Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
plan--to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.
To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
to the Emperor of Austria’s narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
state, Holland, to the north of them, that the people of the Austrian
Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez’ calculation that, in invading this
province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez’ treason.]
Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
Joseph II.
Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
imagined that subordinate, that is, regimental, command in an army
could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
organisation of the old.
The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
peculiarly suitable to their temper.
It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.
Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
reposed.
Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1792. Brussels was entered
upon the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
of Maestricht was planned.
The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
the Revolution: something far more dangerous, something which much more
nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
which had been checked at Valmy.
For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.
The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez’ loyalty to the
revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.
At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
combined march upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.
But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
action of his army.
The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
part of an allied army to march upon the capital, he was compelled to
fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
thousand men--and these foreign mercenaries.
The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
threat of the guillotine.
What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the unshakable conviction
which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
by certain accidents--for accident will always be a determining factor
in war.
The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
expectation was disappointed.
The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just
detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.
It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
surrounded the town and the siege had begun.
On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
fortress of Condé and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses one by one, and when his
communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.
It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
French fortresses was unnecessary.
Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
French success was a military success due to certain military factors
both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission of any such
gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
military superiority of their opponents.
It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.
Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
which had to meet the attack--to wit, the professional military opinion
of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation was
desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
as it were, irrational enthusiasm.
The second point, the so-called “delay” involved in the sieges
undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
judgment.
We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
two fields clear before us:--
1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Condé, and Valenciennes,
with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez’ retreat; Condé is
just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg’s advance, but has not fallen;
Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
Coburg’s command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
last fortnight of April.
2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.
A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.
[Illustration: Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
besieged, Condé and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
double advance on Paris.]
Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Condé, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
prevented the advance of Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
April, 1793.