One thing is certain: not a reference was made therein to the House of Bourbon, or to the throne of Louis—that throne of which Dumourier, in concert with the Prince of Coburg, had so boldly promised the restoration in his manifesto of the 5th April; and not a measure was taken for the advantage or safety of the beautiful and unhappy Marie Antoinette, then languishing in prison at Paris, and over whose devoted head hung the blade of the guillotine, and whom a simple menace from her nephew the Emperor, threatening the advance of his armies, might perhaps have saved.
At all events, it seemed sufficiently evident to the jealous and excitable French that the allies were no longer true to the interests of the fallen Bourbons; and equally so that it was not to restore them the Austrians at least made war. It was in his own name—not that of Louis XVII., king of France and Navarre—their emperor took possession of those fortified places and provinces which his armies overran; and after he became master of Condé and Valenciennes, he no longer cared to define or form a frontier for those districts of the Netherlands which once he proposed to cede to the Prussians; but which Thugut now wished to preserve to the descendants of Rudolph of Hapsburg.
At the same time the Duke of York, who from his own cabinet had received orders and instructions similar to those given to the Prince of Coburg, in the name of George III., resolved to seize upon Dunkerque, which the English had coveted of old; but he did not wait for the departure of a British fleet prepared for this object. The naval squadron was delayed, and in the meantime the duke deliberated with the Austrian general under the ramparts of Valenciennes, to learn if, before engaging in new sieges, they might not give to the French army a final blow which would deprive Kilmaine of all power of interrupting their combined operations.
This was a very simple question, yet they were fourteen days in coming to a conclusion. Though Valenciennes, as already stated, had capitulated on the 28th of July, it was not until the 8th of August that the Austro-British army was in motion, and its advance guard beheld the camp of Cæsar; this on the very day after Kilmaine had wisely evacuated the fortifications and retreated southwards.
It is said that he fully anticipated the march of the combined armies; and this was sufficiently probable, for we know that the committees of the National Convention had mysterious means of procuring secret intelligence, not only from the cabinets of the allies, but from the staff officers of the German troops!
Kilmaine in retiring only obeyed the dictates of wisdom and necessity, and quitted a position which he could not defend, as his army was reduced by defeat and desertion, mutinous, or as the French style it, demoralized.
If the allies had wished to follow and engage him upon the Scarpe or the Somme, a last effort could easily have been made to disperse his troops completely, and then seize upon Paris, where they might have torn the Revolution from its very basis. But such was not the intention of the allied generals. "Their aim on this occasion," says a French writer, "was to profit by our disorders and revolutions to make themselves masters of our places and provinces after assuring themselves of indemnities and guarantees, and to leave the volcano to consume itself, as a Prussian prince said, not long ago: it must be admitted, that never had this policy shown itself more evidently in its shameful nudity!" But the reader must bear in mind that these are the opinions of a Frenchman and a sympathizer with the Convention.
Such was the state of matters when Kilmaine, having abandoned the untenable camp of Cæsar, and fallen back beyond the Scarpe, a navigable river of French Flanders (but still a narrower barrier than the Scheldt) prepared again for retreat, and marched towards the Somme, another river which falls into the British Channel between Crotoy and Sainte Valori. This was his last position—his last asylum; and now the chiefs of the allies, instead of pushing on in pursuit of his retiring bands to complete the triumphs so well begun, faced about, and wheeled off to seize Dunkerque and Quesnay.
It was in autumn that the Royal Duke appeared before the former; and there his troops received a check which proved but the commencement of a long series of disasters; the latter was stormed by the Austrians, and retaken by the French in the following year.
But what must astonish us, even at this epoch of deception and duplicity, political insanity and revenge, is the startling fact that the brave Kilmaine, who had rendered such gallant services to that new and most faithless Republic—he who by a judicious retreat (executed against the advice of the meddling and presumptuous representatives of the people, and in consequence thereof perilled his life) had preserved to shattered France her most important army, was precisely for that reason denounced to the Convention, arrested by its orders, and flung into a loathsome prisons at Paris, where he passed a year; being but too happy, in the obscurity of his dungeon, that he had not perished on the scaffold like the gallant Custine, his predecessor in the command; like his old colonel and protector Biron, and like Houchard, who for the brief period of fifteen days had been his successor, and who, after winning a signal and decided victory over the Duke of York—a victory alike honourable to himself and to the arms of France, expiated by a cruel death the grave fault of having forgotten for a moment the powers of a bullying representative of the people!