The wonder of Europe now transferred itself from the drama of the French
Revolution to the equally absorbing drama of a great war on the Rhine.
"Every day, for four terrible years," wrote a German pamphleteer early
in 1796, "has surpassed the one before it in grandeur and terror, and
to-day surpasses all in dizzy sublimity." That a manoeuvre on the Lahn
should possess an interest to the peoples of Europe surpassing that of
the Reign of Terror is indeed hardly imaginable, but there was a good
reason for the tense expectancy that prevailed everywhere. France's
policy was no longer defensive. She aimed at invading and
"revolutionizing" the monarchies and principalities of old Europe, and
to this end the campaign of 1796 was to be the great and conclusive
effort. The "liberation of the oppressed" had its part in the decision,
and the glory of freeing the serf easily merged itself in the glory of
defeating the serf's masters. But a still more pressing motive for
carrying the war into the enemy's country was the fact that France and
the lands she had overrun could no longer subsist her armies. The
Directory frankly told its generals, when they complained that their men
were starving and ragged, that they would find plenty of subsistence
beyond the Rhine.
On her part, Austria, no longer fettered by allied contingents nor by
the expenses of a far distant campaign, could put forth more strength
than on former campaigns, and as war came nearer home and the citizen
saw himself threatened by "revolutionizing" and devastating armies, he
ceased to hamper or to swindle the troops. Thus the duel took place on
the grandest scale then known in the history of European armies. Apart
from the secondary theatre of Italy, the area embraced in the struggle
was a vast triangle extending from Dusseldorf to Basel and thence to
Ratisbon, and Carnot sketched the outlines in accordance with the scale
of the picture. He imagined nothing less than the union of the armies of
the Rhine and the Riviera before the walls of Vienna. Its practicability
cannot here be discussed, but it is worth contrasting the attitude of
contemporaries and of later strategical theorists towards it. The
former, with their empirical knowledge of war, merely thought it
impracticable with the available means, but the latter have condemned it
root and branch as "an operation on exterior lines."
Jourdan and Moreau.
The scheme took shape only gradually. The first advance was made partly
in search of food, partly to disengage the Palatinate, which Clerfayt
had conquered in 1795. "If you have reason to believe that you would
find some supplies on the Lahn, hasten thither with the greater part of
your forces," wrote the Directory to Jourdan (Army of the
Sambre-and-Meuse, 72,000) on the 29th of March. He was to move at once,
before the Austrians could concentrate, and to pass the Rhine at
Dusseldorf, thereby bringing back the centre of the enemy over the
river. He was, further, to take every advantage of their want of
concentration to deliver blow after blow, and to do his utmost to break
them up completely. A fortnight later Moreau (Army of the
Rhine-and-Moselle, 78,000) was ordered to take advantage of Jourdan's
move, which would draw most of the Austrian forces to the Mainz region,
to enter the Breisgau and Suabia. "You will attack Austria at home, and
capture her magazines. You will enter a new country, the resources of
which, properly handled, should suffice for the needs of the Army of the
Rhine-and-Moselle."
Jourdan, therefore, was to take upon himself the destruction of the
enemy, Moreau the invasion of South Germany. The first object of both
was to subsist their armies beyond the Rhine, the second to defeat the
armies and terrorize the populations of the empire. Under these
instructions the campaign opened. Jourdan crossed at Dusseldorf and
reached the Lahn, but the enemy concentrated against him very swiftly
and he had to retire over the river. Still, if he had not been able to
"break them up completely," he had at any rate drawn on himself the
weight of the Austrian army, and enabled Moreau to cross at Strassburg
without much difficulty.
The Austrians were now commanded by the archduke Charles, who, after all
detachments had been made, disposed of some 56,000 men. At first he
employed the bulk of this force against Jourdan, but on hearing of
Moreau's progress he returned to the Neckar country with 20,000 men,
leaving Feldzeugmeister v. Wartensleben with 36,000 to observe Jourdan.
In later years he admitted himself that his own force was far too small
to deal with Moreau, who, he probably thought, would retire after a few
manoeuvres.
The archduke's plan.
But by now the two French generals were aiming at something more than
alternate raids and feints. Carnot had set before them the ideal of a
decisive battle as the great object. Jourdan was instructed, if the
archduke turned on Moreau, to follow him up with all speed and to bring
him to action. Moreau, too, was not retreating but advancing. The two
armies, Moreau's and the archduke's, met in a straggling and indecisive
battle at Malsch on the 9th of July, and soon afterwards Charles learned
that Jourdan had recrossed the Rhine and was driving Wartensleben before
him. He thereupon retired both armies from the Rhine valley into the
interior, hoping that at least the French would detach large forces to
besiege the river fortresses. Disappointed of this, and compelled to
face a very grave situation, he resorted to an expedient which may be
described in his own words: "to retire both armies step by step without
committing himself to a battle, and to seize the first opportunity to
unite them so as to throw himself with superior or at least equal
strength on one of the two hostile enemies." This is the ever-recurring
idea of "interior lines." It was not new, for Frederick the Great had
used similar means in similar circumstances, as had Souham at Tourcoing
and even Dampierre at Valenciennes. Nor was it differentiated, as were
Napoleon's operations in this same year, by the deliberate use of a
small containing force at one point to obtain relative superiority at
another. A general of the 18th century did not believe in the efficacy
of superior numbers--had not Frederick the Great disproved it?--and for
him operations on "interior lines" were simply successive blows at
successive targets, the efficacy of the blow in each case being
dependent chiefly on his own personal qualities and skill as a general
on the field of battle. In the present case the point to be observed is
not the expedient, which was dictated by the circumstances, but the
courage of the young general, who, unlike Wartensleben and the rest of
his generals, unlike, too, Moreau and Jourdan themselves, surmounted
difficulties instead of lamenting them.
On the other side, Carnot, of course, foresaw this possibility. He
warned the generals not to allow the enemy to "use his forces sometimes
against one, sometimes against the other, as he did in the last
campaign," and ordered them to go forward respectively into Franconia
and into the country of the upper Neckar, with a view to seeking out and
defeating the enemy's army. But the plan of operations soon grew bolder.
Jourdan was informed on the 21st of July that if he reached the Regnitz
without meeting the enemy, or if his arrival there forced the latter to
retire rapidly to the Danube, he was not to hesitate to advance to
Ratisbon and even to Passau if the disorganization of the enemy admitted
it, but in these contingencies he was to detach a force into Bohemia to
levy contributions. "We presume that the enemy is too weak to offer a
successful resistance and will have united his forces on the Danube; we
hope that our two armies will act in unison to rout him completely. Each
is, in any case, strong enough to attack by itself, and nothing is so
pernicious as slowness in war." Evidently the fear that the two Austrian
armies would unite against one of their assailants had now given place
to something like disdain.
Neresheim.
This was due in all probability to the rapidity with which Moreau was
driving the archduke before him. After a brief stand on the Neckar at
Cannstadt, the Austrians, only 25,000 strong, fell back to the Rauhe
Alb, where they halted again, to cover their magazines at Ulm and
Gunzburg, towards the end of July. Wartensleben was similarly falling
back before Jourdan, though the latter, starting considerably later than
Moreau, had not advanced so far. The details of the successive positions
occupied by Wartensleben need not be stated; all that concerns the
general development of the campaign is the fact that the hitherto
independent leader of the "Lower Rhine Army" resented the loss of his
freedom of action, and besides lamentations opposed a dull passive
resistance to all but the most formal orders of the prince. Many weeks
passed before this was overcome sufficiently for his leader even to
arrange for the contemplated combination, and in these weeks the
archduke was being driven back day by day, and the German principalities
were falling away one by one as the French advanced and preached the
revolutionary formula. In such circumstances as these--the general
facts, if not the causes, were patent enough--it was natural that the
confident Paris strategists should think chiefly of the profits of their
enterprise and ignore the fears of the generals at the front. But the
latter were justified in one important respect; their operating armies
had seriously diminished in numbers, Jourdan disposing of not more than
45,000 and Moreau of about 50,000. The archduke had now, owing to the
arrival of a few detachments from the Black Forest and elsewhere, about
34,000 men, Wartensleben almost exactly the same, and the former, for
some reason which has never been fully explained but has its
justification in psychological factors, suddenly turned and fought a
long, severe and straggling battle above Neresheim (August 11). This did
not, however, give him much respite, and on the 12th and 13th he retired
over the Danube. At this date Wartensleben was about Amberg, almost as
far away from the other army as he had been on the Rhine, owing to the
necessity of retreating round instead of through the principality of
Bayreuth, which was a Prussian possession and could therefore make its
neutrality respected.
Hitherto Charles had intended to unite his armies on the Danube against
Moreau. His later choice of Jourdan's army as the objective of his
combination grew out of circumstances and in particular out of the
brilliant reconnaissance work of a cavalry brigadier of the Lower Rhine
Army, Nauendorff. This general's reports--he was working in the country
south and south-east of Nurnberg, Wartensleben being at
Amberg--indicated first an advance of Jourdan's army from Forchheim
through Nurnberg to the _south_, and induced the archduke, on the 12th,
to begin a concentration of his own army towards Ingolstadt. This was a
purely defensive measure, but Nauendorff reported on the 13th and 14th
that the main columns of the French were swinging away to the east
against Wartensleben's front and inner flank, and on the 14th he boldly
suggested the idea that decided the campaign. "If your Royal Highness
will or can advance 12,000 men against Jourdan's rear, he is lost. We
could not have a better opportunity." When this message arrived at
headquarters the archduke had already issued orders to the same effect.
Lieutenant Field Marshal Count Latour, with 30,000 men, was to keep
Moreau occupied--another expedient of the moment, due to the very close
pressure of Moreau's advance, and the failure of the attempt to put him
out of action at Neresheim. The small remainder of the army, with a few
detachments gathered _en route_, in all about 27,000 men, began to
recross the Danube on the 14th, and slowly advanced north on a broad
front, its leader being now sure that at some point on his line he would
encounter the French, whether they were heading for Ratisbon or Amberg.
Meanwhile, the Directory had, still acting on the theory of the
archduke's weakness, ordered Moreau to combine the operations with those
of Bonaparte in Italian Tirol, and Jourdan to turn both flanks of his
immediate opponent, and thus to prevent his joining the archduke, as
well as his retreat into Bohemia. And curiously enough it was this
latter, and not Moreau's move, which suggested to the archduke that his
chance had come. The chance was, in fact, one dear to the 18th century
general, catching his opponent in the act of executing a manoeuvre. So
far from "exterior lines" being fatal to Jourdan, it was not until the
French general began to operate against Wartensleben's _inner_ flank
that the archduke's opportunity came.
Amberg and Wurzburg.
The decisive events of the campaign can be described very briefly, the
ideas that directed them having been made clear. The long thin line of
the archduke wrapped itself round Jourdan's right flank near Amberg,
while Wartensleben fought him in front. The battle (August 24) was a
series of engagements between the various columns that met; it was a
repetition in fact of Fleurus, without the intensity of fighting spirit
that redeems that battle from dulness. Success followed, not upon
bravery or even tactics, but upon the pre-existing strategical
conditions. At the end of the day the French retired, and next morning
the archduke began another wide extension to his left, hoping to head
them off. This consumed several days. In the course of it Jourdan
attempted to take advantage of his opponent's dissemination to regain
the direct road to Wurzburg, but the attempt was defeated by an almost
fortuitous combination of forces at the threatened point. More
effective, indeed, than this indirect pursuit was the very active
hostility of the peasantry, who had suffered in Jourdan's advance and
retaliated so effectually during his retreat that the army became
thoroughly demoralized, both by want of food and by the strain of
incessant sniping. Defeated again at Wurzburg on the 3rd of September,
Jourdan continued his retreat to the Lahn, and finally withdrew the
shattered army over the Rhine, partly by Dusseldorf, partly by Neuwied.
In the last engagement on the Lahn the young and brilliant Marceau was
mortally wounded. Far away in Bavaria, Moreau had meantime been driving
Latour from one line of resistance to another. On receiving the news of
Jourdan's reverses, however, he made a rapid and successful retreat to
Strassburg, evading the prince's army, which had ascended the Rhine
valley to head him off, in the nick of time.
This celebrated campaign is pre-eminently strategical in its character,
in that the positions and movements anterior to the battle preordained
its issue. It raised the reputation of the archduke Charles to the
highest point, and deservedly, for he wrested victory from the most
desperate circumstances by the skilful and resolute employment of his
one advantage. But this was only possible because Moreau and Jourdan
were content to accept strategical failure without seeking to redress
the balance by hard fighting. The great question of this campaign is,
why did Moreau and Jourdan fail against inferior numbers, when in Italy
Bonaparte with a similar army against a similar opponent won victory
after victory against equal and superior forces? The answer will not be
supplied by any theory of "exterior and interior lines." It lies far
deeper. So far as it is possible to summarize it in one phrase, it lies
in the fact that though the Directory meant this campaign to be the
final word on the Revolutionary War, for the nation at large this final
word had been said at Fleurus. The troops were still the nation; they no
longer fought for a cause and for bare existence, and Moreau and Jourdan
were too closely allied in ideas and sympathies with the misplaced
citizen soldiers they commanded to be able to dominate their collective
will. In default of a cause, however, soldiers will fight for a man, and
this brings us by a natural sequence of ideas to the war in Italy.