MR. CALVERT SEES A SHORT CAMPAIGN UNDER LAFAYETTE
The project which Calvert had formed for joining the army he was able to
put into execution within a couple of weeks. The fever which had
attacked him having entirely subsided and his wound healing rapidly, he
was soon well enough to feel a consuming restlessness and craving for
action. The painful experience through which he had just passed, the
still more painful future to which he had to look forward, aroused an
irresistible longing for some immediate and violent change of scene and
thought. His vague plan for joining the army was suddenly crystallized
by the situation in which he found himself, and though this resolution
was strongly opposed by Mr. Morris, who, with keen foresight, prophesied
the speedy overthrow of the constitution and the downfall of Lafayette
with the King, he adhered to it. D'Azay being safely out of the
country--he had retreated to Brussels and joined a small detachment of
the emigrant army still there--and Adrienne protected by his name, his
one desire was to forget in action his misfortunes and to remove himself
from the scene of them. It was this desire, rather than any enthusiasm
for the cause in which he was engaged, which impelled him to offer his
services to Lafayette. Indeed, it was with no very sanguine belief in
that cause or hope of its success that he prepared to go to Metz.
Although he believed, with Mr. Morris, that the only hope of France lay
in the suppression of internal disorder and the union of interests which
a foreign war would bring about, yet he could not regard with much
horror the threatenings of the proscribed émigrés and the military
preparations making by the allies to prevent the spread of the
revolution into their own territories. Indeed, so great was his contempt
for the ministers of Louis and for their mad and selfish policy that he
confessed to himself, but for his desire to serve under his old
commander, he would almost as soon have joined d'Azay at Brussels, or
taken a commission with the Austrians under Marshal Bender, who
commanded in the Low Countries. This division of sympathies felt by
Calvert animated thousands of other breasts, so that whole regiments of
cavalry went over to the enemy, and officers and men deserted daily.
Berwick, Mirabeau, Bussy, de la Châtre, with their commands, crossed
over the Rhine and joined the Prince de Condé at Worms. The highest in
command were suspected of intriguing with the enemy; men distrusted
their superiors, and officers could place no reliance on their men. Of
the widespread and profound character of this feeling of distrust Mr.
Calvert had no adequate idea until he joined the army of the centre at
Metz in the middle of April. Although Lafayette had, since January, been
endeavoring to discipline his troops, to animate them with confidence,
courage, and endurance, they had defied his every effort. Indeed, what
wonder that an army composed of the scum of a revolutionary populace,
without knowledge of arms, suspicious, violent, unused to every form of
military restraint, should defy organization in three months? Perhaps no
sovereign ever entered upon a great conflict less prepared than did
Louis when he declared war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia--for
Francis was not yet crowned Emperor of Austria. But that unhappy monarch
found himself in a situation from which the only issue was a recourse to
arms. Confronted on the one hand by a republican party of daily
increasing power and on the other by an aristocratical one openly allied
with sovereigns who were suspected of a desire to partition his dominion
among themselves as Poland had been, his one hope lay in warring his way
out between the two.
That Louis should be the advocate and leader of this war was the one
inspiration of Narbonne, and, had the King persevered in this, he might
have saved himself and his throne. But, with his fatal vacillation,
after having entered upon military preparations and committed himself to
Narbonne's policy, he suddenly abandoned him as he had abandoned so many
of his advisers. Grave replaced the dismissed and chagrined young
minister, and Dumouriez, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, took into his
hands all the power and glory of the war movement. He developed and
supplemented the plans which Narbonne had already formed, and, by the
New Year, a vast army was assembled and the frontier divided into three
great military districts. On the left, the territory from Dunkirk to
Philippeville was defended by the army under Rochambeau, forty thousand
foot and eight thousand cavalry strong; Lafayette, with his army of the
centre, of more than a hundred thousand men and some seven thousand
horse, commanded between Philippeville and Weissenberg, while Luckner,
with his army of the Rhine, stretched from Weissenberg to Bâle.
Dumouriez's diplomatic negotiations were apparently nearly as successful
as his military operations. Though he could not dissolve that "unnatural
alliance" formed the year before at Pilnitz and enthusiastically adhered
to by Prince Henri and the Duke of Brunswick with the young King of
Hungary and Bohemia, yet, by the assassination of the King of Sweden,
that country was no longer to be feared, England remained neutral by
virtue of Pitt's commercial policy, and many of the petty German
principalities openly approved of and aided the French revolutionists.
With military and diplomatic affairs in this state and with Austria
still holding out for her impossible conditions, 'twas easy for
Dumouriez and the war party to browbeat the wellnigh desperate King into
a declaration of hostilities that was to convulse the whole of Europe
for nearly a quarter of a century. This was done on the 20th of April,
three days after Mr. Calvert had joined Lafayette at Metz, and was
almost instantly followed by orders from Dumouriez to that general to
advance with ten thousand men upon Namur and thence upon Brussels and
Liège.
'Twas Dumouriez's policy (and surely a wise one) to strike the first
blow against Austria through her dependency, Flanders, which country,
but two years before, had shown the strongest disposition to throw off
Austrian rule. How strong that disposition was, Dumouriez himself knew
fully, for he had been sent by Montmorin on a secret mission into
Belgium, and he felt assured that the Brabant patriots would rally to
the standards of the French army. Had that army been what he supposed,
his plans might have succeeded and the humiliations and defeats of the
spring campaign averted.
As has been said, Calvert joined the army at Metz a few days before the
formal declaration of war was made, and so was there when General de
Lafayette received orders to advance upon Namur. He was much touched by
the reception which Lafayette accorded him.
"I will give you a regiment, Calvert, but I need you near my person.
There is no one upon whom I can rely--I wish you could be my
aide-de-camp again. It would be like old times once more," he said,
looking at the young man with so harassed and despondent a glance that
Calvert was both surprised and alarmed.
"I could wish for nothing better," he replied, "but surely you do not
mean what you say--you have many others upon whom you can count."
"Almost no one," replied Lafayette, briefly. "I distrust my officers and
am myself suspected of intriguing with the enemy. I know not what day I
may be forced to fly across the frontier. No one is safe, and I dare
not count upon my troops to obey commands. Although there are only
thirty thousand Austrians in Flanders, I am not sure that we can beat
them," he said, bitterly.
On the 27th of April, Lafayette, who had moved his camp to Givet,
received despatches from Dumouriez detailing the plan of campaign
against Belgium. According to this plan, Lafayette, with ten thousand
picked men, was to advance by forced marches upon Namur. He was to be
supported by two divisions of the army of the North, one of four
thousand men under General Dillon, which was to move from its encampment
at Lille upon Tournay, and the other of ten thousand troops under
General Biron, which was to advance from Valenciennes upon Mons. Before
daybreak on the morning of the 28th Lafayette had his army in motion
and, as they rode out of the city gates together, Calvert noted that the
depression and anxiety which had weighed upon the General so heavily had
disappeared and that he had regained something of his old fire and
intrepidity.
This renewal of confidence was cruelly dissipated three days later when,
on reaching Bouvines, half-way to Namur, after a fifty-league march over
bad roads, Lafayette was met by frightened, breathless couriers with
despatches detailing the humiliating disasters which had befallen both
Biron's and Dillon's divisions. The former, who had advanced upon
Quiévrain and succeeded in occupying that town, was utterly routed on
arriving before Mons, and fled with the loss of all his baggage. Dillon
met with even a more tragic and shameful fate. Moving upon Tournay,
where a strong body of Austrians was ready to receive him, his men were
seized with a sudden panic and fled back to the gates of Lille, where,
mad with fear and crying that Dillon had betrayed them, they brutally
murdered him. This disastrous news being confirmed the following day by
further despatches, Lafayette was forced to fall back to Maubeuge
without striking a blow, and thus ended Calvert's hopes of seeing a
campaign which had promised most brilliantly. The news of these defeats
creating the greatest sensation both at the front and in Paris,
Rochambeau resigned his command, Grave was replaced by Servan in the
ministry, and the army was reorganized.
During the entire month of May Lafayette and his army remained inactive
at Maubeuge awaiting orders which the distracted ministers at Paris were
incapable of giving. 'Twas a pretty little place near the Belgian
frontier, lying on both sides of the Sambre, and which had been ceded to
France by the treaty of Nymwegen. Mr. Calvert spent much of his leisure
time--of which he had more than enough--admiring and studying the
fortifications of this town, which had been engineered by the great
Vauban. Much of it he also spent with Lafayette, who, in the intervals
of disciplining his troops and attending to his increased military
duties--Rochambeau's command had been divided between himself and
Luckner--conversed freely with his young aide-de-camp. Sometimes, too,
at Lafayette's urgent request, Calvert would sing as he had used to do
around the camp-fires in the Virginia campaign. During those days and
evenings of inactive and anxious waiting, the old friendship between the
two was renewed. Lafayette had heard of Calvert's marriage through Mr.
Morris and, with the utmost delicacy, touched upon the subject. Calvert
told him frankly as much of the story as he intended to reveal to
anyone, and this confidence became another bond of friendship between
them. The years of separation and disagreement somehow melted away. The
Lafayette of Maubeuge was like the Lafayette whom Calvert had first
known and admired; he noticed how much of his rabid republicanism had
vanished--indeed, Lafayette himself owned as much, for if he was
impetuous and extreme, he was also courageous and was not afraid or
ashamed to confess his faults.
"I have learned much," he said to Calvert one evening when they were
alone in the General's quarters, "and am beginning to have radically
different opinions upon some subjects from those I entertained but a
short while ago. Sometimes I ask myself if my call for the
States-General did not open for France a Pandora's box of evils. What
has become of all my efforts?" he said, pushing away a map of the
Austrian Netherlands which they had been studying together and beginning
to pace the room agitatedly. "Instead of the wise ministers prevailing
at Paris, a horde of mad, insensate creatures are ruling the Assembly,
the city, the whole country! If only there were some man courageous
enough to defy the Jacobins and their power--to meet them on their own
ground and conquer them! What can I do at this distance, overwhelmed
with military duties, restricted by my official position? I have been
thinking of addressing a letter to the Assembly," he went on, suddenly
turning to Calvert, "a letter of warning against the Jacobin power, of
reproach that they should be ruled by that ignoble faction, or
remonstrance against their unwarrantable proceedings, and as soon as I
can find the time to write such a letter, I shall do so, and despatch it
to Paris by my secretary, let the consequences be what they may."
This design was not accomplished until the middle of June, for, at the
beginning of the month, a number of skirmishes and night attacks took
place between the Austrians, who had encamped near Maubeuge, and
Lafayette's troops, and the General was too much occupied with the
military situation to busy himself with affairs at Paris. These attacks
culminated in a bloody and almost disastrous engagement for the patriot
army on the 11th of June.
The Austrians, reinforced by the emigrant army which had been left at
Brussels and in which Calvert knew d'Azay held a captain's commission,
advanced during the early afternoon of June 11th and attacked the
vanguard of Lafayette's army, encamped two miles from Maubeuge, farther
up the Sambre, and commanded by Gouvion. Although the French occupied a
formidable position, being securely intrenched on rising ground
fortified by a dozen redoubts and batteries arranged in tiers, the enemy
advanced with such fierceness and intrepidity that Gouvion had all he
could do to keep his gunners from deserting their posts. The infantry,
too, behaved ill, and when ordered to advance, wavered and were driven
back at the very first charge from the Austrians. Their cavalry pursued
the advantage thus gained and pressed forward, advancing in three lines
and driving the disordered French troops before them up the hill. At
this juncture, Lafayette, with six thousand men and two thousand horse,
arrived, having been sent for in hot haste by Gouvion when the action
first began, and, attacking the Austrian and émigrés from the flank,
after a sharp and bloody struggle, succeeded by nightfall in putting
them to flight. Although the forces engaged in this action were small,
the slaughter was terrible and the little battle-field by the Sambre
presented a ghastly sight in the moonlight of that June night. Gouvion
himself was killed leading the last attack, and the Austrian and
emigrant forces suffered severely. The regiment which Calvert commanded
was in the thick of the engagement the whole time, once it arrived on
the scene of action, and no officer of either side more exposed or
distinguished himself than did the young American. Indeed, it was not
from reckless bravery that he offered himself a target for the bullets
of the enemy, but from a feeling that he would not be sorry to end
there, to close forever the book of his life. And, as usual with those
who seek, rather than avoid, death in battle, from this action, which
was the only one he was destined to engage in, he came out unscathed,
while many another poor fellow who longed to live, lay quiet and cold
on the bloody ground.
So close was the fighting during the late afternoon that Calvert once
thought he caught a glimpse of d'Azay and, with a strange presentiment
of evil, he determined to look for him among the slain. Accompanied by
an orderly bearing a lantern--though the moonlight was so bright that
one could easily recognize the pallid, upturned faces--he began his
search an hour after the firing had ceased, with many others engaged in
the same ghastly work of finding dead comrades. He had looked but a
short while, or so it seemed to him, when he came upon d'Azay lying
prone upon a little hillock of Austrian slain. As Calvert looked down
upon him, grief for this dead friend and an awful sense of the futility
of the sacrifice which had been made for him, came upon him. He knelt
beside him for a few minutes and looked into the quiet, dead face. He
had never before thought that d'Azay resembled Adrienne, but now the
resemblance of brother and sister was quite marked, and 'twas with the
sharpest pang Calvert had ever known that he looked upon those pallid
features. It might have been that other and dearer face, he thought to
himself. At length he arose and, helping the orderly place the body upon
a stretcher, they bore it back to the camp, where, next day, it was
buried with what military honors Calvert could get accorded it. He sent
a lock of d'Azay's hair, his seals and rings, back to Paris to Adrienne
(he kept for his own her miniature, which he found in d'Azay's pocket
and which he had first seen that night at Monticello), and the letter
she wrote him thanking him for all he had done were the first written
words of hers he had ever had. Though there was not a word of love in
the note--not even of friendship--Calvert re-read it a score of times
and treasured it, and at last put it with the miniature in the little
chamois case that rested near his heart.
The check which Lafayette had put upon the Austrians on the 11th of June
having produced a cessation of hostilities, he wrote and despatched to
the Assembly the letter which he had had in contemplation for some time
and of which he had spoken to Calvert. This courageous letter--the
authenticity of which was fiercely denied in the Assembly--not only did
not produce the effect Lafayette so hoped for, but was followed by the
outrage of the 20th of June. Who does not know the shameful events of
that day?--the invasion of the Tuileries by hordes of ruffians and the
insults to helpless royalty?
When Lafayette heard of the uprising of the 20th he determined to go in
person to Paris, affirm the authorship of his letter, and urge upon the
Assembly the destruction of the Jacobin party. He sent Calvert to
Luckner's head-quarters to ask of the Maréchal permission to go to Paris
and, placing his troops in safety under the guns of Maubeuge, he
departed for the capital, whither he arrived on the 28th. After two days
spent in incessant and fruitless efforts with the Assembly and National
Guard, in audiences with the King and consultations with friends, he
sped back to the army, more thoroughly and bitterly convinced than ever
that the revolution which he had led and believed in was now fast
approaching anarchy; that the throne was lost and his own brilliant
popularity vanished. He took with him to Calvert the news of the sudden
death of the old Duchesse d'Azay--she had failed rapidly since hearing
of the death of d'Azay, and had passed away painlessly on the morning of
Lafayette's arrival in Paris--the escape of St. Aulaire to Canada, and a
letter from Mr. Morris.
"He desired me to give you this," said Lafayette, gravely, handing the
letter to Calvert. "The message is of the greatest importance. We had a
long interview. I am at last come to the same opinion on certain
subjects as himself," he said, with a gloomy smile, "and we want your
co-operation. He will explain all when he sees you. As for myself, I
must say no more," and he went away, leaving the young man to read his
letter alone.