The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  The causes of failure were unperceived. They were partly the nation's reluctance to prepare for war, partly the Government's characteristic inability to follow any systematic plan. There had been no concentration of force: no persistence in policy. Instead Pitt and Dundas had improvised according to the needs of the hour, living from hand to mouth and allowing the enemy the initiative. Flabbiness of decision inevitably degenerated into a futile scramble to rush insufficient forces to whatever point of the Allied circumference the French chose to attack. " The misfortunes of our situation," wrote the shrewd old King, " is that we have too many objects to attend to, and our force consequently must be too weak at each place." 1

  But the Government seemed incapable of learning. It could not see that military operations were not static: that, once initiated, they grew of their own, making ever fresh demands on the nation's strength and manpower. Territorial magnates and lawyers had still to realise that the direction of a world-wide campaign called for at least as much forethought and precision as laying out a plantation or drafting a legal instrument. They let the war run itself—into tangles.

  1 When Fox argued in the House that, if the object of the campaign was to put an end to French tyranny, Toulon was the most important objective: if it was conquest, the West Indies, young Mr. Jenkinson of the India Board, replying for the Government, revealed the confusion in Pitt's mind : the country's war aim was to destroy the Jacobin menace to Europe but the defence of Toulon could obviously not be allowed to outweigh the importance of strengthening the Empire.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Enemy Strikes

  1794-5

  " We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an

  ordinary community. . . . We are at war with a system

  which by its essence is inimical to all other governments ;

  and which makes peace or war as peace and war may best

  contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine

  that we are at war." Burke.

  " I learnt what one ought not to do and that is always

  something." Wellington.

  THAT winter the fever of mass murder, atheism and reckless spending in Paris seemed to be approaching its climax. At Christmas the obscene and diseased journalist, Hebert, presided over the Feast of Reason in Notre Dame, where a whore was elevated at the high altar amid Rabelaisian rites. In the prisons thousands of innocent men and women, flung there by some Party sadist's whim, fed out of troughs on offal or were driven in droves chained like cattle through the streets.1 To decent English minds it seemed unthinkable that men could survive who broke every law of God and man, who robbed and murdered and blasphemed, who denied justice, pity and humanity itself in their ruthless search for power. " From the nature of the mind of man and the necessary progress of human affairs," Pitt declared in Parliament, "it is impossible that such a system can be of long duration." " Surely," cried the high-minded Windham, " Heaven will presently put a whip into every honest hand to lash these villains naked through the world." 2

  The need to destroy the menace quickly before it could spread further was plain. " We are called in the present age," Pitt told the

  1 See the remarkable account of the sufferings of General O'Hara after his capture at Toulon described in Farington, I, m-12.

  2 Windham Papers, I, 162.

  House, " to witness the political and moral phenomenon of a mighty and civilised people, formed into an artificial horde of banditti, throwing off all the restraints which have influenced men in social life. . . . We behold them uniting the utmost savageness and ferocity of design with consummate contrivance and skill in execution, and seemingly engaged in no less than a conspiracy to exterminate from the face of the earth all honour, justice and religion." Because of the inequalities and corruptions of the past, they could count on allies in every country. They had the advantage of waging an ideological offensive. Already Revolutionary agents, with long purses and beguiling tongues, were undermining the resistance of Britain's allies. At Turin, Naples, Florence and Genoa even high officials had been involved in treasonable conspiracies. Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark were seething with subterranean Jacobinism.

  It seemed vital to Pitt to keep the Grand Alliance in being. He was under no illusions about his allies and their selfish, divided aims. But so long as they could be induced to fight against the common enemy of mankind it was best to turn a blind eye to their faults. The human future depended on keeping a cordon sanitaire round France till the Jacobin fever had spent itself.

  Pitt therefore welcomed a visit from Mack, the rising strategist of the Austrian Staff, and promised him additional troops for a renewed offensive in the spring. The army estimates presented to Parliament in February, 1794, after Mack's departure provided for 175,000 Regulars, 34,000 German Auxiliaries and 52,000 embodied Militia. But the bulk of the trained and mobile troops at the Government's disposal had already been committed far beyond recall through its failure to follow out a co-ordinated war plan. Tied to a major campaign on France's northern frontier, it had simultaneously encouraged its naval and military commanders to take the offensive in the Mediterranean and West Indies without a thought of how they could be reinforced and supplied. There were inducements for Britain in both these theatres of war. But in neither could operations be sustained from existing resources.

  It was Lord Hood and his political adviser, Sir Gilbert Elliot— the former Civil Commissioner for Toulon—who committed Britain to a war in Corsica. Sold to France a quarter of a century before by the banking Republic of Genoa, the turbulent island had only submitted to its new rulers after a desperate resistance led by Pascal Paoli. In the spring of 1793 a rebellion had broken out which drove the Republican garrisons into the coastal fortresses and sent Captain Bonaparte's " traitor " family flying to Marseilles for refuge. Though the Cabinet had toyed in the summer with the idea of a landing in the island, Paoli's appeals for British help had remained unanswered.

  But in the New Year, with 1,400 troops crowded on board his transports, Hood saw Corsica as a heaven-sent opportunity. Having lost Toulon he needed a naval base from which to maintain its blockade. With a splendid anchorage the island was several hundred miles nearer the port than Gibraltar. Its forests supplied the masts and timber for the French Mediterranean Fleet. In February, therefore, Hood landed Major-General Dundas's troops and a contingent of sailors in San Fiorenzo Bay.

  But neither the impetuous old seaman nor his adviser had considered the difficulties of conquering and garrisoning an island with four hundred miles of coastline. Though the brigands of the interior acclaimed the English, the strongholds of Bastia and Calvi were defended by 3,500 French regulars—more than double the original invading force. Their investment occupied a growing proportion of Britain's slender military resources for many months. Owing to the peremptory and sometimes almost contemptuous attitude of Lord Hood and his officers towards the Army, the operations led to a lamentable deterioration in relations between the Services. The general, who seemed " an old woman in a red ribbon " to impatient politicians and seamen, not without reason regarded the task demanded of him as beyond his professional powers. The admiral thereupon announced his intention of attacking without him.

  " While General Dundas And his eighteen manoeuvres all sat on the grass," Nelson and the crew of the Agammemnon proceeded to invest Bastia on their own. The siege which followed, though successful, was conducted with grossly inadequate resources. Later, the army, reinforced from England, resumed its rightful place under the command of Major-General James Stuart, a younger son of Lord Bute, on whom the brilliant mantle of Peterborough seemed to have fallen. Largely owing to his and Nelson's efforts Calvi fell on August 10th, though it cost the eager little captain his right eye and all but his life. " Never," wrote Stuart's second-in-command, a still greater soldier named John Moore, " was so much work done by so few men."

  The West Indian campaign had even graver effects on the course of th
e war. In January, 1794, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Grey's 7,000 troops, after a six weeks' voyage, reached Barbados. Despite their small numbers they at once attacked the French islands, and as a result of brilliant co-operation between Grey and Vice-Admiral Sir John Jervis overcame all resistance in Martinique, St. Lucia and Guadeloupe by the end of May. But the real campaign had scarcely begun. Almost at once the victors were simultaneously assailed by reinforcements from France and a negro and mulatto rising. For by denouncing slavery—the gap in Britain's moral front—the French had secured a formidable ally. With the help of the revolted slaves the force from Rochefort, which had evaded the loose British blockade, was able to reconquer Guadeloupe before the end of the year. Yet it was yellow fever more than any other cause which robbed Britain of her West Indian conquests. Within a few months the dreaded " black vomit" had destroyed 12,000 of her finest soldiers and reduced the survivors to trembling skeletons.

  In the conduct of these distant campaigns Pitt and Dundas were handicapped by the lapse of time between the dispatch of orders from England and the receipt of news from the theatres of war. They were still celebrating Grey's victories of the spring when his men were dying by thousands in the autumn. But their difficulties were increased a hundredfold by their failure to prepare for the inevitable consequences of their own actions. They undertook and promised more than they had any reasonable expectation of being able to perform. After initiating operations that called for a steady flow of reinforcements, they were forced to deflect them into other and more urgent channels.

  The measures which the Government now took to remedy the shortage of trained troops and fulfil its promises to its Austrian allies lowered the discipline and dignity of the entire Service. Both senior and junior regimental rank were offered for sale in return for recruits. With every 450 men raised for an existing battalion, a lieutenant colonelcy was offered to the senior major for ^600, and two majorities to the captains at from £550 to £700. Companies were sold to any bidder for £2,800. In the brisk competition that followed the price of a recruit rose to as much as £30 a head.

  This degrading system, which appealed to an innate English snobbery, enabled the Government to raise 30,000 recruits by private bounty at little cost to the Treasury. It involved the passing over of the old professional soldier of modest means—the type from which generals like Abercromby and Dundas were sprung—in favour of upstart young plutocrats utterly ignorant of their profession. Minors found themselves commanding battalions while veteran subalterns, old enough to be their fathers, waited in vain for a company. Even children in the nursery received the King's commission: a contemporary print shows a minute officer of the Guards eating sugar plums at Kelsey's, the St. James's Street fruiterer. As for the recruits raised under such a system, they were what might have been expected. They resembled Falstaff's men.

  Yet it is only fair to remember that Britain's principal contribution to the Allied cause was at sea. The Navy vote for 1794 provided for 85,000 men, or one per cent of the population of England and Wales. As the returning merchant fleets month by month dropped anchor in Thames and Avon, the press-gangs made up the complement of the King's ships. By the beginning of the year eighty sail of the line were in commission. On these depended not only the ring set round France but the subsidies which maintained the Allied armies.

  During the first year of the war the Navy had driven the French flag off the seas, capturing for a loss of six of its own small craft fifty-two frigates and lesser ships-of-war and eighty-eight privateers. Had the state of France been normal this would not have yet had any decisive effect on the war, for only a fraction of her foreign trade was sea-borne. But owing to the anarchic dislocation of her social life, it threatened her with starvation. The harvest of 1793 had failed. By stretching the rights of blockade to include provisions, Pitt had recruited famine as an ally.

  Had the ageing men in control of the Navy shown the same understanding of blockade as their successors, the Republic could scarcely have survived the summer of 1794. Realising their danger the revolutionary leaders commissioned agents in America to buy grain and charter merchantmen. At the same time they made every effort to get their neglected Atlantic Fleet ready for sea. At Christmas they sent Rear-Admiral Vanstabel—a first-rate officer—with two ships of the line and three frigates from Brest to the United States to escort home the grain fleet that was to raise the siege of France.

  Fortunately for the Jacobins the Admiral commanding the Channel Fleet did not believe in close blockade. Lord Howe was a gallant old man of 68—" undaunted as a rock and as silent "—and the first sea officer in the world. But like other elderly sailors he was obsessed with the supreme importance of safeguarding his ships. He refused to expose them to winter gales on the Brittany coast. In this he was strongly supported by the Treasury. In mid-December he accordingly withdrew the battle fleet to harbour, leaving only the frigates at sea. Thus it was that Vanstabel escaped, and others more important after him. For Brest could not be blockaded from Spithead nor even from Torbay.

  Early in April five more ships of the line put out under Rear-Admiral Nielly to meet the convoy which sailed on the nth from Hampton Roads under Vanstabel's escort. No British warship was present to shadow either force. Vice-Admiral Jervis, who was later to prove how closely an enemy coast could be sealed, was engaged in military operations against Guadeloupe, while Captain Nelson, usurping the functions of a soldier, was wearing out his frail body in the trenches around Bastia. Had the qualities they showed five years later been employed at this tune in bottling up the French Atlantic coastline, Europe might have been saved twenty years of bloodshed and tyranny.

  In April the Allies reopened the long-awaited campaign in Flanders. From the heights above Le Cateau, where on the 16th the young Emperor of Austria inspected 160,000 troops, they advanced with the steady leisure of the eighteenth century to besiege Landrecies. Their line stretched from the sea to the Sambre: the cordon of steel that was to strangle revolutionary France.

  Carnot knew that France must break it or starve. All his hopes were pinned on the offensive—such an offensive as old Europe had never seen. He entrusted the command of his northern armies to a thirty-three year-old general, Charles Pichegru, the son of a Jura peasant. His orders were to attack at all costs and go on attacking till he had broken through.

  On the 24th while the main Allied army was grouped round Landrecies, Pichegru struck between the centre and the sea. Sweeping across the Lys valley, the French left under Souham—a thirty-four year-old ex-private—cut the Austrian cordon, drove past Menin and overwhelmed the astonished garrison of Courtrai. But there, though a salient was driven deep into the Allied line, the advance was halted. Confronted by the marshy ground between Scheldt and Lys and the stubborn resistance of the Austrian and Hanoverian regulars, Souham waited until the main force of his right could move forward.

  But in the centre Pichegru's attack failed. Advancing to the relief of Landrecies, his imperfectly trained levies were taken in the flank at Beaumont by the Allied cavalry under the Duke of York and routed with a loss of 7000 dead and 41 guns. Landrecies thereupon surrendered.

  Had Coburg followed up this brilliant exploit, Beaumont might have proved one of the decisive battles of history. But the fleeting opportunity of those spring days of 1794 was not for the old man's grasping. Unable to think save in terms of defensive cordons, he made no attempt to break through Pichegru's demoralised centre or to send his magnificent cavalry sweeping forward to Paris—only ten days' march away. Instead, he paused nervously to repair the rent in his right flank. The day after Landrecies fell the British Army was dispatched north through rain and muddy lanes to Tournai to bar any further penetration into Flanders.

  So, as in the previous summer after Neerwinden, the French were allowed a breathing space. It was not wasted by commanders who knew that the alternative to victory was the guillotine. To keep the enemy inactive till they were ready for a renewed general offensive, they launched a s
eries of desperate assaults on the crossings of the Sambre.

  With this battering on his left and a salient driven deep into his right, nothing would induce Coburg to risk an advance in the centre. His one concern was to restore the classical perfection of his line by driving back the French from Courtrai. But Mack and the Duke of York were able, after some argument, to persuade him to attempt a concerted movement to cut off Souham's 40,000 troops in the exposed salient from their base at Lille.

  The scheme was worked out skilfully. But it relied too much on French passivity and Austrian punctuality. Three of the five Allied corps, on whose exact movements the operation depended, never reached the battlefield at all. Only the Duke of York carried out his part of the programme promptly. As a result 10,000 Britons, after taking all their objectives on May 17th, found themselves at nightfall in the heart of Souham's army.

  Throughout the first four weeks of campaigning the British Army had enjoyed unbroken and deserved success.1 It was now to enter upon a prolonged period of failure. At dawn on the 18th the French, grasping their opportunity, counter-attacked. Soon both the Guards Brigades under Abercromby at Mouvaix and Major-General Fox's Brigade near Tourcoing were encircled and cut off from each other. The Duke at his headquarters could make no contact with either. Everywhere on the misty, enclosed Flemish plain the enemy was swarming. Fortunately, the British soldier rose to the emergency. With superb calm the Guards, covered by the 7th and 15 th Light Dragoons, fought their way back to Tournai. Fox's line battalions, defying the inevitable, struggled all day across country until, with a loss of nearly half of their strength, they regained the Allied lines. " No mobbed fox was ever more put to it to make his escape than we were," wrote Major Calvert. By superb effrontery the Duke of York also escaped capture, at one point galloping in front of his two escort squadrons of Dragoons in a dramatic chase over hedge and dyke with the Star of the Garter gleaming on his breast. Of twenty-eight British guns nineteen were lost. Throughout the day the British never set eyes on an Austrian. For, unlike the ragged French, the Emperor's white-coated columns did not march to the sound of the guns. Instead, they stayed and listened to them.