Before the outbreak of the war in 1792, given the reality that, after the Seven Years’ War, the French army had long remained in a state of peacetime recuperation and that officers and men alike gravely lacked combat experience, André repeatedly emphasized to the General Staff and to senior commanders that four talismans alone could secure victory at this stage: well-drilled soldiers; powerful fire to shatter the enemy’s morale; fully guaranteed logistical supply; and, whenever possible, the prior selection of the battlefield.
In truth, the fourth point—choosing the ground—was easier to accomplish in a war of national defense; once one marched beyond the frontiers, many operations could no longer proceed as neatly as planned. Fortunately, André had always placed great weight on training, on the allocation of artillery, and on supply—above all the first. Even when struck by a surprise attack and caught unprepared, trained soldiers, under the direction of quick-reacting officers, could almost by instinct form a defensive line and counterattack at once.
When General Aoste fell in battle, the French First Volunteer Infantry Regiment under Colonel Oudinot’s command withstood the repeated charges of Austrian cavalry by itself. At the cost of tremendous casualties, it stabilized the wavering and fragile western front of the Army of the North, thereby forcing Archduke Charles of Austria to continue his risky advance eastward—an advance that ended in the destruction of his entire force.
In that engagement, casualties in the volunteer regiment’s two thousand officers and men reached as high as forty percent; four hundred of them lay down on that battlefield and never rose again. And now, the brave and hard-fighting French First Volunteer Infantry Regiment had been renamed the French First Volunteer Infantry Brigade, while its commander Colonel Oudinot had become Brigadier General Oudinot.
In early November, after three weeks of refitting and the completion of replacements, the First Volunteer Infantry Brigade—now more than four thousand strong—set out from the Lille base under Brigadier General Oudinot. Marching at the standard pace of forty kilometers a day, it reached the fortress of Liège, two hundred and twenty kilometers away. When passing near Nivelles, Oudinot and his brigade deliberately detoured to the French soldiers’ cemetery on the city’s northern outskirts, where they paid their respects to the more than three hundred comrades who had died gloriously one month earlier.
The reason that the majority of the fallen were buried beneath the walls of Nivelles, rather than sent back to their home districts, was that Marshal André, in the name of the Northern Command Headquarters, had promulgated a special decree:
Any soldier—rank-and-file, junior officer, or non-commissioned officer—who was killed in action, or who retired due to severe wounds, could, either in his own person or through his direct next of kin, receive a parcel of land in Champagne, in Lorraine, in Alsace, in the newly occupied Austrian Netherlands, or in the German states on the left bank of the Rhine, the size of that parcel to be determined according to merit and rank. After five consecutive years of cultivation, the recipient need pay only a small deed tax—one percent of the land’s assessed value—to obtain full title. One might, of course, renounce the land grant; in that case, the pension could be settled in livres.
Among the nations of Central and Western Europe, none was more enamored of land than the French—though the Germans were much the same. Though France had once possessed vast and fertile colonies overseas, the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen still preferred European soil close to home, and were willing to give everything for the right to own it.
In another timeline, when Napoleon was ordered to undertake an expedition to Egypt, not many soldiers were willing to follow him. Only after Napoleon proposed that every man who went—whether the soldier himself or the heir he designated—could obtain, free of charge, one hundred hectares of French land within two years did the troops scramble desperately for a place on the rolls. Yet after Napoleon returned and seized power, he broke his promise; in the end he used francs in place of land as compensation for the expeditionary soldiers. That was because he intended to use land to cultivate the Catholic Church, the émigré nobles, and the senior officers around him.
Now, after taking control of Reims and the Champagne region, André had, over more than two years, already formed a settled practice: land generally went to the great mass of soldiers and junior officers, while the holdings registered under mid- and senior-ranking officers were strictly limited. Once a man exceeded a set threshold, a special land tax of as much as fifteen to twenty percent a year would be levied, forcing large proprietors to sell. Put plainly, André most detested the rise of a new land nobility.
On the other hand, André actively encouraged mid- and senior-ranking officers—and their relatives—to buy shares in the United Investment Company, and even to take, at prices that were half sale and half gift, equity in the enterprises of the industrial base. He also treated such participation as one of the measures of an officer’s closeness to him. After repeated reorganizations of the United Investment Company, André established many affiliated subsidiaries beneath it, each responsible for the commercial operation of a specific commodity—for example, a clothing company or a potato-agriculture company. Every subsidiary was controlled by the United Investment Company through a minimum fifty-one percent stake; and the entire structure was then controlled by André through his own fifty-one percent stake in the United Investment Company and his sole veto vote. Civil officials, generals, and scientists who were close to André and held high authority possessed small amounts of the United Investment Company’s shares; the next tier of subordinates held even less, whether in the parent company or in the subsidiaries, and so on down the ladder. In short, André personally created a giant monopoly that dominated northern France.
Moreover, in all booty other than land, André’s mid- and senior-ranking officers were invariably the first, and the richest, to profit. Even a major could own an apartment in Reims—where every foot of ground was precious—bought at half its market value, with furnishings and decoration fit to rival those of a German prince.
In the history of Central and Western Europe, so-called revolutions in land systems had been exceedingly rare; the one true exception was this French Revolution. Because the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly had, in law and in moral principle alike—under the influence of the Enlightenment—completely abolished the proprietary rights that feudal lords and the Catholic Church claimed over their lands, André could carry out his desired land reform with a clear conscience. He could then bind the broad mass of peasants and soldiers to the soil, leaving them no choice but to continue fighting across Europe under André’s command.
Furthermore, André’s policy of “enlistment in exchange for land,” a blood-price bargain, did not apply only to Frenchmen. It also inspired two million land-poor peasants in the Austrian Netherlands, and an even greater number of serfs or semi-serfs in the German lands west of the Rhine, to throw themselves eagerly into the glorious and righteous army that marched in the name of liberty and democracy.
…
Liège was built on a steep slope on the west bank of the Meuse, one hundred meters above the riverbank, with the river itself forming a natural moat. Along the surrounding banks stood artillery works—eight batteries in all—each two to three kilometers from the city, and with the interval between adjacent batteries kept within two kilometers so that they could support one another by fire. Of these eight batteries, four lay on the east bank facing toward the German lands; the remaining half stood on the west bank to protect Liège’s rear, radiating around the city and, together with the east-bank works across the Meuse, forming a ring-shaped web of fire.
From late October onward, two cooperating gunboats—Meuse No. 1 gunboats—took advantage of darkness to break through the fortress’s artillery blockade and reach the French camp three kilometers downstream, thereby completely sealing the river’s upstream and downstream navigation. From that point on, the entire fortress of Liège lay under the tight encirclement of the Army of the Meuse.
Since the French now in fact occupied more than eighty percent of the Austrian Netherlands, the western bank of the fortress’s defensive system was expected to become the main battlefield. Accordingly, the commander Comte de Latour ordered that firepower be concentrated to the west of the city, while the four batteries on the east bank were largely garrisoned by German and Dutch mercenaries.
At this time, the Austrian defensive positions on the right bank of the Meuse, starting from the north, were: the Commandant’s Battery, the Avinée Battery, the Nivelles-Léron Battery, and the Chaudfontaine Battery. On the left bank of the Meuse, from north to south, were: the Bressoux Battery, the Flémalle Battery, the Hollogne Battery, and the Lantin Battery.
In early November, upon receiving André’s order that Liège must be taken within four weeks, General Moncey began directing corps staff officers to draft various siege plans. The first battle fought by the Army of the Meuse beneath the walls of Liège was to clear the four gun positions on the right bank of the Meuse, whose garrisons were low in morale and whose artillery strength was inadequate.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
At dawn on November sixth, four hundred picked marksmen drawn from the First Rifles Regiment were divided into four assault parties of one hundred men each. Under the excellent cover of the morning fog, they bypassed several ravines and a broad belt of lakes and marshland, then secretly crawled into position less than two hundred meters from the four batteries, finding concealment in a patch of low scrub.
After nine o’clock, as the fog on the battlefield gradually thinned, the bugles sounded. A French infantry division began, along a long front of five to six kilometers, to form a loose order and launch a feint attack against the four Austrian batteries east of the Meuse. After enduring only two or three rounds of bombardment from several dozen enemy guns, the infantry—having suffered only slight losses—hurriedly turned about at a range of nine hundred meters and withdrew, abandoning the attack.
Just as the German and Dutch mercenaries began to celebrate this “victory,” two French hussar regiments and one chasseurs regiment had already swung around to within one kilometer of the enemy line and launched a fierce assault on the battery garrisons. The Austrian commander hastily ordered the batteries to return fire.
Before his words had even finished, he was struck and killed. At the sight of the red signal flare in the sky—the attack order—the French sharpshooters concealed in the low brush rose as one. With their rifled muskets, they delivered precise fire into the Austrian positions within two hundred meters; the first volley’s priority targets were the gunners and the Austrian commander.
As the enemy batteries reeled under the sudden rifle attack—officers at every level and gunners dropping one after another, the entire forward line collapsing into chaos—more than two thousand French light cavalry, meeting no obstacle, swept forward with sabers raised and charged straight to the infantry breastworks. Minutes later, the German and Dutch mercenaries, utterly devoid of will, laid down their arms and surrendered.
From the moment the cavalry began its charge to the complete seizure of the four batteries, the entire operation took less than thirty minutes. The French killed, wounded, and captured eight thousand Austrian troops—mostly mercenaries—while only two hundred managed to cross the Meuse and return to Liège. French losses were only fifty-two men. It was a crushing victory.
After the four Austrian batteries on the east bank—the right bank—had been thoroughly smashed, Liège’s defenses were all but shattered. Now the remaining sixteen thousand men of the Bohemian Corps had only two paths: surrender to the French, or be destroyed. Moreover, the French steam gunboats could sail the broad surface of the Meuse at will, and deliver fierce bombardment into Liège itself.
On November eighth, thirty thousand reinforcements from the Army of the North, under General Hoche’s command, arrived before Liège. Thereafter, the French siege force surged to more than eighty thousand men—five times the strength of the Austrian garrison. In morale and in arms alike, the two sides could not be spoken of in the same breath. Every French commander already understood that this fortress battle would be the last battle on the Austrian Netherlands front.
Even under these circumstances, General Moncey, adhering to André’s wishes, sent an emissary under a white flag into Liège to urge the Austrian commander Comte de Latour to capitulate. In his letter to Comte de Latour, General Moncey confirmed that captured officers and men would be guaranteed their private property and personal dignity; they would be provided with food and clean water; and the wounded and sick would receive treatment. Noble officers would also be granted treatment appropriate to their station—but they would have to pay for it, as their own ransom. As for ordinary soldiers, the usual term was three months of labor service; since the Bohemian Corps had failed to enter French territory, no additional term would be imposed.
Yet Comte de Latour, born of a soldierly house, flatly refused. He declared that unless an order arrived from Vienna from the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, no one could make him or his Bohemian Corps lay down their arms. To show his resolve, Comte de Latour not only tore up Moncey’s letter of capitulation, but, in front of the French messenger, also insulted the French Commander-in-Chief, calling André nothing but a “base and shameless Reims clown!”
When the messenger repeated Comte de Latour’s words without altering a single syllable, Moncey and Hoche both knew that the Austrian commander who sought his own ruin was doomed. Even if they wished to spare him, the eighty thousand enraged French soldiers would grant him no road to life. After the great victories of the war of national defense, and after the policy of enlistment in exchange for land, André had become, in the eyes of two hundred thousand French troops, the supreme god—God Himself.
…
In the French camp three kilometers from the Bressoux Battery, Lieutenant Colonel Dumas, now promoted to regimental commander, crawled out of his private tent. He handed the unsealed family letter he had just finished writing to a courier at his side, signaling him to send it at once to the gendarmerie bureau of the Army of the Meuse, where designated personnel would inspect and forward the correspondence of officers and men.
This extremely strict wartime censorship decree had been promulgated by André as early as the founding of the Northern Command Headquarters, with the purpose of preventing, whether deliberately or inadvertently, the leaking of secrets in family letters. It was precisely this decree—denounced by countless political enemies in Paris as a grave violation of the troops’ rights—that ensured victory at Valmy. Up to the moment when Duc de Brunswick and his Prussian corps surrendered, the Prussian prince could not fathom from where André had drawn more than one hundred thousand elite French troops to take part in the encirclement and annihilation of the Prussian corps.
Of course, this wartime decree had once irritated Dumas, because the gendarmes would be the first to read the very cloying love talk he wrote to his wife. But before long, Lieutenant Colonel Dumas made his peace with it—because even the private letters of the corps commander General Moncey would be personally examined by the gendarmerie commander.
In addition, a rumor circulated among the officers: the Command Headquarters planned, before next spring, to form a new corps in the Brabant region—Army of the Belgium. Most of that reserve corps’s soldiers, and more than half of its non-commissioned officers and junior officers, would be French-speaking Walloons, while most of its senior commanders would be selected from the field-grade officers at regimental and battalion level in the Army of the Meuse or the Army of the North. That meant that if Lieutenant Colonel Dumas distinguished himself in the siege of Liège, he could apply to transfer to the newly formed Army of the Belgium, and could even be promoted directly from a lieutenant colonel commanding a regiment to a brigadier general commanding a brigade.
“General Dumas! Ha—élisabeth, and my father-in-law, will be delighted for a long time!” Thinking of this, Lieutenant Colonel Dumas showed the thick lips and white teeth characteristic of his Black features and laughed.
Meanwhile, the soldiers of Dumas’s regiment were gathering in small groups like migratory birds on benches around the open ground at the center of the camp, singing at the top of their voices the Army of the Meuse’s marching song, “The Army of the Meuse Is the Greatest.”
Hey, the Prusso-Austrian Coalition are all black crows, trying to trample us underfoot;
From the Ardennes Forest to the banks of the Meuse, hey, our Army of the Meuse is the mightiest;
The warriors of Commander-in-Chief André, wipe your bayonets bright, grip your muskets tight;
We must grow tougher the more we fight, and die with the enemy on the field—die with the enemy on the field…
Whenever the song reached its stirring passages, quite a few passing sergeants would run over to join in, and it swelled into a great chorus of different battalions and regiments. As for the company and battalion supply officers who were distributing rations, they had no choice but to ask the gendarmerie to “drag the soldiers back” from the open-air opera house, and then line them up one by one to receive their provisions.
Under the eyes of the supply officers, a sergeant shouted without pause, “Six days’ rations in total: 4.5 kilograms of brown bread per man—about nine French pounds, and one French pound equals half a kilogram—1.5 kilograms of canned meat—three French pounds—five hundred grams of sweet raisins, three bottles of red wine, and two hundred grams of butter. Remember: only the wounded and sick are entitled to white sugar, brown sugar, and cheese!”
“Damn it, canned food again! We haven’t even finished the last batch. And there isn’t enough butter, either—this wine looks like cheap swill from the Brabant plantations.” Sergeant Kohler, who had just passed by, muttered to Lieutenant Poquelin beside him. (For their story, see chapters 123 to 125.)
“Shut it, Kohler! If you could talk less, the bastard standing in front of me would at least be a second lieutenant by now!” Lieutenant Poquelin, his friend, warned him yet again.
After the Second Battle of Tournai, Poquelin and Kohler were selected and sent to the Reims Bacourt camp for two months of non-commissioned officer training. In late August, they graduated together, were promoted to sergeant, and were assigned as replacements to General Brune’s formation in the Army of the Meuse.
In the Valmy campaign that began in September, Poquelin—already a sergeant—was fortunate enough on the northern line to capture a coalition general who was attempting to break out; with that and his later merits, he rose step by step to lieutenant. By contrast, Sergeant Kohler, who could never restrain his big mouth and loved to complain at random, missed several promotion chances in a row and was still stuck where he was. If not for Lieutenant Poquelin’s guarantee, perhaps Sergeant Kohler would already have been kicked by the corps gendarmerie bureau back to the rear-area training camp at Suippes, to serve as an instructor for recruits.
Seeing his friend’s sullen look, Lieutenant Poquelin knew he had struck Kohler’s sore spot again. His heart softened, and he said, “Later, have the company check the contents of the men’s packs. Tomorrow morning the gendarmerie may do another spot inspection. Remember: two pairs of shoes and insoles; two rolls of hemostatic bandage and gauze; sixty rounds of ammunition; and each squad leader gets two boxes of painkillers—mainly opium—for the whole squad… And one last thing: I remember there’s a big village of more than a thousand people to the northwest. After five o’clock this afternoon, you can take your squad and use the company’s surplus canned food—or livres—to trade with the villagers for fresh meat, or cheese and butter. Remember: you’ve only got two hours.”
