The Years of Endurance (21 page)

Hatred of the foreigner and the foreigner's ally—the traitor— was forged that blood-stained autumn into a fearful weapon against the foes of France. " From this moment," cried Barere to the Convention on August 23 rd, " until that in which every enemy shall be driven out of the territories of the Republic, every Frenchman is permane
ntly
under requisition for service with the armies. The young men will go out and fight: the married men will manufacture weapons and transport stores: the women will make tents and clothing and nurse in the hospitals: the children will make lint and dressings: the old men will cause themselves to be carried to the public squares, there to excite the courage of the warriors and preach the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings."

Yet all this ruthless enthusiasm would not have availed but for the organising genius of a 40-year-old Burgundian captain of Engineers. Earlier in the summer Lazare Carnot, an obscure member of the Convention, had been sent to report on the fortifications of Dunkirk. His astonishing energy as well as his proved fidelity to the Revolution brought its reward. In the middle of August he was appointed—an utterly unknown man—to the Committee of Public Safety. He was told that his task was to organise victory. He set about it without wasting an hour.

Two days after his appointment a
levee en masse
was ordered for the entire manhood of France. It was a new conception of war, blending t
he modern nation with the embattl
ed tribe of the remote past. It was Carnot who made it work. Austere, unsparing, a student of history and theology, with Roman virtues and Calvinistic ideals, the tall ungainly captain stretched out on the floor of his office among his maps and green portfolios unconsciously forged the weapon of the Caesarian Napoleon. During the next twelve months he and his military colleagues worked as few men can ever have worked. They revolutionised the formation, discipline and training of every unit, chose the officers, set the armies in motion according to a single daring and methodical plan, organised the transport and commissariat and mobilised the intellect of the nation to devise weapons of war. Far away on the frontiers, and in the great confused camps of the interior, the ragged armies responded to their unseen touch, while, in the sun-drenched squares and narrow, evil
-
smelling streets of the cities, the gangs went about their business of terror and the guillotine rose and fell.

These were the " workers" of the great Committee that ruled France: Robespierre and his disciples, St. Just and Couthon, its civil administrators; Bar ere, Billaud Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, the panders of the Terror. In the green room of the Pavilion de Flore at the end of the dark passage flanked by cannon—" the steps of the throne "—sat the dreaded " decemvirs " whose word was law, whose disapproval death. Outside Danton, banished by the intrigues of the jealous Robespierre from the Committee he had created, still went about his work of speech and inspiration. Between them these men, wielding a power undreamt of by Louis XIV, hammered France into a new shape for a particular purpose, centralised, hardened, despotic. Under their growing discipline,
c
a ira
assumed a terrible meaning for the world.

It was the Duke of York's forces, laboriously closing in on Dunkirk from marshy towns and villages figuring not for the last time in British history—Ypres, Furnes, Poperinghe—which first felt the tempo of Carnot's quickening hand. In mid-August, marching across the French front towards their new stations, the Guards had been in action at Linselles where, after a Dutch brigade had given way before a Republican attack, the big fellows from the English shires stormed a hill with the bayonet and, when their ammunition failed, cuffed and jostled the puny French like a London mob. Since then the British had been nibbling at the outer suburbs of Dunkirk, quartered in a great quadrilateral between the North Sea and the Bergues-Furnes canal amid morasses, ditches and sand-dunes, scanned in all their movements from the silent tower of Dunkirk Cathedral.

Here in the opening days of September Carnot struck. Using the interior lines which France's position gave her, he assailed Coburg's classic cordon—weak at every point and strong at none—with the shock of hammer blows concentrated against a single spot. The French came on in the new order that Carnot had prescribed for them: the picked men—the natural fighters—going before in fierce, impetuous waves of sharpshooters, the remainder massed in columns whose density made up for lack of training and whose superior numbers, launched in endless waves, enabled them to penetrate the defenders' lines. The covering force of Germans at Hondschoote, though fighting back with the stubborn hardihood of their race, were overwhelmed. Threatened with encirclement between the marshes and the sea, the Duke of York was forced to retire in haste, abandoning his siege guns and most of his stores.

The failure at Dunkirk was a grave disappointment for England. For a few days it endangered the Government. For Chatham at
the
Admiralty had not only failed to send the promised naval aid to the besiegers, but had not even protected them from bombardment by French gunboats. Pitt took it with his wonted courage. He wrote that it was a severe shock, but only, he trusted, a temporary one. " It ought to have the effect of increasing if possible our exertions.''

His faith was rewarded. Hard on its tail came astonishing news from the Mediterranean. Since the arrival of Lord Hood's blockading fleet, the great naval arsenal of Toulon, isolated by the general anarchy of France, had been threatened with starvation. On August 27th, moderate elements in the town, terrified by the holocaust of massacre, rape and arson at Marseilles, ran up the white flag and invited Hood to take possession of the town in the name of Louis XVII. Thus it came about that the greatest arsenal in France and thirty ships of the line passed into the hands of a British fleet of only twelve. When eleven days later the news reached England people could scarcely believe their ears.

The Government was beside itself with joy. " I am much mistaken," wrote Grenville, " if the business at Toulon is not decisive of the war." Pitt thought it offered a better chance of victory than anything that had occurred, and even an experienced soldier like Calvert held that the town was worth more to Britain than the entire Flemish frontier. So it might have been had Hood had the troops to exploit it. But the only garrison available consisted of 1500 seamen and marines from the fleet and a few thousand ill-disciplined Spaniards hastily dispatched by sea from Rousillon and who, according to Captain Nelson, did nothing but cut their prisoners' throats. When Sir Charles Grey, the commander-elect of the intended West Indian expeditionary force, was asked how many men in his view would be needed to hold the fifteen-mile perimeter of the town, he replied 50,000: an expert opinion which Pitt preferred to ignore.

With Hood appealing for troops, there were four courses open to the Government. It could follow its first natural impulse and send its entire available force to Toulon, so laying the foundation of a great offensive to destroy the Jacobin power in the south. This would, however, necessitate not only withdrawing troops from Flanders but the abandoning of any idea of an expedition to either the West Indies or Brittany. Alternatively it could do as Burke and Windham were urging: send every man who could be raised to support a Royalist advance on Paris from the west. Or it could revert to the policy agreed in the spring and, by concentrating all its forces in Flanders, stake everything on an Allied invasion from the north. Or finally it could fall back on its original " blue water " strategy and, eschewing Continental adventures, dispatch an overwhelming force to the West Indies.

Any of these four courses offered some hope of success. But the Government failed to choose any of them. Instead it tried to achieve the impossible and carry out all four. It would not withdraw from Flanders because of the King's anxiety for his Hanoverian possessions and its own concern for the balance of European power. It would not abandon operations in the West Indies because the City would not let it. It would not renounce all idea of helping the western Royalists—for which it had begun in August to assemble a small force at Southampton under Lord Moira—because this would upset the Portland Whigs, a political body which it particularly wanted to mollify. And it would not relinquish its unexpected foothold at Toulon because the opportunity seemed too good to miss.

The result was as might have been expected. A partial withdrawal from Flanders led to a French break-through in October which had to be met by hurrying back other troops to Ostend. The delayed expedition sent to the West Indies in November was only half the size planned and was inadequate either to conquer the French colonies or hold them when taken. The scratch force assembled under Lord Moira waited for artillery and stores until December and then sailed without them to the Brittany coast, only to find that the insurgents had already been driven from it and that the chance of a landing had passed. Meanwhile Toulon was starved of troops, not because the Government did not wish to send any but because it had not left any to send. Not until October 27th did the first British regulars reach the port and then only a small

contingent of two battalions and a few guns from Gibraltar under General O'Hara. The latter almost immediately had the misfortune to be captured in a skirmish.

Pitt consoled himself by drawing up elaborate paper schemes for massing an international army at Toulon for a spring offensive. The treaties signed during the summer with the Mediterranean Powers had provided for the employment of Spanish, Piedmontese and Neapolitan contingents in British pay, and with his usual optimism the Prime Minister reckoned that by December, besides the parings of British garrisons,
he could count on 9000 Piedmon
tese, 6000 Neapolitans, 4000 Spaniards, and at least 5000 Austrians. That this international army might be more difficult to command than a composite British force of equal size never even occurred to his unmilitary mind.

No conceptions of war could have differed more than those of the British and French Governments. The former timidly based military action on public opinion. The latter brutally coerced public opinion to support military action. In Whitehall the first thought always was how " to give the war a good appearance." Ministers weighed rival interests, balanced one theatre of operations against another and doled out men and supplies to appease popular clamour. Invariably compromising, th
ey fell between two stools. Shun
ning unpalatable decisions, they were never able to concentrate their forces and seize the initiative. Setting no tune themselves, they were compelled to dance to the enemy's. Seeking secondary objectives to conciliate the opinion of the hour, they would throw away next year's victory for to-morrow's announcement in the
Gazette
of the capture of a fortress or a sugar island.

While Pitt was gathering in imagination soldiers of every tongue to assail France from the furthest point of the compass, Carnot, relying on interior lines, was massing his forces to strike outwards. Unlike his enemies he perfectly understood the art of war
. His first blow fell in the Rh
one valley where, capturing Lyons from the Federalists, he removed all danger of Austrian infiltration across the Alps into the Midi. In October he struck again in Flanders, defeating the Austrians at Wattignies and a week later piercing the other end of Coburg's overstrained cordon in a two-days' drive through Menin, Ypres and Nieuport which all but cut the British off from their base at Ostend. The threat to Artois was thus lifted till the spring. A few weeks later both northern armies, floundering hopelessly in the Flemish mud, retired into winter cantonments.

With his vulnerable north
ern frontier safe, Carnot now concentrated his forces against the hapless Vendeans. Their gallantry and loyalty could not avail against the force and energy of the terrible Republic. By Christmas half the villages of the west were heaps of cinders and the fields strewn with thousands of corpses. As the blue-coated armies drove outward like some mighty force compressed and brought to boiling point, the bosses of the Jacobin machine followed them scotching dissension with terror. It was in part the expression of the nation's will to live, in part the foul vent of tortured and suppressed instin
cts after a century's misgovern
ment. Men of incredible evil pushed or wriggled their way to the broken surface of French life
and wreaked their will on every
one within their reach. Every life was at their mercy. The prisons were packed with the generous, the noble and the innocent. The guillotine worked ceaselessly. Samson, the executioner, was the high priest of the nation: Fouquier-Tinville, the pock-marked ex-financier and Public Prosecutor, the keeper of its conscience. " Let us go to the foot of the great altar," cried Amar in the Convention, " and attend the celebration of the Red Mass! "

The Terror served its purpose. The will of centralised authority became absolute. Every man not crippled by age or infirmity was pressed into the armies—a force purged by desperation of both fear and pity.
Fanny Burn
ey's husband, the amiable General D'Arblay, discovered to his amazement that the head of his family, a gentle, refined aristocrat devoted to the monarchical cause, had died fighting for the Republic on the Spanish frontier. The party tyrants accompanied the headquarters of every army, terrifying generals and soldiers alike into unquestioning obedience to the dictates of the great Committee in Paris.