The march of the remaining columns was begun in a thick fog which rendered concerted movements difficult, and the Austrian Staff seems to have made no allowance for the varying distances to be covered by the columns; Kinsky having little more than seven miles to traverse from Froidmont to Bouvines, whereas the Archduke Charles had fully fifteen miles from St. Amand to Pont-à-Marque. Bussche concentrated at St. Leger, a little to west of Warcoing, in the night, advanced upon Mouscron, and captured it, but was driven out again with very heavy loss, and forced back to Dottignies. For this misfortune Mack was chiefly responsible, by directing the detachment of so large a proportion of this column on a perfectly aimless errand towards Courtrai. Otto, on Bussche’s left, fared better, driving Compère’s troops from Leers, Wattrelos, and Tourcoing; but, unfortunately, with no further result than to join them to Thierry’s brigade behind Mouscron, to the greater discomfiture of the unfortunate Hanoverians.

To the left and south of Otto the Duke of York with about ten thousand men[237] advanced by Templeuve upon Lannoy which, after a sharp cannonade, he attacked with the brigade of Guards in front while the Light Dragoons turned it by the left; but the enemy beat so hasty a retreat that they escaped with little loss. Leaving two Hessian battalions in Lannoy, the Duke pushed on to Roubaix, where the enemy stood, with greater force both of infantry and artillery, in an entrenched position; but, in spite of a very obstinate resistance, the Guards carried this post also with the bayonet. Having no intelligence of the columns on his right and left, the Duke rightly decided to leave his advanced guard at Roubaix, and to fall back with his main body to Lannoy; when to his dismay he received a positive command from the Emperor himself, who with the Headquarters Staff had accompanied the rear of his column, to push on to the attack of Mouveaux. This order was sheer folly, unless indeed it were dictated by wanton and deliberate wickedness;[238] but it was reiterated in spite of all protests, and though the evening was falling and the troops were weary with a long and harassing day’s work under a burning sun, the Duke reluctantly obeyed. The French position at Mouveaux was enclosed by palisades and entrenchments and flanked by redoubts; but for the third time the brigade of Guards drove the enemy out brilliantly with the bayonet. The Seventh and Fifteenth Light Dragoons under Abercromby’s personal direction at once pressed forward in pursuit, and galloping round the village, which had been kindled by the flying French, overtook the fugitives, and cut down three hundred of them. Three guns were captured; and one small party of the Fifteenth actually rode into the French camp at Bondues,[239] nearly two miles to west of Mouveaux, and set the troops there running in every direction. The main body of the Duke’s column then bivouacked astride of the road between Mouveaux and Roubaix.

With the two columns south of the Duke, however, affairs had gone but indifferently. Kinsky’s advance from Froidmont was delayed by a message from the Archduke Charles, to the effect that his force could not possibly reach the Marque at the appointed hour of six in the morning; but in due time Kinsky moved forward to Bouvines, and drove the French from their entrenchments. The enemy, however, broke down the bridge over the Marque as they retired, and, until the advance of the Archduke began to make itself felt, Kinsky was unable to repair it, since the passage was commanded by a battery of heavy guns. The Archduke’s column had meanwhile left St. Amand at ten o’clock on the evening of the 16th, and after driving back the French advanced posts at Templeuve[240] and Cappelle, a little to east of Pont-à-Marque, finally succeeded in forcing the passage of the river at that point. But it was not till two o’clock in the afternoon, instead of six in the morning of the 17th, that his army had passed to the west bank of the Marque; and his soldiers were too much exhausted to move further than Lesquin, a little east of the road between Pont-à-Marque and Lille. There he bivouacked on the heights between Lesquin and Peronne, a village about three miles to south-east of it; his men having been on foot for twenty-two hours, marched more than twenty miles over bad roads, and fought a sharp action for the passage of the river. His advance, however, had forced the enemy to evacuate Sainghin, and thus enabled Kinsky to repair the bridge at Bouvines; but none the less Kinsky, with excess of caution, would not cross the river, and encamped for the night on the right bank, which was for him the wrong bank, of the Marque.

At the beginning of this day the French commanders had no information of any movements of the Allies beyond the march of Clerfaye; and, accordingly, the divisions of Souham and Moreau, together with Vandamme’s brigade, had crossed to the left bank of the Lys. The advance of the Allies from the east and the combats about Tourcoing, however, soon undeceived them. Pichegru being, as Soult said, fortunately absent, Generals Souham, Moreau, Macdonald, and Reynier met in council at Menin; and on the evening of the 17th they decided to make new dispositions and to set their troops at once in motion. Vandamme’s brigade alone was left on the north bank of the Lys to watch Clerfaye, and the remainder of the troops on that site crossed the river to take up their appointed stations. Malbrancq’s brigade was posted between Roncq and Blancfour, villages lying from three to four miles due south from Menin on the road to Lille; to the left of Malbrancq, Macdonald’s brigade crowned the heights of Mount Halluin; the rest of Souham’s division, under Generals Daendels and Jardon, lay some three miles away to the east of Macdonald, occupying a line between Aelbeke and Belleghem, a village lying a little to the south of Courtrai; and the gap between Macdonald and these troops was filled by the brigades of Compère and Thierry about Mouscron. Thus the formation of the French left wing was that of a double echelon; the three divisions being arranged at the three angles of an isosceles triangle, with the van at the apex, Mouscron, and the rear before Menin and Courtrai. The right wing, consisting of Bonnaud’s and Osten’s divisions, some thirty thousand strong, was assembled about Flers, two miles and a half to the east of Lille; where orders arrived on the evening of the 17th from Souham that a general attack was designed for the morrow, in which the duty of Bonnaud’s division would be to march upon Lannoy and Roubaix.

It was not without anxiety that the reports from the various columns of the Allies were awaited on the evening of the 17th at the Austrian headquarters at Templeuve. The failures of Bussche to capture Mouscron, and of the Archduke Charles to reach the point assigned to him, had sufficed to mar Mack’s plans; and of Clerfaye there was no news whatever. May 17–18. Orders were therefore sent at three o’clock next morning to the Archduke Charles to march at once with his own and Kinsky’s corps upon Lannoy; while the Duke of York and Otto were directed to attack Mouscron at noon, in the hope that before that time something would have been heard of Clerfaye. But it seems to have occurred to none of the Austrian Staff that the disposition of the Allied army, as prescribed by Mack, positively invited the French to take the offensive. On this night Bussche lay at Dottignies and Coyghem with his weakened corps of Hanoverians. On his left the main body of Otto’s column, seven and a half battalions and three squadrons, was at Tourcoing, with detachments of two battalions at Wattrelos, and of three battalions and three squadrons at Leers, on the line of his retreat. Thus his force was distributed in isolated patches along a length of five miles, with its right flank not only unprotected, but actually threatened by a superior force of the enemy, lying within three miles both of Tourcoing and Wattrelos.

On Otto’s left the Duke of York’s column was as dangerously dispersed. The Guards, with the Seventh and Fifteenth Light Dragoons, under Abercromby, were at Mouveaux; four Austrian battalions and the Sixteenth Light Dragoons were at Roubaix; the Fourteenth, Thirty-seventh, and Fifty-third were on the road between Roubaix and Lille, in order to repel any attack from the garrison of the latter place; two Hessian battalions lay at Lannoy, and four squadrons of Austrian hussars were engaged in patrolling. The Duke’s right was indeed covered, but his left was exposed to attack not only by the garrison of Lille but by Bonnaud’s superior force about Flers; and thus both his column and Otto’s practically passed the night pent in on three sides by forces of thrice their strength. To the left, or southward, there was a gap of four miles between the Duke’s troops and the nearest of Kinsky’s detachments, which lay at Pont-à-Tressin and Chereng, with the main body still further south at Bouvines; while the Archduke Charles, with nearly one-fourth of the whole army, lay over against him at Sainghin on the other side of the Marque, with advanced detachments pushed far to the south-west at Seclin. Finally, Clerfaye, with rather more than a fourth of the entire Allied force, was still on the western side of the Lys at Wervicq. Certainly the dispositions lent themselves to a plan of annihilation.

May 18.

At three o’clock on the morning of the 18th, while Coburg was signing the orders for his troops, the French army began its march to the attack. On the south Osten’s division was left about Flers and Lezennes, to watch the Archduke Charles and Kinsky; while Bonnaud, dividing his eighteen thousand men into two columns, directed them northward, the one by L’Hempenpont upon Lannoy, the other by Pont-à-Breug upon Roubaix. Simultaneously Malbrancq’s brigade marched south from Roncq upon Mouveaux; Macdonald’s from Mount Halluin upon the western front of Turcoing; Compère’s from Mouscron upon the northern front; Thierry’s, also from Mouscron, together with Daendels’s from Aelbeke, upon Wattrelos; while Jardon’s brigade moved from Belleghem towards Dottignies to hold the Hanoverians in check. Excluding this last brigade, sixty thousand men in all were thus turned upon the six posts in which the eighteen thousand men under Otto and the Duke of York were dispersed.

Otto’s force, being nearer to the enemy, was the first to feel the weight of the attack. General Montfrault, who commanded at Tourcoing, perceiving the overwhelming strength of the enemy, begged reinforcements from the Duke of York, who sent him two Austrian battalions from Roubaix, but with strict orders that they should return in the event of their arriving too late to save the town. As a matter of fact they did arrive too late, for the garrison had already been driven from Tourcoing; but none the less they attached themselves, as was perhaps natural, to Montfrault, who stood fast on the eastern skirts of the town and held back the enemy for a time, until a French battery unlimbering on ground to the north of him, forced him to retire. Seeing himself threatened by large bodies of cavalry, Montfrault formed his troops into a large square, with four battalions and light artillery in front, one battalion on each flank, and the cavalry in the rear. In this order he fell back, his heavy artillery and waggons being enclosed in the centre of the square, and his light troops skirmishing on all four sides. It was about half-past eight when he began his retrograde movement; but already Wattrelos, the first post on his rear, was in possession of the enemy. The garrison, two Hessian battalions, had manfully resisted an attack of six times their number until eight o’clock, when, finding themselves in danger of being surrounded, they retired, and, with the help of two companies sent forward by General Otto, withdrew successfully to Leers. Montfrault thereupon found himself compelled to leave the main road for a by-way, which ran between Wattrelos and Roubaix, in order to continue his retreat.

Between six and seven o’clock, rather later than the opening of the attack on Tourcoing and Wattrelos, Bonnaud’s two columns came up from the south upon Lannoy and Roubaix; and shortly afterwards Malbrancq’s brigade from the north fell upon Mouveaux, while a part of the French force that had captured Tourcoing appeared also on the north of Roubaix. The Duke of York despatched urgent messages to recall the two Austrian battalions which he had sent to Otto, but of course in vain; and meanwhile he made such head as he could with his handful of troops against overwhelming odds. The troops at Mouveaux were disposed in two sides of a square, the left showing a front towards the east at Mouveaux, the guns stationed in the angle at the northern end of the village, and the right thrown back to the hamlet of Le Fresnoy. To the south, the British brigade of the Line under Major-general Fox, near Croix, sought to bar the way against part of Bonnaud’s division from Lille; but to defend the rest of the ground there were but three Austrian battalions. Of these half a battalion was stationed in Roubaix itself, and the remainder echeloned to the right rear of Fox’s brigade behind the sources of the Espierres brook, which ran along the southern skirts of the village. These Austrian battalions seem to have been the first to give way, and one of them, by Craig’s account, did not behave as it ought; but they were pressed hard both in front and on their right flank, which, owing to the absence of the two battalions sent to Otto, was wholly uncovered. One brigade of Bonnaud’s division therefore succeeded in forcing its way between Mouveaux and Roubaix to Le Fresnoy; and the Duke thus saw Abercromby and the brigade of Guards absolutely cut off from him. Moreover, though he knew it not, the victorious French of Thierry’s and Daendels’s brigades were coming down from Wattrelos upon his rear. Seldom has a General found himself, through no fault of his own, in a more extraordinary position. He had been assured that the Archduke Charles would join him from the south, and he had therefore ordered Abercromby to defend Mouveaux to the last extremity; but not a sign of an Austrian was to be seen whether to south or north. His first instinct was to ride to the Guards at Mouveaux; but this was seen to be out of the question. He then tried to make his way to Fox’s brigade, but found that the French were in possession of the suburbs of Roubaix, and that he was cut off from this brigade also. Realising then that, his Austrian battalions being dispersed, he had not a man left to him except two squadrons of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, he took a small escort from them and rode to Wattrelos, hoping to obtain from Otto the means for extricating the Guards. Meanwhile he sent orders to Abercromby to retire to the heights on the east side of Roubaix.