Then, after this calamity, the British balloon force languished, but not for long, as war clouds were to be seen in the East, where military balloons should have been sent, particularly to Alexandria, but they were not, nor to other places in which Lord Wolseley has himself admitted that they might have proved very useful.
Our own progress at home and the activity displayed on the continent form an instructive contrast, but if we want to ascertain and compare the present with the past we must go back to the year 1793, and follow on chronologically.
The Committee of Public Safety (an excellent kind of committee for London adoption) gave their approval on condition that the gas should be prepared without using sulphuric acid, as sulphur could ill be spared on account of its being so much needed for the production of gunpowder.
Guyton de Morveau showed that water could be decomposed by being forced over red hot metal and borings in a retort, the oxygen being thus separated from the hydrogen which was alone required for an inflation.
Experiments at Meudon were instituted under the direction of Guyton de Morveau, Coutelle, and Conté. Their report led to the formation of a company to be named the Aërostiers, who boasted a captain, a sergeant-major, one sergeant, two corporals, and twenty men.
Coutelle was captain, and the aërostiers went to Meudon to be practised in the aëronautic art. After the preliminary experiments Coutelle was sent off to General Jourdan at Maubeuge with material for the inflation, but he arrived at the moment when General Chasal was under arrest for being involved in a plot to deliver the place to the enemy. Jourdan threatened to shoot him as a spy, but he softened down, as De Fonvielle relates, when he saw that Coutelle was not in the least disconcerted, and ended by congratulating him on his zeal in the defence of his country.
The balloon corps contained in its ranks, as indeed some of the modern associations do, some rather singular individuals. We are told in “Adventures in the Air” of a priest of Montmorency, whom the Reign of Terror had driven to take refuge in the camp, but who only waited the advent of more peaceable times to resume his cassock.
We may also mention Selles de Beauchamp, who entered the corps under the name of Cavalier Albert, and who rose to the rank of officer, and left interesting memoirs on the experiences of military balloonists.
The father of Beauchamp, an officer in one of the royal regiments, was seriously wounded in Piedmont, where two of his brothers were killed; he retired, moreover, and died in 1781, leaving a child six years old, who, two years later, lost his mother also. As an orphan of fortune, as soon as he was old enough, he was sent to the Harcourt College, where he was treated as a youth of quality.
His tutor adopted zealously the revolutionary cause, while Beauchamp stuck to the Court party. The latter, in attempting to leave the country, was arrested and sent to the army of the Loire, but rather than join it he engaged among the military balloonists, of whose life, but for him, we should have known nothing, for the memoirs of Coutelle, though very valuable from a scientific point of view, are too laconic, and enter into no details.