The Years of Endurance (25 page)

In its fear and selfishness the Austrian Court was now past caring for honour. It placed its hope in an end to the Revolution through the dictatorship of Robespierre: the strong man who that summer seemed to be liquidating all opposition. Everywhere in monarchical Europe the weaker brethren, appalled by the triumph of the " abomin
able spirit of liberty
' sought to make their peace while they could: to buy at least a respite at the price of honour, gold and territory.

For France in July, 1794, was an intimidating spectacle In Paris under the " lottery of Holy Guillotine " two or three thousand heads were falling monthly, while in the provinces holocausts took place which made the blood of Christendom turn cold. At Nantes one monster massacred five hundred infants, having first offered their mothers the choice of prostitution or death. Another sadistic scoundrel put more than five thousand people to death at Arras.
¹
Such men were as pitiles
s abroad as at home. Though Pich
egru preserved a discipline which astonished those who recalled the

1
Among his victims were two English girls.—Alison, III, 312.

plunde
ring levies of a year before, his armies were followed by
h
ordes of greedy agents who despoiled the Belgians of everything but the barest necessities.
¹

Conscious of these th
ings, the majority of Englishmen, whatever the views of weaklings and malcontents, upheld the Government in its refusal to negotiate with Jacobins. When the Duke of Bedford moved a resolution in the Lords that His Majesty should be petitioned either to end the war or "be graciously pleased to state what the object of it was," and Fox echoed him in the Commons, Pitt asked what present prospect there was of an enduring agreement. Britain's war gain, he answered, was all that she would lose without it. "It is impossible to say what government we are to propose for France in the event of the Jacobins being overthrown, because that must depend on the circumstances of the times and the wishes of its inhabitants. But this much may be affirmed: that with the sanguinary faction which now rules its councils accommodation is impossible."

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 ar
mies. 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 Con
vention 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 nothi
ng but God and themselves. Aroun
d 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
1
M. 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
gentle
men 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 the
y lacked the seniority to be em
ployed.

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 ne
gotiating 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

¹
Calvert,
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 li
ps—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. O
thers, who had long been secretl
y 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.