MILITARY OPERATIONS ON THE CONTINENT.
While the English were in general victorious on the sea during this year, on land, they, in common with their allies, were generally unsuccessful. This arose from two causes: from the division of sentiment which existed among the officers of the coalition, and from the continued extraordinary efforts of the French republicans. Resolved to extend their sway over the neighbouring countries, to enlarge their own boundaries, and to obtain by plunder the means of supporting their gigantic efforts, at the close of the year 1783 the French had nearly one million armed men in the field, three hundred thousand of whom were on the northern frontier of the republic. To oppose these masses, the allies had not more than 140,000 men. And what rendered the immense force of the French particularly formidable, was the ability, as well as the unanimity, with which it was managed, and the military talent which was rising up among its ranks. On the other hand, the allies, composed of different nations, were commanded by leaders who were jealous of each other, and were far from acting with that cordial co-operation which was necessary, not merely to ensure success, but to prevent defeat. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia, and the jealousy which each had conceived of the other, became so visible, that, early in January, the Duke of Brunswick addressed a letter to the king of Prussia, in which he announced the resignation of his command; stating, as his motive, the unhappy experience that want of connexion, distrust, and cabal had disconcerted the measures adopted during the two last campaigns. After alluding to the unanimity which existed among the French republicans, he said: “If, instead of co-operating with similar principles, each army acts separately and without concert with the others, without fixed plans and without concord, the consequences to be expected are such as have been seen at Dunkirk, at Maubeuge, at the capture of Lyons, at the destruction of Toulon, and at the siege of Landau.” He added, in conclusion:—“The same causes which divided the allied powers divide them still; the movements of the armies will again suffer as they have suffered; they will experience delay and embarrassment, and these will prove the source of a train of misfortunes the consequences of which are incalculable.” The Duke was succeeded in command of the Prussian army by Field Marshal Mollendorf; but, in the month of March, a proclamation announced that the King of Prussia had seceded from the coalition. But this was only a ruse on the part of his Prussian majesty: he wanted English money, and when he had extracted the subsidy from Great Britain, he again joined his allies. Great part of this subsidy, however, was diverted from its original purpose, to forward designs on Poland, to secure the territories which had been allotted to the King of Prussia in the last partition, and to set up a pretension to more. His conduct on this occasion has been well pronounced loose and spiritless; for the troops which he furnished fell far short of the stipulated number, and yet he pocketed more than two millions of English money. The Emperor of Austria was equally slow in providing contingencies: he recommended the Germanic confederation to oppose the republic by a levy en masse; but he neglected to set them an example.
The campaign did not open under better auspices in the Netherlands. Austrians, English, Dutch, and Hanoverians were to fight together there; but a great number of the Dutch were inclined to democracy, and the Duke of York quarrelled with the Austrian commanders, and refused to serve under General Clairfait. At a general council of war held at Ath, it was proposed that the Prince of Saxe Cobourg should continue at the head of the grand imperial army, and that General Clairfait should command the auxiliary forces, the Duke of York acting under his orders. This his royal highness refused with disdain; and the dispute was only settled by the determination that the emperor should take the field in person, and that the supreme command should be vested in him. This ill-timed quarrel has been generally attributed to the pride, petulance, and jealousy of rank of the Duke of York. It would appear, however, that the young prince had nobler reasons for objecting to the supreme command of General Clairfait; he having evinced, on several occasions, his indifference to the common interests of the coalition, and even a readiness to sacrifice that interest to the views of his own government. When the quarrel was settled it was agreed that the campaign should be opened with vigour on the French frontier; that the heads of the columns should be again turned towards Paris; that the army of the King of Prussia should move from the Rhine by the valley of the Moselle, traverse Luxembourg, and join the allies on the Sambre, or co-operate with them on their advance; and that England should send 10,000 men, under Lord Moira, to the coast of Brittany, in order to assist the Vendeans, and to advance with them from the west towards Paris. It was hoped also that the Spaniards might advance from the Pyrenees, and that the King of Sardinia might repossess himself of Savoy, and once more open the road to Lyons.
His imperial majesty arrived at Brussels early in April; and after reviewing the whole army on the heights above Cateau, it marched in eight columns to invest Landrecies. As the allies were already in possession, on the same frontier, of Valenciennes, Coudé, and Quesnoy, this place was not worth the trouble and time it cost to take it. The fortress fell, after a short siege, into the hands of the Prince of Saxe Cobourg; but while the allies were engaged here, Pichegru had penetrated into West Flanders, where General Clairfait was stationed with a division of the imperial army, and had captured Courtrai and Menin. Jourdan, another republican general also, who was already stationed in the country of Luxembourg, had, in the meantime, increased his army to a prodigious extent; after which he fell upon the Austrian general Beaulieu, who attempted to check his progress, and drove him from his lines with great loss. After his conquest of Courtrai and Menin, Pichegru wheeled round upon the Duke of York, who with about 30,000 men, English and Hanoverians, were stationed at Tournay; but here the republican general was signally defeated. Yet, on the next day, Pichegru attacked Clairfait, who was advancing to retake Courtrai, and compelled him to retreat to Flanders. A few days after this Pichegru threw his right wing under Kleber and Marceau, across the Sambre, to attack the Austrian general Kaunitz; but he was defeated with the loss of 4.000 men.
These victories revived the spirits of the allies, and, without waiting for the Prussians, who were not inclined to move, in a grand council of war, they determined to envelope the left, or chief and victorious part of the French army on the Maine, by moving upon it in five attacking columns, from the various points they occupied. The success of these movements depended upon the celerity and good understanding among the commanders; and in these requisites they were sadly deficient. The Duke of York pushed forward towards the appointed centre round which all the columns were to meet, but when he arrived at Turcoing, where he expected to meet General Clairfait, he was surrounded by the republican forces, under Souham and Bonnaud, and completely defeated. The other columns now fell into confusion, and, from the heights of Templenor, the Emperor of Austria had the mortification of witnessing the retreat of the entire army of the allies; after which he returned, first to Brussels, and then to Vienna, leaving the Prince of Saxe Cobourg to command in his inline.
Although the English and Hanoverian column had suffered great loss in the battle of Turcoing, it soon rallied, and even foiled Pichegru in an attempt to seize upon Tournay. The Austrian general, Kaunitz, also gained another victory over the republicans, on nearly the same ground, and drove them across the Sambre. But these victories only served to allure the allies on to their ruin. Every day fresh masses of men from the armed hive of France advanced towards the Sambre, now the theatre of war. Even Jourdan, who had been watching the Prussians on the Moselle, finding that they would not move, repaired thither. At the same time the reinforcements of the allies, having to be brought from great distances, and being difficult to raise, arrived but slowly and in few numbers. Such was the situation of the belligerents when Pichegru, after some manouvres which perplexed the allies, struck off to the left and laid siege to Ypres. General Clairfait marched to the relief of the besieged town and defeated Pichegru; but he recovered the ground he had lost, drove back his opponent, and took the town; the strong garrison therein opening the gates to him, as so many traitors or cowards. In the meantime Jourdan laid siege to and captured Charleroi; although in the route thither he had been defeated in a pitched battle and driven across the Sambre, by the hereditary Prince of Orange, who had been dispatched with a part of the army of the coalition to oppose his designs upon that place. The Prince of Saxe Cobourg was expected to relieve Charleroi; but he did not arrive until after the place was reduced; and then he was attacked by Jourdan on the plains of Fleurus, and, after an obstinate battle, which lasted the whole day, was compelled to order a general retreat. The prince retired in good order to Halle, and again prepared to fight for the preservation of what remained to Austria in the Netherlands; but the Sans-culotte portion of the Belgians now again declared for the French. Bruges opened its gates to them; Pichegru, aided by General Moreau, compelled the Duke of York to retreat to Antwerp; and then the places which the English left in their rear followed the example of Bruges. The Duke of York was joined at Antwerp by Lord Moira with the 10,000 troops originally intended for the war in the Vendée, but who was not ready till that war was over and the Vendeans crushed. The two armies of the Duke of York and General Clairfait occupied the country between Antwerp and Louvain, holding both those towns and Mechlin which lay between them. In the meantime part of the army of Pichegru invested Valenciennes, Condé. Quesnoy, and Landrecies, the garrisons of all of which fortresses, overawed by the threats of the convention, almost immediately capitulated. Pichegru and Jourdan, about the same time, effected a junction, and marched upon Brussels; and, after defeating the Prince of Saxe Cobourg in their route, they entered that city amidst the welcomes of the Jacobin party. The ancient town of Ghent also submitted to the republicans; and, on the 12th of July, the Duke of York and Lord Moira were attacked by the enemy in great force, and compelled to take shelter in Mechlin. Three days after he was compelled to leave Mechlin, and Clairfait was overwhelmed near Louvain, and obliged to abandon both that city and Liege. General Beaulieu was likewise compelled to evacuate Namur, and the citadel of Antwerp, to which the Duke of York had repaired, was not considered a safe retreat. After staying there a week, indeed, the English crossed the Scheldt, and abandoned both the city and citadel to the French. The Duke of York concentrated his forces in the neighbourhood of Breda for the defence of Holland, while General Clairfait retired behind the Meuse. Thus the whole of Austrian Flanders and Brabant, fell under the dominion of the French in one brief campaign. Disheartened by the reverses of the allies, the Prince of Saxe Cobourg, after some altercations with the Dutch generals, who refused to risk another battle, and after making a powerful but vain appeal to his German countrymen on the Rhine and the Moselle, to rise en masse, for the defence of all that was dear to them—of their altars and firesides, of their emperor, their liberty, and their old Germanic honour,—retired from the command of the imperial army. As for the emperor himself, he was so irritated by the want of energy and disaffection of the people, and so discouraged by the events of the war, that a notion got abroad of his intention to abandon the coalition, and seek a separate peace with the republicans. This report of secession, however, was probably circulated for the same purpose as the previous report of the secession of the King of Prussia; namely, to obtain money from England. At all events this was the effect produced: alarmed at it, Pitt dispatched Earl Spencer and Mr. Thomas Grenville to Vienna, and the result was, that the emperor accepted a large subsidy, in the shape of a guarantee of four millions, as the price of his adherence to the coalition. As for the report that the emperor evacuated Flanders, in order that his subjects might experience the difference between his mild government and that of the republicans of France, it seems to be wholly without foundation. But if it afforded him any consolation to know that the Netherlands smarted under the republican rule, his feelings must have been gratified to the utmost. Every young man capable of bearing arms was called into the field of battle; the coin of the country was called in and exchanged for assignats at par; merchandise and property of all descriptions were seized by the freebooting republicans; and the guillotine was kept in constant motion by commissioners sent to fraternise and unite Belgium with France. Moreover, Ghent, Bruges, Ostend, and other towns, with the villages, were heavily taxed, and the plunder derived from the whole country was conveyed to Lisle and Dunkirk, for the use and service of republican France.
During this campaign, a new treaty was concluded with the Duke of Brunswick, who engaged to furnish his Britannic majesty with a body of 2,289 troops, upon condition of receiving the same liberal remuneration as the Hessians, and granting over and above to the noble duke an annual subsidy of £16,000 sterling. This treaty, however, was made too late in the year for the troops to be of any service, and they were, moreover, contemptible in number, compared with the hundreds of thousands which the French poured forth against their enemies. But the King of Prussia appears to have been the grand obstacle in the way of the success of the allied armies. Early in the year, the Germanic diet had agreed to a conclusum for a general armament of the people of the empire—of the burghers and peasantry of all the circles, states, principalities, and electorates comprised in the league; but Frederick William declared that if this conclusum were not withdrawn, he would withdraw his troops; as he could not expose them to the danger which would result from such a measure. The reasons he gave in a declaration for his opposition were, that, by employing the peasantry against the enemy, agriculture would suffer; that arms were wanting for such a mass of people that it was impossible to teach the manual exercise to the inhabitants in so short a time; that, to be victorious, the soldiers exposed to the French must be perfectly exercised; and that it was dangerous, at a time like the present, when the French were watching their opportunity to insinuate their principles, to assemble such a mass of men, whose ideas of government must be various, and among whom, from that cause, dissensions might arise, disastrous in their consequences, not only to the armies, but to the empire. These were Frederick William’s promulgated reasons; but it would rather appear, that, as many parts of his kingdom were dissaffected to the house of Brandenberg, he feared that if the population were armed they might assert their independence, or struggle to be restored to the states to which they formerly belonged. Be that as it may, the opposition of Frederick William to this measure was successful, for the conclusum of the diet was not carried into effect. And yet it was manifestly the only measure which, if it could have been accomplished, could have successfully stemmed the torrent of French conquests.
Although the Prussians were not wholly inactive during this campaign, yet they did not act with much vigour. Early in the year the French army on the Rhine advanced and took the fort of Kaiserslautern, the town of Spires, and several other towns and fortresses. They intrenched themselves at Kaiserslautern; and early in May the Prussian general Mollendorf drove them from thence with great slaughter. But from this time, the French having been shortly after reinforced, the Prussians and their allies did nothing of any consequence. A battle was fought in July, which was maintained, at different points, four whole days; but after both sides had suffered greatly, the imperialists crossed the Rhine, and the Prussians retreated down the left bank of the river to Mayence, leaving the republicans in the possession of territory sixty miles in length. Thus successful, the French marched to the reduction of Treves, and then poured down in great numbers to the Netherlands, first, to assist in the war there, and after that to conquer Holland.
The armies of the republic were also successful in Spain and Italy. In Spain, early in the year, the French having penetrated into the province of Catalonia, a battle was fought near Saint Jean de Luz, in which they were victorious. In May, also, another victory was gained near Ceret; and soon afterwards a third, of still greater importance, over the principal Spanish army posted in the vicinity of Collioure. On the western side, moreover, the towns of Fontarabia and Saint Sebastian fell into the hands of the republicans: the latter, partly by feat of arms, and partly by the treachery of some of the notabilities of that place. By these successes the French had obtained a good basis of operations; but they still had to fight desperately for every foot of ground. During the month of October the French general Moncey received the orders of the convention to overrun the whole of the Basque provinces, occupy Navarre, seize Pampeluna, and transfer his camp to the banks of the Ebro. In compliance with these orders, Moncey led his columns into Roncesvalles, that deep valley, formed by the Pyrenees of Navarre, between Pampeluna and Saint Jean Pié-de-Port, on the French frontier, and after sustaining a loss of 3,000 men, he gained possession of it. But winter was fast approaching, provisions were falling short, and unless he could force his way to Pampeluna, he saw that he must retreat to Saint Jean Pié-de-Port. The Spaniards now occupied excellent ground at the head of the pass between the French army and Pampeluna; and here Moncey attacked them in vain: his left wing was completely defeated, and he was compelled to leave Roncesvalles and to winter his army; some in that part of Guipuscoa of which he had obtained possession in the valley of Bastan, and some at Saint Jean Pié-de-Port.
In Italy the Piedmontese had, at the command of the King of Sardinia, risen en masse, but being destitute of the enthusiasm of liberty, they constituted a body without a soul. Before the middle of April, the army of the Alps amounted to 75,000 men, opposed to which were only 40,000 Piedmontese and 10,000 Austrian auxiliaries. The committee of public safety enjoined their commanders to drive the enemy over the mountains and to seize the passes; and by the middle of May the whole ridge of the Alps between Savoy and Piedmont, and the key of Italy, fell into the hands of the republicans. On the frontier of Nice, the operations of the French leaders were directed by Napoleon Buonaparte, whose design was to turn Saorgio by its left, and cut off the retreat of its garrison by the great road from over the Col di-Tende. The attacking army was divided into three columns: the first, of 20,000 men, under Massena, advanced on the first of April, intending to pass between Saorgio and the sea; the second, under Dumerbion, of 10,000 men, remained in front of the enemy; while the third, of equal force, directed its course to the upper extremities of the valleys of the Vesabia, to communicate with the army of Savoy by Isola. These movements were eminently successful: the rocky citadel of Saorgio, surrounded by the French, surrendered at the first summons; while the French, who ascended the Vesabia, drove the allies back to the Col de Finisterre, and General Serurier cleared the valley of the Tinea and established a communication with the army of Savoy by Isola. Subsequently, the republicans became masters of all the passes in the maritime Alps; and while from the summit of Mont Cenis they threatened a descent on the valley of Susa and Turin from the Col di Tende, they could advance to the siege of the fortress of Coni. It was Napoleon’s wish to push on to the conquest of Italy; but the convention withdrew 10,000 men from the army of the Alps, in order to support that of the Rhine, and the remainder were left to repose in their aerial citadels.
In the meantime the Duke of York had been assisting the hereditary Prince of Orange to cover the United Provinces; but their forces were miserably insufficient, while the democratic party was again corresponding with the French republicans, and giving them every assistance. In Dutch Flanders, Cadsandt and Sluys were reduced before the end of August, and by the beginning of October, after defeating the imperialist general Clairfait, with the exception of Mayence, the French became masters of every place on the left bank of the Rhine between Landau and Nimeguen. On the Maes the strong fortress of Venloo had been allowed to be captured by a coup-de-main, and Bois-le-Duc surrendered after a short siege. The Duke of York, who was stationed at Nimeguen, was now cut off from all hope of reinforcement from Germany; but he, nevertheless, resolved to cover that place, the possession of which would greatly facilitate the advance of the French into the heart of Holland. But his force was insufficient for that purpose: after sustaining two severe assaults, he was compelled to withdraw his troops; and then Nimeguen fell into the hands of the republicans. The Duke retreated across the Waal and the Rhine, and stationed himself at Arnheim in the province of Guelderland, still hoping to arrest the progress of the French arms in Holland. About the same time, Kléber, after a siege of five weeks’ duration, obtained possession of the fortress of Maestricht, although it was garrisoned by 8,000 Dutchmen and Germans in the pay of the States-general, and was, moreover, well stored with provisions and everything necessary for sustaining a long siege. But the Dutch generally fraternized with the republicans, and even the Dutch troops would, in the main, rather have fought against their allies than with the French. Disaffection, treachery, and corruption everywhere prevailed; which sufficiently accounts for the ease and rapidity with which the republicans made conquests in Holland. Early in December, the Duke of York, conceiving that the campaign was finished, set out for England; leaving to General Walmoden the perilous task of protecting the country against superior troops who were already flushed with victory. The elements, also, assisted the French. After several attempts to cross the Waal, about the middle of December a hard frost set in, which enabled them to cross that river, and the Dutch were driven from their posts, while sixty pieces of cannon and nearly 2,000 prisoners, fell into the hands of the republicans. They made themselves masters of several posts on the Waal; but as the ice did not permit the passage of heavy artillery, Pichegru, who was charged by the convention with the conquest of Holland, withdrew his forces again to the left bank, where Grave was captured and Breda invested. Thus threatened, the States-general, imagining that it was possible for them to negociate a separate peace, sent ambassadors to request the ruling faction at Paris to grant such terms as their known good faith and generosity should dictate. The convention flattered the ambassadors with hopes of peace, while at the same time they sent their orders to Pichegru to force his way to Amsterdam. They depended on the disaffection of the people to accelerate their advances, more than the most formidable inundations could check them; in which opinion they were confirmed by frequent invitations sent from the principal towns in every part of the United States, with promises of a cordial reception. It is a notorious fact, indeed, that the English who were defending them were considered by the Dutch people in general to be their enemies, rather than the French who invaded their country; and their antipathy to their defenders was seen in the total inattention paid to their comforts. At this time, from the increasing severity of the weather, sickness greatly prevailed in the English camp; but scarcely any accommodations were prepared for the sick in the hospitals, a scanty allowance of straw only being obtained for a covering. It is said that hundreds were found dead on the banks of the rivers and canals, and that a straggling Englishman, finally, at the close of this campaign, became an object, not only of ill treatment, but of frequent assassination.