Tourcoing Part 2

If that was in his mind, it shows him to have been a prompt and energetic man, and to have had a full appreciation of the place which surprise occupied in the chances of success. If, indeed, the Emperor got the Duke of York's message in time on the 12th, if he had at once accepted the plan, and had with Napoleonic rapidity ordered the bulk of his forces (which were still right away south and east) to move, he might have had them by forced marches upon and across the Scheldt, and ready to execute the plan by the 14th, or at any rate by the morning of the 15th.

But from what we know of the family to which the Duke of York belonged, it is exceedingly improbable that this younger son of George III. had, on this one occasion only, any lightning in his brain; and even if he did appreciate more or less the importance of rapid action, the Emperor did not appreciate it. He committed the two contradictory faults of delaying the movement and of asking too much marching of his men, and it was not until the morning of the Wednesday, May the 14th, that the bulk of the Austrian army, which still lay in the Valenciennes and Landrecies district, broke up for its northward march, to arrive at the rendezvous beyond the Scheldt, and to carry out the plan.[2]

It was not until Thursday the 15th of May that the Emperor joined the Duke of York at Tournai, and very late upon the same day the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up the main body of the Austrian forces from the south to the town of St Amand.

We shall see later what a grievous error it was to demand so violent an effort from the men of the Arch-Duke Charles' command. From Landrecies itself to St Amand is 30 miles as the crow flies; and though, of course, the ma.s.s of the troops which the Arch-Duke Charles had been thus commanded to bring up northward in such haste were most of them well on the right side of Landrecies when the order to advance reached them, yet the average march undertaken by his men in little more than twenty-four hours was a full twenty miles, and some of his units must have covered nearer thirty. I will not delay further on this point here; its full importance will appear when we come to talk of the action itself.

The Arch-Duke Charles being only as far as St Amand on the evening of Thursday the 15th, and his rendezvous, that of the fifth column in the great plan, being Pont-a-Marcq, a further good sixteen miles north-westward, it was evident that the inception of that plan and the simultaneous advance of all the five columns from their five starting-points of Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-a-Marcq, could not begin even upon the 16th. It would take the best part of a day to bring the Arch-Duke Charles up to Pont-a-Marcq; his men were in imperative need of rest during a full night at St Amand, and it is probable, though I have no proof of it, that he had not even fully concentrated there by the evening of the 15th, and that his last units only joined him during the forenoon of the 16th.

The whole of that day, therefore, the 16th, was consumed so far as the first, second, third, and fourth columns were concerned, in merely gathering and marshalling their forces, and occupying, before nightfall, the points from which they were to depart simultaneously in the combined advance of the morrow. They _had_ to wait thus for the dawn of the 17th, because they had to allow time for the fifth column to come up.

The time-table imposed upon the great plan by these delays is now apparent. The moment when all the strings of the net were to be pulled together round Souham was the s.p.a.ce between midnight and dawn of Sat.u.r.day the 17th of May. And the hour when all the six bodies of the allies were to join hands at "R" near Tourcoing was the noon of that day.

Before day broke upon the 17th, Clerfayt was to find himself at Wervicq upon the River Lys and across that stream, while of the five southern columns the Arch-Duke Charles was to be attacking the French troops just in front of Pont-a-Marcq with the fifth column at the same moment; Kinsky, with the fourth, was to be well on the way from Froidmont to Bouvines where he was to attack the French also and cross the bridge; the Duke of York, with the third, was to be well on the way from Templeuve to Lannoy; Otto, with the second, was to be equally advanced upon his line, somewhere by Wattrelos in his march upon Tourcoing; while Bussche, with his small first column, on the extreme north, was to be getting into contact with the French posts south of Courtrai, which it was his duty to "hold,"

impressing upon Souham the idea that a main attack might develop in that quarter, and so deluding the French into maintaining their perilously advanced stations until they were cut off from Lille by the rest of the allies.

The morning would be filled by the advance of Clerfayt from Wervicq southward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing, while the corresponding fighting advance northward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing also, of Otto, York, Kinsky, and the Arch-Duke Charles, should result somewhere about noon in their joining hands with Clerfayt and forming one great body: a body cutting off Courtrai from Lille, and the 40,000 under Souham from their fellows in the main French line.

With such a time-table properly observed, the plan should have succeeded, and between the noon and the evening of that Sat.u.r.day, the great force which Souham commanded should have been at the mercy of the allies.

Such was the plan and such the time-table upon which it was schemed. Its success depended, of course, as I have said, upon an exact keeping of that time-table, and also upon the net being drawn round Souham before he had guessed what was happening. The second of these conditions, we shall see when we come to speak of "The Preliminaries of the Action," was successfully accomplished. The first was not; and its failure is the story of the defeat suffered by the Duke of York in particular, and the consequent break-down of the whole strategical conception of the allies.

But before dealing with this it is necessary to establish a disputed point.

I have spoken throughout of the plan as the Duke of York's. Because it failed, and because the Duke of York was an English prince, historians in this country have not only rejected this conclusion, but, as a rule, have not even mentioned it. The plan has been represented as Mack's plan, as a typical example of Austrian pedantry and folly, the Duke of York as the victim of foolish foreigners who did not know their business, and it has even been hinted that the Austrians desired defeat! With the latter extravagant and even comic suggestion I will deal later in this study; for the moment I am only concerned with the responsibility of the Duke of York.

It must, in the first place, be clearly understood that the failure of the plan does not reflect upon the judgment of that commander. It failed because Clerfayt was not up to time, and because too much had been asked of the fifth column. The Duke came of a family not famous for genius; he was exceedingly young, and whatever part he may have had in the framing of this large conception ought surely to stand to his credit.

It is true that Mack, the Austrian General, drafted details of the plan immediately before it was carried into execution, and our princ.i.p.al military historian in this country tells us how "on the 16th, Mack prepared an elaborate plan which he designed."[3]

Well, the 16th was the Friday.

Now we know that on the 11th of May, the Sunday, the Emperor and his staff had no intention of making a combined attack to cut off Souham from Lille, for orders were given to Clerfayt on that day to engage Souham along the valley of the Lys for the purpose of holding the attention of the French, and in the hope of recovering Menin--the exact opposite of what would have been ordered if a secret and unexpected attempt to cut off Souham by crossing further up the river had been intended. It was at the same moment that the Duke of York was sending word to Clerfayt on his own account, to the effect that he intended to submit a plan to the Emperor, and it is worth noting that in the very order which was sent to Clerfayt by the Emperor he was told to refer to the Duke of York as to his future movements.

The archives of the Ministry of War at Vienna have it on record that the Duke of York made a definite statement of a plan to Clerfayt, which plan he intended to submit to the Emperor immediately, and a letter dated upon the Monday, the 12th--four days before there is any talk of Mack's arranging details,--York writes to Clerfayt telling him that he hopes to make his decisive movement against the enemy on the Wednesday, the 14th.

On the 13th, Tuesday, the orders of the Emperor to both Clerfayt and the Duke of York (which are also on record) set down this plan in detail, mentioning the point Wervicq at which Clerfayt was expected to cross the river Lys, and at the same time directing the Duke of York to march northward with the object of joining Clerfayt, and thus cutting off the French forces ma.s.sed round Courtrai from their base. Further, in this same despatch, the initiative is particularly left to the Duke of York, and it is once more from him that Clerfayt is to await decisions as to the moment and details of the operation.

The same archives record the Duke of York sending Lieut.-Colonel Calvert to Clerfayt upon the 14th, to tell him that he meant to attack upon the morrow, the 15th, and they further inform us that it was on the English Prince's learning how scattered were Clerfayt's units, and how long it would therefore take him to concentrate, that action was delayed by some thirty-six hours.

Evidence of this sort is absolutely conclusive. The plan was not Mack's; it was York's.

PART IV

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE

Tourcoing is an action the preliminaries of which are easy to describe, and need occupy little of our s.p.a.ce, because it was a battle in which the plan of one side was developed and prosecuted almost to its conclusion without a corresponding plan upon the other side.

As a rule, the preliminaries of a battle consist in the dispositions taken by each side for hours or for days--sometimes for weeks--beforehand, in order to be in a posture to receive or to attack the other side. These preliminaries include manoeuvring for position, and sometimes in the fighting of minor subsidiary actions before the main action takes place.

Now, in the case of Tourcoing, there was none of this, for the French at Tourcoing were surprised.

The surprise was not complete, but it was sufficiently thorough to make the whole of the fighting during the first day, Sat.u.r.day (at least, the whole of the fighting in the centre of the field), a triumph for the allied advance.

Let us first appreciate exactly how matters looked to Souham when, on the 15th, the Thursday, the blow was about to fall upon him.

He had under his orders, with headquarters now at Courtrai, now at Menin (see sketch map on p. 58), rather less than 40,000. In that dash upon Courtrai a fortnight before, which had led to the dangerous establishment of so large an advanced body in front of the main French line, one main effect of that advance had been to push back, away to the left beyond the Lys, more than 16,000, but less than 20,000 men under the Austrian General, Clerfayt. With that army, Clerfayt's body, Souham had remained continually in touch. Detachments of it were continually returning to the valley of the Lys to hara.s.s his posts, and, in a word, Clerfayt's was the only force of the enemy which Souham thought he had need to bear in mind.

The bulk of the Austrian army he knew to be quite four days' march away to the south, at first occupied in the siege of Landrecies, and later stationed in the vicinity of that fortress.

Of course, lying in his exposed position, Souham knew that a general attack upon him from the south was one of the possibilities of the situation, but it was not a thing which he thought could come unexpectedly: at any rate he thought himself prepared, by the use of his scouts and his spies, to hear of any such advance in ample time.

In case he should be attacked, the attack might take one of many forms. It might try to drive him over the Lys, where Clerfayt would be ready to meet him; or it might be a general attack upon Courtrai as a centre; or it might be (what had, as we have seen, been actually determined) an attempt to cut him and all his 40,000 off from the main French line.

This main French line ran through the town of Lille, and Lille not only had its garrison, but also at Sainghin, outside the fortifications to the south-east, a camp, under Bonnaud, of 20,000 men. If the attack from the south or from the north, or from both, managed to cut Souham off from Bonnaud's camp, and from the garrison at Lille, he was ruined, and his 40,000 were lost; but he hoped to be kept sufficiently informed of the enemy's movements to fall back in time, should such an attempt be made, and to provide for it by effecting a junction with Bonnaud before it was delivered.

Pichegru, the Commander of the whole French army of the north, who had ordered the advance on Courtrai, happened to be absent upon a visit to the posts away south upon the Sambre River. Souham was therefore temporarily in full command of all the troops which were to be concerned in the coming battle. But the position was only a temporary one, and that must account for the deference he paid to the advice of the four generals subordinate to him, and for the council which he called at Menin on the critical Sat.u.r.day night which decided the issue. He himself quotes his commission in the following terms:--"Commander-in-Chief of all the troops from the camp at Sainghin to Courtrai inclusive."

From the beginning of the week, when a detachment of his troops had but just recovered from a sharp action with the Duke of York's men towards Tournai, Souham appreciated that the forces of the enemy were gradually increasing to the south of him, and that the posts upon the Scheldt were receiving additional enforcements of men. But neither his judgment nor the reports that came in to him led him to believe that the ma.s.s of the Austrian army was coming north to attack him. And in this he was right, for, as we have seen, the Emperor did not make up his mind until Wednesday the 14th, which was the day when orders were sent to the Arch-Duke Charles to march northward.

Souham's att.i.tude of mind up to, say, the Thursday may be fairly described in some such terms as follows:--

"I know that a concentration is going on in the valley of the Scheldt to the south and east of me; it is pretty big, but not yet exactly dangerous, though I shouldn't wonder if I were attacked in a few days from that quarter. What I am much more certain of is that active and mobile force which I beat off the other day, but which is still intact under the best General opposed to me, Clerfayt. I hear that it is marching south again, and my best troops and my offensive must be directed against that. I am far superior in numbers to Clerfayt, and if I can bring him to an action and break him, I can then turn to the others at my leisure: for the moment I have only one front to think of--that on the north."

But the negligence which he or his informants were guilty of--a negligence that was to prove so nearly fatal to all those 40,000 French troops--consisted in the failure to discover what was up upon Friday the 16th.

During those twenty-four hours the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up his column to St Amand; the other four columns upon the Scheldt were concentrated, and upon the north of the Lys, Clerfayt had got orders to move upon Wervicq, and was, during the middle hours of Friday, actually upon the march. Yet, during all that day, Friday the 16th, Souham remained ignorant of the extremity of his peril.

The orders which he dictated upon the Friday night, and largely repeated upon the following morning of Sat.u.r.day the 17th of May, show how little he expected the general action that was upon him. He arranged, indeed, for a cordon of troops to be watching, in insufficient numbers, the side towards the Scheldt, and he sent to Bonnaud and the camp at Sainghin, outside Lille, orders to keep more or less in touch with that cordon. The instructions to this cordon of troops along the eastern side of the French position is no more than one of general vigilance. It is still to Clerfayt and towards the north alone that he directs an offensive and vigorous movement.

In a word, he was a good twenty-four hours behind with his information. He was wasting troops north of the Lys in looking for Clerfayt at a time when that General was already on the march to Wervicq, and he was leaving a scattered line of insufficient bodies to meet what he did not in the least expect, the rapid advance of Bussche, Otto, and York during that Sat.u.r.day upon Mouscron, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.

Therefore it was that although Bussche's insufficient force was driven out of Mouscron at last by superior numbers, Otto and York succeeded in sweeping all the resistance before them, and, in the course of that Sat.u.r.day, reached the first Tourcoing, the second Roubaix, and even Mouveaux.

The whole problem of warfare consists in a comparison between the information that each side has of the movements of the other. The whole art of success in war pivots upon the using of your enemy's ignorance. Had the allies upon this occasion been more accurate in keeping to their time-table, and somewhat more rapid in their movements, they would have caught the French commander still under the illusion that there was no danger, save from the north, and would have succeeded in cutting off and destroying the main French force by getting in all together between Courtrai and Lille. For at that same moment, the early hours before daybreak of the 17th, the allies had begun their movement.

PART V