by Tom Anderson
Wesley had studied Boulanger’s past battles. More importantly he had received first-hand knowledge from both sides of the Marshal’s tactics; Thomas Græme had faced Boulanger at the Battle of Caen ten years before, while Bourcier had served under him during the Poséidon campaign. Wesley deduced that the Marshal was likely to attack by massing his steam artillery at the fore and using this rolling bombardment to shock the Allies, then follow up with columns of Revolutionary infantry to rout the damaged armies. It was a strategy which had worked for him many times before, at Caen and other battles. But, Wesley declared, it would not work here, for one reason; never before had Boulanger faced an enemy who could reply in kind.
Though they had not played a major role in the campaign to this date (a fact worth remembering when one considers the exaggerated wonder weapon that steam tractors have often been painted as in accounts of this period), the British had brought their Project Whistler steam-tanks with them across the Channel. The Royal French also still had many Republican examples they had captured – and Bourcier still had some of his. It is said by contemporary commentators that so much steam gushed into the cold morning air atop the Montmartre Heights that it was as though clouds were being born, and the enemy was as shrouded as if battle was already joined and powder smoke was everywhere.
When Boulanger attacked, sending General Cuvier with his force of steam artillery rolling inexorably forward, Wesley reacted initially with a tactic he had learned during his sojourn in India. A large force of galloper guns, small artillery pieces hitched to fast horses, was deployed on the right of the French axis of advance, moving even more swiftly than the larger steam guns. The gunners proceeded to direct an enfilading fire against Cuvier that Frederick William II of Prussia, fifty years dead, would have been proud to see. Leading the gallopers was, of course, Leo Bone, never one to miss a chance for glory even if his own horsemanship was adequate at best. The scene was immortalised in Charles Gaudan’s 1890 Sensualist painting Charge of the Cannoneers, in which the steam gouting up from the Republican artillery serves to turn them into vague, nightmarish silhouettes in the grey gloom, in stark contrast to the colourful explosion of different uniforms and horses in the foreground.
The attack was only a pinprick, of course – the galloper guns were of small weight. But Boulanger’s steam artillery force did not consist of protguns as we know them, contrary to what many popular beliefs derived from films would suggest.[107] The guns could fire while moving, barely; the entire reason why Boulanger’s strategy of leading with them was so devastating, for the enemy artillery could not easily hit a moving target. But they certainly could not turn their weapons, and the crews riding atop them were not protected. Now, flaws in the Republican plan became clear. The galloper guns were even more agile than the Republican steam guns, meaning that Bone could keep up a persistent, accurate fire hammering away at the advancing Republican line. Even though the balls were generally only half- or one-pounders, lucky shots nonetheless damaged wheels or burst steam boilers, bringing individual guns to a halt. Furthermore, Sir John Moore led out his experimental Rifle Dragoons and their accurate weapons picked off the steering crews of several guns, leading them to slew sideways and collide with others.
Although the bulk of the line of advance continued onwards, Boulanger realised that the gaps the Allies had inflicted had fatally weakened his attack. His foe could survive the thinned-out onslaught, particularly since the steam-guns could not easily turn and close up as men could. For that reason, he told off his small, precious force of cavalry to take out Leo Bone’s galloper guns. He also ordered his rifle-wielding tirailleurs forward to contest the field with Moore. Meanwhile, the bulk of his army, the great mass of infantry, was ready to march over what the steam guns left behind.
The Republican cavalry pursued Bone from the immediate field of battle. Bone ordered his own guns re-hitched rather than abandon them, even though this meant any chance of escape was drastically reduced. His reasoning became clear when he simply retreated to a slightly more defensible position[108] and then ordered the guns unhitched once more. In the immortal line that has graced a half-dozen inaccurate film adaptations, he declared “Give them a whiff of grape!” and the galloper guns filled the air with canister shot. More than half of his crews died on cavalry sabre, and Bone himself suffered a wound to the calf which meant he always walked with a limp thereafter. But Boulanger’s cavalry force was annihilated, taking one of the Marshal’s few tactical options with it. Bone was aided by the fact that the cavalry had been ordered to spike the guns as their first priority, rather than attacking their crews, and had been slow to respond to the attack. However, this also meant most of the galloper guns were also out of the fight. Now it turned into a brawl.
Wesley had arranged his forces on the Montmartre Heights in a formation which has been known ever after as Mornington’s Crescent, though as the Duke himself insisted ever afterwards, it was merely a modernised adaptation of Hannibal’s strategy at Cannae. Most of the Royal French were stationed in the middle, with the Republican French divided into two and placed on their immediate flanks. The other forces extended northwards into two horns that would stretch around Boulanger’s massed force as it marched onwards and surround it. Wesley was concerned about the possibility of Boulanger recognising the strategy and changing his plans, but as the bulk of the Republican force was committed, the Duke slapped his thigh and declared: “Ha! Robespierre should have known better than to burn the books of classical history. We have him now.”
Boulanger’s fractured line of steam-guns continued their advance. As they neared the Allied line and began shelling it, Wesley deployed his own steam force, though he himself had always never cared much for the newfangled contraptions. Sir John Moore withdrew, conceding the field to the tirailleurs in order to better support the Whistler guns he knew so well. The ‘Whistler’ guns were under the command of the hastily promoted General David Daniels. These British weapons, supported by the French guns contributed by Bourcier and the Royalists’ captured stock, sought to attack Boulanger’s guns directly in artillery duel. While Cuvier’s force mostly used howitzer plunging fire to attack the Allied infantry, the British in particular used solid shot and their secret hail-shot weapon, the former to smash the Republican guns’ barrels and boilers by main force, the latter to kill their crews.[109] Nonetheless, if nothing else Boulanger still had plenty of conventional artillery to reply to the British effort with… but now he learned what it was like to try to hit a moving steam-propelled target from the other general’s perspective.
This was not, as some try and paint it, the first clash between steam-driven weapons of war and certainly not the first protgun battle. For a start, British ‘Whistler’ vehicles had clashed with Modigliani’s few steam guns during the invasion of England. But this certainly eclipsed those earlier skirmishes. The Allies were demonstrating to the world the later well-established principle that first adopter frequently loses out in the long run; the inventor of a new war-winning technology is always hampered by the fact that they have grown used to being the only one to possess it, and often are stuck with early models while copycat foreigners have managed to correct the mistakes that have been uncovered through experience.
Nonetheless, the Allies were still outnumbered. Cuvier’s remaining guns hit the Allied lines and tore bloody swathes through them, yet his own line had become too fractured by the Allied counterattack. Further, the French columns behind the guns had themselves become confused, having to engage or avoid the British and Allied French’s own steam-guns. Now Bourcier ordered the deployment of the Tortue steam-wagons which Lisieux had once used to crush the uprising in Paris, retrieved from their guarded Utilitarian warehouses dotted throughout the former City of Light. Stationed in the ‘horns’ of the Crescent with the Irish troops, the Tortues barged drunkenly through the middle of the marching Republican columns and wrought havoc with the enemy formation, their musketmen firing continuously from their firing slits. The Tortu
es had been designed for urban fighting on good roads and did not cope well with the more uneven terrain. All were eventually destroyed or immobilised by Republican artillery or grenadiers, but not before killing many Republican infantry and, more importantly, plunging Boulanger’s centre into chaos. Cuvier’s guns were making breaches in the Allied line, yet often the infantry columns were not there to support them. The breaches closed up, unexploited, and the guns were surrounded and captured simply by Allied infantry climbing atop them from the rear as they were unable to turn swiftly. Boulanger’s initial thrust had stalled.
As the afternoon wore on, both sides’ steam vehicles were now mostly out of the fight, whether through battle damage, immobilisation or simply having had their boilers fail from the strenuous fighting. The conflict was reduced once more to eighteenth-century warfare. The Republican columns in their black and red uniforms, marching below their Bloody Flag colours, sent catcalls towards Bourcier’s troops, calling them cowards and traitors. It did not help that Bourcier’s army had not had time to be re-equipped with Royal French uniforms. They mostly wore the same black and red as Boulanger’s men, going bareheaded after having thrown away their Phrygian caps and lacking replacement shakoes. They had hastily added cockades of Bourbon white or sashes of Royal blue. Nonetheless, no matter what hope Trenet had voiced in his conferences with Boulanger before the battle, Bourcier’s men did not break and switch sides. This battle would be to the finish.
Boulanger suffered from the absence of cavalry now that Leo Bone had destroyed his small force. Facing no opposition, Grouchy’s horse in particular performed several savage flying raids on the approaching columns. He forced them to form square to deflect his attacks and then would quickly retreat as the Allied conventional artillery pounded the compressed squares, a tactic dating back decades. Without cavalry of his own, Boulanger could not reciprocate.
Yet it was not enough. Numbers told. The Republicans ground inexorably onwards. Wesley’s Cannae-like horns tried to wrap around the back of the enemy formation. But Boulanger had been wise enough to keep a five thousand strong force in reserve under Charles Guimard at his rear, ready to relieve the encircled Republicans at the right moment. When Boulanger finally realised Wesley’s plan, he believed that his army would soon break through the bulk of the Allied French force and overrun Paris anyway, by sheer weight of numbers. Nonetheless, it was dangerously unwise to tolerate this encirclement even for a short while. Even if his plan could be guaranteed to work on paper, the men might grow doubtful and panicky. Boulanger therefore sent a message via signal balloon, ordering Guimard to strike at the encircling Irish lines under FitzGerald and smash through.
In the event, though, Guimard never arrived. It is doubtful whether Boulanger ever learned that a Russian force led by Heinz Kautzman, having marched all the way here from Dieppe via St Petersburg’s hellish copy of the Guerre d’éclair, had finally blundered into the Republican reserve and fell upon it. Quite apart from the main battle, visible only as rising powder smoke, the Russians, Lithuanians, Danes and Courlanders had finally found a Republican force to fight and, oblivious of the greater battle, the Bald Impostor crushed Guimard. The Russians and their allies were tired, but then so were the Republican French, and numbers told as decisively as they did on the main field of battle.
Then, just as it seemed the Republicans had finally massed enough organised columns to secure a breakout, Wesley – who had left the Maison de Montmartre and now stood right in their path at the head of his army – ordered the Wyverns forward.
The Wyverns were the last product of Project Whistler, large wooden constructions rolling slowly forward on steam-driven wheels. They were only barely moveable, just enough to bring them close to the enemy before the enemy could discern what they were…
The weapons they carried were rarely useful weapons of war. Yet as everyone from Tippoo Sultan on down had learned over the years, their very novelty and unpredictability could make veteran troops, troops who would calmly march in the face of an objectively far more dangerous hail of artillery, turn and run.
The rockets screamed and whined as they hurtled into the air, their explosive warheads detonating above the Republican columns’ Phrygian cap-clad heads, or sometimes in the midst of the men, killing a dozen or so. One or two were even experimentally equipped with scaled-down hail shot, doing even more withering damage. Finally, even as the last rockets were fired, Wesley threw the last of his cavalry into the Republicans’ flanks and ordered his infantry to advance with bayonets. A cacophony of battle cries filled the air. The Royalists yelled “Montjoie St. Denis!” Bourcier’s former Republicans cried “Vive la France, vive le Roi!”, sometimes after some hesitation. The Americans, Irish and the Scots and Welsh contingents of the British went for their usual cry of “Huzzah!” Some of the English, as well, particularly the northern English.
The southern English regiments surrounding Wesley, however, those whose home counties had suffered and burned under French Republicans, often while their own regiments were far away and unable to help, let out a war cry that had not been voiced by the English soldier in France since the Hundred Years’ War. “HAVOC!” they bellowed, to a man, somehow eclipsing the far more numerous allied French. “HAVOC!” The Hellequin was come once more, and just as his longbowman forefather had sought his vengeance upon France for the Norman Conquest, so now too did the musketman for Modigliani’s invasion.
And yet all of this would have been insufficient. The Republicans could afford to lose a few columns, regroup and try again, with no more tricks left in the Allied arsenal. The history of the world might be quite different had it not been for the fact that Boulanger was confident enough to lead this attack from near the front. With Trenet left in command of the battle as a whole, he was determined to break through and take Paris himself.
When the Marshal realised the attack was faltering in the face of the Wyvern rockets and the counter-attack, he prepared to retreat and regroup. But then he spotted something, or so Chanson records… the red light of the evening sun glinted off a golden crown amid the Allied generals in the middle of the line. King Louis was there.
(In fact he was not – Leo Bone and Olivier Bourcier, the latter ruefully acknowledging the former’s successful use of the tactic in the late campaign in the Vendée, had arranged a double to be there to rally the troops without the risk of the king actually being killed in battle, which the Britons in particular knew from their recent history was a very real possibility.)
Boulanger became consumed by irrational rage, seeing standing before him the very embodiment of the ancien régime whose return he sought to prevent. And he forgot all he had learned of military strategy, all the wonderful tricks of warfare that had led to him being one of the few Revolutionary generals who enjoyed grudging respect even among the conservative powers of Europe, as his heart melted into white-hot fury and he ordered one last march.
Wesley saw that, despite this foolish decision, there was still a chance Boulanger could break through, and if even a few Republicans broke out and into Paris, that could be the end of all they had worked for. So the only option, as Philip Bulkeley later put it, was for the Duke to do something equally foolish. He rode out to meet Boulanger with his small force, both men being surrounded by few living men and plenty of groaning corpses on that hell of a battlefield. “You will face me, sir!” he said, drawing his sword. Wesley, the man who had always seen duelling as a tiresome and wasteful pursuit, who had successfully had it banned in Ireland under his tenure as Lord Deputy, now stood upon a battlefield and challenged the master of all that remained of the French Latin Republic.
The Marshal looked at him. His loyal musketmen raised their weapons to shoot down the Irishman, but Boulanger stayed their hands. “No.” No-one really knows why he did this. The biographer Paul Simons argues that what Boulanger always yearned for was acceptance by high society, for that would prove the Revolutionary system he had always fought for had succeeded. Perhaps.
For whatever reason, Boulanger temporarily forgot the king he believed he had seen and drew his own blade, a heavy cavalry sabre. Wesley leapt from his horse and the two of them drew together, a circle opening up around them as men ceased fighting to watch this extraordinary spectacle. Indeed the very battle, or at least its centre, began to grind to a halt as men turned to look. Among them of course were General Cuvier (who had escaped the destruction of his steam guns) and, for the Allies, Leo Bone and General John Alexander. For the present, that circle of men did not fight, too consumed by what they saw before them, and inadvertently providing an inappropriate metaphor for generations of Societist ‘historians’.
The men duelled. It was not an aesthetically attractive or overly complex fight. Wesley had been trained in fencing; Boulanger had not, but was somewhat younger, stronger and had height and reach on the Irishman. Both were supremely experienced in unarmed combat, both believed in leading from the front as generals. Their swords crashed together once, twice, once more, neither man gaining an advantage. At one point Wesley stumbled and some commentators say that Boulanger allowed him to rise, but this is uncertain. First blood went to Wesley as he nicked Boulanger’s cheek on the backstroke, yet the Marshal ignored the bloody cut with stoicism as he sought to chip away at the Irishman’s defences.