The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Meanwhile, Grenville’s diplomatic offensive was vigorous and practical. As already noted, the Russians had until recently been considered the chief danger to European peace, with the Prussians following as a close second. Catherine the Great was not quite an enemy of Britain, while the Austrians were now in an uneasy alliance with her which the British believed acted as a restraint. The double offensive of the Russians and then the Prussians against Poland had revolted public opinion in Britain, and Austrian silence suggested tacit connivance with its ally, Russia. With the coming of the French Revolution, however, relations between Russia and Britain were at last easing. Catherine detested the revolutionaries and she now at last agreed to a renewal of a commercial treaty with Britain, as well as a pact specifying co-operation in the event of war.

  The Austrians, for their part, were delighted by British enmity towards France. The new chancellor, Baron Thugut, was pleased to have a counterpoise to the Prussians, whom he detested almost as much as the revolutionary French. Britain’s formal allies, the Prussians, were deeply suspicious of the new British rapprochement with Austria, but the Prussians needed money from Britain and asked for it; the British were happy to oblige in return for greater military help. An agreement between the two was signed, and soon the Austrians half-heartedly joined, creating the First Coalition against France.

  Grenville was also busy elsewhere. A convention was soon signed with the King of Savoy, who had lost Nice and Savoy to the French and was now threatened in Piedmont. The British held out promises of despatching a fleet to the Mediterranean to help Piedmont in its efforts to regain Nice and Savoy, and were prepared to pay money for the King to employ Swiss mercenaries. In exchange for a Savoyard army of 50,000 men, the British said they would send a fleet and provide some £200,000 a year. The promise of a British fleet was also thoroughly welcome in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies which controlled Naples in the south. The King agreed to provide 5,000 troops along with four ships of the line to help the British in exchange for British protection.

  The British also sent out feelers to their old enemy Spain. The Spaniards were difficult at first, but the British offered to protect their fleets while the Spaniards helped sustain Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. Portugal, an old friend of Britain’s, was also happy to join the British effort – but only after the annual convoy from Brazil had arrived safely. The Turks preferred neutrality, but were not hostile to the British. The Genoese and the Tuscans, which had strong French links, opted for neutrality. The British also looked to the German princedoms for mercenaries, as they had in the past. Hanover, linked to the British monarchy, promised to send 13,000 men to Holland. Hesse, which had provided a large mercenary army during the American War of Independence, offered some 15,000. The Swedes were also approached for support.

  It was an extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive diplomatic effort and, to begin with, it worked. Grenville was seeking to encircle revolutionary France with hostile monarchical powers. In an astonishingly short space of time he had succeeded: with British fleets projected for the Baltic and the Mediterranean, the French would truly be boxed in. The next section will look at Britain’s naval offensive which in this early stage, as later, was to be Britain’s major contribution to the war effort. Finally, Pitt himself took the reins of Britain’s land assault, which was designed to liberate Holland and take advantage of the explosion of a series of anti-revolutionary civil wars across France.

  Before looking at the British expedition, it is worth considering the nature and extent of the fighting within France itself. France’s predicament looked extremely precarious at the outbreak of the war: the Austrians, soon to be joined by British and Hanoverian forces, were advancing in the north. In the east on the central front, the Prussian and Austrian armies were pressing hard. After being driven out of Mentz, they were also pushed out of the strongly fortified lines of Weissenburg by the Austrian General Wurmser.

  In Piedmont, after the initial advances, the French had been edged out of their camp at Belvedere. The French had also acted rashly by attacking Spain: a Spanish army had defeated General Servan, and the Spaniards had crossed the Bidassoa, as well as taking Port Vendres and Olliolles.

  Within France’s own borders, the worst conflict had broken out in the Vendée, the heavily wooded and pastoral country area of hills and streams, canals and ditches just south of the Loire, which contains an almost impassable area, known as the Thicket. There the aristocracy shared in the lives of the peasantry, who had a joint ownership of the cattle herds of the region, and took part in hunting together; nor were the nobility particularly rich. The people were also highly religious. In 1793 the region erupted into a spontaneous uprising against the revolutionaries. As a near-contemporary historian related:

  Their tactics were peculiar to themselves, but of a kind so well suited to their country and their habits, that it seems impossible to devise a better and more formidable system. The Vendéan took the field with the greatest simplicity of military equipment. His scrip served as a cartridge-box, his uniform was the country short jacket and pantaloons, which he wore at his ordinary labour; a cloth knapsack contained bread and some necessaries, and thus he was ready for service. They were accustomed to move with great secrecy and silence among the thickets and inclosures by which their country is intersected, and were thus enabled to choose at pleasure the most favourable points of attack or defence.

  Their army, unlike any other in the world, was not divided into companies, or regiments, but followed in bands, and at their pleasure, the chiefs to whom they were most attached. Instead of drums or military music, they used, like the ancient Swiss and Scottish soldiers, the horns of cattle for giving signals to their troops. Their officers wore, for distinction, a sort of chequered red hand-kerchief knotted round their head, with others of the same colour tied round their waist, by way of sash, in which they stuck their pistols.

  [The Vendéans were guerrillas shooting from behind trees and bushes with whoops and shouts to alarm the enemy, then withdrawing.]

  When the Republicans, galled in this manner, pressed forward to a close attack, they found no enemy on which to wreak their vengeance; for the loose array of the Vendéans gave immediate passage to the head of the charging column, while its flanks, as it advanced, were still more exposed than before to the murderous fire of their invisible enemies. In this manner they were sometimes led on from point to point, until the regulars meeting with a barricade, or an abbatis, or a strong position in front, or becoming perhaps involved in a defile, the Vendéans exchanged their fatal musketry for a close and furious onset, throwing themselves with the most devoted courage among the enemy’s ranks, and slaughtering them in great numbers.

  The inhabitants of the Vendée traditionally carried poles with which to vault the frequent waterways, a skill the republicans lacked. For two years the war between the guerrillas’ self-styled Royal and Continental Army and the republicans raged with a ferocity unparalleled elsewhere in France: the insurgents won most of the 200 recorded engagements.

  Thus frustrated, the besieging republicans resorted to terror. One republican unit was labelled the Infernal for its cruelties, which included roasting women and children in an oven at Pillau. As one republican soldier noted with considerable dismay:

  I did not see a single male being at the towns of Sain Hermand, Chantonnay, or Herbiers. A few women alone had escaped the sword. Country-seats, cottages, habitations of whichever kind, were burnt. The herds and flocks were wandering in terror around their usual places of shelter, now smoking in ruins. I was surprised by night, but the wavering and dismal blaze of conflagration afforded light over the country. To the bleating of the disturbed flocks, and bellowing of the terrified cattle, was joined the deep hoarse notes of carrion crows, and the yells of wild animals coming from the recesses of the woods to prey on the carcasses of the slain. At length a distant column of fire, widening and increasing as I approached, served me as a beacon. It was the town of Mortagne in flames.
When I arrived there, no living creatures were to be seen, save a few wretched women who were striving to save some remnants of their property from the general conflagration.

  In June 1793 the insurgents of the Vendée tried to capture the town of Nantes, some twenty-seven miles upstream from the sea, which might have given the British a major inland base, as the river Loire was navigable up to there. But the attack was beaten off and Pitt, who had no wish at that stage to get involved in the fighting within France, refused to come to the help of the Vendée. The revolutionaries sent in a huge army of 100,000 men to subdue the region, including 15,000 crack troops. After a major defeat near Cholet, the rebels of the Vendée retreated to Brittany, which would be easier to defend, and inflicted an unexpected defeat on the republicans as they crossed the Loire near St Florent. But at Mons they were at last decisively defeated with the loss of 15,000 men.

  A brilliant guerrilla commander, La Chalette, however, continued to carry out strikes against the French. The war was only finally brought to an end when another large army was despatched to Brittany and La Chalette was captured and shot in March 1796. Pitt had cynically abandoned the insurgents of the Vendée to a terrible fate: a British intervention might have proved decisive in their support.

  In the south the Jacobin putsch against the Girondins caused major unrest in four key cities: Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyon and Toulon. Bordeaux failed to unite in support of the Girondins. However, some 3,000 men took up arms against the Jacobins in Marseilles, only to be mauled at Avignon. There was an uprising in Lyon against the hated overseers in Paris, but the city was quickly surrounded by an army of 6,000 men under General Kellerman: after two months of ferocious bombardment, the city fell, although 2,000 broke out and just fifty reached the safety of the Swiss border. As an act of vengeance, all the major buildings in the city were levelled one by one and many of the rebels were rounded up and massacred. At Toulon, the key port in southern France for projecting French naval power, the insurgents led by royalist naval officers appealed for protection to the English and Spanish fleets cruising off the port, and this was promptly provided ready to give, as we have seen, Napoleon his first military triumph.

  This then was the state of France when Britain joined the war at the beginning of 1793. The Jacobins, a revolutionary minority, were fighting on four fronts: in the east, in the north, in the south-west against Spain and in the south-east against Piedmont. Internally, they were facing a huge revolt in the west in the Vendée and Brittany, and major insurrections throughout central France, as well as the defection of their main southern naval base. The revolutionaries’ hold appeared precarious at best, if not desperate: all they had on their side was their new huge conscript armies, knocked into some kind of fighting shape by Dumouriez and other brilliant French officers, and the revolutionary Terror which inspired officers and men to fight as hard as possible or forfeit their lives. A decisive push by the allied forces at this stage, in particular by Britain, would have seemed enough to snuff out the revolutionary flame.

  This was exactly what did not happen. The British military intervention at the outset of the war was almost unparalleled in history for its disastrous incompetence, timorousness, indecisiveness, and appalling leadership. Pitt’s ministry must share the blame equally with the British commanders: this highly successful peacetime prime minister in the first years of the war turned out to be an almost wholly disastrous wartime one, and his reputation was redeemed only towards the end of the ministry. It is extraordinary that he managed to stay in office through a string of failures, but he was assisted by the support of the King, the disorganization of the opposition and the diplomatic skills of Grenville, which proved as inspired as the actual conduct of the war proved catastrophic.

  Chapter 17

  DUNKIRK

  Pitt’s first intervention was faint-hearted, despatching just 1,500 men under the command of the Duke of York, George III’s favourite son, to land at Helvoetsluys in Holland to help the Dutch in February 1793. This was essentially a token gesture, and proved to be unnecessary as well, as the advancing Austrian army was already winning a series of battles – Aldenhoven, Neerwinden and Louvais – which forced the French to return to Antwerp. Other Allied forces were converging – the Prussians and the Hanoverians. The Austrian Netherlands had been recovered and Holland itself was safe.

  Thus encouraged, Pitt, instead of withdrawing his redundant force, decided to take the initiative: he resolved to seize Dunkirk, once a British possession, as a bargaining counter. He believed that the war was virtually won and would be of short duration. He thought he could offer Dunkirk, once seized, as a prize to the Austrians as one of a chain of ports necessary to protect Belgium from the French, and in exchange get them to stay in the Austrian Netherlands to guarantee security (Austria had long sought to wash its hands of this distant province by handing it over to the Prussians in a territorial exchange, something the British, always uneasy at Prussian intentions, regarded with deep foreboding). The port would in any event be useful in ferrying supplies to the Austrian army, and it would be denied as a base for French privateers.

  The Duke of Richmond, who was Master-General of the Ordnance and effectively minister of war, immediately tried to bring the prime minister down to earth. He had made no preparations for war, and it would take time to train newly recruited troops. The army anyway was overstretched.

  I stated to Mr Pitt that I thought he was going on much too fast in his calculations. That men just raised upon paper were not soldiers . . . that I thought it required at least six months . . . to make them at all fit for service and that even then they would be but very young and raw soldiers . . . I particularly represented to Mr Pitt that very proper [as] his schemes and ideas were they were much too vast to be executed within anything like the time he talked of that . . . by undertaking too much he would do nothing well. That great and long preparations were necessary for all military services, and that he could not too soon fix upon the precise plan he meant to pursue, determine his force . . . appoint his commander and fix the time for his operations. [Pitt] contended strongly that the service in Flanders would not interfere with any of his other plans and talked eagerly about them as what he really had in view . . . I told him that he would find himself mistaken and he said I should find he was not, and so we parted in great good humour.

  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.