It was in such inauspicious circumstances that the representatives of the various powers met in conference at Antwerp. Coburg, who loathed the war and had hoped to end it by an agreement with Dumouriez, April 5. had issued a proclamation declaring himself to be the ally of all friends of order, and abjuring all projects of conquest in the Emperor’s name. Instantly Austrians, Prussians, and English with one voice required him to withdraw it, and to publish a new declaration that he would prosecute the war vigorously. He did so, but with great reluctance; indeed, so bitter was his opposition to the new policy that he tried to open further negotiations with the Convention, and even furnished it with information which he ought to have kept to himself.[114] Meanwhile Lord Auckland announced that England, as well as the other powers, would expect an indemnity for her share in the war; whereupon the Dutch representative announced that, as every one else was taking compensation, he hoped that Holland’s claims would not be forgotten.[115] The sharing of the lion’s skin having thus been determined, the next thing was to decide upon a plan of operations for slaying the lion. A vague project was drawn out for the attack of the frontier-fortresses, in which Coburg reckoned upon the co-operation of over twenty thousand men, that is to say, of thirteen thousand Hanoverians and seven thousand five hundred British, in British pay, besides fifteen thousand Dutch. Dundas was staggered; for he had not yet the slightest idea what were the ultimate designs of either of the German powers, who, as he justly complained, were very backward to give an explicit account of their views either as to the conduct of the war or the termination of it. “We cannot advise the King,” he wrote, “to give a blind co-operation to measures not distinctly explained.” But he hinted that if the Austrians would spare a detachment to help the British to capture Dunkirk at once, England might make fewer difficulties about lending her troops for subsequent operations. The English, he explained, were prejudiced against Continental enterprises; wherefore it was important to convince the nation early that its troops in Holland were employed for an object intimately connected with the interests of Great Britain and the security of her commerce. “The early capture of Dunkirk by a Prince of the blood,” he added, “would give much éclat to the commencement of the war.” In other words, Dundas was ready to employ British troops in the Low Countries only for a political campaign, and not for the military purposes of the war—to use them, in fact, primarily to win votes rather than battles. The attitude is but too characteristic of British Ministers for War.[116]
Meanwhile the Allies on the frontiers of France remained inactive; the Austrians, indeed, blockading Condé, where the French kept them engaged with incessant affairs of outposts, but the British contingent still awaiting the orders which Dundas hesitated to give. In the third week of April the chief of the British staff reported that a considerable force of French was entrenched about Dunkirk, too strong to be attacked by the Duke of York’s troops, and that there was no operation on which the latter could be employed except in support of the Austrians.[117] We shall presently recognise the unseen hand which had been working at Dunkirk. Ten days more of uncertainty passed May 1. away, and at last, on the 1st of May, Coburg produced a plan of operations. By the middle of May he hoped to have about ninety-two thousand men,[118] to which by the beginning of June would be added thirteen thousand more. He proposed, therefore, to hasten the fall of Condé by a bombardment, and then to advance with fifty-two thousand men to the siege of Valenciennes, leaving a cordon of some forty thousand to cover every imaginable point along a front of some fifty miles from Maubeuge on the Sambre to Ostend on the sea. Valenciennes might be expected to fall at the end of July, and then ten thousand men could be left to mask Lille, while fifty thousand marched to the siege of Dunkirk. If this plan were accepted, Coburg pledged himself to the Duke of York to lend his best good-will to the attack on Dunkirk. On this assurance the Duke recommended the plan to which at last Dundas gave his consent, on the understanding that the other powers in general and Austria in particular should give an immediate explanation of their ulterior views. England, he repeated, could not allow so large a force in her pay to be employed on operations whose object was undefined; and he emphasised the statement by an inquiry as to the security of Ostend, which so far had been the British port of disembarkation, evidently as a hint that England reserved her right to withdraw her troops at any moment.
This is a good instance of the manner in which British Ministers evade their responsibility. The British General had, nearly three weeks before, laid before Dundas the following issue. “There is no use for British troops in the Netherlands except to act in support of the Austrians. Their commander has submitted a plan based on the active co-operation of all our troops, present and expected. We think the plan a good one. Are we to act with him, or are we not?” Upon this it was for the Ministry to say at once to Austria, “Our Generals favour your plan of campaign, but until we know your ultimate intentions we cannot take part in it. Unless you come to a definite understanding with us by a certain day, we shall order our troops on the spot to re-embark, and meanwhile we have suspended the march of our reinforcements.” Instead of this they said in effect, “We approve the plan of campaign, and thereby commit our troops to it; but we reserve to ourselves the right to withdraw them, or, in other words, to wreck the operations, whenever we think proper.” If, therefore, the enemy should in the meantime take the offensive and press the Austrians hard, which, as shall be seen, was what actually happened, the responsibility for granting or withholding British assistance was thrown entirely upon the General.
It remains to say a word of the plan itself, and of the troops and commanders who were appointed to carry it out. The enormous front along which Coburg proposed to disperse his force is an example of the system known as the cordon-system, which was in particular favour with the Austrians at this time. It consisted in covering every possible access to a theatre of war with some small body of troops, and had been formulated by Marshal Lacy upon the experience of the war of the Bavarian Succession in 1778, when he had held a front of fifty miles in the labyrinthine country of the Upper Elbe, and reduced the campaign to a mere scuffle of foraging parties. Well calculated to exclude the plague or contraband goods from a country, it was, of course, ridiculous against the invasion of an enemy; for it meant weakness at all points and strength at none, and in fact simply invited the destruction of the army in detail by a force of inferior strength. Nevertheless it was in high favour with all armies of Europe, excepting the British, at that time; and it was a matter of rule that, wherever the enemy stationed a battalion or a company, a countervailing battalion or company must be posted over against it. The Austrians had suffered much from this system in their recent war with the Turks; but their commanders, of whom Coburg had been one, had learned little from the experience. Apart from his adherence to this new and utterly false fashion, which precluded the concentration of troops for a vigorous offensive, Coburg was a sound, slow, cautious commander of the old Austrian type, more intent upon preserving his own army than destroying the enemy’s, and, perhaps, happiest when firmly set down to conduct a siege in form according to the most scientific principles. Withal he was a sensible and honourable gentleman, and extremely popular with his troops. The chief of his staff, and, by common report, the virtual Commander-in-Chief, was the unfortunate Mack, then a colonel forty years of age, who enjoyed the reputation of being the most scientific officer in Europe. The theory of war, as then understood in many quarters, assigned as the first object not the annihilation of the enemy’s force in the field, but the possession of certain geographical points, which were called Strategic Objects. At this game of maps and coloured labels Mack excelled; and, when called upon to fight an action, he so elaborated his plans for the overwhelming of his enemies by the simultaneous onslaught of a number of converging columns that, if everything went right and every column reached exactly the appointed place at exactly the appointed time, he assured to himself not only victory but conquest. But, since he made no allowance for the possible failure of any one of his combinations through unforeseen contingencies or accidents of any description, Mack’s actions were rarely successful and always unduly hazardous. He seems to have been an honest man, of real though misdirected ability; while his character gained for him a confidence and respect which the British in the field accorded to no other foreign officer. But though, as shall be seen, his methods by no means commended themselves to all British commanders, they nevertheless made a fatally favourable impression upon the British Ministry.
To judge with the wisdom that comes after the event, it may be said that the Allied Army was tactically deficient in two principal respects, namely, in the numerical weakness of its light infantry and in the faulty organisation of its artillery. Light infantry and light cavalry at this time were still treated mainly as accessories, useful for the “little war” (to use the French expression) of outposts and reconnaissance, but as something apart from the “great war,” which was reserved for the more solid squadrons and battalions that enjoyed the dignity of a place in the formal Order of Battle. In fact, the work of outposts was supposed to fall wholly upon the light corps, while the regular troops husbanded their strength in security behind them. Hostilities with any nation which is driven back on primitive methods of self-defence, and which neither knows nor respects the contemporary usage of civilised warfare, invariably upset any such arrangement; and the British, after the experience of America, should have been awake to this truth. Indeed, in justice to the officers, many of them were alive to it; but Pitt, since 1783, had been more solicitous for the reduction than the training of the Army. In the matter of artillery the practice of all the nations was the same. Each battalion possessed its two guns, three-pounders or six-pounders, and the remainder of the ordnance was massed into a park, with or without an inner distribution into brigades or batteries. The handling of the artillery by the Count of Bückeburg at Minden had not yet found sufficient appreciation to be made the foundation of a system.[119]
The Austrian troops, in spite of the exhaustion of the long Turkish war, were for the most part worthy of their high reputation, and aroused at first the greatest admiration among British officers. They included, however, a certain number of irregular corps, both horse and foot, chiefly Slavs, which were simply savage banditti of the most dangerous type. They would murder or plunder any one, friend or foe, even to the vedettes of their own army; and no Austrian general would trust himself among them without an escort. The quality of the higher officers was, however, unworthy of that of the men, many of them being old, supine, and narrow-minded; and the corps of officers at large was sharply divided between two factions, which espoused the two opposite schools of Loudon and Lacy. The organisation also was imperfect, for, though the army was indeed distributed into brigades and divisions, these were not kept together, but all detachments were formed of squadrons and battalions arbitrarily collected and entrusted to a general as arbitrarily chosen, who knew no more of the men than they knew of him. In the matter of tactics the Austrians had made no progress since the Seven Years’ War. Cavalry and infantry alike were still formed in three ranks, and the art of handling large bodies of cavalry had been nearly, though not wholly, forgotten.
The Prussians still enjoyed the fame which they had won under Frederick the Great, but they had not been improved by the false training observed by Cornwallis at their manœuvres; while their commander, von Knobelsdorf, though full of zeal, was also full of years, having passed his seventieth birthday. Superior to them were the Hessians, the majority of whom had served in America, where they had learned to manœuvre rapidly and to fight in dispersed order, though the lesson had never been practised since their return to their own land.[120] The Hessian Jäger were particularly good light troops, and were armed with rifles. The whole corps, moreover, was the more effective since it was equipped with regimental transport upon a lavish scale, and was therefore mobile and self-dependent.[121] On the whole, the Hessians seem to have been the most valuable fighting men in the army, though they were not exempt from the love of plunder, a failing which mercenary veterans are apt to judge more leniently, at certain times, than other troops. The Hanoverians were then, as always, fine soldiers, but without the advantage of the Hessians in experience and training. The Dutch, being hastily raised, were ill organised, disciplined, trained, and equipped.
The British, with the exception of the Guards, were, in the opinion of foreign critics, very deficient in training and discipline, for precisely the same reason as the Dutch, namely, persistent neglect. The cavalry was of better material than the infantry, and was very well mounted; but both officers and men were so ignorant of their work that, at first, they could not even throw out vedettes and outposts without instruction from foreigners. The field-guns were inferior to those of the rest of the Allies; the ammunition-waggons were heavy and unwieldy; and the horses were harnessed one before the other instead of abreast, which made them difficult to drive, and took up much room on the road. The models of both harness and waggons were, in fact, of Marlborough’s time; while the medical arrangements, or what passed for such, were those of a still remoter age. Discipline for the most part was bad, especially among the officers, who were subject rather to political than military authority, and, though there were still among their infantry good men who had learned their business in America, far too many were absolutely ignorant as well as neglectful of their duty. Hard drinking in all ranks accounted for much both of the indiscipline and the neglect. To the men, of course, drunkenness brought a flogging at the halberts, but to the officers, unfortunately, it did not necessarily mean punishment; nor was it possible that it should, when respectful consideration was shown to both Prime Minister and Secretary of State for War if they appeared incapably drunk at the House of Commons, because the leaders of the Opposition drank even harder than they. This vice of drunkenness was the most formidable with which good officers had to contend throughout the twenty years of the war, simply because it was a fashion set in high places.[122]
It was no easy task to command such a force as the British, Hanoverians and Hessians, under the orders of such a man as Dundas, and the immediate direction of such generals as Coburg and Mack. Frederick, Duke of York, second son of King George the Third, was in 1793 thirty years old. At the age of sixteen he had been sent to Berlin to study the profession of arms under the eye of Frederick the Great himself, and had returned with a practical knowledge which made him later an admirable Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, but also with an undue preference for the weaker points of the stiff and formal Prussian system. In 1791 he had become Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, in which post he had at first shown himself enough of a martinet to excite discontent;[123] and, though he had wisely changed his ways after a year’s experience, he was not at this time popular with his men, while his officers, who had been taught to look for preferment from politicians, resented his authority whether for good or ill. In this respect he was hampered by the same disadvantages as had beset Lord Stair in 1743; and, unfortunately, he did not possess the qualifications to gain the confidence of his troops in the field. He had the cool personal bravery which belongs to his race, but not the higher moral courage which gives constancy and patience in difficulty or misfortune; and hence he was at once sanguine and easily discouraged. He had learned his work, so far as it could be acquired by the industry of a mediocre intellect, but he was slow of apprehension, without sagacity, penetration or width of view, and with so little imagination or resource that an unforeseen emergency confounded him. On the other hand, his dutiful loyalty and submission, in most trying circumstances, towards Coburg on the one hand, and the Cabinet on the other, were beyond all praise. The Ministry had some just doubts as to his fitness to command, but the King had set his heart upon the appointment; and indeed, where so many Serene Highnesses were gathered together, the superior rank of the Duke was a decided advantage. It was hoped, therefore, to make good his deficiencies by joining to him Sir James Murray, better known by the name which he afterwards assumed as Sir James Pulteney, nominally as Adjutant-general, but really as Chief of the Staff and something more; for it was to his correspondence that the Government looked for information and advice.
Murray was a singular character. He had served in the Seven Years’ War; he had distinguished himself in the West Indies during the American War of Independence; and he had trained an intellect, which was of no common order, not only by shrewd observation of the world but by solid and extensive study. His knowledge was great, his grasp and outlook wide, his judgment cool and accurate, his indifference to danger and hardship absolute; but he was shy, awkward and diffident, with a dreamy indolence which led him too readily to surrender his own correct opinion, and to amuse himself with speculation upon the incorrect opinions of others.[124] When roused he could sum up a situation with an insight, terseness and vigour which showed how close was his hold upon facts; but he was not the helpmate who could make good the defects of the Duke of York. The situation, indeed, demanded a Marlborough, with the insight to see the one thing that was needed, and the tact and ascendency to bring cautious commanders, intriguing Ministers, narrow-minded potentates and irresolute Cabinets into line, for the one true object,—an immediate march on Paris.