THE CAMPAIGN OF 1793–1794
VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER III
1793.
War was declared by the French Convention on the 1st of February 1793, and Dumouriez was ordered to invade Holland forthwith. The Convention, thirsting for the wealth of the Bank of Amsterdam, was anxious to make sure of it before the Allies could put their strength into the field. Two months earlier, when his troops were heartened by the victory of Jemappe, no order could have been more welcome to Dumouriez than this; and even now, though he had few men upon whom he could depend, he resolved if possible to make good the defects of his army by swift and sudden action. The French troops on the northern frontier were very widely scattered, their cantonments extending north and south on the lower Meuse from Roermond to Maastricht, and east and west from the upper Rhine through Aachen to Liège and Namur. His original plan had been to turn all the waterways and fortresses that bar the entrance into Holland from the south, and to invade it by way of Nimeguen; but time was so precious that he resolved to collect a small force of but seventeen thousand men at Antwerp, and to march from thence with all secrecy direct upon Amsterdam. At the same time he directed thirty thousand men from the east under General Miranda to take the Dutch fortresses of Maastricht and Venloo, and then to make for Nimeguen. Speed, in his view, was everything, for the Austrians had already forty thousand men cantoned to the east of the Rhine, and were shortly to be reinforced.
Meanwhile the Allies were still making up their plans for the next campaign. Brunswick and Prince Frederick Josias of Coburg-Saalfeld, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian army, met at Frankfurt, and, after many conferences between the 6th and the 14th of February, decided upon a scheme of operations, which by their own showing required forty thousand more men than they had any expectation of collecting. They saved themselves, however, by laying it down as a cardinal principle that, until Mainz were recovered from the French, the Allied forces must not attempt to pass from the east to the west bank of the Meuse. Belgium (so argued the Austrians) had been eaten up, and so long as the navigation of the Rhine was blocked at Mainz, the subsistence of the Imperial troops on the west of the Meuse must be difficult. Moreover, if the French should retire before an Austrian advance, and mass all their forces on the Rhine, then they might beat Brunswick, who, unless his retreat were assured by the possession of Mainz, would be in danger of utter destruction. The reader should take note of this decision, for not only is it the key to much that appears puzzling in the coming campaign, but it is an excellent example of the principle on which Coburg and Brunswick conducted war, namely, to look at risks first and at objects afterwards. The immediate problem of the defence of the Dutch provinces was left without so much as an attempt at solution. Both Grenville in England and Auckland at the Hague had long foreseen the certainty of a French attack upon them, and had strained every nerve to stir the authorities to action. But the Stadtholder was a man of almost inhuman dulness, apathy and stupidity; and all popular energy was paralysed by the spirit of faction, which, never inactive in Holland, had under the influence of French agents become almost a spirit of revolution. The Dutch army was so defective in training, equipment and discipline that it had ceased to exist as an efficient force; and its few foreign corps, which alone deserved the name of regiments, had been driven to mutiny by a reduction of their pay below the rate fixed by their contract. Even in January and February, Auckland wrote that the Stadtholder looked for British ships and British troops to save him,[103] and that the French party was derisively insinuating that England, nominally the faithful ally of the Dutch Republic, was content to desert her in the hour of danger. Finally, on the 15th of February he begged that the Duke of York might be sent over with a few officers of experience, even if without troops, to take command of the Dutch. “Men, commanders, ships and money,” he wrote, “we could not ask for more if this country were a part of Yorkshire, but I incline to think that it should be considered so for the present; and if it is brought to a question whether we are to conquer it and keep it, or whether Dumouriez is to do it, I have no doubt as to the decision.”
Still the British Government hesitated, for, thanks to its neglect of the Army, it possessed but a handful of troops, and was unwilling to move them to the Continent. Then suddenly, on the 16th of February, Feb. 16. Dumouriez dashed out from Antwerp with his tiny force in four columns. One small body instantly pushed northward towards Moerdyk, to collect boats for the passage of the arm of the sea called the Hollandsdiep; another marched upon Klundert and Willemstadt, a third north-eastward to attack Breda, and a fourth to the north-west to blockade Bergen-op-Zoom and Steenbergen. Everywhere his coming was welcomed by the Dutch. Breda, with large stores of munitions of war, was disgracefully surrendered Feb. 26. on the 26th of February; Klundert and Gertruydenberg fell in quick succession; Willemstadt was then besieged with the captured cannon, and by the 9th of March 9. March Dumouriez was prepared to essay the passage of the Hollandsdiep. But here his course was stayed, for his activity had stirred his enemies on every side.
Feb. 20.
On the 20th of February the seven battalions of British Guards were suddenly paraded before the Horse Guards; and the Duke of York, announcing that the first battalions of the three regiments were ordered to proceed on active service, called for volunteers from the others to bring them up to strength. The whole brigade thereupon stepped forward as one man; and five days later three battalions, numbering under two thousand men of all ranks and denominations, marched to Greenwich amid the cheers, and something more than the cheers, of an enormous and enthusiastic crowd.[104] By nightfall the whole were embarked upon vessels too small to carry more than two-thirds of their number in safety, without medicines or medical appliances, without the slightest reserve of ammunition, and of course without transport of any description. Their commander was Colonel Gerard Lake of the First Guards, and he was ordered on no account to move his men above twenty-four hours’ distance from Helvoetsluis, so as to be able to return on the March 1. shortest notice. By the mercy of Heaven these troops safely reached that port, narrowly escaping a gale which would probably have condemned them either to drowning or asphyxiation; and four days later they March 5. proceeded to Dort to oppose Dumouriez’s passage of the Hollandsdiep. About the same time a flotilla of Dutch gunboats arrived in the Meuse, many of them manned by British sailors and flying British colours. Auckland, by threatening to take command in Holland himself, had at last compelled the miserable Stadtholder to issue orders for the defence of his country.[105]
But the obstacles which were multiplying in Dumouriez’s front were as nothing to the storm that Feb. 20. suddenly broke upon his flank. Miranda had duly moved up to the siege of Maastricht with a force inadequate to the task and, moreover, dangerously dispersed; but the Austrians, declaring themselves too weak to move, still remained torpid in their cantonments, perhaps the more stubbornly because the Prussian Agent at the Austrian headquarters was perpetually urging them to action. At last, however, Feb. 26.
March 1. Coburg on the 26th began to concentrate his forty thousand men and to pass them in five columns across the river; and on the 1st of March, to the great surprise of the French, he burst upon their cantonments on the Meuse, and for four days drove them in utter rout before him. Coburg himself and the left wing halted before Liège, but on the right the Archduke Charles, with the impetuosity of twenty-one years and the instinct of a born soldier, followed up the disorderly rabble from Maastricht southward upon Tongres, boldly attacking wherever he met the enemy. Such of the French as had been in action fled in all directions, abandoning everything; ten thousand deserters hurried across the frontier into France; and a small remnant took refuge behind the canal at Louvain, where it was joined by such French divisions as had not been engaged. Had Coburg pursued his advantage and advanced instantly with all his forces, he could have ended the campaign at once, for the people, furious at the exactions of the Jacobins, and, above all, at the theft of the plate from their churches, March 5. had turned savagely upon the retreating French. Instead of this he halted on the 5th, and wasted ten whole days in cantonments between Maastricht and Tongres. The Convention now ordered Dumouriez at once to proceed to Louvain and assume command, which he did with a very bad grace, leaving General March 9. Flers to take his place in Holland. His presence did much to restore confidence in the French army, and he was not a little helped by Coburg’s inaction. Nevertheless the news that reached him was singularly disquieting. Fresh regiments were embarking from England for Helvoetsluis; two reinforcing columns of Austrians were advancing from the Rhine upon Namur; and eight thousand Prussians, under the Duke of Brunswick-Oels, had arrived at Bois-le-Duc March 11. on the 11th, and were moving with five thousand British and Dutch upon Breda, to cut off the troops on the Hollandsdiep from France and Dumouriez’s own soldiers from Antwerp. In so desperate a situation there was no choice but to take the offensive.
March 15.
On the 15th Coburg at last resumed his advance with forty-two thousand men; and on the 16th Dumouriez marched with forty-eight thousand to March 18. meet him. On the 18th the decisive action was fought at Neerwinden, when the French were totally defeated, with a loss of five thousand men and three guns. The volunteers and the National Guards were the troops that failed in the battle; and after it the men broke up and fled by whole battalions. Ten thousand deserted in the ten days following the action, and Dumouriez was fain to form a rearguard out of his artillery and his few battalions of the Line, and to fall back on Louvain. Coburg, who had lost about three thousand men, made little attempt at pursuit, keeping his main body halted at Tirlemont until the 22nd, but exhorting the Duke of Brunswick-Oels to hasten from Bois-le-Duc to Malines to cut off Dumouriez’s retreat to Antwerp. The Duke, who had already permitted Flers to withdraw with impunity the bulk of his forces to Antwerp, was evidently not disposed to second Austrian operations with Prussian troops, for he refused to move. However, Mar. 23–24.
March 25. the advance of the Austrians compelled Dumouriez to evacuate first Louvain and then Brussels; and on the 25th, finding himself obliged to abandon Namur also, he opened negotiations with Coburg. He had quarrelled with the Convention beyond hope of reconciliation over the iniquity of its rule in Belgium; and he now proposed that the French should retreat from the whole country, and that he should march to Paris to re-establish the monarchy, the Allies meanwhile halting on the frontier and receiving the fortress of Condé as a guarantee. An agreement to this effect was duly made with the March 27. Chief of the Austrian Staff on the 27th, and a circular was issued from the Austrian headquarters, suggesting a conference of the representatives of the powers to decide as to the measures to be next taken.