The 50th and the 51st, which, for some weeks, had been standing ready to go to the relief of the garrison of Toulon, at once embarked (December 5), and young Rice considered himself in luck's way in being called upon to take the field so soon after joining. Ill-fortune, however, still dogged his footsteps, for the captains of the transports delayed for three days in putting to sea, thus losing a fair wind, so that it was not until the 29th that the regiment arrived off Toulon, when it learned that the place had been evacuated in haste ten days before, the garrison having made an unsuccessful sally, in which General O'Hara was severely wounded and captured. Finding that the garrison was now too weak to hold the town against the vastly superior numbers of the Republican forces, Lord Hood set fire to as many as possible of the French ships in the harbour, blew up powder and stores, successfully embarked the British garrison, as well as nearly 15,000 Royalists, who feared for their safety when the Republicans should enter the town, and sailed for Hyères Bay[10] (a little to the east of Toulon), where, on the 31st December, the transports conveying the 50th and 51st joined the fleet--to be received very coldly by the Admiral. But Lord Hood's disappointment at the lateness of their arrival was no greater than that of the officers of the reinforcing regiments. That Toulon should have been abandoned, and that their prospects of honour and glory should have been torn from them by no fault of their own was bad enough, but, to make matters worse, the 51st lost all their regimental baggage and stores, including everything belonging to the officers, which had been placed on a separate vessel for conveyance to Toulon. Sam Rice, a philosopher even in those days, refers to this minor trouble very briefly. "The officers' and the regimental baggage," he wrote, "went into Toulon in the _Moselle_ frigate,[11] which separated from the transports during the night and did not know that the town was evacuated, because the English flag was kept flying. You see we military gentlemen are subject to losses as well as the rest of the world." And the loss both to officers and the men was severe, for their colonel had been at great pains to stock the ship with everything that the regiment could want. CHAPTER III. THE ATTACK ON CORSICA.