The Years of Endurance (23 page)

The West Indian campaign had even graver effects on the course of the war. In January, 1794, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Grey's 7,000 troops, after a six weeks' voyage, reached Barbados. Despite their small numbers they at once attacked the French islands, and as a result of brilliant co-operation between Grey and Vice-Admiral Sir John Jervis overcame all resistance in Martinique, St. Lucia and Guadeloupe by the end of May. But the real campaign had scarcely begun. Almost at once the victors were simultaneously assailed by reinforcements from France and a negro and mulatto rising. For by denouncing slavery—the gap in Britain's moral front—the French had secured a formidable ally. With the help of the revolted slaves the force from Rochefort, which had evaded the loose British blockade, was able to reconquer Guadeloupe before the end of the year. Yet it was yellow fever more than any other cause which robbed Britain of her West Indi
an conquests. Within a few month
s the dreaded " black vomit" had destroyed 12,000 of her finest soldiers and reduced the survivors to trembling skeletons.

In the conduct of these distant campaigns Pitt and Dundas were handicapped by the lapse of time between the dispatch of orders from England and the receipt of news from the theatres of war. They were still celebrating Grey's victories of the spring when his men were dying by thousands in the autumn. But their difficulties were increased a hundredfold by their failure to prepare for the inevitable consequences of their own actions. They undertook and promised more than they had any reasonable expectation of being able to perform. After initiating operations that called for a steady flow of reinforcements, they were forced to deflect them into other and more urgent channels.

The measures which the Government now took to remedy the shortage of trained troops and fulfil its promises to its Austrian allies lowered the discipline and dignity of the entire Service. Both senior and junior regimental rank were offered for sale in return for recruits. With every 450 men raised for an existing battalion, a lieutenant colonelcy was offered to the senior major for ^600, and two major
ities to the captains at from £
550 to £700. Compani
es were sold to any bidder for
£2,800. In the brisk competition that followed the price o
f a recruit rose to as much as
£30 a head.

This degrading system, which appealed to an innate English snobbery, enabled the Government to raise 30,000 recruits by private bounty at
little
cost to the Treasury. It involved the passing over of the old professional soldier of modest means—the type from which generals like Abercromby and Dundas were sprung—in favour of upstart young plutocrats utterly ignorant of their profession. Minors found themselves commanding battalions while veteran subalterns, old enough to be their fathers, waited in vain for a company. Even children in the nursery received the King's commission: a contemporary print shows a minute officer of the Guards eating sugar plums at Kelsey's, the St. James's Street fruiterer. As for
the
recruits raised under such a system, they were what might have been expected. They resembled Falstaff's men.

Yet it is only fair to remember that Britain's principal contribution to the Allied cause was at sea. The Navy vote for 1794 provided for 85,000 men, or one per cent of the population of England and Wales. As the returning merchant fleets month by month dropped anchor in Thames and Avon, the press-gangs made up the complement of the King's ships. By the beginning of the year eighty sail of the line were in commission. On these depended not only the ring set round France but the subsidies which maintained the Allied armies.

During the first year of the war
the
Navy had driven the French flag off the seas, capturing for a loss of six of its own small craft fifty-two frigates and lesser ships-of-war and eighty-eight privateers. Had the state of France been normal this would not have yet had any decisive effect on the war, for only a fraction of her foreign trade was sea-borne. But owing to the anarchic dislocation of her social life, it threatened her with starvation. The harvest
of 1793 had failed. By stretch
ing the rights of blockade to include provisions, Pitt had recruited famine as an ally.

Had the ageing men in control of the Navy shown the same understanding of blockade as their successors, the Republic could scarcely have survived the summer of 1794. Realising their danger the revolutionary leaders commissioned agents in America to buy grain and charter merchantmen. At the same time they made every effort to get their neglected Atlantic Fleet ready for sea. At Christmas they sent Rear-Admiral Vanstabel—a first-rate officer—with two ships of the line and three frigates from Brest to the United States to escort home the grain fleet that was to raise the siege of France.

Fortunately for the Jacobins the Admiral commanding the Channel Fleet did not believe in close blockade. Lord Howe was a gallant old man of 68—" undaunted as a rock and as silent "—and the first sea officer in the world. But like other elderly sailors he was obsessed with the supreme importance of safeguarding his ships. He refused to expose them to winter gales on the Brittany coast. In this he was strongly supported by the Treasury. In mid-December he accordingly withdrew the battle fleet to harbour, leaving only the frigates at sea. Thus it was that Vanstabel escaped, and others more important after him. For Brest could not be blockaded from Spithead nor even from Torbay.

Early in April five more ships of the line put out under Rear-Admiral Nielly to meet the convoy which sailed on the nth from Hampton Roads under Vanstabel's escort. No British warship was present to shadow either force. Vice-Admiral Jervis, who was later to prove how closely an enemy coast cou
ld be sealed, was engaged in mili
tary operations against Guadeloupe, while Captain Nelson, usurping the functions of a soldier, was wearing out his frail body in the trenches around Bastia. Had the qualities they showed five years later been employed at this tune in bottling up the French Atlantic coastline, Europe might have been saved twenty years of bloodshed and tyranny.

In April the Allies reopened the long-awaited campaign in Flanders. From the heights above Le Cateau, where on
the
16th the young Emperor of Austria inspected 160,000 troops,
they
advanced with the steady leisure of the eighteenth century to besiege Landrecies. Their line stretched from the sea to the Sambre: the cordon of steel that was to strangle revolutionary France.

Carnot knew that France must break it or starve. All his hopes were pinned on the offensive—such an offensive as old Europe had never seen. He entrusted the command of his northern armies to a thirty-three year-old general, Charles Pichegru, the son of a Jura peasant. His orders were to attack at all costs and go on attacking till he had broken through.

On the 24th while the main Allied army was grouped round Landrecies, Pichegru struck between the centre and the sea. Sweeping across the Lys valley, the French left under Souham—a thirty-four year-old ex-private—cut the Austrian cordon, drove past Menin and overwhelmed the astonished garrison of Courtrai. But there, though a salient was driven deep into the Allied line, the advance was halted. Confronted by the marshy ground between Scheldt and Lys and the stubborn resistance of the Austrian and Hanoverian regulars, Souham waited until the main force of his right could move forward.

But in the centre Pichegru's attack failed. Advancing to the relief of Landrecies, his imperfectly trained levies were taken in the flank at Beaumont by the Allied cavalry under the Duke of York and routed with a loss of 7000 dead and 41 guns. Landrecies thereupon surrendered.

Had Coburg followed up this brilliant exploit, Beaumont might have proved one of the decisive battles of history. But the fleeting opportunity of those spring days of 1794 was not for the old man's grasping. Unable to think save in terms of defensive cordons, he made no attempt to break through Pichegru's demoralised centre or to send his magnificent cavalry sweeping forward to Paris—only ten days' march away. Instead, he paused nervously to repair the rent in his right flank. The day after Landrecies fell the British Army was dispatched north through rain and muddy lanes to Tournai to bar any further penetration into Flanders.

So, as in the previous summer after Neerwinden, the French were allowed a breathing space. It was not wasted by commanders who knew that the alternative to victory was the guillotine. To keep the enemy inactive till they were ready for a renewed general offensive, they launched a series of desperate assaults on the crossings of the Sambre.

With this battering on his left and a salient driven deep into his right, nothing would induce Coburg to risk an advance in
the
centre. His one concern was to rest
ore the classical perfection of
his line by driving back the French from Courtrai. But Mack and the Duke of York were able, after some argument, to persuade him to attempt a concerted movement to cut off Souham's 40,000 troops in the exposed
salient
from their base at Lille.

The scheme was worked out skilfully. But it relied too much on French passivity and Austrian punctuality. Three of the five Allied corps, on whose exact movements the operation
depended, never reached the battl
efield at all. Only the Duke of York carried out his part of the programme promptly. As a result 10,000 Britons, after taking all their objectives on May 17th, found themselves at nightfall in the heart of Souham's army.

Throughout the first four weeks of campaigning the British Army had enjoyed unbroken and deserved success.
¹
It was now to enter upon a prolonged period of failure. At dawn on the 18th the French, grasping their opportunity, counter-attacked. Soon both the Guards Brigades under Abercromby at Mouvaix and Major-General Fox's Brigade near Tourcoing were encircled and cut off from each other. The Duke at his headquarters could make no contact with either. Everywhere on the misty, enclosed Flemish plain the enemy was swarming. Fortunately, the British soldier rose to the emergency. With superb calm the Guards, covered by the 7th and 15 th Light Dragoons, fought their way back to Tournai. Fox's line battalions, defying the inevitable, struggled all day across country until, with a loss of nearly half of their strength, they regained the Allied lines. " No mobbed fox was ever more put to it to make his escape than we were," wrote Major Calvert. By superb effrontery the Duke of York also escaped capture, at one point galloping in front of his two escort squadrons of Dragoons in a dramatic chase over hedge and dyke with the Star of the Garter gleaming on his breast. Of twenty-eight British guns nineteen were lost. Throughout the day the British never set eyes on an Austrian. For, unlike the ragged French, the Emperor's white-coated columns did not march to the sound of the guns. Instead, they stayed and listened to them.

While these events were happening on the Flanders plain the

¹
Only a few days before its cavalry had ridden over three French squares
in
front of Tournai and taken 400 prisoners and thirteen guns. It was the last time for eighteen years—until a far day on the plains of Salamanca— that British horse were to break a French square.

limelight of battle was shifting to billowing sails, waves and ocean clouds. On May 2nd a young Rhinelander, in the diplomatic service of Austria, watched from a lull near Cowes the Channel Fleet escorting two vast convoys of merchantmen to sea. Years later when he was the first statesman in Europe, Prince Metternich recalled it as the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. At a signal from the Admiral the merchantmen unfurled their sails, those bound for the East Indies passing to the east and those for
the
West Indies to the west of the island. Hundreds of vessels filled with spectators covered the roads, in the midst of which the great ships-of-war followed one another like columns on parade.

If this magnificent spectacle fired a foreigner, how much more so the thought of it inspired Englishmen! The Grand Fleet was at sea after its winter rest, and the country rejoiced. Yet the significance of the event was better understood in hungry France. For on Lord Howe's ability to intercept the American grain convoy her whole future depended.

Had he taken his station off Ushant a few weeks earlier, no unit of the French Battle Fleet, now under orders to meet the convoy, could have left Brest. But a commercial country at war is not governed only by strategical considerations. The London merc
hants demanded protection for th
eir own outgoing convoys, and not till these were ready could Howe sail. When at last he did so, he detailed a quarter of his fleet under Rear-Admiral Montagu to escort his precious charges far out into the Atlantic. Having thus divided his forces to secure secondary objectives the old man looked into Brest and then, seeing the masts of the main French Fleet still in the inner harbour, unaccountably sailed off into the blue to look for the grain ships.

But when, having found nothing in the wastes of the Atlantic, he returned to have another look at Brest on the 19th, his adversary had gone. Three days earlier Rear-Admiral Villaret Joyeuse had got to sea with twenty-six sail of the line. He carried with him a representative of the National Convention and a warning from Robespierre that failure to secure the safe arrival of
the American grain would involv
e the loss of his head.