VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER XI
1794.
The entire army of the Allies, with the exception of Clerfaye’s corps, was gathered into camp about Tournai May 19. in the course of the 19th, the Emperor being received in silence when he rode into the town, while the Duke of York was loudly cheered by the inhabitants.[243] The condition of the army was very far from satisfactory. The troops themselves, or at any rate the British, were not seriously shaken by the rout of the previous day; but the Emperor and the Austrian commanders were much discouraged, and the animosity of the various nations towards each other was dangerously embittered. The British, above all, were furious against the Austrians for leaving them to be overwhelmed without so much as an attempt to assist them. “It is impossible,” wrote Craig to the War Office, “to bring the Austrians to act except in small corps. I lament that we should be destined as victims of their folly and ignorance. Do not be surprised at the word ignorance: I am every day more and more convinced that they have not an officer among them.” These were hard words, but they were true and just, though the Archduke Charles in later days redeemed himself May 20. from this reproach. However, for the moment the commanders laid aside their differences and agreed that the attack should be renewed, this time with united forces, upon Mouscron; and meanwhile Coburg dispersed the whole army in a semicircle around Tournai; the advanced posts running from Camphin on the south by Baisieux, Willems, Nechin, Leers, Estaimpuis, and St. Legers to Espierres, while the inner circle of entrenchments ran from the Scheldt on the north by Froyennes, Marquain, and Lamain to the suburb of St. Martin and the citadel of Tournai itself.
The French Generals, as already narrated, made no effort to follow up their victory of the 18th, but awaited the return of Pichegru, who, on the news of the victory, hastened from the Sambre to turn it to account. On the 22nd, after a consultation with his officers, Pichegru decided to make a general attack upon Coburg’s position, and directed that Souham with four brigades,[244] numbering from thirty to forty thousand men, should assail it on the right or northern half of its front from Espierres to Leers, while Bonnaud’s division should fall upon its left about Templeuve, and Osten’s division should make a demonstration still further to the south May 23. about Baisieux. On the following day between six and seven o’clock in the morning the action began; and after long and hard fighting the Allies were finally driven from three important points, namely, Blandain and the hill of La Croisette immediately adjacent to it, a little to the west of Tournai, and Pont-à-Chin upon the Scheldt, a little below the city. To abandon to the enemy these posts, particularly Pont-à-Chin, which lay on the direct road from Courtrai to Tournai and commanded the navigation of the Scheldt, was impossible; and Coburg decided that they must be recovered at any cost. Throughout this long day’s fighting the troops that had borne the brunt of the work on the 18th had been held in reserve; but at about six o’clock in the evening Fox’s brigade of the British Line was called out to recover Pont-à-Chin which had already been taken and retaken three or four times. The brigade went into this action with fewer than six hundred men, having lost half of its numbers just four days before; but the three gallant regiments, though unsupported, carried the village unhesitatingly with the bayonet, pressed on to the low heights to south of it, swept everything before them, May 22. so far as their front extended, and captured seven cannon. The day ended, after a severe struggle of fifteen hours, in the retreat of the French, with the loss of some six thousand men and seven guns; the fire, both of musketry and artillery, having been the heaviest ever remembered by the oldest soldiers present. Both sides, however, fought for the most part in dispersed formation, and inflicted, comparatively speaking, little damage upon each other. The one exception was Fox’s brigade. “Had their order of attack,” wrote Calvert, “been adopted by the Allies in general, the day would probably have ended in the ruin of the French.” But the losses of the brigade amounted to one hundred and twenty killed, wounded, and missing; and there are few troops that can be trusted, after losing half their numbers on Sunday, to storm a position held by a superior force and lose one-fifth of their remnant on Thursday. Some indeed claim that but for this handful of British soldiers the day would have been lost to the Allies;[245] but whether this be true or not, the 22nd of May should be a great anniversary for the Fourteenth, Thirty-Seventh, and Fifty-Third.
It was directly after this action that the course of events in Poland began to tell upon the councils of the May 23. Imperial Headquarters at Tournai. On the 23rd, Mack, disgusted by the failure of his elaborate plans, resigned his post as Chief of the Staff, and, having first expressed his opinion that the reconquest of Belgium was hopeless, retired for the time into private life. His successor, Waldeck, being a fellow-conspirator with Thugut, was still more eager for the evacuation of the Netherlands; and the Emperor was easily tempted to share their May 24. views. On the 24th a Council of War was held for form’s sake, wherein the Emperor set forth the situation in such a light as to gain a ready vote from his Generals that further efforts in the Netherlands were useless. The Duke of York alone pleaded earnestly for a renewal of the attack upon Flanders; and, as fate ordained it, his representations were seconded by unexpected successes of the Allies on the Sambre and in the Palatinate. On the 24th Marshal Möllendorf and the Prussians surprised the French about Kaiserslautern and drove them back with a loss of three thousand men and twenty guns; and on the same day Count Kaunitz gained a still more important victory on the Sambre. The fact was that serious differences had arisen at Paris between Carnot on the one side and Robespierre and St. Just on the other, because Carnot insisted on keeping the direction of the military operations in his own hands. Robespierre, to whom the art of war was as incomprehensible as a Chinese manuscript, was furious with jealousy and rage. “At the first reverse, Carnot’s head shall fall,” cried the despicable creature, galled by the cold contempt with which his inflexible colleague rebuffed his attempts at interference; and to re-establish civil influence at the seat of war, St. Just, Lebas, and five more Commissioners set out on the 2nd of May for the army of the Sambre. There they introduced the rule of terror in its worst form, and with it, of course, confusion unspeakable. May 18, 20,
22, 24. They fought with the Generals, they fought among themselves; and in the midst of this chaos St. Just took upon himself the supreme direction of the operations whereby the Austrians were to be crushed. Four several times he ordered the army to pass the Sambre, wasting the lives of his troops with obstinate imbecility. May 24. Finally he gave Kaunitz the opportunity for a counter-attack, in which, with inconsiderable loss to themselves, the Austrians routed the French completely, killing and wounding two thousand men, and capturing three thousand more, besides fifty pieces of cannon.
This heavy blow to the French right wing offered a fair occasion for the Allies to renew the offensive in Western Flanders; and the Duke of York urged this step upon his colleagues with all his might. The British Government too, reckoning that the troops, promised by Prussia in return for a British subsidy, must be nearly ready, decided to send out Lord Cornwallis to concert operations with Möllendorf, and directed him also to consult the Emperor and the Duke of York on his way to the Prussian Headquarters. But, as has already been told, King Frederick William was occupied rather with Poland than France at the moment; and he had also been much irritated by certain dispositions which had been proposed for his army by Mack in the middle of May. “I am astonished at the fashion in which Mack thinks to make use of my troops,” wrote the King. “Does Mack imagine that we can live on air?” echoed Möllendorf;[246] both of them being secretly delighted with so good an excuse for remaining inactive. Then suddenly, on the May 29. 29th of May, the Allied Camp at Tournai was thrown into consternation by the announcement that the Emperor was about to return to Vienna. Aided by the defeat of the 18th, Thugut had succeeded in persuading his imperial master to abandon the Austrian Netherlands; and even Mack, the unpopular Quartermaster-general, had supported him by recommending not only the evacuation of the country but the conclusion of peace with France.
The truth was that jealousy of Prussia had prevailed over all other considerations, and that the Emperor had decided to offer help to the Empress Catherine in quelling the Polish insurrection. He hoped, however, at the same time to delude Prussia into keeping thirty thousand men upon the Rhine, and England into furnishing a subsidy for the ostensible prosecution of the war with France; and it was therefore imperative upon him to conceal his intentions. He accordingly gave out that the object of his departure was to hasten the recruiting of his forces; and in his final letter to Coburg, who very unwillingly retained the command, he gave him only vague instructions to adapt his action to the exigencies of the campaign and to save his troops as much as possible. But this duplicity deceived no one, and the less because Waldeck, before he had succeeded Mack as Chief of the Staff, had openly declared that the war in Belgium must be ended. The Austrian troops were profoundly discouraged, and two-thirds of the officers asked permission to retire. They can hardly be blamed, for the succession of murderous actions fought by the Allies against the French on the northern frontier of France, between the 17th of April and the 22nd of May 1794, has few parallels in the history of war. For a month Austrians, British, and Germans had contended almost unceasingly against superior numbers, slaying or taking, not without heavy loss to themselves, French soldiers by the ten thousand, and capturing French cannon by the score. Yet all had been to no purpose, partly because the leaders had deliberately chosen a foolish plan of operations, partly because they had steadily refused to follow up their successes, partly because on the 18th of May they had held two-thirds of the army inactive within sound of the guns which were overwhelming their comrades. The bravest men will not fight upon such terms. They will not be butchered to serve the intrigues of politicians whose dishonesty would disgrace a sergeant, and of potentates whose incapacity would disqualify a corporal. In days to come Austria May 29. was to pay dearly in Italy for the 29th of May 1794.[247]
Immediately before the Emperor’s departure came news from Kaunitz that the French had again crossed the Sambre in force; which compelled Coburg to send him large reinforcements, and thus to weaken the right and centre of the Allies in order to strengthen their left. At the same time, for the sake of keeping the Dutch in good humour, Coburg was obliged to give the supreme command in that quarter to the Crown Prince of Orange, to the natural disgust of Kaunitz, who had shown much ability and achieved great successes. The great safeguard, however, to eastward was that St. Just insisted upon controlling the French operations; and it need not be said that against such an adversary even the Prince of Orange was victorious. But far more serious were the movements of the French on the western flank. Apprised of Coburg’s detachment of troops to the Sambre, hoping still to further Carnot’s projects for invasion of England, and above all conscious of the advantage offered to French tactics by the enclosed country of Western Flanders, Pichegru determined to prosecute his operations on that side. Accordingly, leaving between thirty and forty thousand men in positions about Mouscron and Menin to hold Coburg in check, he marched with about the same June 1. number on Ypres. On the 1st of June about fifteen thousand men surrounded the fortress on the west and south, and opened their first parallel; while some twenty thousand more under Souham took post about Passchendaele, about six miles to the north-east, to cover the siege from Clerfaye, who was lying at Thielt. On that same day, by a curious irony, Lord Howe defeated the Brest fleet, taking eight French ships and sinking two more. This action, in which the regiments on the fleet, and particularly the Sixty-Ninth,[248] played no inconspicuous part, closed for the present all Carnot’s projects of an invasion.
June 4.
The event, however, in no way disturbed the plans of Pichegru. On the 4th of June Clerfaye contrived to pass two battalions into Ypres to strengthen the garrison; but he declared himself unable, with the fifteen thousand men that remained to him, to relieve the place unless he were reinforced. By express command of the Emperor, who had lingered at Brussels on his homeward journey, Coburg sent him some ten thousand men in two detachments, reckoning that, after the recent victory on the Sambre, he could safely draw a few troops from that quarter. Clerfaye, however, continued to display the sluggishness which had characterised his conduct from the beginning June 6. of the campaign. On the 6th, before his reinforcements had reached him, he made a feeble advance against Souham in four columns, and was of course June 10. unsuccessful; and on the 10th, when his force had been raised to over twenty thousand men, he was assailed and defeated with loss by Souham before he could make up his mind to act. On that same day Coburg had designed to make a diversion in Clerfaye’s favour, by an attack on Mouscron, upon a plan calculated so exactly to expose the Duke of York’s column to destruction, as on the 18th of May, that the Duke refused to accept it until it was altered. This, however, was of small importance, for the French, having perfect information of the intended movements, appeared in every direction in such force that the enterprise was abandoned. The state of things at the Austrian headquarters was indeed almost beyond belief. Insensible to all ideas of duty and discipline, the young staff-officers, described by Craig as “in general the most contemptible of puppies,” had talked openly of the projected movement in the coffee-houses at noon, though the Duke of York received no information of it until ten hours later, nor any orders until four o’clock on the next morning. “Mack used to keep these gentry in order,” wrote Craig, “and, had he been here, the prison would have been full of them next day; but indeed it would never have happened.” Meanwhile Clerfaye remained so incurably supine that the Duke of York more than once entreated Coburg to entrust the relief of Ypres June 12.
June 13. to himself, but in vain. Roused by repeated orders to attack, Clerfaye at last moved against Souham in five columns, gained some advantage at first, captured ten guns, and then as usual sat still until Souham had gathered troops sufficient for a counter attack, when he immediately retired to his old position at Thielt.
This sealed the fate of Ypres, the key of maritime Flanders, the chief support of the right flank of the Allies, the bulwark which protected the British communications with Ostend. The Duke of York pleaded hard for a last effort to save it, by a march of the whole army to join Clerfaye; but without success. “The truth is,” wrote Craig, “that the Austrian army is incapable of further action. The men are disheartened and the officers disgusted and disunited.” It was finally decided that, to cover Ostend and the Dutch frontier, Clerfaye should take up a position between the Lys and the Scheldt about Deynse, some ten miles to the south-west of Ghent; keeping half of his force between Bruges and Ostend, and sending the Eighth Light Dragoons, Thirty-eighth and Fifty-fifth, which had formed part of his force, to Ostend. “We are too weak by ten thousand men to hold this defensive position,” wrote Craig; “if the French see their chance and push Clerfaye, they will force us to abandon this position about Tournai and will pass the Scheldt in spite of us; and then ten to one we shall find ourselves separated from him and beaten in detail.... Sooner than hold the defensive position I would concentrate the whole army, eighty thousand men, march to the Sambre, attack them at any risk and march back again.... You may expect to hear from us soon in Holland.” Clearly there was one among the despised British officers who could have taught the Austrians a lesson.[249]
The situation was indeed a desperate one. The Austrians, having taken no pains to restore the fortifications of Tournai, had thrown up an entrenched camp for its protection on the western side. These lines extended from the city southward along the Scheldt to Maulde, and required so many men for their defence that few could be spared for active operations. Some seven thousand Frenchmen at Mons-en-Pévèle kept the left of the Allies in continual alarm for the safety of Orchies, which was the key of Maulde and of the passage of the Scheldt at Mortagne; for if that passage were forced, the communication between Coburg and the army of the Sambre would be endangered. A little to the north of Mons-en-Pévèle was the entire garrison of Lille, and still further to the north, between Lille and Menin, stood from twenty to thirty thousand more French troops. Behind this screen to westward, from fifty thousand to sixty thousand of the enemy were engaged as the besieging and covering armies at Ypres; and far beyond them to the north lay the right wing of the Allies under Clerfaye, stretched in a weak attenuated line from Ostend to the Lys, and only maintaining communication with Tournai by the circuitous route of the Scheldt. On the eastern flank the French had now some seventy-five thousand men on the Sambre, with a capable leader in Jourdan, albeit one still hampered by the interference of St. Just; and this was the only quarter in which recent events had gone favourably for the Allies. Such a situation could not last long, and the strain upon June 16. Coburg must have been cruelly severe. On the 16th, however, there came a gleam of hope. The French on that day again passed the Sambre, but for the fifth time were driven back with heavy loss; and Coburg, having summoned four battalions from that June 18. quarter, determined on the 18th to march and join with Clerfaye in a final attempt to relieve Ypres. The troops were already in motion, when in the evening the news came that the French had crossed the Sambre for the sixth time, and successfully invested Charleroi. Thereupon the enterprise was abandoned. June 19. On the following day Ypres surrendered, and thus Carnot’s original plan of turning both flanks of the Allies began, after two months of murderous fighting, to accomplish itself.
Enabled by the fall of Ypres to turn the whole of his attention to eastward, Coburg at once proposed that he should march with all the Austrian troops to Charleroi, and leave the Duke of York to guard the line of the Scheldt from Tournai to Condé. The Duke answered that his instructions were to keep the whole of the troops in British pay together, but that, if ordered, he would gladly lead the whole of them with Coburg to the Sambre. Since, however, his force was absolutely inadequate to guard the line of the Scheldt, he insisted that, if it were left behind, an Austrian garrison should remain at Tournai, and that he himself should take up a position on the eastern bank of the Scheldt between that city and Oudenarde, so as to ensure his retreat in case of mishap.
The offer to march to the Sambre was fair, and it is difficult to understand why Coburg did not embrace it; for, if the battle on the Sambre were lost, it would obviously be impossible for the Duke’s troops to remain isolated in Flanders. Coburg did, however, reject it, though he consented to station about five thousand Austrians under General Kray between Denain and Orchies, promising that, if he succeeded in forcing back the enemy on the Sambre, he would return without delay, but that, in the event of his failure, he should not expect the Duke of York to maintain his position on the Scheldt. He also took the significant step of transferring the Austrian hospitals and stores at Valenciennes, as well as the magazines about Tournai, to Brussels and Antwerp; the removal of the stores at Brussels having begun some time June 21. before.[250] Finally, on the 21st, he marched away; and the Duke, since the corps in British pay had now shrunk to seven thousand men, contracted his quarters, and took up a new position closer to Tournai.
But meanwhile the news that Ostend was in danger had, as usual, stirred Dundas to unwonted exertion in England. He still made a fetish of the place, and his original intention seems to have been to defend it, without any particular reference to the Duke of York’s operations. On the 17th of June, therefore, he ordered Lord Moira’s force in the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands to sail for Ostend at once, together with drafts of recruits and three fresh regiments from Ireland, making in all a reinforcement of about ten thousand men. On the 20th Moira’s troops embarked, and on the 21st the Eighth, the Forty-fourth, and the recruits arrived at Ostend. The drafts, it must be remarked, arrived without arms or military appointments of any kind; and it was only a fog at sea that prevented a whole regiment, the Ninetieth, from being also landed there without either arms or clothing, Dundas having ordered it to embark without enquiry as to these details.[251] But Pichegru meanwhile did not remain idle, and leaving Ypres on the 20th marched upon Clerfaye’s position at Deynse. The Austrian General, after a short June 23. defence of his entrenchments, retired, with the loss of not a few men and three guns, first to Ghent, and then beyond it, finally taking up a position on the north side of the canal that runs from Ghent to Sluys, June 24.
June 25. where he was presently joined by his detachments from Bruges. On the 25th of June there arrived at Ostend, after a voyage of nineteen days from Cork, one squadron of the Fourteenth Light Dragoons and the Thirty-third regiment, the latter under the command of an officer whose name it still bears, but who was then an impecunious younger son of five-and-twenty, possessed indeed of some skill in playing the violin, but still distinguished by no higher title than June 26. that of Colonel Arthur Wellesley. On the morrow Moira with the last of the reinforcements[252] also reached Ostend, where he found an advanced guard of the French within four miles of the town, a large force of several thousand men close behind it, and the Commandant very wisely embarking his garrison with a view to retreat. The whole district was in a state of panic; but Moira promptly landed the whole of his men, and having observed the difficulties of defending Ostend, and the military worthlessness of the place, quietly selected his fighting ground outside it. “I am not at all satisfied with my position,” he wrote calmly to Dundas, “but since you appear to attach importance to the town I will do my best to maintain it.” “The defences are so detestable,” he added cheerfully to Nepean, “that I shall go into the open field if we must come to blows. If you are to lose everything it does not signify if you are beaten into the bargain.”[253] It is dangerous for a General, be he even so able as Moira, to address an English Minister of War in this strain; for, in the event of mishap, the words may be brought up as evidence against him in Parliament to prove that he was reckless, careless, neglectful, or despondent.
During these days the Duke of York remained in painful suspense at Tournai, until the news of Clerfaye’s defeat on the 23rd warned him to move northward without delay. As Craig had perceived, the French by crossing the Scheldt at Oudenarde could prevent the Duke of York from joining Clerfaye, crush both armies in detail, and then, passing eastward, could annihilate Coburg. The Duke therefore called in June 24. Kray’s Austrians for the defence of Tournai, and marched north-eastward on the right bank of the Scheldt to Renaix, where he learned that on the same day a French corps had summoned Oudenarde. On June 25.
June 27. the morrow Pichegru crossed the Lys at Deynse with the main body of his army, and striking south from thence encamped on the 27th at Huysse, between four and five miles north of Oudenarde. On that same night came a message from Coburg to the Duke of York that on the previous day he had made his attack on the French about Charleroi and had failed. This June 26. was the battle of Fleurus, which had been suddenly broken off by the Austrian commander before decisive advantage had been gained by either side; and it is still a question whether Coburg’s action was dictated by the requirements of Thugut’s policy or by his own military judgment. However that may be, he retreated in good order upon Brussels, halting on the June 27. 27th in a position running from Soignies on the west through Braine L’Alleud to Gembloux on the east. This movement uncovered the Duke of York’s left rear, and placed him in a most dangerous position. He had with him barely ten thousand men, nearly half of them cavalry, which in so close a country were of little service; and from the church-tower at Oudenarde he could see thirty thousand of the enemy in his front. The French, by passing the Scheldt, could at any time cut off his retreat to the north, in which case his only line of safety lay eastward towards Grammont; and this in its turn would be closed if Coburg should continue his retrograde movement towards Namur, which was his first stage on the road to Vienna.
June 28.
On the morning of the 28th the enemy appeared in force before Oudenarde, showing every sign of making the dreaded movement across the river; and the Duke despatched orders to Moira to join Clerfaye immediately. For two days Pichegru continued his menaces on the Scheldt, and then suddenly on the June 30. evening of the 30th he retired, having received orders from Paris to occupy Nieuport, Ostend, and the island of Walcheren in force, with a view to the invasion of England. Ostend, which, together with Nieuport, Henry Dundas had kept under his own orders, was evacuated in good time, while directions to that purport were still on their way from England. Moira’s instructions extended no further than to the defence of Ostend, but, in the critical circumstances of the case, he proposed to join his force to Clerfaye, and to act with him against the French left. Clerfaye at first welcomed the offer, but, on hearing of the misfortune of Fleurus, declared that he could make no engagement with the British whatever. This was unpleasant for Moira, who had counted on the help of the Austrians in protecting the transport of his camp-equipage on the canal from Bruges to Ghent. The situation was dangerous, for the French were in force at three different places within two hours’ march of the canal, bent upon preventing his junction with Clerfaye. Without a moment’s hesitation Moira sent his baggage northward to Sluys, and by a rapid march made his way to Ghent, just in time to anticipate a movement made by the French to intercept him. Thus a valuable reinforcement was secured to the Allies; and three more perilous days were passed without mishap, thanks rather to the Committee of Safety at Paris than to the Austrian commanders in the field.[254]
June 30.
On the evening of the 30th the Duke of York rode over from Renaix to Braine L’Alleud to consult Coburg; and it was then agreed that Clerfaye’s force should change places with the Duke’s, so as to bring the Austrian corps nearer to its own main army, and the British contingent nearer to the sea. At the actual conference both Coburg and the Archduke Charles declared that, having no orders from the Emperor to evacuate the Austrian Netherlands, they felt bound in honour to defend them. Waldeck indeed opposed even a withdrawal from the line of the Scheldt. All this, July 2. however, was mere trifling, for two days later Coburg wrote that his right wing had been driven back from Soignies, and that the Duke would do well to retire to a position appointed him between Brussels and Antwerp. The fall of Mons on the 1st of July having also laid bare the Duke’s left flank and rear, he took the hint, and while protesting against the desertion of the country, gave his orders for retreat in the morning by way of Grammont and thence upon Alost. Tournai, through the courtesy of the French, was peaceably evacuated by the Austrians, though Condé, Valenciennes, Landrecies, and Quesnoy were held. The line of the Scheldt was abandoned, and the Duke of York’s troops were withdrawn from every garrison except Nieuport. As to this last the Duke, as in duty July 2. bound, asked for Dundas’s orders, saying that, if the Government wished to reconquer Flanders, the place should be kept; otherwise the garrison, which included five hundred French emigrants, should not for pity’s sake be exposed to the risk of capture.
Then followed a miserable tragedy. Dundas, apparently before the receipt of this letter, wrote on the 3rd of July to General Diepenbrock, the Commandant at Nieuport, promising to send transports for the embarkation of the garrison, if necessary, but adding that the Government attached great importance to the retention of the place. Within two days the French had broken ground before the miserable little port, where the water was so shallow that ships could not July 16. come near the shore; and less than a fortnight later the unfortunate garrison, which included a few British troops, was compelled to surrender. Forthwith the French massed the emigrants in the ditch of the fort and played upon them with grape-shot until the whole of them were destroyed. It was well known that this would inevitably be the fate of those unhappy men if they fell into the hands of the Republicans; and German authors have not hesitated to censure the Duke of York because, according to the current, though unjust, opinion, he neglected to order the evacuation of Nieuport while there was yet time. It were, indeed, devoutly to be wished that the Duke had respected Dundas less, and had withdrawn the garrison without consulting him, though it is manifest that he would thereby have drawn upon himself the censure of the Government. The blame, therefore, for this shameful business must remain with Dundas; and it was a very great misfortune for England that he was not called to account for it.[255]
Meanwhile the Duke continued his retreat northward down the river Dendre, reaching Lombeek Ste. Catherine, about eight miles west of Brussels, on the July 5. 4th of July. On the morrow the leaders of the coalesced armies again met in conference at Waterloo, when it was decided that Clerfaye’s force should pass eastwards towards Brussels, and that the army of the Allies should ultimately occupy a line from Antwerp, by Louvain, Wavre, and Gembloux, to Namur, but that until the 7th, at any rate, the line in advance of Brussels, extending from Alost by Braine-le-Comte and Nivelles to Sombref, should be maintained. Ghent had already been evacuated; and accordingly on the next day Clerfaye’s force began its march to join Coburg, while Moira moved to Alost and brought his troops for the first time under the Duke’s personal command. But July 6. Jourdan meanwhile was not inactive. On the 6th he attacked the whole line of the Austrians from Braine-le-Comte to Gembloux; and, though repulsed after hard fighting on the east, where a concentrated attack might have given him possession of the Austrian line of communications, he succeeded in pushing Coburg’s right wing back from Braine-le-Comte and Nivelles to Waterloo. Thereupon Coburg warned the Duke of York that he must retire eastward and cancel the agreement made on the 5th. The Duke answered with cold sarcasm that it was a new thing for the Austrians to retire before thirty thousand Frenchmen, and appealed to the Archduke Charles to keep Coburg to his engagements; but received from him only a sad reply that orders must be obeyed. On the 7th and 8th Jourdan renewed his attacks, directing the best of his strength against the Austrian left, which he forced back to the battlefield of Ramillies. He then immediately invested Namur; upon which Coburg, fearing to be cut off from July 7. the Meuse, ordered the whole of his army to retire upon Tirlemont.
The Duke meanwhile, since his left was uncovered by the retreat of the Austrians, withdrew, at Coburg’s request, very slowly northward to Assche, and thence struck north-eastward to the Dyle, which he crossed at Malines, fixing his headquarters at Contich, some eight miles north of that city. A new line of defence was then taken up, which sufficiently showed the divided counsels of the Allies. On the right the July. British contingent, now numbering some thirty thousand men, was posted on the Dyle from Antwerp to Malines. On its left the Prince of Orange with the Dutch troops and from two to three thousand Austrians covered the line from Malines to Louvain; and from Louvain the rest of the Austrian army, between forty-five and fifty thousand men, was extended in a south-easterly direction by Tirlemont, Landen, and Waremme to the Meuse, with a detachment of four thousand more on the eastern bank of that river, and between it and the Ourthe. Thus the British and Dutch, who desired to defend Holland, could be deserted at any moment which the Emperor should select for the pursuit of his own particular object, namely, to carry his army away to share the plunder of Poland. Craig, for his part, felt no doubt whatever that the British and Dutch would very soon be left to their own resources.[256]
The reader may have felt surprised that, with a force of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand men, the French should not have pressed the Allies harder, and made an end of them long before. The fact was that the Committee of Public Safety had interfered with the Generals on the 4th of July, by an order that the recapture of Valenciennes, Condé, Landrecies, and Quesnoy should take precedence of any further operations; and accordingly the army in Belgium had been weakened to provide for this service. This was the work of Robespierre, who at the time was inclined towards peace; and indeed peace appears to have been a common topic of conversation between the French and Austrian outposts from the beginning of July.[257] Thirty thousand French soldiers were accordingly withdrawn to Valenciennes, as many more were wasted in occupying ports of embarkation for England, and the remainder were ordered to push the Allies completely out of Belgium, and then to occupy a cordon from Antwerp to Namur. Pichegru, therefore, took command July 12. in person of the left wing, and on the 12th moved with eighteen thousand men against Malines, while Jourdan on the right simultaneously advanced against Louvain, Jodoigne, and Huy on the Meuse. On the evening of the 12th Pichegru drove the Duke of York’s advanced posts into Malines, where they were promptly reinforced; but the fortifications of the town were in July 15. ruins, and, on renewing the attack on the 15th, the French captured the place with little difficulty. The troops charged with the defence were Hessians and Dutch; and it appears certain that the conduct of one or the other of them was not irreproachable, though there are indications also that the Duke himself was partly responsible for the mishap.
The Duke then threw his left back along the line of the Nethe from Lierre to Duffel; but meanwhile Jourdan had on the same day mastered Louvain, and July 15. in the course of the two following days Jodoigne and Namur also. The Dutch troops about Louvain, upon the loss of that town, fell back northward across the Demer, while the Austrians retired eastward; and thus the line of the Allies was fairly broken owing to their own divergent plans. The Duke of York had already in these days concerted operations with the Prince of July 18. Orange for the recapture of Malines on the 18th,[258] when he received a letter from Coburg saying that, owing to the loss of that place and of Louvain, he had ordered the troops formerly stationed at the latter city to fall back to Diest, and was himself withdrawing from Tirlemont to Landen. The Duke begged him before doing so to essay a general forward movement, but received only a vague and unsatisfactory reply; and July 20. on the morning of the 20th a staff-officer, while inspecting the left of the Dutch position, discovered that the Austrians at Diest were already retreating south-eastward on Hasselt, Coburg having given them orders to this effect without saying a word of his intentions to the July 22. Duke of York. With his left flank thus again laid bare, the Duke was obliged to evacuate Antwerp and retire due north from it across the Dutch frontier to Rozendahl. July 24. Coburg likewise fell back to eastward, crossed the Meuse at Maastricht, and took up a position about seven miles south and east of that fortress at Fouron le Comte. Thus the British and Austrians were finally parted.
It cannot be said that either of them was sorry to take leave of the other. Even in 1793 their relations had not been too cordial, for the Austrians, in their jealousy, would never allow foreign troops to pass through their fortified towns, even during a forced march; and thus the British were frequently condemned to make long and fatiguing detours.[259] But the betrayal of the Duke of York’s column on the 18th of May, and the subsequent operations, deliberately contrived to hasten the evacuation of the Netherlands, converted the dislike of the British for the Austrians into the bitterest hatred and contempt. At headquarters, again, the presence of a soldier such as Craig, with ideas far more enlightened than those of the Austrians, and with some means of insisting upon them through the medium of the Duke of York, can hardly have contributed to harmony. It may be added that the Austrian troops were as severe in their criticism of their chiefs, and particularly of Waldeck, as were any of the British, proclaiming loudly that the abandonment of Belgium was due to French gold.[260] In fact the Austrian army, between heavy losses and deep distrust of its leaders, was utterly demoralised; nor is it surprising that this should have been so. It is indeed more than probable that, if Coburg had wished to make a stand after the action of Fleurus, his men would not have supported him. Of course Coburg had to bear the responsibility for all this, and to digest as best he might some very bitter reproaches from the Duke of York; yet it seems that in truth he was the person the least to blame. Though as a commander in the field he was slow, unenterprising, enamoured of vicious methods, and possessed of no military quality except that of looking carefully to the wants of his troops, yet he did not lack insight, sound sense, imperturbable calm, and the instinct of honesty and straightforwardness. His name is forgotten in England, though his portrait is still occasionally to be found in English print-shops, showing that at one time he had gained a certain fame, which was destined speedily to perish. It can only be said of him that he was beloved by his men, that he bore the sins of others without complaining, and that he was a loyal servant to an unfaithful master.