tances, when two
parties are working together to the same end, but under no common
control, each is prone to think the other behindhand in his work and
exacting in his demands. "Why don't Lord Hood land 500 men to work?"
said Colonel Moore, the general's right-hand man. "Our soldiers are
tired." Nelson, on the other hand, thought that Moore wanted over-much
battering done to the breach of a work, before he led the stormers to
it; and Hood, who was receiving frequent reports of the preparations
of the French fleet in Toulon, was impatient to have the siege pushed,
and thought the army dilatory. "The rapidity with which the French are
getting on at Toulon," he wrote confidentially to Nelson, "makes it
indispensably necessary for me to put the whole of the fleet under my
command in the best possible state for service; and I must soon apply
to the general for those parts of the regiments now on shore, ordered
by his Majesty to serve in lieu of marines, to be held in readiness to
embark at the shortest notice. I shall delay this application as long
as possible."

Nelson, being a seaman, sympathized of course with his own service,
and with Hood, for whom he had most cordial admiration, both personal
and professional. But at the same time he was on the spot, a constant
eye-witness to the difficulties of the siege, a clear-headed observer,
with sound military instincts, and fair-minded when facts were before
him. The army, he wrote to Hood, is harassed to death, and he notices
that it suffers from sickness far more than do the seamen. He repeats
the request for more seamen, and, although he seems to doubt the
reasonableness of the demand, evidently thinks that they should be
furnished, if possible. Hood accordingly sent an additional detachment
of three hundred, raising the number on shore to the five hundred
suggested by Moore. "I had much rather," he wrote, "that a hundred
seamen should be landed unnecessarily, than that one should be kept
back that was judged necessary." On the other hand, when the general,
after a work bearing on the bay had been destroyed, suggests that the
navy might help, by laying the ships against the walls, Nelson takes
"the liberty of observing that the business of laying wood before
walls was much altered of late," and adds the common-sense remark,
that "the quantity of powder and shot which would be fired away on
such an attack could be much better directed from a battery on shore."
This conversat