It is now necessary to sum up the relative conditions of France and the Allies at the close of 1793. The British enterprises against the French at Dunkirk, in La Vendée, and at Toulon had one and all failed; but the tale of disaster was even then not fully told. Upon arrogating to itself the appointment of Generals in the field, the Committee of Public Safety had appointed Oct.-Nov. Pichegru and Hoche to command respectively the armies of the Rhine and Moselle. Pichegru had been a non-commissioned officer of artillery before the Revolution, had since obtained command of a battalion of volunteers, and, by assiduous courting of the Jacobin leaders, had become a Lieutenant-general without seeing a shot fired. Hoche, as we have seen, had risen from the ranks of the French Guards, had distinguished himself in high command at Dunkirk, and, above all, had attracted Carnot’s attention by a memorandum condemning the dispersion of troops after the Austrian manner, and advocating everywhere concentration and a vigorous offensive. “This young fellow will go far,” said Carnot, as he handed the document to Robespierre. “A very dangerous man!” objected the other, who dreaded the success of any man except himself. The task prescribed to Hoche was to relieve Landau, then blockaded by the Prussians; but he found his army in such ill condition that he hesitated to attempt anything until strengthened by Pichegru, when he made a general attack upon the Prussians under the Duke of Brunswick at Kaiserslautern, and was beaten back with Nov. 28–30. heavy loss. Thanks to Carnot’s influence, however, his failure was forgiven to him; and his new project, that he should reinforce Pichegru with two-thirds of his troops and fall upon the Austrians under General Wurmser at Hagenau, was approved. Wurmser perceived the gathering storm, and appealed to Brunswick for help; but King Frederick William had expressly forbidden the Duke to engage himself in any important operations, and the Prussians did not move until too late. On the 23rd of December Hoche opened his Dec. 23.
Dec. 26 attack with great skill and success, and would have annihilated Wurmser, had not Brunswick interfered at the last moment to check the pursuit of the French. The Austrian commander, furious because Brunswick had not supported him from the first, then returned to the eastern bank of the Rhine, thus uncovering the Prussian left, and obliging them likewise to abandon the greater part of the Palatinate, and to content themselves with protecting the neighbourhood of Mainz. Landau, therefore, was recaptured by the French; the eastern frontier of France was purged of the enemy; and, above all, the ill-feeling between Austria and Prussia was more than ever embittered. Broadly speaking, the French by the close of the year had contended successfully alike with the Coalition and with internal foes, having lost ground only in the Eastern Pyrenees to Spain, the enemy from which it could be most easily recovered.
Nevertheless the authority of the Committee of Public Safety was by no means yet fully assured. The Commune of Paris, representing the most infamous of the population, had been jealous of it from the first; and the useful service of the little band of Workers had been accomplished only with great difficulty and by constant concessions to the party of violence. Representatives of the people vested with arbitrary powers still accompanied the armies, interfering with the operations, punishing by summary execution the slightest fault or failure, whether realised or merely suspected, levying barbarous and oppressive requisitions, and thus driving officers, men, and civil population alike to despair. In no army was this policy of terror more ruthlessly pursued than in that of the Rhine, where unlimited powers were exercised by the representatives Lebas and St. Just, of whom the latter, a young man of twenty-six, gave himself the airs of omnipotent Jove, with a guillotine for thunderbolt. A campaign, however, cannot be won solely by decapitation of one’s own troops; and in the winter of 1793-1794 this fact began to impress itself, in respect not only of the army but of France at large, upon some of the ruling men in Paris. But it was no easy matter to convince the unspeakable rogues of the Commune of Paris that terror, which had brought to them personally enormous profit, was, as a national policy, a failure. Early in December 1793 the Committee of Public Safety took several measures to abridge the powers of the Commune; and some of the men who had in earlier days been most violent favoured the reaction towards a milder rule; but none the less Collot d’Herbois, who had been the author of most atrocious cruelties at Lyons since the recapture of the city, continued to obtain official approval of his conduct. Dread of summary restoration of order by some victorious General continually haunted the minds of many of the leaders, and notably of Robespierre; and, since the only idea of this last was to support whichever party was at the moment the stronger, he upheld Dec. 25. Collot, and sought popularity by proposing the execution of another batch of Generals. Thus the opening of the new year witnessed a complete revival of the system of terror.
Immediate mischief was the inevitable result. Carnot had wished after the victory of Savenay to institute a policy of conciliation in La Vendée; but, on the contrary, a ruffianly soldier named Turreau was let loose upon the district with his “infernal columns,” as if to exterminate a herd of wild beasts. The country was laid waste, the villages were burned, and such victims as could not escape the soldiery were swept into Nantes, to be murdered after such manner as might please the still greater ruffian, Carrier. Thereupon the people at once took up arms again. A smuggler bearing the nickname of Chouan[181] organised a band of his fellows for revenge, and was soon imitated by others. Charette and Stofflet again came forward as leaders; and there began a desultory guerilla war, fraught with constant disaster to the Republican troops, which gnawed deeply into the heart of France. At the same time, as if to increase the difficulties of its capable commanders in the field, the Convention lent a ready ear to all complaints against them. The Representatives attached to the armies, with the true instinct of politicians of all times and nations, were careful to take to themselves the credit for every victory, and to impute to the military the blame for every 1794. reverse; and a savage decree was passed that any General condemned to death should be executed in Jan. 1. front of his own troops. Successful commanders ran as great a risk as unsuccessful. Kléber, Marceau, Lapoype, and Bonaparte were one and all denounced in the spring of 1794 by the civilians who had aspired to direct them in the field; and it was only by much labour and cunning that Carnot was able to save their lives.
Nevertheless, despite all drawbacks, there was progress towards improvement in the French army. True, there was still shameful rascality on the part of contractors,[182] which was countenanced by Bouchotte under the protection of Robespierre, and which caused much suffering and desertion. The levy en masse again had proved a failure; but, on the other hand, compulsion to personal service, without exemption of any kind, had forced a better class of recruit into 1793. Nov. 22. the ranks; and it was wisely determined to incorporate these new levies with the battalions at the front, which possessed officers and non-commissioned officers of experience to train them. Finally, the reorganisation of the army into demi-brigades, consisting each of two battalions of volunteers and one battalion of regulars, was, after long delay, decreed and gradually 1794. Jan. 8. brought about. Innumerable useless corps were swept away; the establishments of existing corps were increased; and the law as to election of officers was practically, though tacitly, ignored.[183] At the same time a succession of decrees forbade the attendance of deputations from regiments upon the Convention, strove to check abuses and waste in the matter of Feb. 12. requisitions, and made a new regulation that no soldier should rise to any grade of command—from corporal Feb 15. to general—who could not read and write. All this wrought for discipline and efficiency, for many of the Colonels and Generals appointed by the Jacobins, being unable to read a map or even a letter, had brought about great confusion at the War Office and frequent disaster in the field.[184] At the same time, strenuous efforts were made to improve the cavalry, which had hitherto been absolutely useless; and its establishment was fixed at twenty-nine regiments of heavy and fifty-four of light cavalry, or ninety-six thousand men in all. The horse-artillery also, after but a single year of existence, was augmented to eight thousand men, and the field-artillery, including detachments for battalion guns, to twenty-six thousand men. The whole force of France at the beginning of 1794 reached six hundred thousand effective men, or about half of the figure which, from motives of policy or conceit, was invariably assigned to it by the orators of Paris.
Moreover, to turn military improvements to the best advantage, events conspired to throw power more and more into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety. By a clever decree, the Committee contrived to disarm the hired ruffians who supported the Commune, 1793. Dec. 22. and to make over their weapons to the army; and this blow was followed three months later by the accusation and execution of the leaders of the Commune itself, including Hébert, the supreme ruffian, 1794. March 29. and Ronsin and Vincent, two of the greatest scoundrels in the War Office. The next attack was directed against Danton and others, who had recognised the failure of the policy of terror, and wished to end it; and accordingly he and his followers went to the April 5. guillotine on the 5th of April. This was the work of Robespierre, who at one time had been the firm ally of both of these factions, but was now seeking supreme power in order to carry out certain ideas of his own for the social regeneration of France. Being an absolutely mediocre man, of the type which small provincial journals delight to honour with the title of “our talented townsman,” he was wholly lacking in the ability and experience required for the business of administration; and he seems to have agreed, without knowing what he did, to the abolition of Ministers for departments and the substitution of boards, responsible to the Committee of Public Safety, in their place. Hereby the little knot of Workers, who had real capacity as well as boundless industry, gained an affluence of power, and the military service an increase of efficiency; for their labours were too high for the control of a petty lawyer who possessed no gift but that of composing bad essays, and knew no resource but that of cutting off heads. Nor was the activity of the Workers confined to France alone. Revolutionary agents had been busy all over Europe with persuasive tongues and still more persuasive purses. They had bribed high officials to second Carnot’s military projects by conspiracies at Turin, Naples, Florence, and Genoa; they had met with much encouragement in Holland, and counted on further success in Switzerland; they had made some impression upon Denmark, had half gained Sweden, and had spared no expense to rouse the Turk against Austria. The cost of these negotiations was enormous, but the Government of France was playing for high stakes, knowing well that without victory in all quarters in the coming campaign, bankruptcy and starvation must inevitably bring down the Revolution with a crash.
On the military side Carnot had decided to strike at important points only, and elsewhere to stand on the defensive. In the south he designed to invade Italy, hoping that treachery at Turin would make the work easy; but the principal struggle, as he knew, must be fought out in Belgium. He did not, however, confine his schemes of aggression to that quarter only. He recognised with true insight that Britain was France’s most formidable enemy; and he had actually projected and prepared for an invasion of England, with the help of the Brest fleet, and for a march upon London. The plan was bold, indeed wild in its extravagance, being founded on a false idea that disaffection in England was as deeply seated and as widely spread in action as it was noisy and inflated in speech. None the less the bare menace of invasion served a useful purpose—to scare and disconcert the British Government.[185]
Jan. 21.
In truth it must have been with no very pleasant feelings that Ministers met Parliament in January 1794, having no better news to lay before the Houses than a tale of failure in all quarters. Pitt had, at least, the consolation that a section of the Whigs, headed by the Duke of Portland, in the same month announced to him their intention of separating themselves from Fox, and of giving the Ministry an independent support. It was, however, felt that such an arrangement could neither be satisfactory nor of long continuance, since, as Sir Gilbert Elliot put it, Portland’s party would be no more than “a detached auxiliary force, to act on one occasion, to retire on another, and to be a perpetual object of anxiety to those whom they meant to serve, of hope to the enemy and of speculation to the rest of the world.”[186] Moreover, there were members of it, most notably William Windham, who were extremely dissatisfied with the military policy, or want of policy, initiated by Dundas.[187] Negotiations were, therefore, set on foot for the inclusion of Portland and some of his friends in the Cabinet; and, after six full months spent in bargaining, it was finally arranged, on the 11th of July 1794, that Portland should become Second Secretary of State, Lord Fitzwilliam Lord President, and Lord Spencer Lord Privy Seal, while Windham displaced the incompetent and corrupt Sir George Yonge as Secretary at War. It may be well to add at once that in December Lord Spencer exchanged the Privy Seal for the Admiralty with the capable but indolent Lord Chatham, while Lord Mansfield took over the Presidency of the Council, and Lord Fitzwilliam accepted the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland.
But these changes were accompanied by a reform of the greatest importance in the history of our military administration. Pitt was resolute in refusing to permit the War Department to lie in the Duke of Portland’s hands; wherein he was probably right, for the Duke, though he carried with him votes in the House of Commons, brought nothing to the Council Board beyond a certain ponderous irresolution. Pitt thereupon arranged, though with some difficulty, that Portland should administer the Home Department, including the Colonies, but should have no authority over naval and military business, for control of which he created a third and new Secretariat of State for War. In itself this measure was valuable and sound, but it was absolutely vitiated by the selection of Henry Dundas to fill the new post. In the face of the shameful blunders of the past eighteen months this appointment was almost criminal; but Pitt’s ignorance of war was unfortunately surpassed only by his infatuated trust in his friend. Thus Henry Dundas became the First Secretary of State for War, the very worst man that could possibly have been chosen to found the traditions of such an office. His methods have found faithful imitation by all too many of his successors.[188]
So much may be said by anticipation of events which, though not actually accomplished, were practically assured at the opening of the session of 1794. But the secession of Portland’s following by no means left the Opposition without keen critics of the conduct of military affairs. Tarleton the guerilla-leader of the American war, though a vain and shallow man, knew enough to hit the many weak points of Henry Dundas’s enterprises, and he was backed by one abler and more solid than himself, Major Thomas Maitland, of the Sixty-second Foot, a brother of the extreme radical, Lord Lauderdale. We shall see more of Maitland, who is still remembered at Malta as “King Tom,” in the years before us. Fox also, though as usual guilty of opposition which was purely factious, rightly pressed home upon the Government the duty of defining to themselves what was their true object. If, he argued, the purpose of the war were to substitute some form of government for the present tyranny in France, then Toulon was worth more than the West Indies; if on the other hand it was to obtain permanent possessions, then the West Indies were worth more than Toulon. To this the Government answered by the mouth of Jenkinson, that their end was to destroy the existing government in France; but both he and Pitt added that Toulon was not to be considered of such importance as to justify a sacrifice of the opportunity for acquiring the French West Indies. Plainer evidence could not have been given of the utter unfitness of both to direct a formidable war.[189]