Flanders 1793: A Tale of Two Diaries

By Dominic Fielder

‘Somewhere there was a fault.’

The British campaign in Flanders, between 1793 and 1795, feels like an often-overlooked footnote in British military history. A disaster, that if we somehow look away, will be neatly swept under a rug, and we can return to the familiar narrative of a series of coalitions against France until the victory of Waterloo. Fortescue’s British Campaigns in Flanders is still the seminal work for understanding this campaign and sets the two diaries in context. The anonymous writer known as ‘Officer of the Guard’, was a member of the Duke of York’s staff and is a mixture of beautiful verse and pithy prose. Robert Brown’s account as corporal in the Coldstream Guards, is observant of the everyday. A shared war from very different social strata. 

Terra Firma at length, thank my stars! We have gain’d,
And our raptures, believe me, can scarce be explain’d.
With more transport the breast of a debtor ne’er heav’d,
From straw and his fourpence per diem reliev’d,
Than ours when we shook all our friends by the hand,
As they joyfully leap’d from the decks on dry land.
                                                                Officer of the Guards Vol 1

In February 1793, the French Convention declared war on Great Britain. In response, Great Britain sent a small army, a brigade initially with more men to follow. It was necessary to be on the continent, to be seen to be ‘doing our bit’ to restore the French monarchy; there were after all, political prizes to be had! While the Guards’ officers were no doubt keen to be rid of an overcrowded ship, Corporal Brown makes no mention of the hardship, instead comparing the villages around the port of Helleveotsluis to the country he had just left, ‘The streets are regular and kept remarkably clean, as well as the outside of their houses, which they are continually washing’.

The gaining of Terra Firma was an obvious relief to all the Duke’s soldiers. It had been a less than auspicious start.
 

The port of Hellevoetsluis at Hollands Diep  

The parade of two thousand guardsmen which had set off along the Mall had turned into a drunken ramble by the time it had reached Greenwich. Soldiers were loaded into three overcrowded transports. A soldier slipped on a gang-plank, fell and shattered his leg. Amongst the doctors in the three battalions, no medical supplies could be found. None had been loaded but at least the campaign furniture of the Guards officers had. Some consolation at least. The young officer from York’s inner circle foreshadowed the days ahead, “Somewhere there was a fault.”

The epitaph of the Flanders campaign.

The ships that sailed into Hollands Diep narrowly avoided a storm that would have surely wrecked them. Such an auspicious start was compounded by the constraints of operational orders sent by the government, and Henry Dundas in particular, which attempted to shackle the Duke’s army to a protection of the landing places along Hollands Diep. In early March 1793, there were around 2000 men under the Duke’s command. Two weeks earlier, the French convention had passed a law to levy 300,000 men to be added to a standing army that John Lynn in The Bayonets of the Republic suggested had shrunk from 450,000 in November to 290,000 in February 1793.

While the French were fighting on every border, the Army of the North, under General Dumouriez was around 23,000 with the Army of the Ardennes also nominally under his control. Fortescue paints Dumouriez as the supreme chancer, his aims with the Army of the North uncertain. It seems more likely that Dumouriez had designs on capturing Amsterdam and its gold rather than The Hague and the seat of the Dutch Stadtholder.

The war for Corporal Brown is one that any soldier across the ages could identify with. Marching, waiting, marching again. In fact, there was to be no major engagement in Holland. The French had begun a siege of Willemstadt, a fortress on the south bank of Hollands Diep, but the arrival of a strong Austrian army under Prince Josias, drew Dumouriez and the bulk of his men in the direction of Brussels and a fateful battle.

As the moment of high drama approached, the tempo of the ever present politicking increased. The Duke of York was given license to move further inland but strict instructions from Dundas that the ‘British army’ was not to become just another corps in Josias’ ranks. Two thousand men would barely constitute an Austrian corps but that was being rectified. Hanover was to supply 15,000 infantry and around 5,000 cavalry. More Germans, Hessian troops, would follow as well as several squadrons of British cavalry. All this due by May, but by then the emergency and the chance to secure the peace dividend and political prize could well be lost.

The Duke of York. The King's choice as the commander
of the British army on the continent in 1793.

Dunkirk might seem a strange choice as compensation for Great Britain’s efforts but, along with other French colonies in the West Indies, Fortescue suggests that such a deal had been brokered by Austria. The Imperials from Vienna were playing a much greater endgame, to ensure both its close ties with the restored House of Bourbon but also to expand north into Saxony. By greasing the palms and soothing the consciences of other nations, Prussia was also to receive French territory in the Austrian plan, who could deny Austria a rightful prize when she alone asked nothing of France. Pitt’s embattled administration thought that possessing a little part of France would play well at home with the mob.

Such manoeuvring was scarce confined to the allies. Dumouriez, the master strategist, had a foot firmly planted in both worlds and a step light enough to stay one move ahead of the guillotine. He was perhaps the last man to hold a private counsel with Louis XVI before the King’s execution. A courtier of some thirty years but also the Revolutionary Minister for War and now Commander of the Army of the North. Dumouriez believed that his men were more loyal to him than to France, much as Lafayette had done, the year before. A miscalculation that had nearly cost his predecessor his life.

When the negotiations between Dumouriez and Prince Josias first occurred, I cannot be certain. On the 18th March 1793, the two armies fought at Neerwinden. The Austrian victory sent the French reeling back towards their northern border. Somewhere in that time frame, the Convention in Paris heard that Dumouriez planned to defect. By the 1st of April, a delegation had arrived from Paris to arrest the traitorous general, only for Dumouriez to have them arrested and sent to the Austrian camp.

The timeframe is too tight for these events to play out consecutively. Eleven days for secret negotiations to be discovered, reported to Paris, a decision made and a delegation dispatched to the frontier? Which draws the obvious conclusion of collusion between Dumouriez and the Austrian Prince Josias before Neerwinden, making the battle a bargaining chip and the treachery to have been relayed to Paris from within the General’s close circle. If Dumouriez won, he had more choice. Amsterdam could still be taken. And with money, why restore an unpopular monarchy when a new-style of revolutionary leader might be more acceptable to the masses? The defeat weakened his hand but would the ultimate gambit of changing sides bear fruit?

So he sent the commissioners, under arrest,
To the Austrian encampment, and stood forth confess’d,
A friend to their cause, undertaking to bring
His army to publish young Louis their King.
And instantly mounting the modest cockade,
The power of his rhet’rick the Champion essay’d.
To his florid narration the answer reciev’d
Was, “Vive Dumouriez” Sounds he fondly believed. 

Five thousand Frenchmen followed Dumouriez into exile, less than one in eight that had taken the field at Neerwinden. The rest of the Army of the North could return to France on the swearing of oaths by officers that its men would not bear arms again. Prince Josias was roundly condemned by his allies, even publicly by his own Emperor for the attempts to woo Dumouriez. For the rest of April, the Allies bickered about how best to impose peace, without it seems, the smallest concern that they still had to beat the French to accomplish such lofty goals. At the end of April, Prussia proposed its own negotiations with the Army of the North, to affect a mass defection, and found itself on the end of various verbal attacks from rest of the coalition.

Dumouriez, a man for all seasons? 

A plan was eventually agreed, the capture of the fortress at Valenciennes, which opened a route to Paris. The battle itself, called the battle of Camp Famars, foreshadowed the events of 1794. There were no maps of the terrain. If any reconnaissance had been undertaken, that information failed to reach the frontline. What it did expose was the propensity of the troops to plunder, a scene that appalled Corporal Brown “Every house was plundered in a most unseemly manner, by the Austrians and others of the foreign troops; whose hardened hearts, neither the entreaties of old age, the tears of beauty, the cries of children, nor the moving scenes of the most accumulated distress can touch with pity.” 

Valenciennes fell in a protracted siege at the end of July. The Army of the North, whose leaders had either defected, died at its helm or faced the guillotine for their ‘failures’, retreated. The allies pursued and Paris was just eleven days march away. But the coalition faltered again. The fortress of Lille would be at the backs of the allied forces and the Austrians feared having their supply lines severed. The Duke of York, with two brigades of British infantry and his Hanoverian and Hessian contingent was under pressure to secure Dunkirk before it was too late. After all, grabbing the city once the revolution had been beaten might look a little disingenuous. There was a last meeting between Prince Josias and the Duke of York before the British, with a corps of 10,000 Austrians acting as corps of communications, moved north.

With this moment of separation, the coalition lost the momentum and tempo of the war and would never regain it.

If ever you do attempt to follow the machinations of this campaign, do invest in a map of northern France. How the Austrian corps that accompanied the Duke was meant to protect communications between Josias and York has baffled my understanding. Lille and Dunkirk are around 50 miles apart. That is just one of the many farces that this rich campaign has still to reveal.

The story of Dunkirk and the fateful days of September 1793 are for another post.

~~~~~~~~~~

The King’s Germans is a project that has been many years in the making. Currently Dominic Fielder manages to juggle writing and research around a crowded work and family life. The Black Lions of Flanders (set in 1793) is the first in the King’s Germans’ series, which will follow an array of characters through to the final book in Waterloo. The King of Dunkirk will soon be released and Dominic hopes that the response to that is as encouraging as the reviews of Black Lions have been.
Dominc lives just outside of Tavistock, in Devon where he enjoys walking on the moors and the occasional horse-riding excursion as both inspiration and relaxation.

Social Media
https://www.facebook.com/KingsGermans/
@Kings_Germans (Twitter)
kingsgermans (Instagram)

Buy links
Amazon

Hessians: Reluctant Soldiers

By Kim Rendfeld

The Hessian soldiers who fought for the British in the American Revolution did not come to the New World of their own free will.

The troops comprised conscripts—school dropouts, servants without masters, bankrupts, idlers, drunkards, the unemployed, troublemakers, and any other "expendable" man who was healthy and under 60. Their societies saw them as anything but the best and brightest.

"Hessian" is catch-all term for soldiers rented out to the British by Frederick II, the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and five other German rulers. In Hesse-Kassel, the fee was the equivalent of 13 years of tax revenue, and Landgrave Frederick used it for the public good. He left a full treasury, founded museums and schools, and had a taste for expensive buildings.

About 30,000 soldiers crossed the Atlantic between 1776 and 1783. At first, they were well trained and well equipped. As the war dragged on, it became harder to find men who would make good soldiers.

Although the soldiers received wages, military service was dreaded, and sometimes recruitment was really kidnapping. Once the recruit was pressed into service, the officer needed to get him to the garrison. Desertion at this stage was common enough that the officer had his charge under constant guard and followed complicated procedures such as avoiding large towns and places where the recruit had previously served.

The officer was armed with a sword and gun and might have had a dog. He kept his captive in front of him and warned that a misstep would cost him his life—the captor would be excused for a dead recruit but not a living deserter. If the pair stayed at an inn along the way, the officer chose an innkeeper he knew was on his side. When conscript and guard retired for the night, both of them undressed, and the guard's weapons were stored in a different room so that the conscript wouldn't use them against his captor.

The local populace might sympathize with a captive, but they paid a high price if they helped him. If the conscript escaped in a certain village, its inhabitants would be forced to hand over one of their own as tall as the deserter or they might be extorted to pay a fine. Anyone caught assisting a deserter lost their civil rights and faced death or prison and flogging.

Once part of an army, soldiers were subject to harsh discipline. Thirty lashes was the most common punishment. A man guilty of a more serious offense, like participating in a failed mutiny, was forced to run through a gauntlet and be pummeled with cudgels—repeatedly. Ringleaders of such a plot were hanged, unless the prince showed mercy and imprisoned them indefinitely.

The months-long crossing of the Atlantic could be horrific. Johann Gottfried Seume, conscripted after leaving theology school, vividly describes soldiers being packed like herring, with the taller men unable to stand upright. They were served rotten pork and biscuits with maggots, and their drinking water stank and had filaments.

Among the Hessians, there might have been varying attitudes. They probably didn't know what the Americans and British were fighting about. The officers might have believed anti-American propaganda and thought Congress to be despotic. Common soldiers might have seen their stint in the New World as job to do on behalf of their country. Others might have wondered why they were fighting in a war that had nothing to do with them. Frederick of Prussia, also known as Frederick the Great, said as much to his nephew, Margrave Charles Alexander of Anspach, when refusing to let troops pass through his lands: "My astonishment increases when I remember in ancient history the wise and general aversion of our ancestors to wasting German blood for the defense of foreign rights, which even became a law in the German state."

Perhaps, my ancestor Johann Gebel, a common soldier, shared Frederick of Prussia's sentiments. Born in the Principality of Waldeck, he turned 20 the same year the colonies declared their independence. If I am to believe family lore, Johann didn't want to fight.

We don't know for certain what happened to him while he was a soldier, but he likely deserted when he was a prisoner of war, especially if he was offered land in addition to his freedom. This also was a chance to escape the beatings in the military and not to endure another crossing of the Atlantic. In America, he had an opportunity to be a respectable citizen in a German-speaking community, quite a contrast to an expendable conscript.

Whatever his reasons, Johann was among the Hessians who decided to make their home in postwar America--where people who once fought each other had to learn to live together.

Images are by Charles M. Lefferts (1873-1923) and are in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources
"Hessians" by David Head, George Washington's Mount Vernon

The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War by Edward J. Lowell

"The Hessians" by Russell Yost, The History Junkie

Kim Rendfeld is the author of two novels set in early medieval Francia and is working on a third. In The Cross and the Dragon, Alda, a young Frankish noblewoman, must contend with a vengeful jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband in battle. In The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, Saxon peasant Leova will go to great lengths to protect her children after she's lost everything else.

The Cross and the Dragon will be rereleased in August 2016 in print and ebook formats. You can preorder the ebook at Kobo, iTunes, or Barnes and Noble. The novel will soon be available on Amazon. The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar will be rereleased in November 2016. Preorders are available at Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes. It also will soon be available on Amazon.