Fighting was tolerably general in Europe from 1793 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802. We had been fighting at sea with the French in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st June and at the Nile, with the Spanish at Cape St. Vincent, and the Danes at Copenhagen. We had occupied Toulon at the request of French Royalists, and been compelled to abandon it, very largely through the action of a young officer of artillery named Bonaparte. There had been practically three campaigns in Flanders. The Duke of York, with the 14th, 37th, 53rd, etc., and a brigade of Guards, had been despatched to Holland, where the latter, but three battalions strong, routed an entrenched force of 5000 men, so that “The French, who had been accustomed to the cold, lifeless attacks of the Dutch, were amazed at the spirit and intrepidity of the British.” For this the brigade bears the name of Lincelles on their colours. The 14th also displayed the greatest coolness at Famars, young soldiers though they were; for, attacking with too much impetuosity, their colonel made them halt and re-form, and when thus steadied, took them into action again, the band playing them to victory with the French Revolutionary tune of Ça ira. Ever afterwards the tune is played after dinner at mess, and is the regimental march. The attack on Dunkirk, however, failed, and the duke returned home.
The next year he returned, and the campaign, embittered by an order of Republican France to give no quarter to wounded or prisoners, re-opened. In the brilliant little cavalry action at Villers en Couche the 15th Light Dragoons especially distinguished themselves, and for their gallantry, as well as for saving the life of the Emperor of Germany, eight of the officers were decorated with the cross of the order of Maria Theresa; while at Cateau the Royals fought so brilliantly that £500 was given to the regiment by the Duke of York’s orders.
The success was but temporary. The French concentrated overwhelming numbers, and the army fell back on Antwerp, and then to Holland, and suffered terribly in the dreadful winter of 1794. The stubborn resistance of the rearguard, composed of the 14th, 37th, and 53rd, supported on the flanks by the skilful and bold work of the 7th, 15th, and 16th cavalry regiments, prevented a disaster which the indifference or probable disaffection of the Dutch troops did not tend to lessen; and finally, the dispirited but unbeaten force, abandoning its stores and spiking the guns it could not take with it, reached Bremen. The horrors of that dreadful march, begun on the 6th January 1795, are only equalled by the retreat from Moscow of a French army later; but the discipline and endurance of the troops was beyond all praise. The contemporary records especially mention the Guards, the 27th, 33rd, 42nd, 44th, and 78th Regiments for their splendid discipline. The 28th, too, were notorious for their strong regimental feeling. “Hospitals were their aversion. Their home was the battalion, and they were never happy away from it.” Of all the regiments, the hardy Scotsmen of the 42nd fared best; and in this disastrous campaign, honourable in all its details save that of mere success, another young officer, Arthur Wellesley of the 33rd, first saw fire at Boxtel. Thus the end of the last century was to give the early war-training to two great antagonists—Napoleon at Toulon and Wellington at Boxtel. This alone would render the military history of 1794–95 interesting to all who read.
But the eighteenth century was to see yet another campaign in the Netherlandic area. It had not been, on the whole, peculiarly favourable to British arms, and the last campaign there was to be no exception to the rule.
For, notwithstanding that the duke had the active co-operation of such men as Ralph Abercromby and John Moore, not much came of it. The allied Russians and British made little headway against the French with the “Batavian Republic,” and a check at Alkmaar, followed by a victory at Egmont-op-Zee on the 2nd October 1799 where, according to the duke, “under Divine Providence,” the French were entirely defeated, and where the Royals, the 20th, 25th, 49th, 63rd, 79th, and 92nd did their duty, practically terminated the Helder campaign. For, after an armistice, the British troops left the Netherlands, never to fight seriously in that district until the final victory of 1815, when Wellington, who first saw battle there, was to terminate a series of wars for which the Low Countries had for more than a century been the “cockpit.”
The landing of the army in Walcheren ten years later may be disregarded. Except in the capture of Flushing, there was practically no fighting. The real enemy was fever, and out of the forty thousand men who had been disembarked, thirty-five thousand had been in hospital. The plan of operation was initially bad, the carrying out worse. Between Chatham on shore and Strachan at sea there was so little intelligent co-operation that each abused the other for what was clearly the fact, that
“The Earl of Chatham, with his sword drawn,
Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan;
Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em,
Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.”
As Napoleon himself remarked at one time, “Before six weeks, of the fifteen thousand troops which are in the Isle of Walcheren not fifteen hundred will be left, the rest will be in hospital. The expedition has been undertaken under false expectations and planned in ignorance.”
This is the grim and gruesome truth. With the above exception, then, the theatre of war after the expedition to the Helder was, for many a year, as far as the British army was concerned, changed. The increasing importance of India was beginning to be felt. Napoleon, far seeing, had recognised this, and first put into French minds the value of Egypt. Though there was no canal, as there is now, it was still geographically the shortest road to the East. Then, as now, Egypt was a station on the line that united Great Britain with Eastern possessions that were but embryos of what they are now. The one striking point in the vast and ambitious intellect of the greatest soldier the world has seen, Alexander and Cæsar not excepted, is his grasp of the political future of the nations of Europe. Intuitively he saw the worth of Egypt to the great dominant naval powers, England and France. His views were almost prophetic, his ideas magnificent.
Notwithstanding the disaster to the French of Aboukir Bay, he decided on contending in Africa for the possession of Asia. What a stupendous genius the man had! How astounding the rise of the young officer of artillery, who fought against his fellow-patriots of Corsica, who drove the British out of Toulon, and who was soon to be the dominant soul in all Europe! “Who could have believed that a simple sub-lieutenant of artillery, a stranger to France by name and by birth, was destined to govern that great Empire and to give the law in a manner to all the Continent, in defiance of reason, justice, the hereditary rights of the legitimate princes of the realm, and the combined efforts of so great a number of loyalists in the interior of the kingdom, and all the Great Powers of Europe.”