Dec. 18.
On the 16th Pichegru returned and resumed the command, and on the 18th the weather changed from rain to a severe frost. In a very few days the Maas and Waal were full of floating ice, which began to pack together, threatening to cover the whole breadth of their streams; while on the Leck the rapidity of the current swept away the bridge of boats at Arnheim. Harcourt, foreseeing that before long the ice on the Waal would become passable by the enemy, prepared to retreat northward. Just at this most critical moment, moreover, there arrived orders from Dundas that seven British battalions of his army were required for service elsewhere; that of these seven the Fortieth, Forty-fourth, and Sixty-third must march to Helvoetsluys at once; and that Alvintzy, who so far had thrown every possible difficulty in the way of co-operation with the Allies, must find troops to take their place. Further, it was nowascertained that the Dutch had gone far in negotiation with the French, and there were strong rumours that an armistice had been concluded between them. Meanwhile the cold increased; sentries were frozen at their posts; and the ice on the Waal, in front of the Allies, became strong enough to give passage to the French, while that on the Leck in their rear, though thick enough to prevent the passage of boats, was too thin to bear cavalry or artillery. Harcourt’s anxiety was extreme; and he begged Dundas urgently for some further instructions as to the duty expected of him, since the order to weaken the force by sending home seven battalions was not in itself of any great assistance.
Dec. 27.
Affairs were in this condition when, on the 27th, the French crossed the Meuse on the ice to the Bommeler Waert, surprised the Dutch posts there, and pushed on by Bommel over the frozen Waal to Tuil. The Dutch at this place fled instantly without firing a shot, some of the fugitives running on even to Utrecht. At Meteren, a few miles north of Tuil, the French were checked by the Hessians; but, with their right flank exposed by the flight of the Dutch, it was doubtful whether these could maintain their position. Their commander, however, General Dalwig, decided to stand fast, and ascertained by reconnaissance nextDec. 28.day that the French did not exceed two thousand men; whereupon Walmoden ordered ten battalions and six squadrons of British and Emigrants under David Dundas to Geldermalsen, a short distance north of Meteren, in the hope of annihilating this foolhardy French detachment. Accordingly, at one o’clock onDec. 30.the morning of the 30th, the force moved out from Meteren in three columns, two of them to move direct upon Tuil from the north and north-east, while thethird, under Lord Cathcart, fetched a compass to close in upon the enemy from the west. Cathcart’s column unfortunately found the roads impassable and never came into action; but Dundas nevertheless attacked without him, and drove the French, after a sharp fight, from their entrenchments and across the Waal, with the loss of four guns and many killed and wounded, while his own casualties did not exceed fifty. This checked the ardour of the enemy for the moment, and during a few days there was peace upon the Waal.[288]
1795.
Walmoden now reinforced his right about Tuil, for the news had reached him that the fortresses of Gertruydenburg and Heusden, on the extreme right of the Allied line, were in serious danger; and on the 3rd ofJan. 3.January 1795 he shifted his quarters to Amerongen, due north of Tiel, and on the north bank of the Leck. Grave at this same time capitulated, and released a large number of French troops for the field. Moreau’s division therefore took up cantonments over against Alvintzy’s corps from Xanten down the Rhine to the Pannarden Canal. Souham’s division, now transferred to Macdonald, occupied the space between the Meuse and Waal as far as the point opposite to Tiel; two more divisions were in the Bommeler Waert, and yet two more about Gertruydenburg and Breda. On the 3rd of January the weather again became intenselyJan. 4.cold, and at noon on the 4th two French detachments from the Bommeler Waert marched over the ice, drove in the posts before Tuil and at Hesselt, a little to the east of it, after hard fighting, and thus gained a passage by which they could move westward on the northbank of the Waal. On the following day the FrenchJan. 5.attacked Tuil itself, whereupon the Dutch gunners at once fled from their batteries on the river; but, advancing from thence against Geldermalsen, the enemy was repulsed with some loss by the Thirty-third, Forty-second, and Seventy-eighth, under the direction of General David Dundas. It was, however, plain that these posts could not be held against a strong attack so long as frost practically neutralised their natural defences; and Walmoden recalled Dundas and all the troops in that quarter to the north side of the Leck, in order to take up a new line of cantonments extending from Arnheim on the east by Wageningen, Reenen, Amerongen, and Wyk-by-Duurstede to Honswyk.
Jan. 6.
A sudden thaw on the 6th offered hopes of re-establishing the old position on the Waal, and orders were issued on the 7th for a reconnaissance in force of the whole line of the French posts on the followingJan. 8.day; but on the morning of the 8th the frost abruptly set in again, though not before the troops were already in motion beyond power of recall. On the right, Dundas succeeded in driving the enemy from their posts on the Linge to the Waal, and in recovering Buren and Tiel. The brunt of the work fell upon the Fourteenth, Twenty-seventh, and Twenty-eighth under Lord Cathcart; and these drove the enemy in succession from the villages of Buurmalsen and Geldermalsen and captured a gun, not, however, without a loss of one hundred and thirty men to themselves. On the left the orders seem to have miscarried, probably through the confusion due to divided command. Before the operation could be carried any further, Pichegru, finding that the ice on the Waal was stronger than ever,Jan. 10.on the 10th fell upon the Allied line in great force at three different points between the Pannarden Canaland Tiel. The attack was repulsed upon the right, but the Austrians were forced back on the left flank, and Walmoden ordered the whole force to withdraw once more behind the Leck. This was effected with little loss; Colonel Coote’s brigade of the Fortieth, Fiftieth, and Seventy-ninth being the only British forces severely engaged. Walmoden had fully intended to continue the retreat eastward across the Yssel; but Lord St. Helens, at the Hague, unfortunately protested against this, and another thaw enabled Walmoden to acquiesce. On the night of the 12th frost again set in more severely than ever, and on the 14th the French attacked along the whole line fromJan. 15.Arnheim to Reenen. They were beaten back with heavy loss; but Walmoden, feeling that he was unable to hold his ground, on the following morning gave the order for a further retreat.
The days that followed are amongst the most tragical in the history of the Army. During November and December the discipline of the troops in Holland had greatly improved, but with the coming of the frost and the hardships that attended the constant alarms and marches on the Waal, it had once more broken down completely. Certain regiments of French emigrants, which had joined the army late in the year, were the worst offenders; but it seems certain that some of the British were not far behind them. The country to the north of Arnheim is at the best of times an inhospitable waste, and there were few dwellings and few trees to give shelter or fuel after a dreary march through dense and chilling mist over snow twice thawed and refrozen. Marauders from the regiments of every nationality swarmed round the columns; the drivers of the waggons freed themselves from all control, and the line of march was disorderly beyond description. When the daywas ended, the troops of different nations fought for such scanty comforts as were to be found; and once there was a pitched battle between the Guards and the Hessians, who had been on bad terms with each other from the beginning of the campaign. Day after day the cold steadily increased; and those of the army that woke on the morning of the 17th of January saw about them such a sight as they never forgot. Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, waggons full of baggage, of stores, or of sick men, sutlers’ carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered on to the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans round an empty rum-cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together about a plundered waggon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby, swathed in rags, peeping out of the pack, with its mother’s milk turned to ice upon its lips,—one and all stark, frozen, dead. Had the retreat lasted but three or four days longer, not a man would have escaped; and the catastrophe would have found a place in history side by side with the destruction of the host of Sennacherib and with the still more terrible disaster of the retreat from Moscow.[289]
Jan. 19.
By the 19th the surviving fragments of the battalions reached their destination on the Yssel, where they were cantoned on the west side of the river from Zutphen to the sea. But there was no hope of long repose for them there. Harcourt perceived clearly that the re-embarkation of his force was now the only resource leftto him, and that the place of embarkation must be on the Weser, since the lack of supplies and the incapacity of his commissariat-officers would inevitably forbid him to remain long on the Ems. Within a week, want of victuals and the hostility of the inhabitants compelled him to continue his retreat from the Yssel; andJan. 27–29.on the 27th the march eastward was resumed, the main body of the British retiring towards Osnabrück, the Germans upon Münster. One detachment of British,[290]however, was sent northward under Lord Cathcart’s command to fetch a compass through West Friesland and along the borders of Groningen, in order to ascertain whether the people of these provinces were as ill-affected as their fellows towards the House of Orange. By whose orders this isolated force was despatched upon such an errand is uncertain; it is only known that the column was followed up and incessantly harassed by the enemy, and that it was not very successful in discovering friendly sentiments among the Dutch. Upon reaching the Ems, the army halted, and on the 5th February took up cantonments on the western bank of the river, Cathcart on the extreme north guarding the passes of the Bourtanger Moor from the Dollart southward, while Abercromby fixed his headquarters further to south and west of the river at Bentheim, and the Hanoverians retired to Münster.
The state of the troops by this time was worse than ever, for thousands of sick had perforce been left behind on the Yssel. “Your army is destroyed,” wrote Walmoden to the Duke of York; “the officers, their carriages, and a large train are safe, but the men are destroyed. The army has now no more than six thousand fighting men, but it has all the drawbacks of thirty-three battalions, and consumes a vast quantityof forage.” A more terrible reproach was never yet levelled against any force; nevertheless it was rather the politicians than the military commanders who had made such a reproach possible, by flinging commissions broadcast to any man or even child who could afford to satisfy the crimps. Upon entering German territory the men met with kindlier treatment from the inhabitants; but the infamous conduct of the French Emigrant Corps threatened to turn the Germans also into enemies. It now became abundantly clear that most of these regiments were simply frauds, imposed upon the English Ministers by a band of unscrupulous adventurers. But the English army, of course, had to bear the burden of their sins; and the Hanoverians and Hessians, naturally espousing the cause of their countrymen, turned upon the British with a bitterness which destroyed all cohesion between the nations of the Allies.[291]
Meanwhile the French, after leaving their opponents to retreat unmolested from the Leck, resumed their advance, and at the end of January occupied Kampen and Zwolle on the Yssel. They made, however, no attempt to hinder the further retirement of the Allies; and their movements for the next fortnight were of the most leisurely description. Then arrived rumours of a French understanding with Prussia, of the neutralisation of North Germany, and of a line of demarcation to be drawn according to the actual territory occupied by the opposing armies. The French at once woke to the importance of gaining immediate possession of Groningen and East Friesland, and General Macdonald’s corps was detached to invade Groningen, while those of Moreau and Vandamme remained in observationon the Yssel. On the 19th of February Macdonald occupied the town of Groningen, and thence turning eastward he, on the 27th, attacked Cathcart’s fortified posts at Winschoten. He was repulsed; but two daysFeb. 27.March 1.March 3.later the attack was renewed with success by General Reynier, and Cathcart was forced to retreat, which he did with great dexterity, crossing the Ems upon the 3rd. The entire British force then fell back to the east bank of the Ems to hold the line from Emden to Rheine, headquarters being fixed at Osnabrück.
Five days later the British Cabinet at last decided to withdraw its troops from the Continent, and on theMarch 11.11th Harcourt, to his infinite relief, received intimation that transports for twenty-three thousand men were on their way to him. The Hanoverians were in consternation over the danger to which Hanover was exposed by this measure, but there was no help for it. A fewMarch 16.days later Prussian troops arrived to hold the line of the Ems, and on the 22nd the British began their march to Bremen for embarkation. The Prussians did their utmost by obstruction, discourtesy, and insolence to disoblige them on their passage through the country; but this was natural, for they had always professed contempt for the British as a nation of traders, and a tradesman is never so despicable to a dishonest customer as when he refuses to grant himApril 14.further credit. Finally, on the 14th of April, the infantry and part of the artillery took ship for England, leaving the remainder of the artillery and the whole of the cavalry behind them under Lord Cathcart and David Dundas. The number embarked was nearly fifteen thousand, some proportion of the sick having been recovered; so that the losses after the retreat from the Leck must have amounted to about six thousand men, of which not a tithe were killed orwounded in action. Thus disgracefully ended the first expedition of Pitt and Dundas to the Low Countries.
Authorities.—The British despatches relating to the expeditions to Flanders will be found inW.O. Orig. Corresp.46–48, and in Entry Book No. 11. The number of private letters included in this collection makes it of unusual value. For the campaigns at large the best accounts known to me are in Ditfurth’sDie Hessen in den Feldzügen, 1793, 1794, und 1795(Kassel, 1839), and in Witzleben’sPrinz Friedrich Josias von Coburg-Saalfeld(Berlin, 1859), which is not a little built upon Ditfurth, but contains much that is valuable of its own and a superb atlas of maps. On the French side the short memoir of David and the life of Pichegru are of little worth compared with the narrative of Jomini. Marshal Macdonald’sMémoiresare disappointing at this period. Of English printed accounts the most important is Jones’sHistorical Journal of the British Campaign in 1794. TheJournalof Corporal James Brown of the Coldstream Guards supplies a few interesting details. Sir H. Calvert’sJournal and Correspondenceis often of value; and there is a great deal of most useful information in the foot-notes to the miserable doggerel called theNarrative of an Officer of the Guards. Unfortunately the author, like Brown and Calvert, was a Coldstreamer, for which reason all three confine themselves chiefly to the doings of the brigade of Guards. The regimental histories of the 14th Foot and 15th Hussars have occasionally interesting material, but, taken altogether, the regimental records are disappointing.
THE END
Printed byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh.
Stanford’s Geogl. Estabt., London.THE NETHERLANDS in the 18thCentury.
Stanford’s Geogl. Estabt., London.
THE NETHERLANDS in the 18thCentury.
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