Tourcoing

by Hilaire Belloc

The Duke of York, as we have seen when he was arranging the business and writing to Clerfayt and the Emperor, had talked of moving upon the 14th, by which presumably he meant organising the attack on the 14th, and setting the first columns in motion from their places of rendezvous in the early hours of that day, Wednesday, before dawn.

If that was in his mind, it shows him to have been a prompt and energetic man, and to have had a full appreciation of the place which surprise occupied in the chances of success. If, indeed, the Emperor got the Duke of York’s message in time on the 12th, if he had at once accepted the plan, and had with Napoleonic rapidity ordered the bulk of his forces (which were still right away south and east) to move, he might have had them by forced marches upon and across the Scheldt, and ready to execute the plan by the 14th, or at any rate by the morning of the 15th.

But from what we know of the family to which the Duke of York belonged, it is exceedingly improbable that this younger son of George III. had, on this one occasion only, any lightning in his brain; and even if he did appreciate more or less the importance of rapid action, the Emperor did not appreciate it. He committed the two contradictory faults of delaying the movement and of asking too much marching of his men, and it was not until the morning of the Wednesday, May the 14th, that the bulk of the Austrian army, which still lay in the Valenciennes and Landrecies district, broke up for its northward march, to arrive at the rendezvous beyond the Scheldt, and to carry out the plan.[2]

It was not until Thursday the 15th of May that the Emperor joined the Duke of York at Tournai, and very late upon the same day the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up the main body of the Austrian forces from the south to the town of St Amand.

We shall see later what a grievous error it was to demand so violent an effort from the men of the Arch-Duke Charles’ command. From Landrecies itself to St Amand is 30 miles as the crow flies; and though, of course, the mass of the troops which the Arch-Duke Charles had been thus commanded to bring up northward in such haste were most of them well on the right side of Landrecies when the order to advance reached them, yet the average march undertaken by his men in little more than twenty-four hours was a full twenty miles, and some of his units must have covered nearer thirty. I will not delay further on this point here; its full importance will appear when we come to talk of the action itself.

The Arch-Duke Charles being only as far as St Amand on the evening of Thursday the 15th, and his rendezvous, that of the fifth column in the great plan, being Pont-à-Marcq, a further good sixteen miles north-westward, it was evident that the inception of that plan and the simultaneous advance of all the five columns from their five starting-points of Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq, could not begin even upon the 16th. It would take the best part of a day to bring the Arch-Duke Charles up to Pont-à-Marcq; his men were in imperative need of rest during a full night at St Amand, and it is probable, though I have no proof of it, that he had not even fully concentrated there by the evening of the 15th, and that his last units only joined him during the forenoon of the 16th.

The whole of that day, therefore, the 16th, was consumed so far as the first, second, third, and fourth columns were concerned, in merely gathering and marshalling their forces, and occupying, before nightfall, the points from which they were to depart simultaneously in the combined advance of the morrow. They had to wait thus for the dawn of the 17th, because they had to allow time for the fifth column to come up.

The time-table imposed upon the great plan by these delays is now apparent. The moment when all the strings of the net were to be pulled together round Souham was the space between midnight and dawn of Saturday the 17th of May. And the hour when all the six bodies of the allies were to join hands at “R” near Tourcoing was the noon of that day.

Before day broke upon the 17th, Clerfayt was to find himself at Wervicq upon the River Lys and across that stream, while of the five southern columns the Arch-Duke Charles was to be attacking the French troops just in front of Pont-à-Marcq with the fifth column at the same moment; Kinsky, with the fourth, was to be well on the way from Froidmont to Bouvines where he was to attack the French also and cross the bridge; the Duke of York, with the third, was to be well on the way from Templeuve to Lannoy; Otto, with the second, was to be equally advanced upon his line, somewhere by Wattrelos in his march upon Tourcoing; while Bussche, with his small first column, on the extreme north, was to be getting into contact with the French posts south of Courtrai, which it was his duty to “hold,” impressing upon Souham the idea that a main attack might develop in that quarter, and so deluding the French into maintaining their perilously advanced stations until they were cut off from Lille by the rest of the allies.

The morning would be filled by the advance of Clerfayt from Wervicq southward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing, while the corresponding fighting advance northward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing also, of Otto, York, Kinsky, and the Arch-Duke Charles, should result somewhere about noon in their joining hands with Clerfayt and forming one great body: a body cutting off Courtrai from Lille, and the 40,000 under Souham from their fellows in the main French line.