Along the line, other cannons were being readied. The enemy was a hundred yards, approaching at a steady pace. Soon they would volley and charge home. Trevethan returned and kicked at the body of the man who Krombach had just put down, having seen the man attempt to get back to his feet.
“Surrender, boy before someone kills you,” he yelled at the spread-eagled soldier.
Along the line of the redoubt, the French were falling back, skirmishers eager to retire to the main body of the battalion. They had masked the advance of the line and stopped the guns from unleashing devasting round shot into the closely packed lines. Now it was only a matter of the eight hundred soldiers pressing home their advantage and storming the gun line.
Krombach retreated from the wall. The French had stopped. Fifty yards distant, they raised an uneven line of muskets and fired. The spit of hundreds of muskets was drowned by the crashing of musket balls into the gabion wall. A gunner who had been busily loading a lethal dose of round-shot and canister on the adjacent cannon, died in the middle of his labours.
Another artilleryman took the place of the fallen man and continued the work.
Beyond him there was another yelp of pain but Krombach's eyes were fixated on the wall of smoke that marked the French line. From behind it a huge cheer erupted; eight hundred bayonets broke through the mist and raced at the gabion wall.
The Hanoverian worked swiftly, biting the cartridge paper and loading the weapon. He pushed the ramrod in and didn’t even bother trying to re-house it, just letting it fall to the sand and cocked the musket. At twenty yards he jerked back on the trigger, felt the kick of the weapon followed by a powerful shock wave of sound that forced the air from his lungs. The whole of the gun-line was wreathed in thick smoke but Krombach could hear nothing more. There was a ringing inside his head and he stared quizzically at the barrel of the musket in stupefied wonder.
Around him, gunners worked in noiseless motion, swabbing out the smoking gun barrel that Krombach had been stood no more than six feet away from when it had fired. Beyond that, Trevethan was clutching at his arm, trying to staunch a steady trickle of blood that seeped from a tear in the right shoulder of his jacket. Krombach staggered back towards the Cornish Major before remembering the enemy infantry. He wheeled sharply, waiting for the first silhouettes to cross the gabion wall.
None came.
Through the threads of smoke that had begun to disperse around the sweating artillerymen who toiled to reload their long-barrelled field pieces was a charnel yard of broken bodies. Those who had lived through the storm of the cannonade had run. Those left behind were misshapen lumps of flesh. Men with shattered or missing limbs tried to crawl away towards the safety of the town they had left minutes earlier. Others writhed in a mass of slaughtered corpses yards from the wall. Krombach fought the urge to wretch and as he did the ringing passed and the screams of the remnants of the French line reverberated in his ears. He stumbled blindly back towards Trevethan. Moments later, the redoubt was smothered in smoke and the crashing boom of cannon, as the artillery fired again.
Wormhoudt: 6th September 1793
The knot of skirmishers had shuffled their way back to the safety of the grenadier battalion with surprising ease. The hussars had circled at the small group of infantry but misjudged the range and five horsemen had paid the price for their miscalculations. Another half a dozen bore wounds from the muskets of von Bomm’s men. Whether the cavalry commander had sensed that the moment for revenge might come later or had merely decided that the coming fight was now a matter for the battalions of infantry that were now clearly in view to the deployed line of Colonel Franke’s man, was unclear. Either way, von Bomm felt a sense of pride that he had brought all his men safely back to the security of the battalion. That feeling of security would be very short lived though, once the enemy infantry had closed to within musket range of the line.
“Good work, von Bomm. Have your men ready if you please. The line is to retire. Make them pay for the ground as best you can.”
Von Bomm nodded, expecting as much. The oxen and crew of the two field pieces were already making wide turning circles, tearing up the fields which flanked the roads, to begin the return journey to Wormhoudt. The battalion and guns would never get there of course. It was simply a case of Franke choosing the best position in which his grenadiers might deploy and make their final stand.
There were now eight enemy infantry battalions visible supported by a battery of guns and a full regiment of hussars. The French marched in columns and would inevitably close the gap on the slower moving line that would need to check its retreat every time the hussars threatened.
Once the French horsemen had summoned the courage to pass the line to either flank, then the battle was as good as lost. A route back to Wormhoudt would be cut and somewhere in fields heavy with harvest crops, the 1st Grenadiers would cease to exist.
There was a full two miles back to Wormhoudt but the line set off at a quick march. The frontage had soon become ragged but Franke cared little about that. When the spit of muskets from behind and the words of von Bomm warned of the encroaching enemy, Franke would expect the line to about turn and reform in short order.
Before the withdrawal began, Franke had updated his captains on the bones of his plan. About a mile from Wormhoudt the open ground narrowed and two ancient copses pinched out some of the farmland. The gap of some five hundred yards was still wider than that of the battalion deployed in line, but Franke aimed to bridge open ground between the two wooded flanks as best he could. If von Bomm’s men could hold off the cavalry in the cat and mouse duel of the next mile, then the numbers of the enemy might be mitigated for a while. And if the opposing commander was rash and attacked without preparation, perhaps the redcoat battalion might be able to further delay the seemingly inevitable. The Colonel had also given over his horse to a junior subaltern with orders to find Freytag or Wallmoden and hurry the cavalry or anyone else to the spot. For the second time in the campaign the battalion had been left cruelly exposed in its deployment. Franke’s outwardly calm air remained.
“We’ll be like the Spartans in those tales your expensive tutors told you. Only I have no intention of this command being wiped out. We will hold the line at that gap and if we need to fall back, we will pivot like an arrow head, the tip facing the French. Try and keep the cavalry off our flanks. If we must march in square, so be it, but it’s a last resort. I want our fire power maximised for as long as possible. Good luck.”
With that the officers exchanged handshakes, von Bomm holding out his hand to Captain Baumann who hesitated, then accepted the gesture, with the curtest nod of his head and a stilted expression of his best wishes.
The twenty minutes that the line marched towards their new position was largely without incident. The skirmishers, working in pairs, fell back steadily. The hussars, more circumspect now, were happy to follow up at the walk. Behind them, the infantry columns began to close the distance and von Bomm observed a knot of mounted French officers pointing to various positions in the fields ahead. Perhaps they had already noticed the narrow gap as a likely deployment position or were just content to let the enemy withdraw. Even if the battalion reached the cover of Wormhoudt, the numbers of enemy were greater than at Rumes. Then there had been cavalry and infantry coming to the relief of the battalion.
Von Bomm tried to calculate matters in his mind while the screen retreated in an orderly manner. The French had not reacted to the advance of the grenadiers. Why should they? It would have been better for them to allow the redcoats to have made the mile-long ascent towards Mont Cassel and defeat them somewhere near the crest of the hill when the King’s Germans were fatigued from their morning’s labours. No, the French were already on the attack. The offensive from Mont Cassel was unlikely to be an isolated incident. If the enemy were attacking along the line, it made the prospects of help more unlikely. The thought caused von Bomm a moment’s hopelessness. At least the Spartans had been remembered in the
annals of history. First Grenadiers would be overwhelmed by ten times their number and no-one would be any the wiser.
He shook his head, to rouse his own spirits and drive such ideas from his mind. He barked instructions in the vague directions of a pair of skirmishers, telling the men to keep vigilant. Inside he knew those words were more for him; measuring his gait to its most martial air, he counted back another fifty paces. Once there, half of the skirmisher pairs retired on the line of von Bomm’s position before ordering Sergeant Keithen to begin his own count. When Keithen had made his ground, the balance of the pairs would fall back to the sergeant’s position. In this manner the battalion had made it to the terrain chosen by Colonel Franke. Von Bomm fanned his skirmishers left and right, covering the battalion frontage as best he could. Now it was a case of waiting for the French.
Whatever the plans of the French commanders were, there seemed little tempo to their activities, a battery of guns deployed to the left of the road at a range of some seven hundred yards to the line, while to the right, a swarm of enemy skirmishers gathered, two to three hundred men by von Bomm’s estimation. When the battery of eight guns opened fire, Franke reacted by ordering the four grenadier companies into open order, a formation used for the parade ground rather than the battlefield; round-shots cut down swathes of ripened corn but caused few casualties on the line. The pair of three pounder battalion guns had a great deal of fun though, aiming round after round in the direction of the hussars and forcing the enemy cavalry back to a position behind the artillery and out of range of the small calibre weapons.
This drew the ire of the French gunners and von Bomm watched as enemy gunners braced themselves at the wheels of their pieces to train their fire on the smaller guns. The duel was brief and bloody. In ten minutes, the two guns were smashed, and redcoats lay dead or wounded around the battalion field pieces. A burly sergeant who von Bomm recognised as Fritz Hahn, who had taken command of Apple Tree house at Rumes, carried a man over his right shoulder and dragged another wounded comrade away.
The whistles and insults that the redcoats had aimed at the retreating hussars died out as the savagery of the enemy artillery destroyed their own guns. Now the French began to limber their field pieces up, content to move forward. They would choose a range at which canister could play on the lines of redcoats and even the trickery of Franke could do little about that.
While the guns limbered, the swarm of blue-coats moved forward and von Bomm called out to his men. “Skirmishers, the eyes of the Colonel are on you. Choose your targets and hold your positions. Aim for the officers and Sergeants. Anyone giving orders,” he began to pace the length of the line, repeating the commands.
As he passed near Tomas Pinsk, he winked at the young farmhand.
“Getting paid to shoot officers, eh, Pinsk; can’t be bad.”
With the line patrolled, he returned to a central spot and watched his men with a degree of pride. The French fielded at least four times as many muskets but without the proficiency of the Hanoverians. They kept to a hundred yards. While the corn around him danced with the passage of musket balls, few rounds found their mark. After a dozen minutes of sporadic skirmishing, one Hanoverian lay dead and three more wounded.
The French, on the other hand, had lost at least thirty fallen, that von Bomm could count. Their skirmishers had adopted a rather curious practice of the bravest souls pressing forward while the bulk of the men stayed thirty yards back, loading weapons which were exchanged for spent ones. Most of the casualties though were amongst this group.
Those acting as loaders had committed the cardinal error of clustering together, perhaps for moral support and comfort in their shared lot. While the distance at which the blue-coats congregated was at the maximum limit of the Brown Bess, his grenadier skirmishers had exacted a heavy price on the enemy. There were no signs of any white-coated troops which designated the experienced soldiers of Louis’ army. If the ranks were largely conscripted men, then perhaps the training of the King’s Germans might stand for something in the heat of the battle ahead.
Shrill whistles sounded along the French line and blue-coated skirmishers withdrew through the line of the newly deployed infantry. The enemy was ready to deliver a crushing blow, barrels loaded with canister aimed at the two ranks of redcoats in open order. As the orders were given for port fire sticks to be lowered to the touch holes of the artillery barrels, Franke yelled the order, “Grenadiers, lay down.”
Four hundred yards of the over-extended line dropped to the ground with great relief, von Bomm’s men a further eighty yards nearer the cannon needed no invitation and had dived for the relative cover into the blanket of corn. The rolling crash of artillery fire echoed across the open ground, pressed in by pine and birch trees to the flanks. Gunners sponged out barrels and adjusted the aim of the barrels cursing the Hanoverians for denying them their pleasure. Another round of fire was thrown into the area where the redcoats had stood but the effect was impossible to judge. Von Bomm’s men waited and he watched the enemy battery commander shrug at a senior officer who berated him and motioned that the guns needed to advance again. The corn was clearly absorbing the ferocity of the canister and the redcoats were making a mockery of the artillerymen.
Without waiting for limber teams, the officer ordered his men to start wheeling the guns forward and von Bomm watched as the field pieces began to rumble unsteadily over the hardened earth. At two hundred yards and a few minutes of sweating and shoving the guns deployed again and the process of ferrying ammunition to the new position began, a stream of gunners no doubt cursing their officers and the generals for this indignation.
While the enemy toiled, the infantry line rose at the command of Franke and advanced through the long corn, passing over the prone bodies of von Bomm’s men. Startled gunners watched on in mesmerised fascination as the redcoated line approached. At eighty paces the redcoats stopped. The spell broke with the bark of a command and enemy gunners raced to service their weapons.
The redcoated line delivered a deadly volley along the length of the battery. Franke did not wait to see the effect but ordered the battalion to fix bayonets and charge.
Those French gunners left alive after the maelstrom of musketry, ran.
Limber teams who had only called up to the new position turned and fled at the sight of the routing artillerymen.
And the whole sorry mass, gunners, panic-stricken limber drivers and their horse teams peeled away and punched a hole through the hussars posted behind the artillery, in turn sweeping cavalrymen into the chaos.
Franke halted his men, returned the ranks to close order and ordered the battalion to reload. He had bought himself time. The retreat to Wormhoudt could continue. They might make the temporary safety of the village after all.
The town of Wormhoudt proved to be too ambitious a target for the battalion to reach but that did not matter. Franke had already decided that his next bottleneck would be the river line of the Yser. The Yser was little more than twenty yards wide but it was a reasonable barrier. It would soon be the turn of the French infantry to press home their numerical advantage but von Bomm watched with satisfaction as company after company of grenadiers was fed across the stream. The enemy swarm of skirmishers had returned, this time emboldened by the fact that all the redcoats, save the skirmish screen were behind the river. Von Bomm, resisted the temptation to look at his watch so instead checked the position of the sun and gauged the time to be somewhere after ten in the morning.
Where were the cavalry?
Freytag had ordered them to support this attack. With the last of the companies over the river, von Bomm blew three shrill blasts on his whistle. His company turned and began their weary return to the comfort of the Yser. He counted the pairs back. A dozen men were missing but that part of the butcher’s bills would be accounted for later.
The French sent a battalion forward to engage the redcoats, a second stood in reserve to replace the first when the heat of the firefight had br
oken the conscripted men. The other six battalions, the chastened gunners and vengeful hussars moved away, to find the road that ran from Steenvoorde and an unguarded bridge into the village of Wormhoudt.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Line of Retreat.
Bambecque: 6th September 1793
The humid air had drawn up a large bank of storm clouds, bilious and black, which threatened to overwhelm the coast at any moment. Under the increasing heat of the day, Captain Brandt had watched as a string of messengers arrived from villages to the south and west. From the sketched map that Neuberg had received he knew that Herzeele and Houtkerke lay to the south; Wormhoudt, Wilder and Esquelbecq lay to the west.
By mid-day, a steady flow of carts ferried wounded redcoats from those directions, pausing only long enough to deposit their human cargo before making the return journey. An hour later, the balance of 3rd Brigade was retreating to hold the line of the Yser, where 10th Regiment had been posted as a rear-guard. The cordon had been contacted; the Hessian cavalry were the last of the rear-guard, fighting a delaying action against superior numbers of French dragoons.
The captain had been summoned to Neuberg, who had received orders and the barest accounts of the action from Oberst von Klinkowström, the Brigade’s commander. Brandt touched his bicorne in salute as von Klinkowström rode off but the commander looked worn by the events of the day.
The King of Dunkirk Page 24