war, were for the most part worthy of their high reputation, and
aroused at first the greatest admiration among British officers. They
included, however, a certain number of irregular corps, both horse
and foot, chiefly Slavs, which were simply savage banditti of the
most dangerous type. They would murder or plunder any one, friend or
foe, even to the vedettes of their own army; and no Austrian general
would trust himself among them without an escort. The quality of the
higher officers was, however, unworthy of that of the men, many of
them being old, supine, and narrow-minded; and the corps of officers
at large was sharply divided between two factions, which espoused the
two opposite schools of Loudon and Lacy. The organisation also was
imperfect, for, though the army was indeed distributed into brigades
and divisions, these were not kept together, but all detachments were
formed of squadrons and battalions arbitrarily collected and entrusted
to a general as arbitrarily chosen, who knew no more of the men than
they knew of him. In the matter of tactics the Austrians had made no
progress since the Seven Years’ War. Cavalry and infantry alike were
still formed in three ranks, and the art of handling large bodies of
cavalry had been nearly, though not wholly, forgotten.
The Prussians still enjoyed the fame which they had won under Frederick
the Great, but they had not been improved by the false training
observed by Cornwallis at their manœuvres; while their commander, von
Knobelsdorf, though full of zeal, was also full of years, having
passed his seventieth birthday. Superior to them were the Hessians,
the majority of whom had served in America, where they had learned to
manœuvre rapidly and to fight in dispersed order, though the lesson
had never been practised since their return to their own land.[120]
The Hessian Jäger were particularly good light troops, and were
armed with rifles. The whole corps, moreover, was the more effective
since it was equipped with regimental transport upon a lavish scale,
and was therefore mobile and self-dependent.[121] On the whole, the
Hessians seem to have been the most valuable fighting men in the army,
though they were not exempt from the love of plunder, a failing which
mercenary veterans are apt to judge more leniently, at certain times,
than other troops. The Hanoverians were then, as always, fine soldiers,
but without the advantage of the Hessians in experience and training.
The Dutch, being hastily raised, were ill organised, disciplined,
trained, and equipped.
The British, with the exception of the Guards, were, in the opinion
of foreign critics, very deficient in training and discipline, for
precisely the same reason as the Dutch, namely, persistent neglect.
The cavalry was of better material than the infantry, and was very
well mounted; but both officers and men were so ignorant of their work
that, at first, they could not even throw out vedettes and outposts
without instruction from foreigners. The field-guns were inferior to
those of the rest of the Allies; the ammunition-waggons were heavy and
unwieldy; and the horses were harnessed one before the other instead
of abreast, which made them difficult to drive, and took up much room
on the road. The models of both harness and waggons were, in fact, of
Marlborough’s time; while the medical arrangements, or what passed for
such, were those of a still remoter age. Discipline for the most part
was bad, especially among the officers, who were subject rather to
political than military authority, and, though there were still among
their infantry good men who had learned their business in America, far
too many were absolutely ignorant as well as neglectful of their duty.
Hard drinking in all ranks accounted for much both of the indiscipline
and the neglect. To the men, of course, drunkenness brought a flogging
at the halberts, but to the officers, unfortunately, it did not
necessarily mean punishment; nor was it possible that it should, when
respectful consideration was shown to both Prime Minister and Secretary
of State for War if they appeared incapably drunk at the House of
Commons, because the leaders of the Opposition drank even harder than
they. This vice of drunkenness was the most formidable with which good
officers had to contend throughout the twenty years of the war, simply
because it was a fashion set in high places.[122]
It was no easy task to command such a force as the British, Hanoverians
and Hessians, under the orders of such a man as Dundas, and the
immediate direction of such generals as Coburg and Mack. Frederick,
Duke of York, second son of King George the Third, was in 1793 thirty
years old. At the age of sixteen he had been sent to Berlin to study
the profession of arms under the eye of Frederick the Great himself,
and had returned with a practical knowledge which made him later an
admirable Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, but also with an
undue preference for the weaker points of the stiff and formal Prussian
system. In 1791 he had become Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, in
which post he had at first shown himself enough of a martinet to
excite discontent;[123] and, though he had wisely changed his ways
after a year’s experience, he was not at this time popular with his
men, while his officers, who had been taught to look for preferment
from politicians, resented his authority whether for good or ill.
In this respect he was hampered by the same disadvantages as had
beset Lord Stair in 1743; and, unfortunately, he did not possess the
qualifications to gain the confidence of his troops in the field.
He had the cool personal bravery which belongs to his race, but
not the higher moral courage which gives constancy and patience in
difficulty or misfortune; and hence he was at once sanguine and easily
discouraged. He had learned his work, so far as it could be acquired by
the industry of a mediocre intellect, but he was slow of apprehension,
without sagacity, penetration or width of view, and with so little
imagination or resource that an unforeseen emergency confounded him.
On the other hand, his dutiful loyalty and submission, in most trying
circumstances, towards Coburg on the one hand, and the Cabinet on the
other, were beyond all praise. The Ministry had some just doubts as
to his fitness to command, but the King had set his heart upon the
appointment; and indeed, where so many Serene Highnesses were gathered
together, the superior rank of the Duke was a decided advantage. It was
hoped, therefore, to make good his deficiencies by joining to him Sir
James Murray, better known by the name which he afterwards assumed as
Sir James Pulteney, nominally as Adjutant-general, but really as Chief
of the Staff and something more; for it was to his correspondence that
the Government looked for information and advice.
Murray was a singular character. He had served in the Seven Years’
War; he had distinguished himself in the West Indies during the
American War of Independence; and he had trained an intellect, which
was of no common order, not only by shrewd observation of the world
but by solid and extensive study. His knowledge was great, his grasp
and outlook wide, his judgment cool and accurate, his indifference to
danger and hardship absolute; but he was shy, awkward and diffident,
with a dreamy indolence which led him too readily to surrender his
own correct opinion, and to amuse himself with speculation upon the
incorrect opinions of others.[124] When roused he could sum up a
situation with an insight, terseness and vigour which showed how close
was his hold upon facts; but he was not the helpmate who could make
good the defects of the Duke of York. The situation, indeed, demanded
a Marlborough, with the insight to see the one thing that was needed,
and the tact and ascendency to bring cautious commanders, intriguing
Ministers, narrow-minded potentates and irresolute Cabinets into line,
for the one true object,—an immediate march on Paris.
Such a march could undoubtedly not have been made without risk, owing to
the dearth of food in France; yet the opportunity was favourable, and
the hazard was slight compared with the certain danger of delay.
◆Feb. 19.◆ Already in February the Republic had wantonly made a fresh
enemy by declaring war upon Spain; and the campaign in Belgium had
produced results for which the most sanguine of her enemies could
hardly have hoped. ◆March 8.◆ On the first news of the Austrian
successes, the Convention instantly formed a special tribunal for the
trial of traitors and conspirators against France, and summoned two
of the defeated generals to appear before it. This done, it proceeded
to take measures for hastening the levy of the three hundred thousand
men, decreed a fortnight before. The scenes of ridiculous enthusiasm,
which had become usual in Paris, followed as a matter of course; but
the multitude of men who, for various reasons, claimed exemption, was
astonishing, and the rascality of many who were enrolled was flagrant.
A great many of these rogues made a trade of fraudulent enlistment,
receiving a bounty from several corps and selling the arms and clothing
received from each of them; while the number of women, who claimed
allowances for the removal of their husbands to the army, sufficed to
warrant the belief that every recruit was a polygamist. ◆March 10.◆ In
the provinces, both north and south, there was violent resistance to
the levy; and on the 10th of March, at Saint Florent le Vieil on the
Loire, the peasants turned upon the troops which had been brought up
to enforce the ballot, and, though armed only with cudgels, dispersed
them and drove them from the town. That evening the alarm-bell rang in
every church of the surrounding parishes; and five days later bands
of peasants drove the National Guards from Chollet, some twenty miles
south of Saint Florent, and took that town also. This was the first
manifestation of a great counter-revolutionary movement, famous in
history as the revolt of La Vendée.
The Convention, however, did not at first realise the importance of this
outbreak, in the critical state of things in the north. An attempt to
reinforce Dumouriez at Louvain, by calling out ten thousand of the
National Guards of the northern provinces, provided only a few worn-out
men and boys,[125] whom the General contemptuously dismissed to their
homes. Then came the defection of Dumouriez himself, which was well-nigh
fatal to all military improvement. The General had disparaged the
election of officers by their men; he had urged that the volunteers
should be incorporated in the Line; he had tried to enforce discipline
upon all; and, finally, he had turned traitor and taken some of his
regular troops with him. It was therefore plain that discipline was an
abomination, that all his recommendations were vicious, that the regular
troops were not to be trusted, and that volunteers only were to be
accounted faithful. Never was the regular army of France so near to
total dissolution at the hands of its countrymen as at this moment of
supreme military peril. ◆April 6.◆ Beurnonville, having tried to abolish
abuses, was driven from the War Office; a good Jacobin, Bouchotte, with
a still better Jacobin, Vincent, at his elbow, was installed in
Beurnonville’s place, and the whole of Pache’s vile following returned
with them to office.[126] A camp was ordered to be formed at Peronne,
and in it were assembled, not with disgrace but with honour, all the
soldiers who had been imprisoned by Dumouriez for misconduct, all the
deserters, the cowards and the skulkers, who had fled from the army of
Belgium. Further, it was resolved that representatives of the people,
with absolute powers, should be sent to rally and reorganise the
northern forces, and to set the fortresses in order. If ever a nation
seemed bent upon compassing its own destruction by piling madness upon
madness, it was the French at this moment.
Yet, amid all the confusion, there appeared the first sign of the
powers which by terrible means were to reduce France and, through
France, the whole Continent of Europe to discipline and order. On the
6th of April the Convention chose nine of its members, renewable by
monthly election, to wield the Dictatorship of France, with the title
of the Committee of Public Safety. ◆April 10.◆ On the 10th of April a
rough Alsatian officer, Kellerman by name, whose gallantry had raised
him from the ranks to a commission during the Seven Years’ War, came
forward with a scheme which preserved the famous regiments of the
French Line. Finally, among the six representatives despatched to
save the wreck of Dumouriez’s army was Captain Lazare Carnot of the
Engineers; by birth a younger son in a respectable family of Burgundy,
by repute well known in Europe as an original thinker upon military
matters in general, and upon the defence of fortresses in particular.
Though now forty years of age and of twenty years’ standing in the
army, he was still a captain, for his military opinions had given
offence in high quarters under the Monarchy; and it was as a simple
captain that he was to appoint generals, and to organise victory under
the Republic. Deeply read in theology and history, a passionate devotee
of mathematics and of science, he had framed for himself high ideals,
which, as he thought, the Revolution was appointed to fulfil; and he
upheld its principles through good report and evil report, not with the
Gallic effervescence that is bred of self-consciousness, but with the
austere fanaticism of a Scot who takes his stand upon the Covenant.
He believed; and in his faith he had buried all thought of self. Rank,
wealth, fame alike were indifferent to this spare, stern, ascetic
soldier. To give all that lay in him for the cause, to render faithful
account of every trust reposed in him for the cause, to forward all
that would further it, to combat all that could impede it—such were
the principles that governed his conduct. With these motives to
inspire him, with great natural gifts, and with every faculty of mind
and body trained to the highest point, it is not surprising that his
intellectual grasp was wide, his insight clear, his energy infectious,
his industry indefatigable. Such was the man who in the early days of
April hurried to the north, his brain teeming with thoughts, long since
conceived, as to the training best suited to the French soldier, with
his natural aptitude for attack. Five years before, while advocating
a scheme of short service, he had written that it is war and not a
lifetime in the barrack-yard that makes the old soldier.[127] To
General Dampierre, who had been appointed on his recommendation to
succeed Dumouriez, Carnot left it to apply this precept, while he
himself, with ominous directness, hastened northward to repair the
half-ruined fortress of Dunkirk.
VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER V
◆1793.◆
The effect of Carnot’s arrival at Dunkirk in overthrowing Pitt’s
original plan has already been told. There can be no doubt that the
French had full information of the Minister’s designs, for it became
a proverb that the most secret projects of the British War Office
were always well known to the enemy and to everybody in England.[128]
Nevertheless, if the British Cabinet had thereupon frankly abandoned
any attempt upon Dunkirk, Carnot’s labours might have been turned
to naught. The French army was only slowly assembled during April,
and even at the end of the month was of inferior force and scattered
over a wide front; for the French were not free from the vices of the
cordon-system, nor were likely to be, so long as civilians interfered
with their military dispositions. ◆April.◆ Apart from the garrisons of
Quesnoy, Valenciennes, Condé, Lille and Dunkirk, Dampierre kept ten
thousand men on his right, under General Harville, between Maubeuge and
Philippeville: ten thousand more, under General Lamarlière, lay on his
left, in an entrenched camp thrown up by Carnot at Cassel and at other
points between Lille and Dunkirk: and five thousand at Nomain, Orchies,
and Hasnon, covered the interval between Lille and the main army. This
last, consisting of thirty thousand men under Dampierre’s immediate
command, lay in an entrenched camp at Famars, a little to the south of
Valenciennes, with a detachment in another fortified position at Anzin,
to the north-west of that town. In all, therefore, he had about fifty
thousand men at hand for service in the field.
◆April 23.◆
Meanwhile the Allies, who were still below their full strength,
occupied the following positions. On their right, that is to say,
to westward, six thousand Dutch and about three thousand Imperial
troops, under the Hereditary Prince of Orange, lay at Furnes, Ypres
and Menin; next to them two thousand five hundred British and about
the same number of Austrians and Prussians, under the Duke of York,
occupied Tournai; next to the Duke of York, Knobelsdorf, with about
eight thousand Prussians, held the line of Maulde, Lecelles and Saint
Amand on the Scarpe; next to Knobelsdorf, Clerfaye, with about twelve
thousand men at Vicoigne and Raismes, and at Bruay and Fresnes, on
the Scheldt, encompassed Condé on the south, while the Prince of
Würtemberg with about five thousand men blockaded it on the north. At
Onnaing, due south of Condé, lay the principal army, about fifteen
thousand strong, with the advance guard at Saint Saulve; and to the
east of the main army General Latour with about six thousand men
occupied Bettignies, in observation of Maubeuge, with a detachment at
Bavai to preserve communication between Bettignies and Onnaing. The
total force of the Allies may thus be taken, roughly, at over sixty
thousand men, not including thirty thousand Imperial troops under the
Prince of Hohenlohe-Kirschberg, which were uselessly detained at Namur,
Trèves and Luxemburg. The English cavalry, the Hanoverians and the
Hessians, had not yet arrived, though the first detachments of the two
former were drawing near to the front; but none the less the Allies
were actually superior to the French in numbers, and very far superior
in quality. The whole of their multitudinous posts were strongly
entrenched; but it will be observed that, besides the essential defect
of the enormous extension of their front, their line was cut in two by
the river Scheldt, which gave the greater opportunity for a successful
attack upon one or other of their wings. The general distribution of
the Allies corresponded in the main with their lines of retreat, that
of the British lying west to the sea, that of the Dutch north-east upon
Antwerp, that of the Austrians east upon Namur; so that a successful
attack upon the British would probably lay bare the Austrian right,
and a decided defeat of the Austrians must certainly uncover the
British left. With their usual jealousy for supreme control, the
Austrians mixed a contingent of their own troops with the Allies in
every section of the army, an arrangement which gave rise to infinite
confusion, since it made even small detachments dependent on two or
three different sources of supply. For each nation made provision for
its own troops in its own way, and, owing to diversities of system and
of differences in calibre of muskets and cannon, it was impossible to
enforce any effort towards uniformity.
Still, the inactivity of Coburg during April was marvellous. It never
occurred to him to overwhelm any one of Dampierre’s isolated divisions
of untrained men by concentrating a superior force upon it. He never
reflected that, even if both sides adhered to the cordon-system, the
French could bring up the whole manhood of their country to make their
cordon stronger than his own at every point. He allowed Dampierre to
school his troops with impunity by perpetual affairs of outposts,
without remembering that the French could more easily replace two men
than he could replace one. Finally (but this may be pardoned to him) he
did not guess that, while he was wasting a campaign over formal sieges,
the French would evolve from the experience of many skirmishes a new
system of tactics—that they would abandon the old formal training, and,
turning to account the indiscipline which springs from the principle
of equality, would grant independence of action to the born fighting
men, and trust to the national impetuosity to carry the rest forward in
dense masses to the attack.
It is a shameful reproach to the Allies that, overmatched though he was
in every respect, the French General took the initiative and made the
first move of the campaign. ◆May 1.◆ On the 1st of May he assailed the
whole line of the Allies from Saint Saulve to St. Amand; but, the
attacks being unintelligent and incoherent, he was beaten back at every
point with a loss of two thousand men and several guns. ◆May 8.◆ Urged
by the Convention to save Condé, he on the 8th essayed a second attempt,
and on this occasion confined himself to demonstrations only upon the
flanks of the Allies, concentrating a larger proportion of his force
against Clerfaye’s position in the centre. These sounder principles
brought him within an ace of success. He himself directed a frontal
attack from Anzin against Raismes and Vicoigne, and after four
successive repulses carried the position of Raismes, excepting the
village. Lamarlière meanwhile with little difficulty made his way
towards St. Amand, while one of his divisions, crossing the Scarpe,
pressed on unseen through the forest of Vicoigne, nearly to the road
which leads from St. Amand to Valenciennes. There this division began to
throw up a redoubt and batteries to cannonade Clerfaye’s defences of
Vicoigne, so as to cut off communication between him and Knobelsdorf,
and to ensure a junction with the garrison of Valenciennes. The
situation was critical, for, if the French succeeded in holding
possession of the road, the post at Vicoigne was lost, and the whole
line of the Allies was broken. Fortunately the Duke of York had moved
three battalions of Guards to Nivelle, a little to the north of St.
Amand, having promised Knobelsdorf help in case of need; and at five
o’clock in the evening the brigade came upon the scene, just as the
French were gaining the upper hand of the Prussians. The country to
north and west of Valenciennes is a level plain, broken only by the
three forests which bear the names of Marchiennes, Vicoigne, and
Raismes, so that the Duke could see little or nothing of what was going
forward until his troops were actually on the scene of action. The
Coldstream, being first for duty, by Knobelsdorf’s order entered the
wood, and quickly driving the French back, followed them up to their
entrenchments. There, however, they were met by musketry in front and a
fierce fire of grape from a masked battery in flank; when, finding
themselves unsupported by the Prussians, they fell back in good order
with a loss of over seventy killed and wounded. Seeing, however, by the
appearance of the red coats, that Knobelsdorf had been reinforced,
Lamarlière’s division made no further effort to advance; and Dampierre,
while leading a last desperate assault upon Vicoigne from the front, was
mortally wounded by a cannon-shot. ◆May 9.◆ This decided the fate of the
day: his successor stopped the attack, and on the following morning
retreated. On the next day Clerfaye and Knobelsdorf stormed the enemy’s
newly-built batteries and captured their garrison of six hundred men,
but failed to take the guns, which, according to the French custom of
the time, had been withdrawn and kept limbered up for the night, in
readiness for escape.[129] The loss of Clerfaye’s and Knobelsdorf’s
corps in the two days was little short of eight hundred officers and
men; that of the French was far heavier, and was aggravated by the death
of Dampierre. It speaks highly for the man that with troops so raw he
should have made so fine a fight against some of the best soldiers in
Europe.