The discussion of future operations with the Court of Berlin was, in
fact, only a trick of Thugut to keep as many Prussian troops as possible
on the French frontier; and the whole intent of the Emperor’s taking
personal command was that Coburg and other honest men in his army, who
profoundly distrusted his chief adviser, should be kept under proper
restraint. Thugut now declared, in answer to Pitt’s proposals, that
Austria would not advance a penny towards the subsidies for the Prussian
army, being well able to dispense with every part of it beyond the
twenty thousand men which formed its contribution towards the forces of
the Empire. ◆March 11.◆ In fact, he was so madly jealous and fearful of
Prussia at this time that he secretly proposed to Russia a scheme for a
joint attack upon her. On learning the Emperor’s decision, King
Frederick William ordered Marshal Möllendorf to begin the withdrawal of
his troops from the Rhine. Coburg was in consternation, for he knew
that, without Prussian help, the execution of the approved plan of
campaign would be impossible. He therefore asked the Duke of York to
join him in requesting Möllendorf to delay his retirement, and
despatched letter after letter to Vienna, adjuring the Emperor in terms
of touching devotion and patriotism to send every man that he could
raise to Flanders, and to work loyally with Prussia to crush the
terrible power of the Revolution while there was yet time. Möllendorf
courteously acceded to his desire; but the Prince’s protests fell on
deaf ears in the Imperial capital. There were over sixty thousand men
ready for service at Vienna, but from his insane dread of Prussian
aggression, Thugut would not part with one of them; and Coburg’s only
reward for his faithful and disinterested counsel was rude and
ungracious rebuke. Just at the critical moment, however, Lord Malmesbury
checked the further withdrawal of the Prussian troops, by threatening to
break off all negotiation for a subsidy unless they remained on the
Rhine until he could receive further instructions from London. This
brought the impecunious King to reason, for without English money he was
lost. Shortly afterwards the parley was, with Pitt’s sanction, resumed;
and there was much haggling over the sphere wherein the Prussian troops
should be employed, Frederick William declaring that for operations on
the Rhine he would furnish eighty thousand men, but for Belgium not more
than fifty thousand. ◆April 19.◆ Finally, Malmesbury succeeded in
compromising matters; and a treaty was signed at the Hague on the 19th
of April, whereby Prussia, in consideration of a lump sum of £300,000
and a subsidy of £50,000 a month, engaged herself to provide sixty-two
thousand men, to be employed wherever Great Britain and Holland, their
paymasters, should think fit. ◆April 30.◆ Ten days later Fox in the
House of Commons predicted that this would be a useless waste of money;
and it will be seen that he was a true prophet.[212]
Meanwhile Coburg was doing his utmost to prepare his army for the heavy
work that lay before it; but the Austrian forces had not improved since
the previous year. Heavy losses had brought many young soldiers into the
ranks; and, owing to the extreme extension of his line of cantonments,
the troops had gained little rest during the winter. The French
delivered as many as forty-five petty attacks between the 6th of January
and the 26th of March, each one of which meant the setting of many
detachments in motion for long and harassing matches. Moreover, owing to
the decay of the Emperor’s popularity in Belgium, the people would do
little or nothing for the troops; and, Coburg being unwilling to take
from the inhabitants what they refused to give, the men suffered greatly
from want of food, fuel, and shelter. Money would, of course, have
overcome all difficulties, but, though the Prince begged piteously for
it, he could obtain none from Vienna; and the consequences were most
cruel. “Some regiments,” he wrote in February, “have been without bread
for several days, and two contractors have been driven to suicide.” On
the other hand, taking a true measure of his enemy, Coburg had issued
instructions that the French must be attacked at all times and in all
circumstances, and that, even in the defence of a position, at least a
third of the men should be kept ready for a counter-attack. But there
was one clause in his orders which seems to give the key to many an
Austrian defeat. “Men defending entrenchments will sit in the banquette,
arms in hand, until the enemy comes within three hundred paces, or even
somewhat nearer, and then open a heavy fire.” British troops were
accustomed to hold their fire until the enemy was within thirty paces;
and hence it was that the French Army of Italy, when they met them in
Egypt, found the red coats tougher adversaries than the white.[213]
Among the rest of the Allies matters were little better than with
the Austrians. The Hessians in Flanders were far below their proper
strength, sickness and constant skirmishes having swallowed up the
additional recruits furnished during the winter; while the brigade
which had been attached to Moira’s force left one hundred dead and
two hundred and fifty invalided in the Isle of Wight, over and above
five hundred sick men whom they carried with them to Ostend.[214] As
to the British, everything was, as usual, behindhand, though the Duke
of York had now a more energetic Chief of Staff than Murray in Colonel
James Craig, whom we saw last at Wilmington in 1781. Recognising from
his American experience how serious was the Duke’s deficiency in light
troops, Craig tried to hire some from Prussia, but without success.
There was a difficulty about the British siege-train, for it was
discovered, some weeks after the Duke had made requisition for it, that
the application had been mislaid at the Office of Ordnance. Though
Dundas made profuse promises of British drafts and reinforcements, to
the number of five thousand men, not one thousand of these had arrived
by the middle of March, and Abercromby’s brigade was quite unfit to
take the field. The remount-horses were discovered to be very bad.
Artillery-drivers, moreover, the dearth of which had been represented
by the Duke for quite six months, were found to be so scarce in England
that the Master-General was fain to seek them, though without success,
in Hanover. A fresh disappointment arose in the matter of foreign
troops, for it proved impossible to obtain three thousand Brunswickers,
whom Dundas had counted upon taking over from the Dutch into the
British service. Rapidly the forty thousand soldiers promised by Pitt
dwindled away; and Craig resigned himself to the inevitable fact that
the deficiency would amount to at least ten thousand men. But this
was not, to his thinking, the most formidable danger. With a boldness
which must have shocked Pitt and Dundas, he wrote to the War Office a
very strong and damaging criticism of the cordon-system, and predicted
that nothing but misfortune could attend Generals who upon principle
preferred dispersion to concentration.[215]
So the month of March passed away, the unhappy Coburg waiting in
anxious suspense to know first, when the troops that composed his
heterogeneous army would be ready; secondly, what their numbers might
be when they were ready; and thirdly, what the Emperor would expect
him to do with them when it should please him to honour headquarters
with his presence. Meanwhile Coburg had even in February given orders
for the contraction of his cantonments; and at the beginning of April,
after much shifting, his force occupied the following positions.
The Right or western Wing of the Allied Army, covering maritime
Flanders, was entrusted to Clerfaye with a force of Austrians,
Hessians, and Hanoverians, who thus occupied the ground formerly
entrusted to the British and Dutch. His headquarters were at Tournai,
where an entrenched camp had been thrown up. In his front also Orchies
and Marchiennes had been strengthened by field-works; and on his right
efforts had been made to restore the defences of Menin, Ypres, and
Nieuport, though, except in the case of Ypres, with little result. The
effective strength of Clerfaye’s army in the field, after deduction of
garrisons for the strong places, was about twenty-four thousand men.
On Clerfaye’s left, and connected with it by a detachment of five
thousand men under General Wurmb at Denain on the Scheldt, stood the
Centre or principal army, consisting of about twenty-two thousand men
under the Duke of York, about forty-three thousand men under Coburg
himself, and of about nineteen thousand Dutch under the Prince of
Orange. The Duke occupied the right with headquarters at St. Amand,
Coburg the centre with headquarters at Valenciennes, and the Prince of
Orange the left with headquarters at Bavai. It was reckoned that, after
providing for garrisons, Coburg could spare sixty-five thousand men for
active operations.
The Left Wing consisted of twenty-seven thousand Dutch and Austrians
under Count Kaunitz, which were stretched over the space from
Bettignies, a little to the north of Maubeuge, to Dinant on the Meuse.
To these must be added fifteen thousand more Austrians under General
Beaulieu, cantoned between Namur and Tréves, bringing the grand total
of the Allied force to something over one hundred and sixty thousand
men, of which at the very most one hundred and twenty thousand were
free for work in the field.[216]
It will be noticed that the corps of Clerfaye and of the Duke of York
had exchanged the places which they had occupied during the previous
year, pursuant to the design of the British Ministers that the Duke of
York should be kept under the immediate eye of Coburg. The first result
of this interference was to spoil Clerfaye’s temper for the whole
campaign; for he judged his force too weak for its task of defending
the maritime provinces; and indeed it was only by the positive orders
of Coburg that he consented to hold the command.[217] The whole
arrangement, in fact, was calculated to cause confusion. It was bad
enough that the lines of retreat for the British and Austrians should
be in exactly opposite directions; and the obvious course, upon the
change of the Duke of York’s station, would have been to have shifted
his base to Antwerp. But far from this, not only was his base continued
at Ostend, but, to make matters worse, a brigade of British was placed
under Clerfaye’s command, and a respectable number of Austrians under
the Duke of York’s; so that in case of mishap, not only must the lines
of retreat for the right and right centre intersect each other, but
neither corps could retire upon its base without leading several of its
regiments in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile on the French side Carnot had girded himself for a supreme
effort. “We must finish matters this year,” he wrote to Pichegru on the
11th of February; “unless we make rapid progress and annihilate the
enemy to the last man within three months, all is lost. To begin again
next year would mean for us to perish of hunger and exhaustion.” He
therefore decided to combine the armies of the North, of the Ardennes
and of the Moselle, and to mass two hundred and fifty thousand men
along the line from Dunkirk to the Meuse. Of these about one hundred
thousand were to move upon Ypres, march thence upon Ghent, master
maritime Flanders, and then wheel eastward upon Brussels; while at
the same time another hundred thousand were to advance upon Namur and
Liège, and sever communication with Luxemburg. In other words, he
designed to turn and envelop both flanks of the Allied Army, leaving
about fifty thousand men to stand on the defensive in the intermediate
space between Bouchain and Maubeuge.
Of the many eminent critics who have passed judgment upon this
plan, there is not one who has failed to point out and condemn its
defects; and indeed it is obvious that if the Allies, neglecting small
detachments, should fall with their full strength upon either wing
of the enemy, they might annihilate it. An advance of the French in
overwhelming strength upon the communications of the Allies about Namur
would have been equally effective and far less hazardous. Yet Carnot
prescribed the invasion of the maritime provinces as the first object,
partly no doubt with a view to the ultimate invasion of England, but
chiefly, as I conceive, with the political object of threatening the
retreat of the British and thus overawing the most formidable power
in the Coalition. It is worth while to recall that in 1815 Wellington
looked for Napoleon to turn the western flank of the Allies and cut
the British off from the sea, and that he dreaded such a movement so
much that he made his dispositions at Waterloo with a view to prevent
it. Wellington’s action has been as sharply criticised as Carnot’s;
and yet, when two such men agree upon such a point, their opinion is
at least worth serious consideration. In any case, the threatening of
the lines of communication both east and west was quite sufficient
to distract the councils of the Allies, to set them quarrelling as
to which among themselves should be sacrificed to the others, and
so perhaps to bring about political discord and the rupture of the
Coalition.
At the end of March Pichegru gave the strength of the army of the
North at two hundred and six thousand, and of the army of the Ardennes
at thirty-seven thousand men, making a total of two hundred and
forty-three thousand present under arms, of which one hundred and
eighty-three thousand were free for service in the field. The army of
the North at the beginning of April was thus distributed. The Left
Wing, seventy-one thousand men, extended from Dunkirk by Cassel and
Lille to Pont-à-Marque; the Centre, forty-seven thousand men, from
Arleux (near Douai) by Cambrai, Bouchain, and Bohain to Étreux, a
little to the north of Guise; the Right Wing, thirty-six thousand men,
from Avesnes by Cerfontaine, St. Rémy, and St. Waast to Maubeuge. This
made a total of one hundred and fifty-four thousand men ready for the
field; one half of them, under such leaders as Moreau and Souham,
standing on the frontier of maritime Flanders. As early as on the 11th
of March Carnot ordered Pichegru to begin the advance on Ypres; but the
General, though willing to train his troops by countless skirmishes,
made no movement until the 29th of March, when he attacked the Austrian
advanced posts at Le Cateau with thirty thousand men, and was beaten
back with the loss of twelve hundred killed and wounded and four guns.
“It is dangerous,” he reported, “to match our young troops against the
enemy so soon”; and therewith his operations incontinently ceased.
Meanwhile Coburg, still awaiting his orders, made no attempt to
overwhelm any one of the scattered French divisions. ◆April 2.◆ At last
on the 2nd of April the Emperor quitted Vienna, reached Brussels in
company with his brothers, the Archdukes Charles and Joseph on the 9th,
and on the 14th joined Coburg at Valenciennes. ◆April 14.◆ The Prince
then laid before him the danger of the Allied position, with both wings
too weak to take the offensive against an enemy which was reported to be
three hundred thousand strong; and followed this up by recommending the
advance of the centre to the siege of Landrecies, for which Mack had
prepared one of his usual elaborate schemes. Thus the Austrians reverted
once more to a war of petty sieges, which could produce no decisive
result. Indeed the only thing to be said for operations in the selected
quarter was that the country was open and well suited to cavalry, in
which arm the Allies were far superior both in quantity and quality to
the French. The Emperor approved the plan; and the troops were set in
motion forthwith, nominally for a great review to be held in the
Emperor’s honour near Le Cateau. Thus, despite all Carnot’s efforts to
take the initiative, it fell to the Allies to open the new campaign.
VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER X
◆1794.◆
◆April 16.◆
On the 16th of April, as had been arranged, the whole of the main army
was inspected by the Emperor on the heights of Cateau. The British
infantry was represented, as in the last campaign, by three battalions
of Guards, with a fourth battalion formed out of their flank-companies,
and by Abercromby’s brigade of the Fourteenth, Thirty-seventh, and
Fifty-third. These last had at length received their first instalment
of recruits to make good their losses during 1793, in the shape of a
draft which was described as “much resembling Falstaff’s men, and as
lightly clad as any Carmagnole battalion”[218] of the French Army.
The cavalry numbered twenty-eight squadrons, drawn from fourteen
regiments[219] and organised into four brigades, three of heavy and one
of light dragoons, the last being supplemented by a picked squadron
of the Carbineers under the command of Captain Stapleton Cotton, a
lad of twenty, who in later years was to earn the title of Viscount
Combermere. The review over, the Emperor took up his quarters in Le
Cateau, whither the commanders forthwith repaired to him for orders.
◆April 17.◆
The French troops under Pichegru in the immediate front of the Emperor
consisted of three divisions, with an average strength of twelve
thousand men each, extended along an entrenched position some eighteen
miles long, on the wooded heights of Bohain and Nouvion. Of these
Fromentin’s division held Catillon on the Sambre, a village rather
over four miles east and south of Le Cateau; westward of Fromentin,
Ballaud’s division lay astride the road from Le Cateau to Guise, at
Arbre de Guise and Ribeauville; and, still further to west and south,
Goguet’s division held the ground about Vaux, Prémont, and Bohain. The
nearest French troops beyond these to westward were fifteen thousand
men under Chappuis about Cambrai; while to eastward three divisions of
the French right wing, numbering some thirty thousand men, lined the
Sambre from St. Waast to Maubeuge.
There was therefore an opportunity of overwhelming one or other of
these isolated bodies; but the Austrians clung religiously to their
old methods. The force was divided into eight columns, three of which
were directed to move north-westward toward Cambrai, so as to check
any movement from that side. These need trouble us no more. Of the
remaining five, two on the left were ordered to drive the enemy out of
Catillon, cross the Sambre, and after clearing the forest of Nouvion
to push forward their light troops. One column in the centre, under
Coburg’s personal command, was designed to move by Ribeauville upon
Wassigny to master the heights further to southward; while two more
on the right, under the Duke of York and Sir William Erskine, were
to advance, the former upon Vaux, the latter upon Prémont, to drive
the enemy from their entrenched positions there and at Bohain, and
to press their light troops forward upon Le Catelet. All commanders
were expressly ordered to halt the main portion of their troops on the
captured ground, so that there was no intention of pursuing the enemy
in the event of success.
It would be tedious to describe so feeble an operation. The scene of
the engagement is a country much broken by ravines and hollow roads,
so that the heavy artillery of some of the columns was with difficulty
brought forward; but the French, being in a manner surprised, were
manœuvred out of their positions with little trouble or loss. The
Duke of York’s and Erskine’s columns alone encountered resistance
worth mentioning, but they found little difficulty in turning the
French entrenchments, while the Austrian Hussars and a squadron of
the Sixteenth Light Dragoons succeeded in cutting down great numbers
of the retreating enemy. Altogether the Allies lost fewer than seven
hundred killed and wounded, while the action was reckoned to have cost
the French over two thousand men, besides from twenty to thirty guns,
of which eleven were captured by the British columns. Beyond this the
French were little molested in their retreat to Guise, and the trifling
success of the day was marred by disgraceful plundering and burning on
the part of the Allied troops after the engagement. The British had
already shown tendencies in this direction, but had been checked by the
Duke of York, who had hanged two offenders, caught red-handed, on the
spot, without even the form of a drumhead court-martial. Now, however,
the Austrians led the way in misconduct, either led astray by some of
their savage auxiliaries, or in aimless revenge for their starvation
during the winter; and the British were only too ready to follow the
example.[220]
[Illustration:
CAMPAIGN OF APRIL, 1794.
_Stanford’s Geogl. Estabt., London._
]
◆April 18.◆
On the following day the army halted between Nouvion and Prémont,
pushing its outposts further to southward, while detachments of
Austrians were posted also at Prisches, a few miles north of Nouvion,
and at La Capelle, Fontenelle, and Garmouset to eastward, so as to
cover the left flank and rear of the army. Thereupon the Prince of
Orange, whose troops had been advanced towards Cambrai on the 17th,
countermarched to Le Cateau, and assembling his force at Forest, about
three miles to the north of it, ◆April 20.◆ on the 20th fell upon the
enemy’s posts over against Landrecies on the left bank of the Sambre.
After a hard struggle, which cost him one thousand men and the French
twice as many, he carried the French position, and at once opened the
trenches before the town. ◆April 21.◆ On the following day Pichegru
delivered feeble and incoherent assaults upon the positions of Prisches
and Nouvion, and upon the heights to the south of Wassigny, all of
which were beaten off with the loss to him of many men and four guns.
◆April 22.◆ Further desultory fighting at the advanced posts on the
next day was equally unfavourable to Pichegru, as indeed he deserved
for his folly in not concentrating the thirty thousand men, who lay
ready to his hand at Maubeuge, for an overwhelming attack.
Coburg then judged it safe to proceed with the siege in earnest,
and, withdrawing the covering army to the north, formed it in a huge
semicircle around the besieging force. His left wing curved round from
the heights that lie to eastward of Landrecies, and between it and the
village of Maroilles, southward to Prisches, thence south-east across
the Rivierette to Le Sart, and thence by Fesmy to the Sambre, the
whole line being strongly entrenched, with several bridges thrown over
the Rivierette. The force allotted for the defence of this tract was
thirty-two battalions, fifty squadrons, and twenty-six light companies,
the left under General Alvintzy, the right under General Kinsky. On the
western bank of the Sambre the right wing completed the semicircle,
with a total of twenty-six battalions and seventy-six squadrons. The
first section of the defences on this side ran westward of Catillon
to the Selle, from which stream the Duke of York’s army carried the
line north-westward to the road from Le Cateau to Cambrai. This, a
broad paved way, runs straight as an arrow over the long waves of
rolling ground that lie between the two towns, the undulations rising
to their highest at the village of Inchy, upon which the Duke rested
his right. The position thus occupied by the Allies was over twenty
miles in extent, following a chain of hills of easy slope but seamed to
east of Catillon by deep watercourses and hollows, and broken by small
copses and enclosures in the neighbourhood of the villages. Westward
from Catillon, however, towards Cambrai the hills subside into a broad
plain, not unlike Salisbury Plain, except that the undulations are far
longer and the acclivities therefore less severe. Covered with crops
but unenclosed, its gentle slopes and unseen folds present an ideal
field for the action and manœuvres of cavalry.
◆April 23.◆
On the 23rd intelligence reached the Allies that fifteen thousand
of the enemy had moved out from Cambrai in three columns towards
the north-east, were driving in the outposts along the lower Selle,
and had even crossed that river, apparently with the object of
intercepting the Emperor Francis, who was returning from a visit to
Brussels, to rejoin the headquarters of the army. The Austrian General
Otto, receiving information of these movements from Major-general
Sentheresky at St. Hilaire, between four and five miles north-west
of Inchy, at once joined him there; and reconnoitring further north
he found the enemy, apparently about ten thousand strong, near the
village of Villers-en-Cauchies. Having with him only two squadrons
of the Fifteenth Light Dragoons and as many of the Austrian Leopold
Hussars, making together little more than three hundred sabres, Otto
fell back to St. Hilaire, and sent a message to the Duke of York for
reinforcements. Late at night he was joined by the Eleventh Light
Dragoons, two squadrons of the Austrian Zeschwitz Cuirassiers, and
Mansel’s brigade of the Blues, Royals, and Third Dragoon Guards, the
whole numbering ten squadrons.
◆April 24.◆