Montfrault, however, had fared ill in his attempt to withdraw. Until he reached the ground between Wattrelos and Roubaix, his square preserved good order; but being attacked at that point by overpowering numbers from the south as well as from north and west, it was broken up, and fled in disorder towards Leers. Meanwhile General Fox, finding himself absolutely isolated, at length gave the order for his brigade, which so far had held its own, to retire. The retreat began in perfect order, and the brigade, having successfully fought its way to the road at Lannoy, followed it for some distance, under incessant fire from all sides, until checked by a battery covered by an abatis, which the French had thrown up on the road. The first shots from this battery struck down several men, and Fox for the moment feared that surrender would be inevitable; but fortunately in the ranks of the Fourteenth was a French emigrant who knew the district well, and undertook to lead the brigade across country. It pursued its retreat therefore under constant fire of artillery and musketry in front and on both flanks, and with cavalry constantly threatening its rear; but it kept its assailants at bay, and at one moment made so sharp a counter-attack as to take temporary possession of some French guns. Thus partly by good luck, partly by good conduct, partly by the misconduct and mismanagement of the enemy, the three battalions contrived to reach Leers, with the loss of all their battalion-guns excepting one, and of nine officers and five hundred and twenty-five men out of eleven hundred and twenty. The greatest credit was given to General Fox for the coolness, skill, and patience with which he extricated his brigade.
Abercromby appears to have begun his retreat from Mouveaux at about nine o’clock, but of necessity very slowly, having with him a considerable number of guns. The retirement was conducted in perfect order as far as Roubaix, the Seventh and Fifteenth Light Dragoons covering the rear with great gallantry. At Roubaix the French, though in occupation of the suburbs, were not in possession of the little walled town, which was still held by a dismounted squadron of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons. The place consisted of a single long street, the direct continuation of which led to Wattrelos, while, just outside the eastern gate, the road to Lannoy turned sharply to the right, being bordered on one side by a deep ditch and on the other by the Espierres brook. To defile through the town took necessarily much time, but the guns emerged safely and the Guards also. Next to the Guards were the Austrian Hussars, still in the street; then in rear of them a party of the Fifteenth; next to this party were the Sixteenth, who were formed up in the market-place; and in rear of all were the remainder of the Fifteenth, holding the pursuing French in check. All was still in order when a French gun posted on the Wattrelos branch of the street suddenly opened fire from the edge of the town, sending shot after shot among the Austrian Hussars. The ordeal would have been a severe one for any troops, and presently the Hussars dismounted and tried to find a way out among the houses, but in vain. The trial became unendurable as the French pressed on and opened fire on all sides upon the horsemen thus pent in for slaughter; and at last the whole body remounted, galloped wildly down the road, swung round the corner, where the French infantry thrust vainly at them with their bayonets, and raced onward for three or four hundred yards, when the foremost troopers suddenly found the way blocked by horseless guns. The French had brought a second gun to enfilade the road to Lannoy, and the drivers of the British cannon had fled. The shock of this mass of galloping horsemen suddenly checked was appalling. In an instant the ground was strewn with men and horses, kicking and struggling in frantic confusion, while a number of bât-horses dashed into the ranks of the Guards, plunging and lashing out, with their loads hanging under their bellies. For a short time the disorder appears to have been beyond remedy, for a belt of wood surrounding the town gave excellent shelter to the French sharpshooters, who had a very easy target in the mass of struggling men and animals. Very soon, however, the Guards recovered themselves, and cleared a way for the cavalry to pass on beyond the wood to open ground. There the Light Dragoons rallied, the rear-guard was re-formed, and the retreat, always under heavy fire, was resumed towards Lannoy.
That village, which was enclosed by a low earthen rampart and a shallow ditch, had likewise been attacked early by one of Bonnaud’s brigades from Lille, but had been defended with the greatest gallantry by two battalions of Hessians, who were apparently still in possession when the British troops approached it, though surrounded on the west side, and indeed nearly on all sides, by the French.[241] The British officers, however, could see no sign of a friendly garrison, and Colonel Congreve was actually wheeling his cannon round to open fire on the place, when there galloped up to them some blue-coated horsemen, who, being mistaken for Hessians, were allowed to approach without molestation, and succeeded in cutting the traces of some of the guns before they were discovered. The Guards then perceiving their retreat to be cut off, faced about against their pursuers, and, leaving the high road, made their way across country as best they could south-eastward to Marquain. The Hessians in Lannoy, either before or shortly after this, were forced to evacuate the village, and, finding the road to Leers blocked by the enemy, were likewise obliged to make their way across country in disorder, losing out of nine hundred officers and men some three hundred and thirty, of whom two hundred were cut off and captured in Lannoy itself.
Meanwhile the Duke of York, conspicuous by the star on his breast, had been hunted all over the country by the enemy’s dragoons, and had escaped, as he frankly owned, only by the speed of his horse. On reaching Wattrelos he found it in the hands of the French, but passing beyond it under constant fire he came upon a gallant little party of Hessians still holding the bridge of the Espierres brook. These by a final attack with the bayonet gained a little respite for him, but were presently swept away from the bridge, and escaped only by fording the brook neck-deep. The Duke, thinking apparently that the bridge was lost, or not knowing of its existence, spurred his horse into the brook; but the animal rearing up and refusing to enter the water, he dismounted, scrambled over on foot, and taking a horse from one of his aide-de-camps, at last succeeded in finding Otto. About Leers and Nechin the fragments of Otto’s force, together with some of the Duke of York’s men, rallied upon the few battalions that held these places. The French did not press their advantage, and at half-past four the action came to an end. The loss of the Allies was about three thousand men killed, wounded, and missing, which was relatively slight, for, with proper management and conduct on the part of the French, not a man of the Duke’s and Otto’s columns would have escaped alive. The Brigade of Guards lost one hundred and ninety-six officers and men killed, wounded, and missing, the flank-companies being the heaviest sufferers; while the Seventh, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Light Dragoons, who by general admission behaved admirably, lost fifty-two men and ninety-two horses. The total loss of the British of all ranks was nine hundred and thirty, besides which nineteen out of their twenty-eight guns were captured.
It may be asked what the rest of the army was doing on this day, while these two columns, together less than one-third of the whole, were in process of annihilation. The answer is that, for some reason, it observed a conspiracy of inaction. Bussche sat still at Dottignies exchanging occasional shots with Jardon’s brigade. Clerfaye crossed the Lys near Wervicq at seven o’clock in the morning, and turning eastward advanced between Bousbecque and Linselles, where he was met by Vandamme’s brigade, which numbered eight thousand men against his sixteen thousand. He engaged the French, overthrew their right wing, took eight guns, and then remained stationary; until, being informed of the approach of more French troops about Bondues, he withdrew to the Lys, which he recrossed on the next day, and thence retreated northward. The behaviour of Kinsky and of the Archduke Charles was still more extraordinary. Kinsky, on being asked by one of his officers for orders at six o’clock in the morning, replied that he was sick and no longer in command. The Archduke Charles received at five in the morning the order to move at once upon Lannoy, a distance of six miles, so that his troops might well have come upon the scene of action between eight and nine. He did not march till noon, though within sound of the guns, nor did he strike the road from Tournai to Lille until three, when he received orders to return to Tournai. The military renown justly earned later by the Archduke forbids us to believe that this delay was due to ignorance; and the fact that, though the Duke of York had early informed the Emperor of his danger, not a word was sent to hasten the Archduke or Kinsky, shows clearly that their torpidity was not unexpected nor disapproved at headquarters. Jealousy of the Duke of York and of Mack are among the reasons assigned to account for the general paralysis of the Austrian commanders; but possibly the true reason was that Thugut was sick of the war in Belgium, and wished the English to sicken of it also. Why he should have chosen the slaughter of several hundred British and Austrians as the best means of forwarding his purpose, and how he persuaded Austrian officers to second him therein, are matters which only an Austrian can determine. For us it must suffice that the decisive battle of the campaign was lost by the deliberate design of the Imperial Generals. Before long they were to learn that those who court defeat for dishonest ends may, when they least desire it, find defeat thrust upon them.[242]
VOL. IV. BOOK XII. CHAPTER XI
1794.
The entire army of the Allies, with the exception of Clerfaye’s corps, was gathered into camp about Tournai May 19. in the course of the 19th, the Emperor being received in silence when he rode into the town, while the Duke of York was loudly cheered by the inhabitants.[243] The condition of the army was very far from satisfactory. The troops themselves, or at any rate the British, were not seriously shaken by the rout of the previous day; but the Emperor and the Austrian commanders were much discouraged, and the animosity of the various nations towards each other was dangerously embittered. The British, above all, were furious against the Austrians for leaving them to be overwhelmed without so much as an attempt to assist them. “It is impossible,” wrote Craig to the War Office, “to bring the Austrians to act except in small corps. I lament that we should be destined as victims of their folly and ignorance. Do not be surprised at the word ignorance: I am every day more and more convinced that they have not an officer among them.” These were hard words, but they were true and just, though the Archduke Charles in later days redeemed himself May 20. from this reproach. However, for the moment the commanders laid aside their differences and agreed that the attack should be renewed, this time with united forces, upon Mouscron; and meanwhile Coburg dispersed the whole army in a semicircle around Tournai; the advanced posts running from Camphin on the south by Baisieux, Willems, Nechin, Leers, Estaimpuis, and St. Legers to Espierres, while the inner circle of entrenchments ran from the Scheldt on the north by Froyennes, Marquain, and Lamain to the suburb of St. Martin and the citadel of Tournai itself.
The French Generals, as already narrated, made no effort to follow up their victory of the 18th, but awaited the return of Pichegru, who, on the news of the victory, hastened from the Sambre to turn it to account. On the 22nd, after a consultation with his officers, Pichegru decided to make a general attack upon Coburg’s position, and directed that Souham with four brigades,[244] numbering from thirty to forty thousand men, should assail it on the right or northern half of its front from Espierres to Leers, while Bonnaud’s division should fall upon its left about Templeuve, and Osten’s division should make a demonstration still further to the south May 23. about Baisieux. On the following day between six and seven o’clock in the morning the action began; and after long and hard fighting the Allies were finally driven from three important points, namely, Blandain and the hill of La Croisette immediately adjacent to it, a little to the west of Tournai, and Pont-à-Chin upon the Scheldt, a little below the city. To abandon to the enemy these posts, particularly Pont-à-Chin, which lay on the direct road from Courtrai to Tournai and commanded the navigation of the Scheldt, was impossible; and Coburg decided that they must be recovered at any cost. Throughout this long day’s fighting the troops that had borne the brunt of the work on the 18th had been held in reserve; but at about six o’clock in the evening Fox’s brigade of the British Line was called out to recover Pont-à-Chin which had already been taken and retaken three or four times. The brigade went into this action with fewer than six hundred men, having lost half of its numbers just four days before; but the three gallant regiments, though unsupported, carried the village unhesitatingly with the bayonet, pressed on to the low heights to south of it, swept everything before them, May 22. so far as their front extended, and captured seven cannon. The day ended, after a severe struggle of fifteen hours, in the retreat of the French, with the loss of some six thousand men and seven guns; the fire, both of musketry and artillery, having been the heaviest ever remembered by the oldest soldiers present. Both sides, however, fought for the most part in dispersed formation, and inflicted, comparatively speaking, little damage upon each other. The one exception was Fox’s brigade. “Had their order of attack,” wrote Calvert, “been adopted by the Allies in general, the day would probably have ended in the ruin of the French.” But the losses of the brigade amounted to one hundred and twenty killed, wounded, and missing; and there are few troops that can be trusted, after losing half their numbers on Sunday, to storm a position held by a superior force and lose one-fifth of their remnant on Thursday. Some indeed claim that but for this handful of British soldiers the day would have been lost to the Allies;[245] but whether this be true or not, the 22nd of May should be a great anniversary for the Fourteenth, Thirty-Seventh, and Fifty-Third.
It was directly after this action that the course of events in Poland began to tell upon the councils of the May 23. Imperial Headquarters at Tournai. On the 23rd, Mack, disgusted by the failure of his elaborate plans, resigned his post as Chief of the Staff, and, having first expressed his opinion that the reconquest of Belgium was hopeless, retired for the time into private life. His successor, Waldeck, being a fellow-conspirator with Thugut, was still more eager for the evacuation of the Netherlands; and the Emperor was easily tempted to share their May 24. views. On the 24th a Council of War was held for form’s sake, wherein the Emperor set forth the situation in such a light as to gain a ready vote from his Generals that further efforts in the Netherlands were useless. The Duke of York alone pleaded earnestly for a renewal of the attack upon Flanders; and, as fate ordained it, his representations were seconded by unexpected successes of the Allies on the Sambre and in the Palatinate. On the 24th Marshal Möllendorf and the Prussians surprised the French about Kaiserslautern and drove them back with a loss of three thousand men and twenty guns; and on the same day Count Kaunitz gained a still more important victory on the Sambre. The fact was that serious differences had arisen at Paris between Carnot on the one side and Robespierre and St. Just on the other, because Carnot insisted on keeping the direction of the military operations in his own hands. Robespierre, to whom the art of war was as incomprehensible as a Chinese manuscript, was furious with jealousy and rage. “At the first reverse, Carnot’s head shall fall,” cried the despicable creature, galled by the cold contempt with which his inflexible colleague rebuffed his attempts at interference; and to re-establish civil influence at the seat of war, St. Just, Lebas, and five more Commissioners set out on the 2nd of May for the army of the Sambre. There they introduced the rule of terror in its worst form, and with it, of course, confusion unspeakable. May 18, 20,
22, 24. They fought with the Generals, they fought among themselves; and in the midst of this chaos St. Just took upon himself the supreme direction of the operations whereby the Austrians were to be crushed. Four several times he ordered the army to pass the Sambre, wasting the lives of his troops with obstinate imbecility. May 24. Finally he gave Kaunitz the opportunity for a counter-attack, in which, with inconsiderable loss to themselves, the Austrians routed the French completely, killing and wounding two thousand men, and capturing three thousand more, besides fifty pieces of cannon.