THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
Tourcoing is an action the preliminaries of which are easy to describe,
and need occupy little of our space, because it was a battle in which the
plan of one side was developed and prosecuted almost to its conclusion
without a corresponding plan upon the other side.
As a rule, the preliminaries of a battle consist in the dispositions taken
by each side for hours or for days--sometimes for weeks--beforehand, in
order to be in a posture to receive or to attack the other side. These
preliminaries include manoeuvring for position, and sometimes in the
fighting of minor subsidiary actions before the main action takes place.
Now, in the case of Tourcoing, there was none of this, for the French at
Tourcoing were surprised.
The surprise was not complete, but it was sufficiently thorough to make
the whole of the fighting during the first day, Saturday (at least, the
whole of the fighting in the centre of the field), a triumph for the
allied advance.
Let us first appreciate exactly how matters looked to Souham when, on the
15th, the Thursday, the blow was about to fall upon him.
He had under his orders, with headquarters now at Courtrai, now at Menin
(see sketch map on p. 58), rather less than 40,000. In that dash upon
Courtrai a fortnight before, which had led to the dangerous establishment
of so large an advanced body in front of the main French line, one main
effect of that advance had been to push back, away to the left beyond the
Lys, more than 16,000, but less than 20,000 men under the Austrian
General, Clerfayt. With that army, Clerfayt's body, Souham had remained
continually in touch. Detachments of it were continually returning to the
valley of the Lys to harass his posts, and, in a word, Clerfayt's was the
only force of the enemy which Souham thought he had need to bear in mind.
The bulk of the Austrian army he knew to be quite four days' march away to
the south, at first occupied in the siege of Landrecies, and later
stationed in the vicinity of that fortress.
Of course, lying in his exposed position, Souham knew that a general
attack upon him from the south was one of the possibilities of the
situation, but it was not a thing which he thought could come
unexpectedly: at any rate he thought himself prepared, by the use of his
scouts and his spies, to hear of any such advance in ample time.
In case he should be attacked, the attack might take one of many forms. It
might try to drive him over the Lys, where Clerfayt would be ready to meet
him; or it might be a general attack upon Courtrai as a centre; or it
might be (what had, as we have seen, been actually determined) an attempt
to cut him and all his 40,000 off from the main French line.
This main French line ran through the town of Lille, and Lille not only
had its garrison, but also at Sainghin, outside the fortifications to the
south-east, a camp, under Bonnaud, of 20,000 men. If the attack from the
south or from the north, or from both, managed to cut Souham off from
Bonnaud's camp, and from the garrison at Lille, he was ruined, and his
40,000 were lost; but he hoped to be kept sufficiently informed of the
enemy's movements to fall back in time, should such an attempt be made,
and to provide for it by effecting a junction with Bonnaud before it was
delivered.
Pichegru, the Commander of the whole French army of the north, who had
ordered the advance on Courtrai, happened to be absent upon a visit to the
posts away south upon the Sambre River. Souham was therefore temporarily
in full command of all the troops which were to be concerned in the coming
battle. But the position was only a temporary one, and that must account
for the deference he paid to the advice of the four generals subordinate
to him, and for the council which he called at Menin on the critical
Saturday night which decided the issue. He himself quotes his commission
in the following terms:--"Commander-in-Chief of all the troops from the
camp at Sainghin to Courtrai inclusive."
From the beginning of the week, when a detachment of his troops had but
just recovered from a sharp action with the Duke of York's men towards
Tournai, Souham appreciated that the forces of the enemy were gradually
increasing to the south of him, and that the posts upon the Scheldt were
receiving additional enforcements of men. But neither his judgment nor the
reports that came in to him led him to believe that the mass of the
Austrian army was coming north to attack him. And in this he was right,
for, as we have seen, the Emperor did not make up his mind until Wednesday
the 14th, which was the day when orders were sent to the Arch-Duke Charles
to march northward.
Souham's attitude of mind up to, say, the Thursday may be fairly described
in some such terms as follows:--
"I know that a concentration is going on in the valley of the Scheldt to
the south and east of me; it is pretty big, but not yet exactly dangerous,
though I shouldn't wonder if I were attacked in a few days from that
quarter. What I am much more certain of is that active and mobile force
which I beat off the other day, but which is still intact under the best
General opposed to me, Clerfayt. I hear that it is marching south again,
and my best troops and my offensive must be directed against that. I am
far superior in numbers to Clerfayt, and if I can bring him to an action
and break him, I can then turn to the others at my leisure: for the moment
I have only one front to think of--that on the north."
But the negligence which he or his informants were guilty of--a negligence
that was to prove so nearly fatal to all those 40,000 French
troops--consisted in the failure to discover what was up upon Friday the
16th.
During those twenty-four hours the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up his
column to St Amand; the other four columns upon the Scheldt were
concentrated, and upon the north of the Lys, Clerfayt had got orders to
move upon Wervicq, and was, during the middle hours of Friday, actually
upon the march. Yet, during all that day, Friday the 16th, Souham remained
ignorant of the extremity of his peril.
The orders which he dictated upon the Friday night, and largely repeated
upon the following morning of Saturday the 17th of May, show how little he
expected the general action that was upon him. He arranged, indeed, for a
cordon of troops to be watching, in insufficient numbers, the side towards
the Scheldt, and he sent to Bonnaud and the camp at Sainghin, outside
Lille, orders to keep more or less in touch with that cordon. The
instructions to this cordon of troops along the eastern side of the French
position is no more than one of general vigilance. It is still to
Clerfayt and towards the north alone that he directs an offensive and
vigorous movement.
In a word, he was a good twenty-four hours behind with his information. He
was wasting troops north of the Lys in looking for Clerfayt at a time when
that General was already on the march to Wervicq, and he was leaving a
scattered line of insufficient bodies to meet what he did not in the least
expect, the rapid advance of Bussche, Otto, and York during that Saturday
upon Mouscron, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.
Therefore it was that although Bussche's insufficient force was driven out
of Mouscron at last by superior numbers, Otto and York succeeded in
sweeping all the resistance before them, and, in the course of that
Saturday, reached the first Tourcoing, the second Roubaix, and even
Mouveaux.
The whole problem of warfare consists in a comparison between the
information that each side has of the movements of the other. The whole
art of success in war pivots upon the using of your enemy's ignorance. Had
the allies upon this occasion been more accurate in keeping to their
time-table, and somewhat more rapid in their movements, they would have
caught the French commander still under the illusion that there was no
danger, save from the north, and would have succeeded in cutting off and
destroying the main French force by getting in all together between
Courtrai and Lille. For at that same moment, the early hours before
daybreak of the 17th, the allies had begun their movement.