The War of Wars (20 page)

Pitt rejected Richmond’s advice largely because he had no wish to get bogged down in the war within France. His objective was to guarantee Holland and seize French colonial outposts, then negotiate peace with the French. He thought he could sell the Dunkirk expedition to British public opinion as an essentially limited one designed to buttress British naval defences.

With Holland effectively cleared of the French, a conference was held in April between the British, Austrian and Prussian commanders. The three agreed to continue besieging the garrison towns along the French border, in particular Valenciennes, Condé and Mainz. These duly fell in July. The Austrian commander, the Prince of Coburg, now proposed a bold strike into France, to take Cambrai and then march on Paris itself with the aim of ending the Revolution, which was now struggling with the revolts in the south as well as the Vendée insurrection in the west.

The British objected: they preferred to stick to their limited aims and
seek a quick peace with France. This showed a disastrous psychological ignorance of the ruthless revolutionary enemy they were dealing with, which saw the prosecution of war and terror as its only means of survival: in spite of repeated British attempts a negotiated peace was never on the cards with such an enemy, which sought to bring down the old order in Europe, not engage in the kind of gentlemanly duels that had characterized previous British-French wars. Meanwhile the French began to fight back. So it was agreed to descend on Dunkirk, a town of little strategic and small tactical importance to anyone except as a useful bargaining counter for the British in peace negotiations: it was explicitly agreed that the British would have sole charge of the operation.

The British army was not, at this time, at its best. The experience of the American War of Independence, which had ended a decade before, had not been forgotten; at the same time the intervening years had dulled its edge. It was underfunded, thanks to Pitt’s ill-judged parsimony. It still retained the system of purchase of commissions as a means of raising finance, with the result that too many inept, inexperienced, callow young scions of the aristocracy had bought their way to the top. It suffered too from lack of co-ordination, as each commanding officer, regarding his regiment as his personal property, managed it as he saw fit.

A story is told of a Scottish aristocratic family: when a child was heard screaming from the nursery, the nurse explained, ‘it is only the major roaring for his porridge’ – the infant’s career was already certain. The soldiers were often middle-aged or mere boys and many were sick for much of the time. They ‘swore terribly’, drank furiously and were ill-disciplined and lightly clad. As for the Duke of York himself, he was plump and red-faced and certainly courageous. He was also attended by able officers such as Lord Abercromby and Sir William Erskine, but it was said of him that ‘his stupidity as a man was equalled only by his ignorance as a general’.

The Duke ordered his men to march north-westward to Dunkirk on 15 August, straight into a classic military debacle. The navy shipped large amounts of supplies in secret to the port of Nieuport but these arrived late, eight days after the Duke and his 14,500 men had arrived at the outer approaches to Dunkirk. There he waited in frustration,
having lost the element of surprise. Although the town was poorly defended, the French had time to flood the marshes to the south, forcing the British to attack along the shoreline, where they were vulnerable to fire from French gunboats. While the Duke waited for his supplies, the French were able to bring up no fewer than 30,000 reinforcements.

Unaware of these developments, Pitt behaved with aristocratic hauteur in this, the first real engagement of the war. In July he went to his country home at Holmwood and then to visit his mother towards the end of August, travelling down to Walmer to walk up the partridges with his confidant, Dundas. On 3 September the ebullient Duke of York invited Pitt and Dundas to cross the Channel to witness his attack as though it were a military exercise; they declined. On 6 September he attacked – only to discover the enormous size of the army he was facing – some 45,000 men. In a huge pitched battle he suffered some 10,000 casualties and retreated rapidly.

The first battle of the war had been a complete disaster, with blame attaching to Richmond for mistakes in the supplying of the forces, the navy under the Earl of Chatham, Pitt’s elder brother, for failing to furnish support in time, and the Prussians and the Austrians for failing to tie down sufficient quantities of French troops on their fronts – as well as to the hapless Duke of York. Richmond almost resigned from the government after Pitt voiced criticism. The King was furious at the humiliation of his favourite son, who took the defeat badly. Public opinion was highly critical. The British had also lost standing on the continent: they had no card to play as they had not captured Dunkirk, and their army was now redundant, with huge losses suffered in a failed and futile cause.

The Prussians immediately began to lose interest in the French war: always keen on spoils, they had anticipated an easy victory, and this was not to be had. The Prussians were anyway furious that their German-speaking rivals, the Austrians, had taken Valenciennes and Condé in the name of the Emperor, not of Louis XVI – which also infuriated French loyalist officers. The Prussians decided to switch their attentions back to Poland: Frederick William left his army on the Rhine to join his Polish forces.

The Duke of York was sent to reinforce the Austrians in besieging the town of Maubeuge. But the Austrians were beaten back and together with the British forced towards the coast. Reinforcements had to be rushed to prevent a defeat before the armies went into winter quarters. The only news that raised Pitt’s spirits in 1793 had come on 13 September, when the British Mediterranean fleet and Spanish navy landed at Toulon at the request of the city, now in rebellion. This victory had come to Britain entirely by accident, without a British life being lost, where it had eluded them in north-west Europe, with a staggering loss of 18,500 men by the end of the year.

Pitt was elated and talked of the ‘final success of the war’ being in sight. In a flurry of activity, the government ordered ten British companies from Gibraltar as well as 10,000 Hessians from Flanders and two regiments in Ireland to be sent to reinforce Toulon, which Prussia believed would act as a bridgehead to open a new southeast front in France. The Austrians were asked to send 5,000 troops from northern Italy and the Neapolitans 5,000 more. Together with 9,000 Sardinians and 3,000 Spaniards promised for the following year, Pitt believed he could muster an army of 60,000 men in the south of France.

Yet by October there were only some 13,000 allied troops: the Austrians in particular were unimpressed by the capture of Toulon, asserting that the northern front was far more important as it threatened Paris. The Austrians, who had some 93,000 troops in the Netherlands and 38,000 on the Rhine, regarded the excitable British, with some 22,000 men including their German mercenaries (the Prussians had 46,000), as no more than minor players on the continent, and were not disposed to accept their orders.

Meanwhile the position at Toulon was turning awkward: the French pretender for the Regency after Louis’s execution, his brother the Comte de Provence, wanted to land there and proclaim the restoration of the monarchy. He had to be forcibly detained at his point of departure, Genoa. The British had publicly come out in favour of monarchy in France, but only in the vaguest possible terms: ‘His Majesty invites the co-operation of the people of France . . . He calls upon them to join the standard of an hereditary monarchy, not for the
purpose of deciding, in this moment of disorder, calamity, and public danger, on all the modifications of which this form of government may hereafter be susceptible, but in order to unite themselves once more under the empire of law, of morality, and of religion . . .’ The aim was not to lose the support of moderate republicans. The British were also quarrelling with their Spanish allies as to who should be in command of land forces. The British naval commander, Hood, did well in the American War of Independence, but was sixty-nine and had a less sure touch on land.

However, all these ambitious plans were frustrated in mid-December when the young French artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, successfully captured the heights overlooking the harbour. On the following day Hood was forced to evacuate. He gave the order to Sidney Smith to destroy the captured French fleet in a single night, that of 18 December. Smith valiantly tried to carry out his order: thirty-three French ships altogether were destroyed. One English ship was wrecked when a French powder ship nearby was blown up by the Spaniards. Eleven more were badly damaged, leaving fourteen intact. Meanwhile, there was an appalling scene, as French troops skirmished with the withdrawing British and allied forces on the outskirts of town. The inhabitants hysterically milled around the harbour, desperate to get away: some 15,000 people from Toulon were received aboard the British ships, some 4,000 aboard a single one, the
Princess Royal
.

Subsequently Hood was blamed for not having seized the entire French fleet as prizes before Toulon fell: but the Spaniards also claimed them, and a war would have broken out between the two allies had he attempted such a thing. The huge damage done to the French fleet – the first major British naval victory of the war – was however overshadowed by the utter collapse of the allied war effort in the south. The Austrians were blamed by the British but, as Chatham remarked, the situation had required either a total commitment of forces or immediate abandonment. This second appalling defeat in the ‘short war’ was compounded by the revenge of the Jacobins against Toulon: of Toulon’s 28,000 inhabitants after the British evacuation, only 7,000 were still alive a month later.

Having failed in the north and south, the British at last turned their
attentions to the west, where the Vendée war was still in full swing. An expedition of 12,000 men, including 2,000 cavalry, prepared to descend on the Isle de Noirmoutiers opposite the mouth of the Loire, to prepare for an attack on Nantes. The commander was to be the Earl of Moira, formerly Lord Rawdon, a distinguished veteran in the American War of Independence and a protégé of Lord Cornwallis.

From the first Moira found his force being depleted by demands from other areas, particularly the West Indies. When at last he set out in December, and reached the coast of Cherbourg, he found no royalists to greet him: they had already been defeated and dispersed. By mid-January 1794, after hanging about hopelessly off the French coast, the expedition had returned to Cowes.

Still worse was to follow. Pitt tried to put the best gloss on the disaster of the first year of the war, claiming he had saved Holland and Flanders, when in fact the Austrians and Prussians had saved them, and the British had merely failed at Dunkirk and Toulon, losing nearly 20,000 men. He and Grenville resolved to embark on a new continental offensive against France with their tricky allies, Austria and Prussia.

The British army was now reorganized on a more ordered footing, with provision for raising 175,000 regulars, 52,000 militia – some 16,000 of them in Ireland – ‘fencible’ (volunteer) cavalry and 34,000 hired mercenaries. A new campaign was planned, involving two pincers to close in on Paris. An army would be landed near Le Havre and move up the Seine; another would advance from the north-east: this would consist of some 300,000 men, 40,000 of them British and German soldiers which would advance from Flanders and seize the frontier fortresses.

It was the old plan again, under the old commander, the twenty-nine-year-old Duke of York whom both Pitt and Dundas privately considered incompetent, but were unable to replace: the Austrians actually preferred him because they believed they could manipulate him. The Prussians, who were to provide 100,000 men, insisted that because the war was being waged entirely in British interests they be paid £2 million. The British were understandably reluctant to pay. So too were the Austrians, who were by now deeply suspicious of their Prussian rivals. Not until April was agreement reached for a reduced Prussian force of 62,400 men at a cost of around £1 million paid largely by the British.

All now seemed well: the King of Prussia, no less, decided to command his army; the Emperor of Austria also took command of his forces, arriving in Belgium to inspect the allied armies on 9 April. This brought to an end an unseemly squabble in which the Duke of York, who had refused to serve under the Austrians’ best general, General
Clairfait, because of his inferior status, agreed to serve under the Emperor. As was remarked at the time: ‘one incompetent prince, who knew little about war, was thus to be commanded by another incompetent prince who knew nothing.’

Just ten days later, however, a large Polish uprising under the popular Thaddeus Kosciusko, which had broken out the previous month, moved on to capture Warsaw. This aroused intense anxiety among Britain’s continental allies: the Russians wanted help to quell it; the Austrians were alarmed at the destabilization of central Europe; and the Prussians wanted to share in any possible spoils. But for the moment the campaign against France proceeded. The fortress of Landrecies was taken, partly by a brilliant British cavalry charge. It became a classic in British military history. On 24 April, two squadrons of British and two of Austrian cavalry, numbering 400 men, had come across a body of 800 French cavalry in thick woods near Montrecourt. They pursued the larger French force up a hill, where they found themselves face to face with an entire division. The British promptly charged forward, while the Austrians engaged in a flanking movement. They were taking on sixty cannon, aiming straight at them, supported by 12,000 men, ranged in six battalions. The charge of the 15th Hussars was memorably described by a young cornet, Robert Wilson:

When we began to trot, the French cavalry made a movement to right and left from the centre, and at the same moment we saw in lieu of them, as if created by magic, an equal line of infantry, with a considerable artillery in advance, which opened a furious cannonade with grape, while the musketry poured its volleys. The surprise was great and the moment most critical; but happily the heads kept their direction, and the heels were duly applied to the ‘Charge!’ which order was hailed with repeated huzzas . . .