The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  Further Republican disasters followed. The trickery and greed of the Paris demagogues had destroyed whatever patriotism and

  1" But the climate," he added, " is of a nature to keep us all tolerably cool."—Calvert, 25.

  patience the victor of Jemappes possessed. Furious at their knavery, the restless, scheming Dumouriez had formed the Caesarian plan of marching at the head of his army on Paris as the saviour of a demoralised country. Defeated, he now decided to achieve his ambition with the help of the enemy. On the last day of the month he sent an aide-de-camp to the astonished Austrians and offered to evacuate the Netherlands and march against the Convention. Three days later he delivered up the French War Minister and three other politicians who had been visiting his headquarters. Failing to carry his troops with him, he followed himself on April 5th.

  Within a fortnight the war had been transformed. The door was wide open to an Allied advance across the northern plains of France. The chance seemed too great to reject. Pitt and Dundas, strongly pressed by the King, consented to postpone their West Indian projects and throw their whole striking force into Flanders. To fill the place of the still missing Prussians they promised to put 40,000 British, Hanoverians and Hessians into the field. They thus committed themselves against their better judgment to a continental campaign of the costly kind dear to William III and Marlborough. Yet, reluctant to relinquish the more popular " blue water " strategy of their dreams, they insisted that the British contingent might be withdrawn whenever they chose. In this way they vainly imagined they could preserve their freedom of action.

  Their Allies were equally anxious to preserve theirs. All of them had what seemed to them more urgent objectives than a common victory over the Republic they had once more ceased to fear. The Prussian and wanted to extend their eastern frontiers. They were not prepared to waste men and money on another western campaign until this had been achieved. The Austrians wanted territorial accessions on the Danube to counterbalance the acquisitions of their Russian and Prussian neighbours. Without these they did not feel secure. They therefore put forward a plan for exchanging Belgium for Bavaria with the Bavarian Royal Family. Britain, whose historic barrier against French aggression in the Low Countries was the presence of Austria, hastily sought to prevent this by bribing the Imperial Government with a promise of French frontier fortresses.

  All this chaffering lowered the tone of the war. The grand crusade of Burke's imagination was degenerating into a vulgar scramble for territorial aggrandisement. Even Holland put in a claim for compensatory fortresses. The Allies argued that they were the victims of French aggression—not for the first time in the past century—and that it was only fair that France should pay. But the evil did not end there. Though the road to Paris lay open, the Allied armies remained motionless on the French frontier for weeks while their politicians debated " indemnities." British unprepared-ness as well as Allied greed contributed to the delay. For it was one thing for Pitt to promise an army: another to produce it. Hanoverians and Hessians bought with British gold might march in haste across the muddy lanes of north Germany; the Guards, joyously escaping from the boredom of Helvoetsluys, float down chilly Dutch canals towards a kindlier Flanders, and the Government hurriedly replace every available regiment with home service “Fencible " corps raised for the duration. But the depleted ranks had to be filled with recruits, transformed overnight into soldiers by making them drunk with bounty money and bundling them, still dazed, into transports. A Staff Officer complained after they had landed that they were " totally unfit for service . . . being mostly either old men or quite boys, extremely weak and short." " How they are to be disposed of till they can be taught their business," wrote the apologetic Adjutant-General, " I am at a loss to imagine. I was not consulted on the subject until it was too late." 1

  The command of this polyglot army was entrusted to the 28-year-old Duke of York. Having been indentured by his father to Frederick the Great, he had acquired some reputation as a martinet if not as a soldier. The Government had little faith in the appointment. But it felt that the Duke as a prince of the blood might be able to hold his own with the Royalties at Coburg's headquarters. His Chief of Staff, Major-General Sir James Murray 2—a brilliant but shy man—had as little confidence in himself as the Government in the Commander-in-Chief. The most experienced soldier in the expeditionary force was an old Scot, Major-General Ralph Abercromby.

  When on May 1st Coburg at last advanced, it was with the stately deliberation of eighteenth-century military science. He had

  1 Calvert, 52-

  2 In July, 1794, Murray assumed the additional name of Pulteney.

  more than 100,000 men, of whom over half were Austrians, many of them veterans of the Turkish wars. The diversity of their race, habits and uniforms much impressed their British comrades. " The drawings which Captain Cook brought back from the South Seas," wrote Major Calvert, " are nothing to some of our friends! " In the demoralised state of France there seemed little to stop a swift and resolute march on Paris. But the pedants of the Imperial Staff would do nothing contrary to the canons of their text-books. Every road by which a French raiding party might advance against rear or flank had to be guarded, every outpost laboriously driven in and even the smallest fortress stormed or blockaded. The army advanced with infinite slowness, spread out in an enormous cordon from Maubeuge to Ostend. As soon as it reached the frontier fortresses of Conde and Valenciennes, it stopped to besiege them in form. Nothing would induce Coburg to advance further till they had been reduced.

  Here the Allied army remained for two months, trenching, sapping and mining and suffering more from boredom than from the enemy, while the chances of ending the war in 1793 evaporated. Two hundred miles to the east 100,000 Prussians with like deliberation besieged the Rhineland city of Mainz. The British public watched these elaborate military exercises, at first with respectful interest and then with a growing sense of tedium. It thrilled with pride when it learnt how the Coldstream in a daring counter-attack had driven the enemy from a fortified wood near Vicogne. It listened with sympathy to tales of the trenches before Valenciennes. But by the time the town fell on July 28th, a feeling of weariness had set in. England was back where she had been before Chatham taught her to make war by striking across oceans: in the interminable labyrinth of Flemish barn and spire, march and countermarch, sap and parallel so familiar to the youth of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. Imperial Vienna's conception of a campaign was one of reducing places. To seek out and destroy the enemy's army in the field or spread dismay through his tottering system by a bold-advance were operations alien to its measured pace. They were not provided for in the text-books.

  The leisured country gentlemen who ruled fin-de-siecle England proved obedient pupils. They were the product of the salon, the palladian mansion, the stately periods of classic oratory and architecture. They also saw the war to crush the infant dynamic of armed Jacobinism as a campaign of capturing places. As soon as Valenciennes fell—with all the antique pageantry of paraded colours, massed bands and incongruously ragged sansculottes marching out with military honours to carry back death and desolation to their own insurgent countrymen1—the British Government staked out a claim of its own. Vigorously backed by the King, it claimed that the capture of Dunkirk on the Allied right was a prior British objective. For not only would its possession shorten the Expeditionary Force's communications but would provide a set-off to allied " indemnities " and a bargaining counter at the peace conference. It would also—and this was an important point for Ministers dependent on a parliamentary majority—deprive French privateers of their most dangerous base and compensate the City for the postponement of the West Indian campaign. As Dundas put it, such a diversion would help to " give a good impression of the war in England."

  He failed to see that it would not help to win it. Instead of advancing southwards on Paris the Allied army broke up, the Austrians investing Le Quesnoy and the British marching north to Dunkirk. Here they dug the
mselves in round the port pending the arrival of a squadron of gunboats and the plans which the Lord Chancellor had obligingly drafted to co-ordinate the combined operations. Unfortunately the Cabinet's loquacity somewhat impaired the value of its deliberations, for its intentions quickly became public not only in London but in Paris.

  Yet though the Allies failed to strike the decisive blow, the door to victory remained open. Throughout the summer of 1793 the defeat of the Revolution seemed inevitable. The unreason and violence of the ruling demagogues in Paris had split France into factions. In La Vendee the peasants had taken up arms against the scum of the cities who had come to proscribe their priests and conscript their young men. That summer the country folk of the Bocage, the deep-wooded, patriarchal land south of the Loire, turned out in thousands to defend their hearths and altars. In Paris the Jacobins, installed in the new Committee of Public Safety,

  1 They were released on condition that they did not serve again against the Allies. They were promptly employed against the Royalists of La Vendee.

  denounced the Girondins as traitors. Those of the latter who escaped the mob fled to the provinces, where they raised a revolt. Lyons, Marseilles, Avignon and Bordeaux all declared for a " Federal" Republic against the tyranny of Paris. By the end of June twenty-six out of the eighty-five Departments had repudiated the Commune. From Caen in Normandy, where the Federalists set up their headquarters, the Girondin heroine, Charlotte Corday, set out to assassinate the Jacobin journalist, Marat.

  Yet once again the Allies' selfishness and lack of constructive idealism healed France's divisions. When Valenciennes fell it was not the lilies of the native Bourbons that rose above the citadel but the hated bunting of the Hapsburgs. The Prussians spoke of Lorraine as an " indemnity," the Austrians of Alsace, the Spaniards, who had invaded France from the south, of Roussillon. As in the autumn of '92 the love of the peasant for the soil of his country turned such threats into a terrible boomerang.

  The Allies were as selfish in action as in inaction. Even when the whole Rhone valley took up arms for the Federalists, the Austrians and Piedmontese refused to march. Pitt sent Lord Mulgrave to Turin to urge this obvious move. But the Court of Savoy mistrusted the Austrians, and the Austrians were too busy watching the Prussians in Poland to undertake another western offensive. They looked on at the suicidal struggle between the Jacobins and Girondins without stirring.

  Alone among the Allies the British realised the opportunity. Their strongest stympathies were naturally with the insurgents nearest their own coasts. The forest war of the Royalists of the West stirred the chivalrous Burke and Windham to white heat. But unfortunately the Government was in a difficulty. Pitt had always been careful to insist that Britain was not fighting to put back the Bourbons or to impose any particular form of rule on the French. The brothers of the murdered French King were not an inspiring rallying point for a liberating movement and commanded little general support. But the western rebels were their devoted adherents. To support them too unreservedly would be to commit Britain to a partisanship incompatible with her war aims.

  But even greater impediments to effective British aid were lack of man-power and irresolution in using it. So serious had been the drain of the Flanders campaign that at one time there were only three regular infantry regiments left south of the Tweed. The main division of the Mediterranean Fleet, whose appearance in southern waters was urgently demanded by British diplomats at Vienna, Madrid, Naples, Turin and Lisbon, had been unable to sail from Spithead till the end of May and then only by drafting soldiers on board. And though a French squadron left Brest on June 4th to blockade the Royalists on the Brittany coast, the great ships of the British Channel Fleet were still in harbour a month later waiting to complete their crews. Before they sailed the insurgents had been repulsed from Nantes—the base designed for a British-Royalist advance on Paris.

  For though the fates seemed determined to punish the moral delinquencies of the Revolutionary leaders, the human instruments through which Fate could alone work seemed equally determined to. reject such chances. The British Government took each windfall from Providence as a matter of course and, when it had lost it, calmly awaited the next. Nothing could shake its astonishing complacency. When Fox moved that negotiations should be opened for peace, Pitt, pointing out that it would be strange to do at the start of a most successful war what could only be excused at the end of a disastrous one, claimed that British operations had been uniformly attended " with the most brilliant, rapid and unexpected success." 1 And the country on the whole agreed with him. Only Burke, watching from the prophetic shades of Beaconsfield, remained incredulous. " No," he declared, " it will be a long and a dangerous war—the most dangerous we were ever engaged in." But the general view was that with the Allies only 160 miles from Paris and all Christendom save Denmark, Switzerland and Venice leagued against the Republic, the southward march would soon be resumed and the dark menace of the Revolution ended.

  Had the French only remained quiescent it might have been. The British conception of war was a semi-static one: mildly active for themselves and wholly passive for the enemy. But passive was j ust what the Jacobins were not. During the summer and autumn of 1793 they were more active than anything seen on earth for a hundred years.

  1 War Speeches, 93-6.

  That July a young English girl living in Switzerland went to Stadt to gape at a party of Jacobin emissaries on their way to Venice. She and her emigre friends laughed heartily at the " foolish, poor, pale faces " of the despised and hated " sansculottes!’ But had she known that for the next three years she and her family would be fugitives before their victorious armies and would be finally driven to take refuge on board an English man-of-war—the one unconquerable thing left in the world—she would more likely have cried.1 For the French, having set up absolute liberty as their God and found it—as a God—a failure, had now set up another: human energy. Henceforward they worshipped only the red blood in their own veins: the ruthless will that knew no denial. Wherever freedom, in whose name they made such extravagant claims, impeded the triumph of their will, they crucified freedom. Because despotism and cruelty won their ends most swiftly, they glorified despotism and cruelty and called them liberty and justice.

  Such a belief might be vile and, in the long run, false to eternal truth. But the French after a century of tepid faith and shams put their whole trust in it and—till it in turn failed them—gave themselves without reserve to its service. Those who talked with the ragged prisoners in Hampshire that summer were astonished at the intensity of their hatred of established religions: at Alresford four hundred Jacobin officers on parole openly boasted of their intention to massacre some neighbouring emigre priests at the first opportunity. A British naval officer who captured some French seamen described how one day he begged one of them who had a fiddle to oblige with the Revolutionary hymn. For some time the man refused, then struck up, accompanying himself by his voice. " When he came to that part * Aux armes, Citoyens, formez vos bataillons,' he seemed inspired; he threw up his violin half-way up the foremast, caught it again, pressed it to his breast and sung out ' Bon, £a Ira,' in which he was joined by his comrades:

  " ' Fired with the song the French grew vain, Fought all their battles o'er again,

  And thrice they routed all their foes; and thrice they slew the slain;'

  1 Wynne Diaries, I, 206,

  and seemed ready and willing for any mischief." 1 Those who led such men—uncouth, imperfectly educated, perverted often by vile, sadistic passions and daemonic in their hatreds, ambitions and enthusiasms—were resolved to smash everything that stood in their path. And almost everything that the old world valued.

  On the 24th of July—two days after the fall of Mainz—Robespierre, ousting Danton, joined the Committee of Public Safety. This man, mediocre in heart and intellect, possessed one almost superhuman talent: a single-minded belief in himself and his opinions. To them he was ready to sacrifice everything: liberty, justice,
decency, his friends and, if need be, humanity itself. For he believed himself to be the embodiment of the General Will. For the moment the mob shared his belief. And as the triumph of his ideals necessitated the triumph of France, to destroy her enemies and his own, no sacrifice could be too great and no means too cruel.

  Almost his earliest act was to send the general of the northern armies to the guillotine for the crime of being unsuccessful. Old Custine was the first of many who died for the same offence. The timely sacrifice electrified the survivors. Like the Long Parliament's Self-Denying Ordinance, it produced astonishing results.

  So did the terror which Robespierre unloosed on the rebellious and the faint-hearted. " Better," cried one of his followers, " that twenty-five million beings should perish than the Republic one and indivisible! " On August 27th the Jacobins, routing the southern Federalists, stormed their way into Marseilles. In the wake of their armies came subhuman beings with unrestrained powers: men like the drunkard Collot d'Herbois; the little white-faced human ferret, Hebert; and the ex-priest Le Bon who sat all day in a fever of ecstasy watching the blood spouting from the guillotine. And when the guillotine proved too slow for their business, they tied men and women in droves together and mowed them down by chain-shot or threw them screaming into the rivers.