by Tom Anderson
It was the Grote-Markt.[100] Silly really. Writers of fiction would feel the need to place an event of such import, hah, in some little anonymous side street. But no. We held the old palace of the Duke of Brabant, while the French held the Town Hall. Both the buildings had been battered almost to ruins, for the Markt was large enough for us to use our artillery, which too often had lain unused thanks to the vicious street fighting. Arguably that helped us, though, as the French were the ones who had more artillery thanks to their war doctrine. But they also had a well-nigh all-infantry army, while we had useless cavalry. Worthless horsemen, or rather, perfectly serviceable horses with worthless men on top. Worthless men who did nothing to prevent the infighting of Germany, even encouraged it. Worthless men who would rather fight to the death for their ownership of a tiny slice of the cake than admit that there was a whole cake at all. “Is not my slice all there is? Do not look at the others! They come from quite different gateaux!”
Hah, I have been counselled against colourful metaphors. They always confuse the printers and make them mix up all the letters! Never mind. Yes, it was the Markt, and I was in the palace, sniping with my rifle. I have heard it called a far from gentlemanly pursuit; well, as I have said, if being gentlemanly is acting like the ‘gentlemen’ I have encountered, this poor country does not need them! I do not care if you tar me with the red brush of the Jacobin because of that – my words should be proof enough against that paint sticking to me.
The battle had stalled. Neither side had been able to bring up artillery for a while, and neither of us were able to force the other from their buildings. So we just waited for a stupid young soldier to show his head and then tried to take him out before it was too late. Until just before luncheon – such as it was – when we were surprised to hear hoofs. We assumed it must be one of our useless cavalry forces, finally having reached streets where they might be of some good, but then why the urgency?
We caught sight of them a few seconds later. My friend Willi, who owned a spyglass, watched them. “Looks like two groups of ours chasing each other,” he said puzzledly, then frowned. “No, wait! Some of the first group have French trousers on…”
That in itself was nothing special, for every army in the field steals from the enemy. But few would risk the distinctive red trousers of the French, as it would immediately get him shot by panicky sentries.[101] Which meant… “Frenchmen wearing our jackets,” I said. Perhaps it was, again, just them stealing from us, but what if it was a deliberate deception against the laws of war?
“Here they come!” said Willi, and we all readied our rifles. “Aim at the first ones only!” I said, and we aimed and fired as they cantered through the square.
The French in the Town Hall fired as well, and several figures fell to the cobblestones, both of the pursuers and the pursued. Then the survivors were galloping from the Markt, except… two, three of the French wearing our jackets peeled off and went back to one of the downed figures, crying “Général!” Of course we shot them down pretty quick as well.
“General?” Willi breathed. “That was one of their generals?”
We knew what to do. We were young, foolish, and convinced of our own invincibility, for all the counter-evidence we had seen so far. Soon we were running across the Markt, laughing as we dodged the fire from the French, yet it was not so bad as it might be; they had heard as well, and were pouring from the Town Hall to try to rescue their general. Their own men therefore blocked much of their fire. We were slightly ahead of them, though, and I forced them to take cover by shooting my rifle from the hip. It looked as though the French had only sent musketmen, as they used a smaller proportion of riflemen than us. That made sense, as it left their sharpshooters in the Town Hall to keep firing at us, but it meant they couldn’t reply very well to my fire on the ground. That bought us some time.
We quickly found three men who might fit the bill. No-one knew what the General looked like, or even which General it was. They all wore our Hessian jackets, but red French trousers, and all three had gold watches or some other expensive jewellery that marked them out as rich men. “I’ve got this one, you’ve got that one–” I began, and then Hermann fell dead as one of the French snipers shot him in the back. “And leave the third to me,” I said smoothly, grabbing something from my pack and stuffing it into the groaning bluecoat’s pocket.
We fled the field, losing two more men in the process, but finally arrived back at the palace with our two bodies. “Let’s find out who they are,” I told Willi, and we kicked them awake.
One started babbling in French for a while before realising where he was, then in slow baby-talked German managed: “I am General Armand Poulenc, an officer in the French Republican Army, and you have my parole,” accepting his capture.
The other mumbled something and then said he was Major Johann Grimm of the Hesse-Darmstadt army. His accent suggested he told the truth.
Willi looked disappointed. “You bag yourself a general, Pascal, and all I get is this bloody foreigner,” he said, kicking Grimm in the back. “And we’re not even allowed to loot this one, he’s on our side.”
Fury consumed me and I waved my bayonet under Willi’s nose. “He is no foreigner,” I said through my teeth, then helped Grimm to his feet. “This is a foreigner,” I said, and through his protests, slit Poulenc’s throat.
Yes, that rumour is true. I do not deny it. My justification should be the same as the Carolinian’s, and if that is good enough for anyone, so should mine be. But of course the Carolinian was a gentleman…
Willi took a step back, uncomprehending. His actions were born of ignorance, not malice, I knew. He changed the subject: “What about that third one?”
Heinz, who had taken over Willi’s spyglass while we had been fighting, told us: “The Frenchies bagged it and took it in.”
“I wonder whether that one was a Frenchman or… one of ours,” Willi said hastily, seeing my expression.
“I hope it was a Frenchman, otherwise I shall feel quite guilty,” I said, and a moment later the phosphorus bomb I had planted in the man’s pocket ignited. Seconds after that, the Town Hall was on fire. Minutes later, we were storming it, and the battle for Brussels began to turn…
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946)—
The Saxons and Danes entered the war in October 1807. Though sending some troops to assist the Mittelbund in Flanders, for the most part their main goal was in undercutting Austria now that Francis had finally turned his attention to the French-occupied German lands once more. There was a small possibility that Austria might be able to claw back its reputation that had suffered so much while Francis was consumed with the Ottomans and Italy, and Saxony and Denmark had too much to gain from the Hapsburgs remaining pariahs in German society. Therefore, Johannes II and John George V pre-empted the ageing General Kray by invading Swabia in November, not making much progress against Ney but nonetheless defining the assault as their affair and nothing to do with Austria. It is said that it was the news of this audacious coup that stopped Kray’s heart and meant Francis went flailing to find another general, most of his best either in Italy or trying to hold down Bavaria and Bohemia.
In the meantime, Ney faced off against the Saxon General Franz Wagner and the Danes’ Lars Nielsen, assisted by the veteran Swedish commander Gebhart Blücher. It was the latter who proved instrumental in discomfiting Ney, who still suffered somewhat from the Revolutionary problem of lacking horsemen, for all that his moderate rule in Swabia had led to better recruitment than in most places. The Swabian Germanic Republic resisted far superior Saxon-Danish forces for almost a year thanks to Ney’s brilliance, and it was not until September 1808 that the Saxons and Danes made a breakthrough at Ludwigsburg (or “Louisbourg-de-la Souabe” as it was then officially known) and exposed Ney’s capital of Stuttgart.
Ney still had a small chance of being able to throw them out, for all
that discontent with the war was rising throughout Swabia and Lisieux was breathing down his neck, but it became obvious that the Austrians were planning to use the Danes’ and Saxons’ lack of much progress as an excuse to enter the war and show them up: the biter bit. The Archduke Ferdinand had General Alvinczi stationed in Grigioni, in the former Italian-speaking Switzerland, and the Hungarian was poised to stab Ney in the back and take all the credit for his downfall.
Recognising this, the Saxons – notably without the knowledge of the Danes – secretly approached Ney with a deal. The Frenchman would be allowed to leave the country safely if he handed it over, intact, to the exiled Duke of Württemberg, Frederick IV. It had been his father Frederick III who had fled the country after hearing of the execution of the Badenese ruling family back in 1798, and had died in exile in Vienna in 1803. The new Duke was willing to forgive and forget to some extent, especially if it bagged his family the other small states that Ney had incorporated into his Swabian Germanic Republic, particularly Baden itself, Württemberg’s traditional rival.
Ney considered the offer, and finally accepted: “Let it be known,” he wrote, “that I do this not out of cowardice or betrayal of my principles, but because I know the Hapsburgs would put this new country we have built to fire and the sword, calling them ‘traitors’, and because I do not want my men to suffer.” Ney’s French troops, though removed from their privileged position, were permitted to stay in the Swabian army or to leave as they willed, providing they agreed not to fight the Saxons or Danes – but not, notably, the Austrians.
This diplomatic masterstroke came to light in November 1808. Francis II was furious, but there was little Austria could do if she did not wish to alienate the Germanies further. Duke Frederick became Frederick I of the new (or rather restored) Duchy of Swabia. It would not be for another five years that a “Michael Elchingener” would mysteriously emerge from nowhere to be appointed prime minister by the Duke. Many remarked on his resemblance to a certain earlier ruler…
Lisieux, in a fury, ordered an attack on the ‘traitors’, but by now France’s manpower was, at last, running dry. Facing Royal French and British incursions from the west, Neapolitans from the south, Austrians and Italians from the east, and with a collapsing position in the north, it could not be long before the Republic would start to totter…
Flags of the War of the Nations
EXCERPTED FROM “THE REGISTER HISTORICAL OF THE WORLD, 3rd EDITION” Flag plate #25: Flags of the ‘War of the Nations’; the French Latin Republic against the overwhelming force of the anti-Jacobin allies across Europe and beyond.
Chapter #78: Vive la Contre-révolution
“I do not fear defeat. I do not rule it out, but I do not fear it. For if the French people of the superior Latin race indeed fail to triumph over our Germanic foes and their treacherous, hidebound Latin lackeys, then we have proved our own great truth wrong.
And if this is a world without that truth, I would sooner see the whole French nation burn with me than stand to live in it.”
- published in The Lost Diaries of Jean de Lisieux in 1907,
considered by most scholars to be a forgery
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)—
The collapse of the French Latin Republic is surely a subject worthy of a book in itself. In it we see the grand strategy of the earlier conflicts fail and fade away, replaced by mindless brawling and human misery on a scale not seen since the Thirty Years’ War. Both sides knew what they were fighting for: no longer ideology, or king and country, or religion, but simple revenge and survival. For all Lisieux’s attempt to create a glass cage in which reality was defined solely by his propaganda flowing from the omnipresent presses and semaphore network, the Republican French leadership knew what might come to pass if the country were to fall to the same enemies whom they had fought so bitterly for more than a decade. The Austrians and their allies would offer the Republic the same mercy that the Republic had offered the Germanies: none.
The conquest of Toulon in 1807 by Neapolitan and allied forces was the first death blow for the Republic, undoing in a single stroke Olivier Bourcier’s successes in holding back the Archduke Ferdinand in Piedmont. Outflanked, Bourcier fell back. Lisieux sent a reserve army under General Marceau in an attempt to support Bourcier in retaking the key port, but this only ended up stripping forces from Devilliers at a critical moment in the invasion of Royal France. It can be argued that this decision allowed the survival of most Royal French besieged cities thanks to the Bone-Barras plan, allowing Britain’s relief force to throw back Devilliers and finally destroy both general and army in 1808. As we shall see, this means the further argument can be made that Lisieux inadvertently spared his country much suffering…
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946)—
The time taken to assemble the reserve troops under Marceau meant that it was winter before an attempt could be made to retake Toulon. The headstrong Marceau, a former subcommander under General Drouet in Spain, sought to lay siege nonetheless, seeing the city’s fall as an affront to the Republic. However, while the French were well supplied (being within their own country, not that this dissuaded them from la maraude), so were the Neapolitans and their allies in Toulon, for Nelson’s navy dominated the Mediterranean. A rash midwinter attack by Marceau was bloodily repulsed in January 1808, in which Nelson led troops from the fore and famously lost his ear to a wild bayonet stroke from a Republican soldier.
Had that soldier been just a little more accurate, had he slain Nelson, it is likely Marceau would have won anyway; the French came very close to breaking through the city’s defences, and it was the unflappable charisma of their maverick English leader which lent the Neapolitans their motivation to hold fast in the face of the attacks. For all that the ageing King Charles had been sceptical about Nelson’s grand plans to take Aragon, Nelson was inadvertently creating a new national identity for his men, one which transcended former divisions such as that between Naples proper and Sicily. It was based upon a sense of pride that Naples, formerly a weak power that had been tossed from power to power for centuries like the ball in an H-ball game,[102] had stood up to the French Republicans, repulsed them from their land and now sought to take the fight to the most powerful nation in all Europe. To be sure, luck had played a very large part in that survival and counter-attack, the Rape of Rome and the collapse of Hoche’s support combined with the fact that he had been estranged from Lisieux at the time for example. But logic seldom has much to do with a national mythos. The Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was reborn in a new image, and woe to those leaders who failed to appreciate this…
A second attempt on Toulon by Marceau in March was if anything even closer to success when a runner from Bourcier’s army arrived, telling the general that the Archduke Ferdinand had finally defeated Bourcier in an epic battle at Draguignan. The killing blow had been made by General Alvinczi in a triumph that would lead to him being placed in command of the later attempt to invade Ney’s Swabia from the former Switzerland, which of course in the event came to nothing. Foiled, and knowing that the Austro-Italians would easily be able to overrun his exhausted army if he continued with his siege attempts at Toulon, Marceau sullenly retreated to Marseilles and the Republic suffered a great propaganda defeat…
*
From: “The Kingdom Strikes Back: Great Britain’s Return to the Jacobin Wars” by Andrew Johnson (1970)—
After the victory at Angers in June 1808, the Republicans were swiftly cleared from the former territory of Royal France. But Royal France was effectively under the command of Leo Bone (or Napoléon Bonaparte as he was already professionally known in the country) and so of course that would not be enough. While the British and Royal French forces were somewhat exhausted after the destruction of Devilliers’ force, Bone insisted on a continued offensive. By the w
inter of 1808, as the Republicans frantically scraped the bottom of their manpower barrel to assemble a new army, the Royalists and their allies had taken the strategic town of Royan on the Gironde Estuary and thrust a salient in the direction of Caen. The British commanders in particular (as opposed to the American and Irish) felt an urgent need to conquer Normandy and thus erase the embarrassment caused by Wesley’s strategic retreat from Granville earlier in the campaign. One might expect that Lisieux’s propaganda would make much of that defeat, but by this point it was so divorced from reality that to gloat over that retreat would have been to admit that British troops were in France, and that Royal France existed, and that Britain had not yet been conquered by Hoche. Which was unacceptable.
