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  The Great Coalition and its Failure, 1793-1796

The Great Coalition and its Failure, 1793-1796

Great Britain was not alone in resisting France. Austria and Prussia had begun war with France in the previous year, and to these allies were added Holland and, before long, Spain and Sardinia; and, as usual, Great Britain paid heavy subsidies to the powers composing this Great Coalition. That France, with her army at first a mob, with the discipline of her navy ruined by the Revolution, with the extremists in power and engaged in guillotining one another, and with Royalist risings in various districts, should have successfully resisted such a coalition is one of the marvels of history. The forces of Great Britain, Austria, and Prussia were concentrated in Belgium, and in twelve marches could have occupied Paris.

Coalitions of European powers, however, have seldom worked harmoniously. The allies, as a contemporary said, wanted to hunt the sheep before killing the dog; instead of a joint advance upon the capital, each was intent upon securing the frontier fortresses which it could claim at the peace. Moreover, they were jealous of each other and had no commander to direct the whole operations. Meantime, the armies of France, with their country threatened, exhibited a patriotism and an enthusiasm which carried all before them. The generals represented literally the survival of the fittest, for' those that failed were nearly always dismissed and sometimes guillotined. Above all, the new Government that France had evolved left the control of the war to one man, and that a man of genius, Carnot.

Consequently, though in the summer of 1793 there were eight foreign armies on French soil, and Lyons, Toulon, and Brittany had risen against the Revolution, before the end of the year these risings had been put down and all the foreign armies but one had been expelled. In the following year, 1794, the French drove the allies not only from Belgium but from Holland as well, and secured the Rhine frontier that they had been striving for so many centuries to obtain (In 1794 the French won sixteen pitched battles, took one hundred and sixteen towns and two hundred and thirty forts, and captured ninety thousand prisoners and three thousand eight hundred cannon; and they opened the next year with capturing the Dutch fleet, which was embedded in the ice, by a cavalry raid).

Holland therefore dropped out of the coalition, and in 1795 both Prussia and Spain withdrew from it. With 1796 came Napoleon's famous campaign in Italy, in which, after invading Piedmont and forcing its ruler, the King of Sardinia, to withdraw from the war, he defeated the Austrians in a succession of battles, then marched to within ninety miles of Vienna and obliged the Austrians at the beginning of 1797 to make peace. It must be confessed that Great Britain played a somewhat inglorious part in the military operations from 1793 to 1796. No doubt her allies were largely to blame - Great Britain was heading a crusade, it has been said, with an army of camp followers. But her statesmen had done nothing in the years after the American war to profit by its lessons. As a consequence, at the beginning of the French war, both officers and men. whether cavalry or infantry, were untrained, whilst the artillery was worse than at any other previous period of its history, In the course of the war, the Government, at its wits' end to get recruits, adopted the pernicious system of promoting those officers who succeeded in enlisting a certain number of recruits, and sent out regiments of boys instead of men to tropical climates - which, in the case of most of them, meant certain death. In equipment, the Government was scandalously negligent. It I ailed to send out greatcoats to soldiers campaigning in the Netherlands during the winter, or boots for those fighting in tropical districts infested with dangerous insects. Troops were sometimes sent out who had never fired a shot, or with wholly insufficient supplies of ammunition; and the arrangements for transport and hospitals were inconceivably bad.

1793-1796; Part 2

Chronology
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