The Years of Endurance (20 page)

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 throug
h 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-siecl
e
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 countrymen
¹
—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 themselves 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 south
ward 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 c
ruelty won their ends most swiftl
y, 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.

In the face of such terror resistance died. While the Queen, pale and listless, went amid jests to the scaffold, the Girondins who had dethroned her husband were hunted down like rats. Opposition became unthinkable. The slightest criticism of the Government was branded as treason. The thought of the Austrian flag waving

¹
Gardner, 159.

over French cities acted as an acid dissolvent to every malcontent cause.