On the same day that the Royal Irish left Antwerp a French General, Löwendahl, appeared before Ostend with 21,000 good troops, a numerous artillery, and 5000 pack horses, laden with fascines for the siege; he finished his first parallel on the 14th of August, and next day threw up batteries on the shore to enfilade the harbour and to keep at a distance the British frigates which hovered about the port. After thus cutting off Ostend from communication with England he pushed on his works with vigour, and on the 18th twenty pieces of artillery and ten or twelve mortars opened a violent cannonade which lasted for four days almost without intermission. The defending troops were greatly overworked; half of them were constantly at the batteries or in the covered way; the remainder had to be ready to turn out at a moment’s notice, and as there were no casemates or bomb-proofs, the only shelter for the men when off duty was in barracks and private houses, which rapidly crumbled under the French projectiles. The officers were rather better off, for they shared with the sick and wounded the cellars of the town-hall, made shell-proof with walls of sandbags. All ranks were vilely fed; the officer of the XVIIIth who wrote the anonymous ‘Continuation of Stearne’s Journal’ says “the beef stank, the biscuits were full of maggots.” There were not enough artillerymen to man the guns; when the gun carriages were knocked to pieces by round shot there were none in reserve to replace them, and by the end of the siege only seven pieces of ordnance remained fit for use. Three days after the bombardment began de Chanclos wrote gloomily to Cumberland—
“This town is a heap of ruins ... the great fatigue, and entire absence of quiet, night or day, owing to bomb-shells and cannon-balls, put the garrison into very bad humour, and it is really not saying too much to call it bad. I might even add that one must be an Englishman to put up with what we are suffering here! The enemy is sapping up to the covered way and is attacking on our weakest side. Nearly all our cannon have been dismounted, many artillerymen have been killed and the survivors decline to work the guns.”
He thus reported the loss of the town:
“August 24.
“On the night of the 22nd a general assault was made on our covered way by fifteen companies of Grenadiers, supported by two battalions. The point chosen was the sea front at low water. We repulsed the enemy more than once, killing and wounding 500 men, and making prisoners of 2 captains, a lieutenant, and 30 odd grenadiers. At day break I assembled my commanding officers to obtain their opinion as to our situation. Everyone agreed that we could not hope to hold out for more than a few days.”
As soon as this informal Council of War was over de Chanclos ordered his drummers to beat the Chamade; and after obtaining a truce for the burial of his dead he offered to capitulate on condition that the garrison should be allowed to march out of Ostend with all the honours of war, and be escorted safely to Austrian territory.[74] In proposing these terms he forgot to specify the Austrian fortress to which his troops were to be conveyed, the route by which they were to travel, and the date on which they were to arrive. The French General, however, noticed these omissions, and with suspicious alacrity agreed to Chanclos’s terms: the garrison marched out with all due pomp, fully expecting to be escorted at once to the nearest Austrian town; but soon the troops learned to their deep disgust that the French had discovered the flaws in the articles of capitulation, and were about to send them by a devious route to Mons. This was considered very sharp practice, not at all worthy of an honourable enemy; but the King of France had every reason for wishing to deprive England as long as possible of the services of the defenders of Ostend, for the young Pretender, Charles Edward, had landed in Scotland; the rebellion, known in history as “the ’45,” was rapidly gaining strength; and Government was clamouring for the return from Belgium of the British troops. After a short halt at Ghent, they were crowded into canal boats for an involuntary “personally conducted” tour through Belgium, and from the description left by an officer of the regiment it is clear that the most ardent sight-seers could have extracted no pleasure from this journey.
“We were escorted by a party of Horse, and constantly attended by agents of theirs (the French) whose business it was to inveigle away our men, and by large promises (of which these rascals were not sparing) induce them to desert; as our progress was rendered designedly slow we were only drawn by the boors of the country a very few miles a day. A French trooper with his carbine was placed at the head of each billander, who did not fail to threaten the poor wretches with firing at them whenever they did not pull to please them. We continued on board this incommodious embarcation seventeen days, when we arrived in Tournai, where we disembarked.”
As Tournai is about thirty-two miles from Mons, the column should have begun its march very early in the morning to have covered the distance in one day, but the escort refused to move till 8 A.M., and consequently it was 7 o’clock in the evening before the British arrived at St Gillain, a fortified village held by the Austrians as an outpost to Mons, a few miles farther on. Alleging that in bringing the garrison of Ostend to this outpost they had fulfilled their undertaking, the French halted, ceremoniously saluted the Colours of each regiment, and then retired. The British officers were at a loss to understand why the French had left the column at St Gillain instead of escorting it to Mons, but in a few minutes they learned the reason from an Austrian general whom Cumberland had sent to meet them. A large body of the enemy’s troops were lurking in the neighbourhood, with orders to attack St Gillain if the regiments from Ostend remained there, and if they attempted to reach Mons to capture or exterminate them on the march; the only hope of escape, therefore, was to start at once on the chance that the intercepting force had not already taken up its position. Without a moment’s delay the ranks were re-formed, the pans of the muskets re-primed and the bayonets fixed; then in profound silence the weary troops plodded along the causeway leading towards Mons. “As it was a moonlight night we could command a view of the country about us, and as we every moment expected the enemy we continued our march in the greatest order; not a whisper was to be heard; the officers who were present will always remember with pleasure the discipline and good disposition every regiment showed on that occasion. At eleven we arrived at Mons, where owing to some mismanagement we waited two hours before we got admittance.”[75] This delay was obviously caused by bad staff work, but the arrangements of the French were no better. The enemy, confident that the Ostend troops would be too tired to push on that night, left no patrols to watch the exits from the village, with the result that 20,000 Frenchmen took up a position astride the causeway an hour after the refugees had found safety within the walls of Mons. For three weeks the Royal Irish were blockaded in this fortress; then thanks to the manœuvres of a relieving force they “slipped out” at dead of night, and in a few days reached the neighbourhood of Brussels.
Affairs in Scotland were now going so badly that nearly every English soldier was recalled from the Continent to defend England against the Jacobite invasion. The XVIIIth landed at Gravesend early in November, and after various changes of quarters embarked for the seat of war in Scotland in the spring of 1746. On the voyage a vexatious incident occurred by which the regiment was prevented from taking any active part in the Scotch campaign. While off the coast of Yorkshire the transports, containing the 12th, 16th, XVIIIth, and 24th regiments, were warned that three French men-of-war were cruising in the neighbourhood; the ships ran for safety into the Humber, where they remained until the report was proved to have no foundation; and owing to this delay the Royal Irish did not reach Leith until the day after the rebels had been finally crushed at the battle of Culloden. For two years the regiment was stationed in Scotland, in the summer making military roads in the Highlands, in the winter quartered at various towns, and when the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle put an end to the war the XVIIIth was ordered to Ireland, after it had been placed on a peace footing by reductions so sweeping that the establishment of each company was fixed at two sergeants, two corporals, one drummer, and twenty-nine private soldiers.
In 1755, our relations with France were again strained to breaking point: in America the French garrison of Canada and the British garrison of the colonies on the Atlantic coast were waging fierce, though unofficial war in the forests south of the river St Lawrence; and as the conflict seemed likely to spread to Europe, troops were withdrawn from Ireland to Great Britain. Among the regiments hurriedly brought across St George’s Channel was the XVIIIth, rapidly recruited up to a strength of seventy-eight men per company. But the “Seven Years’ War” brought no laurels to the Royal Irish, who were condemned to inactivity in the United Kingdom, while other corps were winning fame on the Continent and in the West Indies, in Canada and the Philippine Islands. In 1767, four years after peace was declared, the regiment was ordered to Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, one of the oldest of our American colonies. The beginning of the lamentable quarrel between the mother-country and her English-speaking over-sea provinces found the Royal Irish still quartered at Philadelphia, but in 1774, Boston, the chief town of the colony of Massachusetts, became such a hotbed of disaffection that General Gage, who commanded the troops in British North America, reinforced its garrison with troops drawn from less disloyal centres of population. Among the regiments ordered to Boston was the XVIIIth, at that time very weak in numbers, for hardly any recruits had arrived from home, and those enlisted at Philadelphia were “bounty-jumpers,” who deserted at every opportunity.