Upon the 13th, by night, twelve dragoons volunteered to take news out of Maubeuge, a sergeant leading them. They swam the Sambre and got clean away. They rode all night; they rode by morning into Philippeville and begged that three cannon shots might be fired, for that was the signal by which Maubeuge was to know that they had brought news of the hard straits of the city beyond the Austrian lines. They rode on without sleep to Givet, and there at last they heard that an army was on the march, straight for the relief of the siege.
Carnot had gathered that army, bringing in the scattered and broken detachments from the right and the left, concentrating them upon Avesnes, until at last he had there to his hand 45,000 men. Carnot was there in Avesnes, and we have records of the ragged army, some of them fresh from defeats, most of them worthless, pouring in. There were those who had one shoe, there were those who had none; they were armed in varying fashion; they were wholly under-gunned. The boys straggled, marched, or drooped in, the gayer of them roaring marching songs, but the greater part disconsolate. With such material, in one way or another, Carnot designed to conquer. Maubeuge had been upon half rations since the beginning of the week, it might ask for terms in any hour, and between him and it stretched the long high line of wood wherein Coburg lay entrenched impregnably.
The nominal command of the hosts so gathered was in the hands of Jourdan, a travelling draper who had volunteered in the American War, whom the Committee of Public Safety had discovered, once more a draper, and to whom it had given first the army of the Ardennes, then this high post before Maubeuge. He was a man of simple round features and of easy mind; he had but just been set at the head of the Army of the North: left to himself he would have lost it—and his head. But the true commander was not Jourdan, it was Carnot. Carnot came to represent only the force of the Parliament of which he was a member and the force of the Committee of Public Safety of which he was the brain; but once on the field he exceeded both these capacities and became, what he had always been, a soldier. His big and ugly, bulging forehead with its lean wisp of black hair hid the best brain and overhung the best eye for tactics of all those that preceded and prepared the final effect of Napoleon’s armies.
The great Carnot in Avesnes that night stood like a wrestler erect and ready, his arms free, his hands unclenched, balancing to clutch the invader and to try the throw. He, with that inward vision of his, saw the whole plan of the struggle from south to north, and overlooked the territory of the French people as a mountain bird overlooks the plain. He knew the moment. He knew it not as a vague, intense, political fear, nor even as a thesis for the learned arms and for the staff, but as a visible and a real world: he saw the mountains and the rivers, the white threads of roads radiating from Paris to all the points of peril, of rebellion or of disaster; he saw the armies in column upon them, the massed fronts, the guns. He saw the royal flag over Toulon and the English fleet in harbour there, he saw the Bush and the Marsh of Vendée still unconquered, he saw the resistance of Lyons (for he had no news of its surrender); above all he saw those two doors against which the invader leaned, which were now pushed so far ajar and which at any moment might burst open—the lines of Weissembourg; and here, right to his hand, the entrenchments that covered the last siege of the northern frontier. He saw reeling and nearly falling the body of the Republic that was his religion, and he saw that all the future, death or life, lay in Maubeuge.
The Sunday night fell over Paris and over those long Flemish hills. The morrow was to see the beginning of two things: the trial of the Queen and the opening of a battle which was to decide the fate of the French people.
Battle of WATTIGNIES
OCT. 15TH. & 16TH. 1793
AND THE
RELIEF OF MAUBEUGE