now undertook, in concert with the Dutch, to protect Holland,
or, in other words, to conduct that most delicate and trying of
operations—manœuvring with inferior numbers over a wide front to hold
a superior force in check. The first difficulty arose with the Dutch,
for the Prince of Orange, apparently enamoured of the Austrian methods,
was eager to scatter the troops over a multitude of different points;
but this the Duke, with Craig at his back, steadily refused to do. The
Prince then urged that the Dutch fortresses should be garrisoned by
British troops; but the said fortresses were all in bad condition, and
were repairing only with that incredible slowness which was peculiar
to the Dutch Government. The Duke, therefore, refused this also;
feeling tolerably sure that, if he consented, his battalions would
be sacrificed piecemeal for the defence of Holland, while the Dutch
looked on without raising a man to help them. The two gates of Holland
on the south were Bergen-op-Zoom and Breda, and on the east Grave and
Nimeguen, with the fortress of Bois-le-Duc midway between Breda and
Nimeguen. The two eastern gates were safe so long as the Austrians
retained Maastricht and their position on the Meuse; but the Austrians
were not to be trusted. Accordingly, the Duke resolved to garrison
Breda, Bergen-op-Zoom, and, if possible, Bois-le-Duc with Dutch troops;
himself taking up a position on the north bank of the river Aa, with
his right resting on Bois-le-Duc and his left on the great morass
called the Peel. From this central point he judged that he could move
to the help of any of the Dutch fortresses to southward, cover the
province of Gelderland, and keep Grave and Nimeguen within reach in
case of mishap on that side.
He was about to march thither from Rozendahl when the news came that
Moreau, who was advancing northward along the coast after the capture of
Nieuport, had driven back the Dutch posts and had besieged Sluys. The
Prince of Orange thereupon besought the Duke to stand fast, producing a
letter from Coburg which contained not only an assurance of his ability
to hold the passage of the Meuse, but even a hint of possible offensive
movements. After some hesitation the Duke consented to a compromise by
moving to Osterhout, a little to the north-east of Breda, so as to give
some countenance both to Breda and Bergen-op-Zoom. ◆July 31.◆ He
marched, accordingly, on the 31st of July, unmolested by the enemy, who
were in force around Antwerp; and the Prince of Orange then came to the
wise but rather belated decision to evacuate all the Dutch fortresses to
the south of the Scheldt. ◆Aug. 8.◆ The Duke, therefore, lent him a
strong detachment of his men to hold the communications between Breda
and Bergen-op-Zoom, so as to release Dutch troops to cover the retreat
of these garrisons and to relieve Sluys.[272]
Just at this moment Henry Dundas, hearing of Moreau’s advance, and
having by chance a few troops unemployed, decided to send a naval
armament to Flushing, together with five battalions under Lord Mulgrave,
for the defence of the Dutch territories in that quarter. As was his
rule in such cases, Dundas kept Mulgrave under his own immediate
command, but withal instructed him not to go against any order of the
Duke of York,—an arrangement admirably calculated to paralyse the force
and to raise discord between the commanders. ◆Aug. 17.◆ Mulgrave, who
had started apart from his troops, reached Flushing on the 17th, and
finding that none of them had arrived, occupied himself in examining the
situation. He was soon satisfied that the French had no further designs
for the campaign than to take Sluys and Flushing, as ports from which to
ship the harvest of the Austrian Netherlands to France. Meanwhile, the
Dutch no sooner heard of his coming than they suspended their operations
for the relief of Sluys, in the hope that Mulgrave would do the work for
them; and the French, having also full intelligence of everything,
increased their force at Sluys to twenty-five thousand men, which made
the relief practically impossible. Dundas, meanwhile, wrote with the
greatest confidence of the success of that operation, which his own
interference had condemned to failure; announcing also that Mulgrave’s
force, which had not yet even arrived at Flushing, would be required
elsewhere in a month. ◆Aug. 26.◆ At length the five battalions sailed
into Flushing on the 26th, nominally thirty-two hundred strong, and
actually with the following qualifications for immediate service in the
field. The Thirty-first[273] was composed chiefly of recruits, of whom
two hundred and forty were unarmed. The Seventy-ninth had but one
officer to each company, and but eight rounds of ball-ammunition a man.
The Eighty-fourth had twenty rounds a man, but, the regiment having
never ceased marching from quarter to quarter ever since it had been
raised, the men were wholly untrained. The Eighty-fifth had thirty
rounds a man, but half of the soldiers had never had arms in their
hands. The Thirty-fourth alone appears to have been fit and ready for
work. Fortunately there was no work for them to do, for Sluys
surrendered on the very day of their arrival; and Mulgrave, after
landing them at Flushing to learn the elements of their business,
suggested that at least two of the battalions had better remain there
and be made into soldiers, instead of sailing to certain annihilation in
the West Indies. To this Dundas agreed, for he purposed to take from the
Duke of York ten of Moira’s battalions, and was well content to leave
him inferior troops in their place. Meanwhile, as a specimen of utter
imbecility, this despatch of Mulgrave’s detachment has few equals even
in English military annals. The mere promise of help was sufficient to
relax the exertions of the Dutch. The troops were embarked so late as to
miss the object of the expedition, and, even if they had been embarked
in time, they were of quality too poor to have accomplished it. In
brief, the whole enterprise bears the unmistakable mark of Henry
Dundas.[274]
Meanwhile Spencer and Grenville had throughout August pursued their
negotiations at Vienna with very indifferent success. One point Thugut
was ready to concede, namely, the recall of Coburg, who indeed resigned
on the 9th of August, being worn down in body and mind, and thoroughly
disgusted with his command. But Thugut absolutely refused to order
troops from the Rhine to Belgium, and demanded the guarantee of a loan
of three millions for the present campaign besides a new subsidy for the
next. It was necessary to refer these pretensions to the Cabinet in
London; ◆Aug. 12, 14.◆ and long before the reference had even been made,
the Austrian Council of War ordered Clerfaye, who was to succeed Coburg,
to devote all his efforts to the defence not of Belgium but of
Luxemburg, Mainz, and Mannheim. But though the Allies were idle, the
French were not; and, thanks in part to a threat of the Committee of
Public Safety to massacre the garrisons unless the fortresses were
delivered, they had recovered both Quesnoy and Landrecies by the 15th of
August. ◆Aug. 27.◆ The fall of Sluys, and the recall of the troops
detached to Walcheren also enabled Pichegru to begin a forward movement,
and on the 27th he advanced from Antwerp north-eastward to Hoogstraeten,
driving in all the Dutch posts, and seeming to threaten the turning of
the Duke of York’s left. ◆Aug. 30.◆ The Duke, thereupon, on the advice
of a Council of War, retired on the 30th to his chosen position between
Bois-le-Duc and the Peel, while Pichegru sent a strong detachment
eastward to occupy Einhoven in force.[275]
Meanwhile a message had reached the Duke of York from Clerfaye,
suggesting a general forward movement to save the beleaguered cities of
Valenciennes and Condé; ◆Sept. 1.◆ and on the 1st of September a
conference was held between the Allied commanders at Bois-le-Duc to
consider the proposal. It was not yet known to them, apparently, that
Valenciennes had already surrendered to the French on the 29th of
August, and that Condé was at the last gasp; and there was some talk
among them of an advance of the British to recapture Antwerp, while the
Austrians on the Meuse protected their rear. The news that both
fortresses had fallen, and that the French forces thus liberated for the
field were hastening to the front, naturally deranged this plan; and
though the Duke was anxious still to make the attempt, Craig perceived
little hope of success, chiefly because he could not trust the Austrians
to give hearty co-operation. In truth, the Allies had let slip the
favourable moment through their own dissensions, and the opportunity was
not to recur again. ◆Sept. 4.◆ On the 4th of September Pichegru marched
northward from Hoogstraeten to Meerle, as if to threaten Breda, but on
the 10th turned eastward, after leaving a detachment before that place,
and on the 12th reached Oosterwyk. ◆Sept. 13.◆ On the following day he
attacked the Duke’s advanced posts at Bokstel, and on the 14th captured
them, making two battalions of Darmstadt-Hessians prisoners. This was an
unpleasant mishap, for these troops had hitherto always behaved
admirably; but, though they complained of the Duke for not supporting
them, the Duke in his secret report declared them to have been
panic-stricken. ◆Sept. 15.◆ Alive, however, to the importance of
regaining this post and the line of the Dommel, the Duke ordered
Abercromby forward next day with ten battalions and as many squadrons of
British, to recover the lost ground. The movement was very nearly
disastrous, for Abercromby only just missed falling into the midst of
Pichegru’s main army, which was on march to the eastward; but quickly
apprehending the situation, he withdrew his troops in excellent order
with the loss of about ninety men, two-thirds of them prisoners. This
skirmish is notable both because it brought Colonel Arthur Wellesley of
the Thirty-third under fire for the first time, and because it led to
the trial of four officers, three of them belonging to a most
distinguished regiment, for cowardice. This was a healthy sign, for it
showed that the older officers were bent on ridding the Army at the
earliest possible moment of the worthless comrades imposed on them by
Dundas.[276]
On the same day the Duke received information that this demonstration
against Bokstel was but a feint, the main force of the enemy, reported
to be eighty thousand strong, being in motion to turn his left. His
intelligence seems to have been extremely vague and imperfect at this
time; but being dissatisfied with his position, to which, owing to dry
weather, neither the Peel nor the Aa afforded adequate protection, he
decided that the retention of it was not worth the risk of being cut
off from his retreat to the Maas. ◆Sept. 16.◆ He therefore retired on
the next day to that river, crossed it at Grave and took up a position
on the north bank, with his headquarters at Wychen, a few miles to the
north of Grave. It then remained for him to make his dispositions to
defend the line of the river, the unprotected portion of which extended
for some seventy-five miles from Fort Loevestein, at the western end
of the Bommeler Waert[277] on to the west, to Venloo on the east. Any
effective defence with the forces at his disposal was impossible, and
the Duke therefore arranged that all troops in British pay should be
sent to him from West Flanders, and that the Dutch, who were sitting
inactive behind their fortresses, should send men to repair and to
defend Crevecoeur and Bommel.
The Duke’s next effort was to concert offensive operations with
Clerfaye, who lay on his left; and he had the greater hopes of a
favourable issue, since the new Secretary at War, William Windham,
was already on his way to that officer on a mission from London. But
the Austrian Commander also had been unfortunate. ◆Sept. 17–18.◆
On the 17th and 18th General Latour’s corps of seven thousand men,
which guarded his left on the Ourthe, was driven back by a greatly
superior force of Jourdan’s right wing under General Schérer; whereupon
Clerfaye, who had watched the whole process without moving one soldier
of his forty thousand to save Latour, immediately retired behind the
Roer, leaving eight thousand men as a garrison for Maastricht. The
Austrian General therefore rejected all idea of the offensive as
impossible, but consented to maintain communication with the Duke if he
would extend his left to Venloo, which, like all the Dutch fortresses,
was in miserable repair and without a sufficient garrison. The Duke
agreed, and so the matter was arranged; Clerfaye, however, giving the
Duke clearly to understand that if his right were turned he should
cross the Rhine.[278]
The Duke thereupon made his plans for protecting a line of from
seventy-five to ninety-five miles of river with a force of thirty
thousand soldiers of all ranks, the sick list having by this time
claimed close upon seven thousand men of his army. His right from the
Bommeler Waert to Grave was held by about five thousand Hessians, their
main body being stationed at Alfen, a little to the east of the island;
Grave was held by two Dutch battalions; east of Grave four brigades of
infantry and two of cavalry lay about Mook; Abercromby, with two more
brigades of infantry and one of cavalry, stood higher up the river at
Gennep; and six thousand Hanoverians under Walmoden prolonged the line
from Gennep to Venloo, with their main body at Well. Craig, however,
did not deceive himself as to the inevitable issue, being firmly
convinced that there was an understanding between the Austrians and
French; wherein he appears to have been correct.[279] “We shall have to
fall back behind the Waal,” he wrote; “depend on it, this will happen in
a few days ... and in a fortnight the Austrians will be behind the
Rhine.” Jourdan followed up the Austrians, leaving Kléber to invest
Maastricht; whereupon Clerfaye, who had sixty thousand men behind the
Roer, forthwith called loudly on the Duke of York to relieve that
fortress. Grenville at the Foreign Office, anticipating something of the
kind, had already despatched urgent representations to Vienna requiring
the concurrence of the Austrians in this operation, but of course to no
purpose. The Duke, by advice of Abercromby and Walmoden, sent Craig to
stir up Clerfaye, and, that the Austrians might have no pretext for
complaint, moved sixteen thousand men at great risk towards Venloo.
◆Oct. 2.◆ But all was perfectly useless, for Clerfaye declined to budge.
An attack of the French on his position on the 2nd of October gave him
the excuse that he wanted; and he immediately retreated across the
Rhine.[280]
◆Sept. 22.◆
Pichegru meanwhile, on the 22nd of September, had completely invested
Bois-le-Duc, and sent two divisions forward to line the Maas over
against the Duke of York’s position. The French were now in the greatest
distress from want of provisions, which had to be brought from Antwerp
in waggons, and that by long detours in order to circumvent the Dutch
fortresses. It was therefore imperative for Pichegru to possess
Bois-le-Duc as an advanced base; and the place was the more difficult
for him to master since he had no siege-artillery. Unfortunately the
cowardice of the Dutch delivered to him all that he wanted. ◆Sept. 24.◆
On the 24th he opened a feeble bombardment with his fieldpieces upon
Fort Crevecoeur, which guarded the passage into the Isle of Bommel from
the south; ◆Sept. 28.◆ and on the 28th, the place, though amply
provisioned and in a good state of defence, was yielded up by the Dutch
Commandant. Thereby Pichegru gained not only forty-two heavy guns, but
the command of the sluices whereby the inundation of Bois-le-Duc could
be let flow or drawn off. ◆Sept. 30.◆ The loss of Crevecoeur did not
improve the good feeling of the British towards the Dutch, who, from the
first entry of the Duke of York into their country, had showed the
bitterest animosity against his men. ◆Oct. 3.◆ Intelligence now reached
the Duke that a general insurrection of the French party in the United
Provinces was imminent; and three days later the retreat of Clerfaye
compelled him to retire northward across the Waal, over which he had
already thrown a bridge of boats. The movement was conducted with some
confusion owing to the mismanagement of the Duke’s Staff; but Pichegru
suffered the Allies to shuffle themselves without the slightest
molestation into their appointed positions. The Hessians held the
Bommeler Waert on the south bank of the Waal, and the line of the Linge
over against it on the north bank. At the village of Geldermalsen on the
Linge the right of the British joined the left of the Hessians,
extending from thence eastward along the Waal to the road from Nimeguen
to Arnheim; where the Hanoverians carried the line to its end at the
parting of the Waal and the Leek, maintaining communication with
Clerfaye’s Austrians at Emmerick. Nimeguen, though ill fortified and
provided for, was also held on the southern bank of the Waal.
By this time even the long-suffering Cabinet in England was growing
weary of paying subsidies to Austria and Prussia for service which
they never rendered. ◆Oct. 4.◆ On the 4th of October Dundas advised
the Duke of York that the Government had resolved to give them no
more money, and ordered him to cut off the allowance hitherto paid to
Clerfaye unless he agreed to active concert of operations. Thugut,
however, had in many respects gained his point. The British Government,
thinking that a bad ally was better than none, had consented on the
14th of September to guarantee to Austria a loan of three millions
in consideration of her services during the first campaign; at the
same time renouncing a project which had been put forward for placing
Clerfaye’s force, together with the Duke of York’s, under the supreme
command of Cornwallis. Thugut was jubilant; for everything was
going as he wished. In Poland, Suvorof was rapidly putting down the
insurrection, in stemming which the Prussian Generals had shown the
greatest feebleness; Belgium was already abandoned, as he had desired;
and the Cabinet of London had rewarded Austria for her treachery by
financial assistance. In the circumstances he could not do less than
give promises of effectual help in the defence of Holland, though of
course without the slightest intention to fulfil them.
Meanwhile the behaviour of the Dutch grew more and more suspicious.
◆Oct. 10.◆ Bois-le-Duc was disgracefully surrendered on the 10th of
October by the Commandant; and a regiment of French emigrants, which
formed part of the garrison, having been denied permission to cut its
way through the besiegers, was massacred in cold blood. On the same day,
by a curious coincidence, the British Government warned the Dutch that,
unless they exerted themselves, the British army should be withdrawn; at
the same time proposing to put the Duke of Brunswick in command of the
British and Dutch forces in order to keep them together. ◆Oct. 18.◆ Then
a week later, as if to bribe the Stadtholder to compliance, Dundas
authorised the payment of one hundred thousand pounds to the Dutch,
which was simply so much money wasted; for the Prince of Orange would do
nothing for the defence of the country, and wished to employ the British
for the repression of his own rebellious subjects. How, in the face of
the Duke of York’s letters, the British Ministers in London hesitated to
order the immediate withdrawal of the army is incomprehensible, except
on the supposition that they still trusted to the proved ill-faith of
the Emperor Francis.[281]
The French, meanwhile, continued to follow up their advantages.
◆Oct. 6.◆ Jourdan, on the east, after leaving detachments to besiege
Venloo and Maastricht, had occupied Cologne on the 6th of October, and
drawn up his army in face of Clerfaye’s main body, which was extended
along the Rhine from Duisburg to Bonn and beyond. Moreau, who had taken
over the command owing to Pichegru’s illness, also pushed forward seven
thousand men in front of Grave, posted thirty thousand between Ravestein
(a little to west of Grave) and Bois-le-Duc, and ten thousand men
opposite the Bommeler Waert. ◆Oct. 18.◆ On the 18th he began to lay a
bridge of boats over the Meuse at Alfen, and, being allowed by
scandalous carelessness on the part of the Allies to complete it, passed
a considerable force over the river. ◆Oct. 19.◆ On the 19th he attacked
the posts at Apeltern and Druten, to east and north-east of Alfen,
carried them after a very obstinate resistance from the Thirty-seventh
and Rohan’s Emigrants, and succeeded in capturing the greater number of
the Thirty-seventh,[282] who had mistaken a party of French Hussars for
the Emigrant cavalry in the British service. At the same time
intelligence came that a strong French detachment had passed the Meuse
between Roermond and Venloo, and was heading for Cleve, thus threatening
to turn the Duke’s left. Accordingly, in his public despatch, the Duke
announced that he was about to draw the whole army to the north of the
Waal; but privately he reported that he could not do so, since the
Dutch, in spite of many promises, had made no effort to put Nimeguen in
a state of defence. ◆Oct. 20.◆ On the 20th the French threw a permanent
bridge across the Meuse a little to the north-west of Ravestein at
Batenburg, and two days later began a new series of attacks upon the
advanced posts, at the same time making demonstrations about St. Andries
on the Bommeler Waert. ◆Oct. 27.◆ By the 27th the troops round Nimeguen
had been driven into the outskirts of the town, and the Duke, who had
transferred his headquarters to Arnheim, called all of them except
fourteen battalions to the north bank of the Waal. The French main body
then took up a position between Grave and Nimeguen, threatening to seize
the two eastern keys of Holland.
◆Oct. 28.◆
At this critical moment Clerfaye paid a visit to the Duke at Arnheim,
and promised that by the 3rd of November a corps of some seven thousand
Austrians under General Werneck should arrive to assist in an offensive
movement from Nimeguen. At the same time some effort was made to
persuade Möllendorf to move to the Rhine about Bonn, and to support
Clerfaye’s left. But the British Government had recently, though none
too soon, cut off the subsidy to the Prussians; and Möllendorf’s answer
was that his orders were to send twenty thousand of his men to South
Prussia and fifteen thousand men to Westphalia, so that evidently
nothing was to be expected from that quarter. ◆Nov. 1.◆ On the 1st
of November the French broke ground before Nimeguen, and on the same
day Werneck announced that his corps could not arrive before the 7th.
Meanwhile the French erected batteries a little above Nimeguen at Ooi,
which, though silenced for a time by the guns of the Allies on the
opposite bank, so seriously damaged the bridge of boats that General
Walmoden, who was in command, thought it prudent to withdraw the
greater part of the garrison to the northern bank. ◆Nov. 4.◆ On the
4th, however, he made a sortie with the troops that remained, including
six British battalions, supported by seventeen squadrons of British
and Hanoverian cavalry.[283] The British, advancing under a very heavy
fire, swept the enemy out of their trenches without drawing a trigger,
and the cavalry pursuing the fugitives inflicted on them heavy loss.
The casualties of the Allies in this affair were over three hundred
killed and wounded; but, though the sortie checked the progress of
the French for the time, yet by the 7th they had not only repaired
the batteries destroyed by the Allies, but had erected another which
brought a cross fire to bear on the bridge of boats. Moreover, a letter
arrived from Werneck that his arrival at Nimeguen, which he had fixed
for the 7th, would be impossible until the 16th—a message which the
Duke rightly interpreted to signify that he would not come at all.
◆Nov. 7.◆