The Years of Endurance (60 page)

Direct attack having failed to dislodge the French, a council of war was held to consider other possibilities. The Duke proposed that 4000 more Russians from Kronstadt and some fresh troops from England should be used with part of the forces already landed either in a descent on the North Sea coast behind the French lines or in an attack from the Zuyder Zee on Amsterdam, where the Dutch were reported to be spoiling for a rising. But both Abercromby and David Dundas opposed amphibious operations of any kind—a prejudice which they seemed to share with Admiral Mitchell. The Duke therefore relucta
ntly
abandoned the idea in favour of a second frontal attack.

Planned for September 29th, the attempt had to be postponed till October 2nd owing to another appalling bout of storm and rain. This time the main assault on the French left was undertaken by Abercromby with the pick of the British Army. Advancing rapidly along the beach, he reached the village of Egmont seven miles down the coast before encountering serious opposition. But here, lacking trained riflemen capable of dealing with the French sharpshooters, he suffered heavy casualties, including his second-in-command, Major-General Moore, who was dangerously wounded. It was the skill and gallantry shown that day by this young hero —now thirty-seven—which laid the foundations of that reputation as the first soldier of the new army which he retained till his death at Corunna.

Meanwhile the other three columns were held up by the main

¹
Colburn
's
Military
Magazine,
Feb., 1836, cit.
Fortescue,
IV, 677.

²
Bunbury,
II,
44.

French lines around the village of Bergen, three miles away, largely through the refusal of the Ru
ssians to obey orders. Had Aber
cromby been able to march to Dundas's assistance he might have cut off the main enemy force and won a decisive victory. But his men were exhausted, parched with thirst and short of ammunition. He again forgot that his opponent's plight might be still worse. After dusk Brune withdrew unmolested, leaving the British in possession of Alkmaar and the Egmonts.

The hopes of those inclined to hope—of the politicians at home and the younger officers on the spot—now rose again. Spencer described Egmont as a " glorious and important victory "; Popham thought that after the " wonderful gallantry of the British troops " the French would soon be pushed beyond the Meuse. But the generals did not share the prevailing optimism. Even the news of the Archduke's speedy capture of Mannheim failed to cheer them. They were oppressed with the lack of transport, the soaking ground and endless dykes under the lowering Dutch skies, and the pitiless surf that endangered their precarious communications with England. They pushed on slowly after the enemy, but they did so with heavy hearts. Yet had they been able to read the letters passing between the French commanders and their Government in Paris, they might have felt—and behaved—differently.

For after Egmont even Brune abandoned hope. He wrote on October 4th that if the British continued to attack, lassitude among his troops might cause disaster, that Dutch desertion was growing, and that the Batavian Government, impressed by the Allied successes, was showing unmistakable signs of hedging. Like the Duke of York, he was short of provisions, his bread waggons having been taken for the wounded and large supplies having been abandoned at Alkmaar. Such was the position when on October 6th
the
Allies cautiously resumed their advance, with the intention of reconnoitring the new French-Batavian line from Wyk on the North Sea through Kastrikum to Akersloot, about half a dozen miles south of Alkmaar. Beyond it lay the narrow defde, scarcely four miles wide, between the ocean and an inlet of the Zuyder Zee, through which the interior could alone be reached.

That morning Abercromby, advancing along the North Sea beach, found himself at the outskirts of Wyk, some way in front of the general Allied movement and widiin easy striking distance of
the
defile. On the left of the line Dundas also moved rapidly, capturing Akersloot and pushing on towards Uitgeest, half-way between that place and the Zuyder Zee. But in the centre Brune, opposed by a Russian column outside Kastrikum, called up his reserves and with characteristic "impetuosity counter-attacked. Within a few minutes what had been intended by the Allied Command as an affair of outposts became a general engagement. The Russians, their discipline undermined by suspicion, were only saved from disaster by a brilliant charge of the 7th Light Dragoons under Lord Paget, sixteen years later to command the cavalry at Waterloo. Abercromby, abandoning all hope of seizing the defile, was also forced to hurry to their aid.

For several hours a desperate fight continued round Kastrikum. It was pelting with rain, the country was confused and intricate, and clouds of smoke hung like fog in the trees. The Duke, trying to follow the course of events from the church tower of Alkmaar, completely lost control of the battle. Both he and Ins advisers were deceived by the vigour of Brune's counter-attack into believing that the French had received reinforcements from the interior— a fear which had grown during the melancholy weeks of waiting into an obsession.

The feelings of the opposing commanders on the morrow of the battle were, therefore, curiously similar. Brune, whose outnumbered soldiers, though temporarily successful against the Russians, had been worsted by nightfall at every point by the stubborn patience of the British, felt that any renewal of the fight would result in the rout of his army and an Orange rising. Abercromby and David Dundas, appalled by their casualties and the inexperience of their young Militiamen—" all powerful if attacked but without resource if beaten "
¹
—and baffled by problems of supply and transport, multiplied tenfold by the weather, felt that the only safety lay in a strong defensive line. They, therefore, represented to the Duke the necessity for an immediate retreat to the Zype canal. The young Commander-in-Chief, realising the gravity of the decision, asked them to put their reasons in writing. This they did in a compendious " Appreciation of the Situation " which enumerated all their own difficulties and dangers and omitted those

¹
Abercromby to Dundas, Oct., 1799.—
Fortescue,
IV, 699.

of the enemy. They appreciated everything except the situation " on the other side of the hill."
¹

To the dismay, therefore, of the British rank and file, who imagined in the words of one of them that they had given the French a " complete drubbing,"
²
and to the even greater astonishment of the enemy, the Allied Army on the evening of October 7th began to retreat. By the 9th it was back in its old lines behind the Zype. Some of the supply waggons took two days to cover the nine miles of mud. Ironically, as soon as they reached safety the weather cleared for the first time that autumn and grew so mild t
hat the troops were able to battl
e. Their spirits, however, did not recover.

The retreat was the subject of mutual reproaches between the Services. Admiral Mitchell announced that what he had always dreaded had come to pass: the army had missed a glorious opportunity and should have been in Amsterdam long ago. " You'll pardon my ideas of a soldier," he wrote to the First Lord, " I hope that your Lordship does not think that I mean to criminate." It is just to add that his more enterprising subordinate, Home Popham, did not share his views. As an experienced transport officer he had grown deeply impressed with the badness of the army's communications, the inadequacy of its single port and the shortage of shipping. He felt, too, that the expedition had been sent to the wrong place.

Two days after the retreat all hope of using the army against any other part of Holland was dashed by the news from Germany. The departure of the Archduke Charles from Zurich and the arrival of Korsakoff's Russians had been followed by a succession of disasters. From the first the latter had shown a dangerous contempt for the enemy and a disregard of all normal precautions. Where the Archduke advised the posting of a regiment, Korsakoff only placed a company, remarking scornfully:
"I
understand you; an Austrian battalion or a Russian company! " The convergent movements from widely separated mountain valleys by which the Russians were to drive the French from Switzerland would have been perilous if directed against undisciplined barbarians: in the

¹
See two brilliant articles by Colonel Alfred Burne in the
Army
Quarterly
and the
Fighting
Forces
for October, 1939.

²
Surtees,
Twenty-f
ive
Years
in
the
Rifle
Brigade,
28.

face of Massena it was madness. Before Suvorof, battling his way over the Alps with incredible hardihood, could emerge from the St. Gothard, the French had flung their main force against Zurich. By the night of September 24th Korsakoff's army was surrounded.

Russian heroism redeemed Russian folly," but failed to avert disaster. Korsakoff, disdaining MasseUa's summons to surrender, fought his way out of the trap, but at the cost of all his horse, guns and transport. S
uvorof drove his army over goat-
tracks along the edge of precipices to the rendezvous, only to find that his countrymen and the Austrians had been f
orced to retreat. To escape de
struction he had to break through a ring of foes and lead his exhausted and starving veterans over desolate passes of ice and snow. Achieving what to any other man would have been impossible, he lost 13,000 men, every cannon and waggon he possessed, and all but broke his heart. It was the first time the old hero had ever been defeated.

The Cabinet reviewed these events on October 15th, In view of the uselessness of further campaigning, the mounting toll of British sick and the reports of the Admiralty on the difficulties of maintaining supplies on that
windswept coast, they resolved
-Grenville alone protesting—to abandon the idea of holding the Fielder during the winter. Three days later the Duke of York agreed with Brune for an armistice. Each side still underestimated the other's difficulties. Brune was haunted by the fear of a Dut
ch rising and by news of Chouan
Successes on the Loire. The invaders, who had only three days' bread left, were therefore to their surprise allowed to depart in peace. Eight thousand French prisoners were to be repatriated, but not the Dutch fleet. "Whatever the British do, they always succeed in adding to the number of their ships," an Austrian observer noted.

The evacuation was completed early in November though at a loss of four ships and several hundred men. The Russians were landed at Yarmouth, where they alarmed the inhabitants by drinking the oil from the street lamps.
¹
The country after its high hopes was bitterly disappointed. Pitt tried to explain the failure away by the weather, contending—falsely—that the diversion had enabled

¹
Fortescue,
IV, 701.

the Russians and Austrians to triumph at Novi. " It ought," he added, " to be a source of satisfaction to us that our army has been restored to us safe and entire." But the country took no pleasure in the thought, and the Opposition made full use of its opportunity. Sheridan, imitating Pitt's Jove-like complacency, pointed out that, besides the capture of the Dutch fleet, the nation had gained some useful knowledge. It had been found that no reliance could be placed in the Prime Minister's knowledge of human nature, that Holland was a country intersected by dykes, that the weather in October was not so good as in June. The question was whether the price paid had not been too dear.

The worst consequence of the debacle was that the country lost its reviving faith in the Army. The bounding confidence of the summer was succeede
d by an extreme pessimism about
Continental operations. Sheridan ex
pressed the general view of Dun
das's offensive policy by describing it as nibbling at the rind of France " From this moment until Arthur Wellesley's first victories in Portugal nine years later, the British people, as opposed to their Prime Minister, took up a
non
possumus
attitude as to their ability to rescue Europe from itself. They concentrated their efforts instead on saving themselves.

Before the sailing of the expedition Windham had predicted that it would destroy in the bud, and before it came to its full strength, an Army that with a little delay might have exceeded anything yet known by England.
¹
But what it destroyed was not the Army but the nation's faith in its ability to use it. Pitt's airy notion of doubling it with further drafts from the Militia faded into nothing. Dundas's project for capturing the Combined Fleets by a landing on the Brest peninsula—something that " by its brilliancy and importance might surpass the battle of the Nile "
²
— lost its appeal. And though in pursuit of Windham's Chouan crusade the now thoroughly disgruntled Russians were moved to the Channel Islands—where their impact on the islanders appears to have been much like that of Peter the Great on Evelyn's holly hedges—the preparations for a descent on France were pursued with little vigour. The insurgents, instead of receiving the troops they had hoped for from England, only saw their enemies rein-