The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  Only internal weakness arising from the moral failings of the Revolution saved the selfish and divided Allies from immediate destruction at the hands of the Republican armies. At the end of July the murderous fever in the French capital reached its peak. After suspending the last remaining forms of justice and virtually canonising himself on the Champ-de-Mars, Robespierre frightened the corrupt majority in the Convention into turning on him. On July 28th—the 9th Thermidor of the Revolutionary calendar—they drove him from the Assembly. Next day he and his terrible henchman, young St. Just, were sent to the guillotine before they could rouse the mob in their defence.

  Power now passed to lesser men—jackals who for their own ends had obeyed the master terrorists. Tallien, Fouche, Barras were vile creatures but, unlike the grim idealists they had served and slain, they knew the advantages of moderation. They now became the leaders of a kind of revolutionary counter-revolution of profiteer regicides whose sole aim was to stablise their own ill-gotten wealth and power. They were committed to the war because with-

  1 Calvert, 293. It should be remembered, however, that the Revolutionary armies imposed no creed of racial domination : no conquered foreigner was penalised for not being a Frenchman.

  out it they could neither control the army nor stifle the popular reaction which might punish their past crimes. The sudden rise of these corrupt men brought a brief respite to Britain. For except for Carnot, who retained power for a few more years, they Were not primarily concerned with winning the war. They were concerned only with its continuance.

  But their enemies took no advantage of their respite. Britain's attempt to stiffen her allies failed dismally. The guarantee of an Austrian loan of £3,000,000 in September was promptly followed by the surrender of Valenciennes and further Austrian withdrawals. Meanwhile, Malmesbury wrote from Frankfurt that the conduct of the Prussians was becoming daily more shameful: " I lament every hour that I remain near them." 1

  Even Pitt now realised that German statesmen viewed England, as Grenville put it, merely as an inexhaustible milch cow. In an interview with the Prussian Ambassador he lost his temper and upbraided him for his country's breach of faith. But the only result was that King Frederick William gave orders that the campaign on the Rhine should cease altogether.

  '* Depend on it," wrote Major Calvert from the Duke of York's headquarters, " an English guinea is an article no German prince can withstand, and when a subsidy is in view it bewilders their senses and leaves them no inclination for exertion except for the attainment of it." Instead of relying any longer on them, this honest soldier hoped his countrymen would henceforward trust in nothing but God and themselves. Around him the Dutch, one of the bravest peoples in the world, now divided and ruled by plutocrats whose only law was profit, watched the British preparations to defend their native soil without stirring a hand to help them. Though Captain Sidney Smith, undeterred by his failure at Toulon, rushed in and out of their estuaries turning every vessel he saw into an imaginary gunboat, the stolid burghers remained indifferent. No preparations were made to destroy forts, magazines and ships against a French advance, and the most ordinary means of defence were neglected. " Anything so brutish, stupid and selfish," Windham wrote, " was never seen."

  Early in September, having replenished his supplies from the 1M. C. Dropmore, II, 636.

  fortresses and harvests of the Low Countries, Pichegru resumed the offensive in overwhelming force. Crossing the Dommel, he drove the British on the 14th from the fortified post of Boxtel. A counter-attack under cover of darkness, in which Arthur Wellesley received his baptism of fire, failed disastrously, largely owing to the indiscipline and lack of training of the newly promoted and youthful regimental commanders from England For where men mistrusted their officers no operation could succeed.

  Sullenly the army retreated beyond the Waal. It was back where it had started eighteen months beforet No wonder it swore terribly. " The rare old Duke of York," it sang:

  " He had ten thousand men;

  He marched 'em up a great high hill, Then marched 'em down again."

  Gone were the halcyon days when gentlemen of the Staff sat down to dine in shady Flemish gardens off food cooked by His Majesty's Hanoverian field-kitchen and served by laced footmen. Now they were lucky if they got anything to eat at all. Even the woollen gifts which the benevolent ladies of Great Britain had showered on their defenders in the first winter of the war had ceased to come. The army felt neglected and forgotten. Its boots were worn out and its uniforms stained and ragged; recruits arrived in thin, linen jackets and trousers without waistcoats, drawers or stockings. The Royal Waggon Corps, founded to supply its needs, had apparently been recruited from the thieves' kitchens of Blackfriars and Seven Dials, and was known as the Newgate Blues. The military hospitals were mere short-cuts to the next world: a Dutch observer counted 42 bodies flung out of one barge of 500 sick who had been left untended on the open deck, without even straw. The surgeons' mates allowed the sick and wounded to starve, and spent the vast sums they claimed from the government in drinking and debauchery.1

  From top to bottom the military administration, tested by adversity, was rotten. The best officers, like Moira, were recalled to England because under the Horse Guards' rigid rule of promotion for the higher ranks they lacked the seniority to be employed.

  1 Fortescue, IV, 315 ; Calvert, 338.

  Everything that could make an efficient fighting force was lacking except courage. " We want artillerymen," wrote Calvert, " we want a general officer at the head of the artillery, we want drivers and smiths, and we want three major-generals of infantry; we want a commanding engineer of rank and experience; we want a total reform in our hospitals; we want, at least, two out of the four brigades of mounted artillery with which his Grace of Richmond is amusing himself in England. We want a total stop put to that pernicious mode of bestowing rank on officers without even the form of recommendation, merely for raising (by means of crimps) a certain number of men, to restore to the Army those independent and disinterested feelings and those high principles which should actuate a soldier and form the basis of the military discipline of a free country."1 The new Secretary at War, who with his accustomed eagerness was on a personal visit to the front, commented bitterly on the shortage of artillery drivers. " One sits at home quietly and overlooks such particulars," he wrote, " but the fate of armies and of kingdoms is decided often by nothing else." 2

  With more than half its 21,000 infantry down with typhus, wounds and exposure, and with Dutch traitors and French agents swarming through its lines, the British Army had only one hope left—winter. The floods of November turned the Waal into an impassable barrier of desolate waters. Behind it a forlorn handful of redcoats preserved the last foothold of the ancien regime in the Low Countries. It alone stood between the Jacobins and the banks of Amsterdam and the Dutch Fleet and naval stores. To the east the French were already in Cologne, and the Austrian Army back beyond the Rhine. Prussia was secretly negotiating peace, and Spain, invaded and riddled with defeatism, preparing to do the same.

  But in December, when the British Government, relying on winter, had withdrawn seven regiments for the West Indies and recalled the Duke of York, an intense frost succeeded the rain. A week before Christmas the floating ice in the Waal began to pack. By the new year the frozen flood had ceased to be a barrier. Breaking every canon of eighteenth-century war and trusting for supplies to a barren and ice-gripped countryside, Pichegru and Moreau

  1Calvert, 359-60.

  2 Windham Papers, I, 224.

  crossed the river. To avoid annihilation the outnumbered British and Hanoverians fell back towards the Ysel.

  The cold spell of that January was something which old men remembered fifty years afterwards. The birds fell dead from the trees, and morning after morning Parson Woodforde in Norfolk found the chamber-pot in his room frozen solid. The retreat of the British Army across the icy wastes of Gelderland had the quality of a nightmare. There was no shelter
against the arctic wind. Discipline vanished, the Brigade of Guards and their traditional foes, the Hessians, engaging in pitched battle round the bread waggons. " Those of the Army that woke on the morning of the 17th of January," Sir John Fortescue has written, " saw about them such a sight as they never forgot. Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, waggons full of baggage stores or sick men, sutlers' carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered on to the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans round an empty rum cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together about a plundered waggon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby swaddled in rags, peering out of the pack, with its mother's milk turned to ice upon its lips—one and all stark, frozen, dead. Had the retreat lasted but three or four days longer, not a man would have escaped." 1 As it was, more than six thousand—a third of the expeditionary force— perished in four days.

  The retreat completed the disintegration of Holland. The Prince of Orange fled with his treasure in a fishing-boat to England, where his custom of drinking himself into a coma over his midday meal at Kew Palace put a severe strain on the hospitality of his allies. The great banking family of Hope did the same. Others, who had long been secretly treating with the enemy, openly acclaimed the conquerors: the mob rose, set up trees of Liberty and flaunted the tricolour. On January 20th the French entered Amsterdam and proclaimed a revolutionary Republic. There was not even time to remove the fleet. A few smaller vessels got away to England, but to the grief of the British Admiralty a flying body of French horse and artillery galloped across the frozen Zuyder Zee

  1 Fortescue, IV, 320-1.

  and surprised the Dutch battleships ice-bound in the Texel. So sudden was the advance that Lord Malmesbury, returning to England from Brunswick with the future Princess of Wales, only narrowly escaped capture.

  All hope of a stand inside Holland now vanished. The hungry and demoralised survivors of the British army fell back into North Germany, where they were insulted and neglected by the Prussians who, having no further hope of subsidies, treated them as a pack of contemptible and defeated tradesmen. Early in March the Government sent transports to the Weser to evacuate them. On April 13 th, 1795, the infantry embarked at Bremen, the cavalry and a small force of artillery remaining behind to protect Hanover.

  For northern Europe the war was over. Prussia had already made her peace with the Revolution. The French were in an arrogant mood, but the Ministers of Frederick William preferred to stomach it. For they saw in the ruthlessness of the new France—its centralisation, contempt for established morality and unabashed acquisitiveness—a temper akin on a grander scale to their own. Like the Jacobin Republic, the Kingdom of Prussia kept its eye on the main chance and its neighbours' territories.1 If its rival, Austria, chose to weaken itself by continuing the war for ideological reasons, so much the better. On April 5th a treaty was signed at Basle by which France retained all German lands west of the Rhine until a general peace. If thereafter France still kept them, Prussia, with French connivance, was to compensate herself elsewhere: in other words at the expense of the Hapsburgs and the lesser Teuton states. The Republic was formally approved by a European Power which in return was left ruler of north Germany. " The treaty," wrote Malmesbury, "instead of one of a shameful and ignominious peace, may be considered as one of a predatory alliance; and such a league

  1 A valuable contemporary appreciation of Prussia is preserved among Lord Grenville's Foreign Office papers : " The character of this people, formed by a succession of rapacious Princes, is turned towards usurpation. The war with France was disagreeable to them because it melted down the accumulations of old Frederick, and did not present an immediate accession of territory. But the War with, or rather against, Poland was not unpopular, because the moral principles of a Prussian go to the possession of whatever he can acquire. And so little is he the slave of what he calls vulgar prejudice that, give him opportunity and means, he will spare you the trouble of finding a pretext. This liberality of sentiment greatly facilitates negotiation, for it is not necessary to clothe propositions in honest and decent form."— H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 232.

  between two such Powers may have very serious consequences." 1 It certainly shocked what remained of the conscience of Europe. King George when he heard the news could scarcely credit it.2 But countries within the Jacobins' reach took a more realistic view and followed Prussia's example. Tuscany even managed to make peace before her. In May the new Dutch or Batavian Republic concluded an alliance with France, granting her the use of its fleet against Britain, an annual tribute of four and a half millions and the permanent maintenance of a French army in Holland. Luxemburg surrendered in June, and Sweden made peace in the same month. In July Spain withdrew from the Coalition, ceding Hispaniola to the Republic and secredy promising to use her influence to turn Portugal against England. Only Austria, little Piedmont and the Two Sicilies remained languidly faithful to the Grand Alliance. All were far away from Britain. Between them and her lay victorious France with its dependent population swollen by conquest from twenty-six to thirty-five millions. " Dread and terrible times," noted Woodforde in his diary, " appear to be near at hand."

  1Malmesbury, III, 250.

  2H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 57

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Home Front 1794-5

  " It matters little whether the disasters which have arisen

  are to be ascribed to the weakness of Generals, the intrigues

  of camps or the jealousies of Cabinets ; the fact is that they

  exist, and that we must anew commence the salvation of

  Europe." Pitt.

  " Let us trust to nothing but God and ourselves, for I

  repeat it again and again, there is nothing else left on which

  we can rely with safety." Major Calvert.

  THE collapse of Holland and the evacuation of the British army changed the character of the war. It gave the enemy the entire continental coastline facing England. It placed him on the flank of her trade-route with northern Europe and the Baltic—the lifeline along which she imported naval stores and, in time of bad harvest, grain. It doubled the work of the Navy by extending the blockade. On the day that Amsterdam fell five ships of the line had to be withdrawn from the Channel fleet to watch the Dutch ports.

  Britain was thus forced back on to her last line of defence. Simultaneously the Navy on which she had become more dependent than ever was crippled by the loss of her former allies' bases and ships. Holland's considerable fleet not only withdrew from the fight, but on May 16th, with the Batavian Republic's declaration of war, passed over to the enemy. Spain, with naval resources equal to France's own, was an even greater loss. Only the unseaworthy and ill-disciplined squadrons of Sicily and Portugal remained to the Grand Alliance.

  It seemed doubtful if the Navy could bear the strain. Many Continental observers thought not. Despite brilliant frigate exploits and the victory of the 1st of June, it had already shown signs

  of finding its world-wide burden too heavy. The American convoy had been allowed to reach Brest. Sierra Leone, on the West African coast, had been plundered by a Republican squadron in September, 1794,1 and there had been moments in the summer when the King at Weymouth had seemed in some danger of being kidnapped by French smugglers who put nightly into the Dorset coves. During an alarm in September the frigates on guard in Portland Bay actually opened fire on one another.2 In November, through Howe's policy of keeping his main fleet in harbour for the winter, a British battleship had been captured by a French division 200 miles off Ushant, and a fortnight later reinforcements for Guadeloupe had been allowed to sail from Brest. Nor was naval discipline satisfactory: a ship of the line, ordered to the West Indian station, had mutinied at Spithead, and had only been brought back to duty after the guns of the Fleet had been levelled agai
nst her.

  Had it not been for the demoralisation of the French navy, Britain might easily have suffered disaster. But fortunately the French, though capable of inflicting damage, were not able to take the offensive. After Christmas Villaret Joyeuse's fleet, raiding in the Atlantic, lost no less than five ships of the line, three of them foundering in a tempest. Even this ill-fated voyage cost Britain seventy merchantmen, and enabled French naval reinforcements to reach the Mediterranean. Here also British convoys suffered, many hundreds of vessels being captured by French privateers for lack of proper protection.3

  With the coastline of Europe to patrol from Hamburg ro Genoa and convoys to protect in every part of the world the Navy needed leadership of genius. Instead it was commanded mostly by elderly men of routine. Lord Spencer, who had taken over the office of First Lord of the Admiralty from Chatham, was an upright and capable patrician who was later to show himself capable of bold decisions at a critical time. But for the present he was inexperienced and self-opinionated. Almost his first act was to quarrel with the best senior officer in the Service, Lord Hood, because the outspoken old man had given unpalatable advice. The Mediterranean command