French army, was born in Dublin in the year 1750, and was descended
from an ancient Irish family which had always been strongly attached to
the Roman Catholic religion, and opposed to the interests of England.
So deep was the animosity of his father to the church and government
as established in Ireland, that in 1765 he took Charles to France, and
there recommended him, when only in his fifteenth year, to enlist as a
private hussar in the Regiment de Lauzun, a distinguished cavalry corps
of the old French service, raised originally in the departement of the
Garonne. He accompanied this corps to America, where he served in the
War of Independence under the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette, Grand
Provost of the kingdom of France, and was present in most of those
battles in which Washington and his generals so signally discomfited
the troops of Great Britain. Association with officers of the United
States army, added to those impressions made upon him during his youth
in Ireland and the teachings of his father, caused Kilmaine to imbibe
strongly the sentiments of a revolutionist.
He repeatedly distinguished himself in action; and his colonel, the
gallant Biron, after passing him through the more subordinate ranks,
appointed him sous-lieutenant of a troop.
On the conclusion of the war, the Irish hussar returned with his
regiment to France, full of those ideas of liberty and insurrection
which he had seen so signally triumphant in the New World; and nearly
all his brother officers had imbibed the same opinions. Thus it was
with ill-concealed joy that the young Kilmaine and his comrades, the
Hussars de Lauzun, in 1789, saw a Revolution which seemed destined to
achieve results like those they had witnessed in America, break forth
in old monarchical France.
In 1789 he was appointed captain of his troop, and continued to serve
with the hussars, who became so much attached to him, that during the
tumults of 1794 he contributed greatly, by his influence, presence
and example, to retain under their colours nearly the whole of the
regiment, which like the regiment of Royal Germans and the Hussars de
Saxe, seemed disposed to desert _en masse_. Thanks to the patriotic
zeal displayed by Kilmaine in the cause of his adopted country, the
officers of noble family who chose to become emigrants were alone lost
to the service; but this proved to him a new source of advancement, and
he was soon appointed a _chef d'escadre_, which in the French army is
equal to the rank of a general officer, being commander of a division;
and about this time he enjoyed the friendship of his countryman, the
Comte O'Kelly, who was ambassador of France at Mayence, with an income
of 30,000 livres per annum.
As a chef d'escadre Kilmaine served throughout the first campaigns of
the Revolution, and under Dumourier and Lafayette commanded a corps of
that army which burst into the Netherlands and annexed that territory
to republican France.
He fought with remarkable bravery at the great battle of Gemappes,
on the 6th November, 1792, and with his hussars repeatedly charged
the Austrians, driving them _sabre à la main_ along the road that
leads from Mons to Valenciennes; and so pleased was his general, the
unfortunate Dumourier, that in the moment of victory he named him
colonel; but this nomination was not confirmed by the minister of war.
However, he was soon after gratified by a brevet of maréchal de camp,
which made him, in rank, second only to a lieutenant-general.
He continued to serve with this army, and to be one of its most
active and able officers, during all the sufferings which succeeded
the victory at Gemappes. It consisted of forty-eight battalions of
infantry, and three thousand two hundred cavalry. In December, by the
neglect of the Revolutionary Government, these troops were shirtless,
shoeless, starving and in rags; fifteen hundred men deserted; the
cavalry of Kilmaine were soon destitute of boots, saddles, carbines,
pistols and even sabres; the military chest was empty, and six thousand
troop and baggage horses died at Lisle and Tongres, for want of forage.
"To such a state," says Dumourier, "was the victorious army of Gemappes
reduced after the conquest of Belgia!"
Honourable testimony has been given to the unceasing efforts of
Kilmaine to preserve order among his soldiers amid these horrors;
and with other staff-officers, he frequently endeavoured by private
contribution to make out a day's subsistence for their men, who roved
about in bands, robbing the villages around their cantonments at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and in revenge many were murdered by the peasants when
found straggling alone beyond their out--posts.
After the defection and flight of General Dumourier, Kilmaine adhered
to the National Convention, and by that body was appointed a general
of division; and now he redoubled his energies to restore order in
the army, which by the defection of its leader was almost disbanded;
thus, in one month after General Dampierre took command, so ably was he
seconded by Kilmaine, the discipline was completely established.
He commanded the advance-guard of Dampierre in the new campaign against
the allied powers, on the failure of the congress at Antwerp on the
8th of April, 1793; and his leader bears the highest testimony to the
gallantry and noble conduct of Kilmaine, in the "murderous affairs of
the 1st and 2nd May;" in which, according to the official report, he
had two chargers shot under him.
Six days of incessant skirmishing succeeded, during which Kilmaine
never had his boots off, nor returned his sabre once to the scabbard;
and he displayed the most reckless valour on the 8th of May, in that
battle fought by Dampierre to deliver Condé.
The French were routed with great loss; Dampierre was slain; and on
Kilmaine as an active cavalry officer devolved the task of covering the
retreat of the infuriated and disorderly army, which fell back from
Condé-sur-l'Escaut, which is a barrier town, and was then the nominal
lordship of the unfortunate Duke d'Enghien.
On General la Marche succeeding Dampierre, he sent Kilmaine with his
division to the great forest of Ardennes, which formed a part of
the theatre of war, on the invasion of France by the allies; but he
remained there only a short time, and rejoined the main army, which he
found in the most critical circumstances.
The fall of Dampierre and the arrestment of Custine acted fatally on
the army of the North, which was now reduced to about thirty thousand
rank and file, and these remained in a disorderly state, without a
proper chief, and without aim or object--its manoeuvres committed to
chance or directed by ignorance; for, with the exception of Kilmaine,
its leaders were destitute of skill, experience, and energy. Quitting
the camp of Cæsar, they returned to their fortified position at
Famars, three miles distant from Valenciennes, the approach to which
it covered. Here they were attacked on the 23rd of May, driven back,
and obliged to abandon the city to its own garrison under General
Ferrand; a success which enabled the allies under the Duke of York
to lay immediate siege to Condé and to Valenciennes, the two most
important barrier towns upon the northern frontier. While the army of
the North continued in full retreat towards the Scheldt, the British
commander-in-chief briskly attacked Valenciennes, which General Ferrand
first laid in ashes, and then delivered up; his garrison, as the reward
of their obstinate defence, being permitted to march out by the gate of
Cambray, on the 28th of July, with all _the honours of war_. Condé had
already fallen on the 10th of the same month.
General Custine, who in the two preceding campaigns had rendered such
essential services to the faithless Convention, was meanwhile brought
to trial on the charge of corresponding with the enemy, and fell a
sacrifice to the malice of his accusers.
It was on the banks of the Scheldt that Kilmaine rejoined the army
early in August, with his division from Ardennes; and now his position
became almost desperate. In presence of the scaffold erected by the
ferocious mutineers for all the vanquished generals, and in a camp
where no suspected person dared to assume the precarious office of
leader, when pressed upon him, he accepted the bâton provisionally, and
in the meantime said to the representatives who were sent from Paris to
manage affairs and act as spies upon the army, "that he wished another
more skilful than himself should take the great responsibility of
leading the troops of the Republic."
His presence for a time appeased the tumults in the army. Though upon
the banks of the Scheldt, and having before him both the Duke of York
and the Prince of Coburg, Kilmaine, with only twenty-four thousand
ill-appointed troops, dared not attempt to attack them; for if he
fought and lost the day, he could thereafter assume no position of
sufficient strength to prevent the allies from penetrating to Paris
and crushing the power of the Convention. After so many levies and
enrolments, that body had no longer a battalion to spare, and had
around it only the frothy orators of armed clubs, and the refuse of
prisons; thus it dared not abandon the capital or retire beyond the
Loire, for now the men of Poitou, Bretagne, and La Vendée were in arms
under the white banner, and elsewhere the tides of war and politics
were setting in against them. At this crisis Mayence had capitulated,
after a three months' bombardment. Toulon was under the cannon of the
British; the Spaniards had invaded Roussillon; the Austro-Sardinians
menaced Provence, the ancient patrimony of the House of Anjou; and on
the Alps their troops hung over Dauphine and Vienne; finally, after
the revolution of the 31st of May, which had assured the triumph of
Robespierre, Lyons, Marseilles, and all the departments of the south,
with those of the west, were roused against the pride, power, and
oppression of the Convention.
If it was really true that the allied monarchs wished to re-establish
the fallen throne of Louis XVI.,--if, as they had so proudly announced
in their manifestos, it was to restore order to bleeding and desolated
France, and to repress the Republic and its horrors,--they had
displayed their standards in the Netherlands, never were circumstances
more favourable to them than after the retreat of Kilmaine towards
the Scheldt: but the secret measures of wily diplomatists had more
influence then, on events, than the arms of the allied kings.
It appears that, in the second campaign, when the allies were masters
of Condé and Valenciennes, and saw that the road to Paris was almost
open to them, the Austrians wished to take their revenge locally for
the cruel deeds of which they had been spectators in the Camp de
la Lune; and were more intent upon gratifying this sentiment than
advancing into the heart of France.
The Prince of Coburg had shown himself from the first frank, loyal, and
gallant; he had promised to Dumourier to concur in his daring project
for re-establishing the monarchy, and for that purpose had engaged
to form an auxiliary force to aid him, while solemnly renouncing all
projects of aggrandizement for the crown of Austria. But for these
engagements he had not received from his cabinet either instructions or
authority. When Thugut was supreme director of the Austrian affairs,
it was to these rash promises of the prince his consent was required;
he disapproved of them so strongly, that they were cancelled by the
Emperor of Austria, and a congress met at Antwerp, where, in concert
with Britain, it was decided that in the result of the war the allies
ought to find indemnities for the past, and guarantees for the future
peace of Europe.
These were the expressions of the protocol which the members of the
congress comprehended without difficulty; but French diplomatists
loudly declared that a projected dismemberment of France was clearly
announced in its phraseology.
One thing is certain: not a reference was made therein to the House of
Bourbon, or to the throne of Louis--that throne of which Dumourier,
in concert with the Prince of Coburg, had so boldly promised the
restoration in his manifesto of the 5th April; and not a measure was
taken for the advantage or safety of the beautiful and unhappy Marie
Antoinette, then languishing in prison at Paris, and over whose devoted
head hung the blade of the guillotine, and whom a simple menace from
her nephew the Emperor, threatening the advance of his armies, might
perhaps have saved.
At all events, it seemed sufficiently evident to the jealous and
excitable French that the allies were no longer true to the interests
of the fallen Bourbons; and equally so that it was not to restore them
the Austrians at least made war. It was in _his own name_--not that of
Louis XVII., king of France and Navarre--their emperor took possession
of those fortified places and provinces which his armies overran; and
after he became master of Condé and Valenciennes, he no longer cared to
define or form a frontier for those districts of the Netherlands which
once he proposed to cede to the Prussians; but which Thugut now wished
to preserve to the descendants of Rudolph of Hapsburg.
At the same time the Duke of York, who from his own cabinet had
received orders and instructions similar to those given to the
Prince of Coburg, in the name of George III., resolved to seize upon
Dunkerque, which the English had coveted of old; but he did not wait
for the departure of a British fleet prepared for this object. The
naval squadron was delayed, and in the meantime the duke deliberated
with the Austrian general under the ramparts of Valenciennes, to
learn if, before engaging in new sieges, they might not give to the
French army a final blow which would deprive Kilmaine of all power of
interrupting their combined operations.
This was a very simple question, yet they were fourteen days in
coming to a conclusion. Though Valenciennes, as already stated, had
capitulated on the 28th of July, it was not until the 8th of August
that the Austro-British army was in motion, and its advance guard
beheld the camp of Cæsar; this on the very day after Kilmaine had
wisely evacuated the fortifications and retreated southwards.
It is said that he fully anticipated the march of the combined armies;
and this was sufficiently probable, for we know that the committees
of the National Convention had mysterious means of procuring secret
intelligence, not only from the cabinets of the allies, but from the
staff officers of the German troops!
Kilmaine in retiring only obeyed the dictates of wisdom and necessity,
and quitted a position which he could not defend, as his army was
reduced by defeat and desertion, mutinous, or as the French style it,
_demoralized_.
If the allies had wished to follow and engage him upon the Scarpe
or the Somme, a last effort could easily have been made to disperse
his troops completely, and then seize upon Paris, where they might
have torn the Revolution from its very basis. But such was not the
intention of the allied generals. "Their aim on this occasion," says
a French writer, "was to profit by our disorders and revolutions to
make themselves masters of our places and provinces after assuring
themselves of indemnities and guarantees, and to leave the volcano to
consume itself, as a Prussian prince said, not long ago: it must be
admitted, that never had this policy shown itself more evidently in its
shameful nudity!" But the reader must bear in mind that these are the
opinions of a Frenchman and a sympathizer with the Convention.
Such was the state of matters when Kilmaine, having abandoned the
untenable camp of Cæsar, and fallen back beyond the Scarpe, a navigable
river of French Flanders (but still a narrower barrier than the
Scheldt) prepared again for retreat, and marched towards the Somme,
another river which falls into the British Channel between Crotoy and
Sainte Valori. This was his last position--his last asylum; and now the
chiefs of the allies, instead of pushing on in pursuit of his retiring
bands to complete the triumphs so well begun, faced about, and wheeled
off to seize Dunkerque and Quesnay.
It was in autumn that the Royal Duke appeared before the former; and
there his troops received a check which proved but the commencement of
a long series of disasters; the latter was stormed by the Austrians,
and retaken by the French in the following year.
But what must astonish us, even at this epoch of deception and
duplicity, political insanity and revenge, is the startling fact that
the brave Kilmaine, who had rendered such gallant services to that new
and most faithless Republic--he who by a judicious retreat (executed
_against_ the advice of the meddling and presumptuous representatives
of the people, and in consequence thereof perilled his life) had
preserved to shattered France her most important army, was precisely
for that reason denounced to the Convention, arrested by its orders,
and flung into a loathsome prisons at Paris, where he passed a year;
being but too happy, in the obscurity of his dungeon, that he had not
perished on the scaffold like the gallant Custine, his predecessor
in the command; like his old colonel and protector Biron, and like
Houchard, who for the brief period of fifteen days had been his
successor, and who, after winning a signal and decided victory over the
Duke of York--a victory alike honourable to himself and to the arms of
France, expiated by a cruel death the grave fault of having forgotten
for a moment the powers of a bullying representative of the people!
Kilmaine only recovered his liberty after the fall of Robespierre; but
he still remained for some time in Paris, without military employment,
though he eagerly and anxiously sought it. He found himself there at
the epoch of the insurrection of the 22nd May, 1795, and with much zeal
and valour he seconded General Pichegru in the struggle made by that
officer to defend the National Convention against the excited mobs of
the Parisian fauxbourgs. Amid a thousand dangers Kilmaine continued
to fight for the Convention until the 13th Vendemaire of the year
following, actively co-operating with Bonaparte and the revolutionary
party.
Being appointed to the command of a division in the army of Italy, he
marched with Napoleon across the Alps to the invasion of that country,
and shared in the glory of his first victories, and in that brilliant
campaign in which the French destroyed two armies, took two hundred
and eighty pieces of cannon, and forty-nine stand of colours from the
Austrians, who were commanded by the veteran Wurmser, the bravest of
all brave men.
At the head of his division Kilmaine fought with remarkable courage at
Castiglione delle Stiviere, a fortified town in Lombardy, where, in
the beginning of August, 1796, several severe engagements took place
between the French and Austrians, which resulted in the discomfiture of
the latter. Mantua was the next scene of Kilmaine's achievements; and
in July that ancient city, after fifty years of peace, beheld the army
of Napoleon before its walls, while all the country on the right bank
of the Po was laid under contribution.
The whole direction and charge of the siege of Mantua was committed
to Kilmaine by Bonaparte in September, when Wurmser, after being
successful against General Massena, was overthrown by Augereau and our
Irish soldier, and after a six days' contest shut himself up in the
city on the 12th, after which the siege was pressed with great vigour.
Twice after this did an Austrian army under Alvinzi attempt its relief,
and twice were they baffled by the besiegers; on the last occasion an
advancing corps of seven thousand men were compelled to surrender to
Bonaparte and Kilmaine within gunshot of the walls, and the position of
the aged Wurmser, his garrison, and the Mantuans, became desperate in
the extreme.
In an action before Mantua in October, Kilmaine had his horse killed
under him, and a rumour was spread through France and Britain that he
was killed. Wurmser made several furious sallies, and on one occasion
was severely routed by Bonaparte. In the _Courier du Bas Rhin_, we
are told that the French repulsed him with the loss of eleven hundred
men and five pieces of cannon, and that "their dispositions were made
by General Kilmaine, commander of the siege of Mantua." Bonaparte, in
his dispatch to the Directory, dated the first day of October, writes
thus:--
"On the 20th of September, the enemy advanced towards Castellocio,
with a body of horse 12,000 strong. Pursuant to the orders they
had received, our advanced posts fell back, but the enemy did not
push forward any further. On the 23rd September, they proceeded to
Governolo, along the right bank of the Mincio, but were repulsed, after
a very brisk cannonade, with the loss of eleven hundred men and five
pieces of cannon.
"_Le Général Kilmaine_, who commands the two divisions which press the
siege of Mantua, remained on the 29th ultimo in his former position,
and was still in hopes that the enemy would attempt a sortie to carry
forage into the place; but instead they took up a position before the
gate of Pradello, near the Carthusian convent and the chapel of Cerese.
The brave General Kilmaine made his arrangements for an attack, and
advanced in two columns against these two points; but he had scarcely
begun to march when the enemy evacuated their camps, their rear having
fired only a few musket-shots at him. The advanced posts of General
Vaubois have come up with the Austrian division which defends the
Tyrol, and made one hundred and ten prisoners."
In November a series of sanguinary actions were fought between the
French and Austrians at Arcola, where the latter were completely
overthrown; and there fell Citizen Elliot, a Scotsman, who was one of
Bonaparte's principal aides-de-camp. During this time Kilmaine was at
Vicenza with three thousand men; all the French cavalry were sent there
to be under his orders; and though still commanding the operations
against Mantua, he shared in the disastrous battle fought near Vicenza
by the aged Alvinzi, who was advancing to raise the siege. Despairing
to reach Mantua, the latter fell back upon the Vicenza road, and was
routed after a bloody conflict of eight hours' duration.
Early in December, Wurmser led a sortie, sword in hand, against
Kilmaine. The Imperialists sallied out of Mantua at seven in the
morning, and almost in the dark, under a furious cannonade, which
lasted all day; "but General Kilmaine," says Bonaparte, "made him
return, as usual, faster than he came out, and took from him two
hundred men, one howitzer, and two pieces of cannon. This is his third
unsuccessful attempt." So energetic were the measures, and so able the
precautions of Kilmaine, that Wurmser, seeing all hope of succour at
an end, surrendered, after a long, desperate, and disastrous defence,
at ten o'clock on the morning of the 3rd February, 1797, giving up
his soldiers as prisoners of war. The following is a translation of
Kilmaine's brief letter on this important acquisition:--
"Kilmaine, Général de Division and Commandant of Lombardy, to the
Minister of War. Milan, 17 Pluviose (Feb. 5), 1797.
"Citizen Minister--I avail myself of a courier which General Bonaparte
sends from Romagna (in order to announce to the Directory the defeat
of the Papal troops), to acquaint you with the capture of Mantua, the
news of which I received yesterday evening by a courier from Mantua
itself. I thought it necessary to announce this circumstance, because
General Bonaparte, who is occupied in Romagna annihilating the troops
of his Holiness, may probably have been ignorant of this fact when
_his_ courier departed. The garrison are our prisoners of war, and
are to be sent into Germany in order to be exchanged. I have not yet
received the articles of capitulation; but the commander-in-chief will
not fail to send them by the first courier.
"Kilmaine."