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Home The French Revolution and the Great War, 1789-1802 The Great Coalition and its Failure, 1793-1796 1793-1796; Part 2 |
1793-1796; Part 2But chief among the causes of failure was the fact that our small army was frittered away on a variety of objects instead of being concentrated upon one. In the first year of the war (1793) there were three distinct centres of operations in Europe; and in all there was failure to record. Hood landed a force to co-operate with the French Royalists at Toulon; but he had to withdraw after suffering considerable losses. Another force was sent to Quiberon Bay, to help the Royalists in Brittany, but arrived too late to be of any service (Two years later, in 1795, an expedition was sent to Quiberon to aid a fresh rising. By order of the Government it occupied, as a base of operations, a barren rock in the Atlantic with no safe landing-place, and eventually withdrew with great difficulty, having achieved nothing). A third force under the Duke of York was sent to assist the allies in Belgium. The duke besieged Dunkirk unsuccessfully, but fought in conjunction with the Austrians some engagements in which our men showed bravery. When, however, in the next year, the French advanced in overwhelming numbers, the duke was forced to retire from Belgium to Holland, and finally the remnant of his forces entered Hanover and returned, in 1795, back to England.Meantime, outside Europe, the chief centre of military operations was in the West Indies. A promising start was made in 1793. But the French sent out reinforcements, and not only recaptured most of what they had lost but stirred up the negro slaves in our own islands. Our own forces, inadequately reinforced and inadequately equipped, were wasted by yellow fever and the hardships of the campaign. An army, however, sent out in 1796 under Abercromby - the ablest general of the time - succeeded in restoring order in our own islands and in recapturing some of the French; and, finally, in 1798 the British made a treaty of peace with the famous negro, Toussaint 1'Ouverture, who had made himself master of the greater part of San Domingo. The net result of our operations in the West Indies was the capture of Martinique and St. Lucia, and the treaty just alluded to which saved the harbours of San Domingo from being the haven for French privateers. But these gains had been accomplished at the expense, it has been estimated, of a hundred thousand men, of whom half had died during the campaigns and the other half were discharged as permanently disabled. In the East, however, we were more successful; we captured the French settlements in India (1793) and the settlements of Holland in the Far East (1795), besides the Cape of Good Hope. Our maritime supremacy enabled us to destroy our enemies' commerce and to occupy some of their islands. But even on the sea during the opening years of the war our operations were somewhat disappointing. Lord Howe won a battle in the Atlantic, known as the glorious First of June, in 1794; but the great convoy of corn, which it was all-important for the French fleet to protect, got through to France unseen during the manoeuvres before and after the battle. Moreover, the British did not at first efficiently undertake the blockade of the French ports, and more especially of Brest. Consequently in 1796 the French, taking the offensive, were able to dispatch a fleet from Brest to Bantry Bay in Ireland with fifteen thousand men on board. The ship, however, containing the French admiral and general lost touch with the fleet (The French fleet left Brest just as night was coming on, and Pellew, the commander of a British frigate which was watching the port, attached himself to the French fleet, just out of gunshot, and by making false signals, burning blue lights, and sending up rockets, played havoc with the commander-in-chief’s orders, and got the fleet into hopeless confusion), and the winds were persistently contrary for the remainder of the fleet when it tried to sail up the bay; so that the French had finally to retire without landing in Ireland at all. If they had landed, they might have roused that island to a successful rebellion. In another sphere of operations, in the Mediterranean, the British missed their opportunities. The fleet might have commanded the coast road to Genoa and increased the difficulties of the French campaigns in Italy; as it was, Napoleon's wonderful success in Italy in 1796 led us to evacuate that sea in the following year. |
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