Meanwhile on the French side Carnot had girded himself for a supreme effort. “We must finish matters this year,” he wrote to Pichegru on the 11th of February; “unless we make rapid progress and annihilate the enemy to the last man within three months, all is lost. To begin again next year would mean for us to perish of hunger and exhaustion.” He therefore decided to combine the armies of the North, of the Ardennes and of the Moselle, and to mass two hundred and fifty thousand men along the line from Dunkirk to the Meuse. Of these about one hundred thousand were to move upon Ypres, march thence upon Ghent, master maritime Flanders, and then wheel eastward upon Brussels; while at the same time another hundred thousand were to advance upon Namur and Liège, and sever communication with Luxemburg. In other words, he designed to turn and envelop both flanks of the Allied Army, leaving about fifty thousand men to stand on the defensive in the intermediate space between Bouchain and Maubeuge.
Of the many eminent critics who have passed judgment upon this plan, there is not one who has failed to point out and condemn its defects; and indeed it is obvious that if the Allies, neglecting small detachments, should fall with their full strength upon either wing of the enemy, they might annihilate it. An advance of the French in overwhelming strength upon the communications of the Allies about Namur would have been equally effective and far less hazardous. Yet Carnot prescribed the invasion of the maritime provinces as the first object, partly no doubt with a view to the ultimate invasion of England, but chiefly, as I conceive, with the political object of threatening the retreat of the British and thus overawing the most formidable power in the Coalition. It is worth while to recall that in 1815 Wellington looked for Napoleon to turn the western flank of the Allies and cut the British off from the sea, and that he dreaded such a movement so much that he made his dispositions at Waterloo with a view to prevent it. Wellington’s action has been as sharply criticised as Carnot’s; and yet, when two such men agree upon such a point, their opinion is at least worth serious consideration. In any case, the threatening of the lines of communication both east and west was quite sufficient to distract the councils of the Allies, to set them quarrelling as to which among themselves should be sacrificed to the others, and so perhaps to bring about political discord and the rupture of the Coalition.
At the end of March Pichegru gave the strength of the army of the North at two hundred and six thousand, and of the army of the Ardennes at thirty-seven thousand men, making a total of two hundred and forty-three thousand present under arms, of which one hundred and eighty-three thousand were free for service in the field. The army of the North at the beginning of April was thus distributed. The Left Wing, seventy-one thousand men, extended from Dunkirk by Cassel and Lille to Pont-à-Marque; the Centre, forty-seven thousand men, from Arleux (near Douai) by Cambrai, Bouchain, and Bohain to Étreux, a little to the north of Guise; the Right Wing, thirty-six thousand men, from Avesnes by Cerfontaine, St. Rémy, and St. Waast to Maubeuge. This made a total of one hundred and fifty-four thousand men ready for the field; one half of them, under such leaders as Moreau and Souham, standing on the frontier of maritime Flanders. As early as on the 11th of March Carnot ordered Pichegru to begin the advance on Ypres; but the General, though willing to train his troops by countless skirmishes, made no movement until the 29th of March, when he attacked the Austrian advanced posts at Le Cateau with thirty thousand men, and was beaten back with the loss of twelve hundred killed and wounded and four guns. “It is dangerous,” he reported, “to match our young troops against the enemy so soon”; and therewith his operations incontinently ceased.
Meanwhile Coburg, still awaiting his orders, made no attempt to overwhelm any one of the scattered April 2. French divisions. At last on the 2nd of April the Emperor quitted Vienna, reached Brussels in company with his brothers, the Archdukes Charles and April 14. Joseph on the 9th, and on the 14th joined Coburg at Valenciennes. The Prince then laid before him the danger of the Allied position, with both wings too weak to take the offensive against an enemy which was reported to be three hundred thousand strong; and followed this up by recommending the advance of the centre to the siege of Landrecies, for which Mack had prepared one of his usual elaborate schemes. Thus the Austrians reverted once more to a war of petty sieges, which could produce no decisive result. Indeed the only thing to be said for operations in the selected quarter was that the country was open and well suited to cavalry, in which arm the Allies were far superior both in quantity and quality to the French. The Emperor approved the plan; and the troops were set in motion forthwith, nominally for a great review to be held in the Emperor’s honour near Le Cateau. Thus, despite all Carnot’s efforts to take the initiative, it fell to the Allies to open the new campaign.
VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER X
1794.
On the 16th of April, as had been arranged, the whole of the main army was inspected by the Emperor on April 16. the heights of Cateau. The British infantry was represented, as in the last campaign, by three battalions of Guards, with a fourth battalion formed out of their flank-companies, and by Abercromby’s brigade of the Fourteenth, Thirty-seventh, and Fifty-third. These last had at length received their first instalment of recruits to make good their losses during 1793, in the shape of a draft which was described as “much resembling Falstaff’s men, and as lightly clad as any Carmagnole battalion”[218] of the French Army. The cavalry numbered twenty-eight squadrons, drawn from fourteen regiments[219] and organised into four brigades, three of heavy and one of light dragoons, the last being supplemented by a picked squadron of the Carbineers under the command of Captain Stapleton Cotton, a lad of twenty, who in later years was to earn the title of Viscount Combermere. The review over, the Emperor took up his quarters in Le Cateau, whither the commanders forthwith repaired to him for orders.
April 17.
The French troops under Pichegru in the immediate front of the Emperor consisted of three divisions, with an average strength of twelve thousand men each, extended along an entrenched position some eighteen miles long, on the wooded heights of Bohain and Nouvion. Of these Fromentin’s division held Catillon on the Sambre, a village rather over four miles east and south of Le Cateau; westward of Fromentin, Ballaud’s division lay astride the road from Le Cateau to Guise, at Arbre de Guise and Ribeauville; and, still further to west and south, Goguet’s division held the ground about Vaux, Prémont, and Bohain. The nearest French troops beyond these to westward were fifteen thousand men under Chappuis about Cambrai; while to eastward three divisions of the French right wing, numbering some thirty thousand men, lined the Sambre from St. Waast to Maubeuge.
There was therefore an opportunity of overwhelming one or other of these isolated bodies; but the Austrians clung religiously to their old methods. The force was divided into eight columns, three of which were directed to move north-westward toward Cambrai, so as to check any movement from that side. These need trouble us no more. Of the remaining five, two on the left were ordered to drive the enemy out of Catillon, cross the Sambre, and after clearing the forest of Nouvion to push forward their light troops. One column in the centre, under Coburg’s personal command, was designed to move by Ribeauville upon Wassigny to master the heights further to southward; while two more on the right, under the Duke of York and Sir William Erskine, were to advance, the former upon Vaux, the latter upon Prémont, to drive the enemy from their entrenched positions there and at Bohain, and to press their light troops forward upon Le Catelet. All commanders were expressly ordered to halt the main portion of their troops on the captured ground, so that there was no intention of pursuing the enemy in the event of success.