“One can always manage to command if one chooses on the day of battle, so that I am perfectly certain, though I have not an army, that nothing will happen where I am but what I choose; I have already learnt all that is necessary, and am beginning to understand Russian. Do you think now, my Charles, that I was right in always wishing you to be an engineer? You have now shown genius,[66] as I knew you would. But are you sure you are not slightly wounded, though you do not say so?
“Do not let any of His Majesty’s messengers come to me without sending me a letter. A thousand messages to my comrade Rouvroy, whose fate and wound I envy. Poor Poniatowski![67] I tremble lest he should follow in his father’s footsteps. He has already the same courage, the same military intelligence, personal devotion to His Majesty, generosity, etc., but I trust he will not have the same fate. Embrace him for me.”
The news of the taking of Sabacz had made a welcome break in the weary existence the Prince’s father was leading; but Potemkin’s apathy made him relapse into bad humour and impatience. He tried in vain to sting his pride by making constant allusions to the storming of Sabacz, but he had rightly guessed “that, either out of policy, ill-will, or incapacity, the marshals were resolved, even before the campaign was begun, on doing nothing.”
At last, wearied by this determined inaction, he wrote to Prince Potemkin that he should leave the next day for Marshal Romanzoff’s[68] camp in Ukrania.
“At last,” writes the Prince, “I have left those filthy entrenchments which, in virtue of a few projecting angles, are supposed to represent a fort; eight days more and I should have died of it. Potemkin nearly drove me mad. Sometimes on good terms, sometimes on bad, at daggers drawn or prime favourite, speaking or not speaking, but sitting up sometimes till six in the morning to induce him at least to say one word sensible enough to report,—I could no longer endure the whims of such a spoilt child.”
Wearied to death by this horrible inaction, the Prince went to see why Marshal Romanzoff was no better employed than Potemkin.
Romanzoff, as amiable as Potemkin was the reverse, loaded the Prince with promises and attentions, all equally, false. At the end of a few days Ligne was fully convinced that the two Commanders-in-Chief of the Russian army were agreed on one point—“to play a trick on the Emperor Joseph, and only begin the campaign in July, by which time the whole of the Turkish forces would have been directed against the Austrians.” The Prince de Ligne redoubled his efforts to stir up Potemkin. He wrote to the Austrian ambassador at St. Petersburg, and to the Comte de Ségur, urging them to inform the Empress of the situation; but though himself in such favour at Court he never once wrote to Catherine. She knew the motive of his silence, and was irritated at it; but she would not complain, in case that, in a fit of frankness, the Prince should say too much. “If I had chosen,” he says, “to write only once in praise of Prince Potemkin and his operations,[69] I should have received showers of presents in diamonds and serfs. Catherine would have been very well pleased if I had deceived her; it would have been more convenient for her to believe that all was going on well.”
In spite of his anger against the Russian Marshals the Prince de Ligne, who was a connoisseur, sincerely admired the Muscovite nation and soldiery.
“I see that the Russians,” he writes to the Comte de Ségur, “learn the liberal arts in the same way that le médecin malgré lui (the doctor in spite of himself) took his degree. They are foot-soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, priests, dragoons, musicians, engineers, actors, cuirassiers, painters and surgeons. I see the Russians sing and dance in the trenches, though they are never relieved, and remain in the midst of shot and shell, of snow or mud, clever, clean, attentive, respectful, obedient, trying to forestall their orders by divining them in the eyes of their officers.”
The greatest pleasure the General de Ligne had was to write and receive news of absent friends. His letters are so wonderfully graphic, the slightest detail is invested with so much charm, that one is never tired of reading them. Those he wrote to his son Charles are a perfect diary of his life.