fortnight the volume of the enemy’s fire increased daily; fresh batteries were unmasked in various directions, and everything tended to confirm the reports of spies and deserters that the French, now about 40,000 strong, were preparing for an attack in force. The preliminary bombardment began at 2 A.M. on the 16th of December, when Napoleon concentrated the fire of five batteries upon Fort Mulgrave, one of the most important of the western series of redoubts. It was held by a mixed force: a body of Spaniards occupied the northern half of the work; the southern was in charge of a detachment of British, under Captain W. Conolly, Royal Irish Regiment. By the end of the day the redoubt was in ruins, with half its garrison of seven hundred men disabled; at two o’clock in the morning of the 17th the French advanced against it, but though in overpowering force, for half an hour they made no progress till the Spaniards were seized with panic and left the British in the lurch. The enemy had begun to occupy the northern end of the work, when Conolly, though himself hard pressed, sent a subaltern and thirty-six men to retake it. With splendid courage this handful of soldiers drove back the Republicans, and for a time kept them at bay; but soon the weight of numbers began to tell, the survivors of the detachment were forced backwards, and at four o’clock the “remnants of the XVIIIth” were ousted from Fort Mulgrave. An hour or two later the French, breaking through the line of fortifications at a second point, carried Mont Faron, a hill 1800 feet high, which from the north partly commands the harbour and the town. On the enemy’s side of this mountain the slopes are steep and rocky; and as much labour had been expended in increasing their natural difficulties, Faron was considered so impregnable that only four hundred and fifty men were employed to guard its two miles of frontage. At daylight every work upon this hill was attacked and, though none of the British posts were driven in, the French poured through the gaps left by the Spaniards and Neapolitans, and established themselves upon the shoulder of Mont Faron from which Toulon is overlooked.