Part 20

The fall of Dampierre and the arrestment of Custine acted fatally on the army of the North, which was now reduced to about thirty thousand rank and file, and these remained in a disorderly state, without a proper chief, and without aim or object--its manoeuvres committed to chance or directed by ignorance; for, with the exception of Kilmaine, its leaders were destitute of skill, experience, and energy. Quitting the camp of Caesar, they returned to their fortified position at Famars, three miles distant from Valenciennes, the approach to which it covered. Here they were attacked on the 23rd of May, driven back, and obliged to abandon the city to its own garrison under General Ferrand; a success which enabled the allies under the Duke of York to lay immediate siege to Conde and to Valenciennes, the two most important barrier towns upon the northern frontier. While the army of the North continued in full retreat towards the Scheldt, the British commander-in-chief briskly attacked Valenciennes, which General Ferrand first laid in ashes, and then delivered up; his garrison, as the reward of their obstinate defence, being permitted to march out by the gate of Cambray, on the 28th of July, with all _the honours of war_. Conde had already fallen on the 10th of the same month.

General Custine, who in the two preceding campaigns had rendered such essential services to the faithless Convention, was meanwhile brought to trial on the charge of corresponding with the enemy, and fell a sacrifice to the malice of his accusers.

It was on the banks of the Scheldt that Kilmaine rejoined the army early in August, with his division from Ardennes; and now his position became almost desperate. In presence of the scaffold erected by the ferocious mutineers for all the vanquished generals, and in a camp where no suspected person dared to assume the precarious office of leader, when pressed upon him, he accepted the baton provisionally, and in the meantime said to the representatives who were sent from Paris to manage affairs and act as spies upon the army, "that he wished another more skilful than himself should take the great responsibility of leading the troops of the Republic."

His presence for a time appeased the tumults in the army. Though upon the banks of the Scheldt, and having before him both the Duke of York and the Prince of Coburg, Kilmaine, with only twenty-four thousand ill-appointed troops, dared not attempt to attack them; for if he fought and lost the day, he could thereafter assume no position of sufficient strength to prevent the allies from penetrating to Paris and crushing the power of the Convention. After so many levies and enrolments, that body had no longer a battalion to spare, and had around it only the frothy orators of armed clubs, and the refuse of prisons; thus it dared not abandon the capital or retire beyond the Loire, for now the men of Poitou, Bretagne, and La Vendee were in arms under the white banner, and elsewhere the tides of war and politics were setting in against them. At this crisis Mayence had capitulated, after a three months' bombardment. Toulon was under the cannon of the British; the Spaniards had invaded Roussillon; the Austro-Sardinians menaced Provence, the ancient patrimony of the House of Anjou; and on the Alps their troops hung over Dauphine and Vienne; finally, after the revolution of the 31st of May, which had assured the triumph of Robespierre, Lyons, Marseilles, and all the departments of the south, with those of the west, were roused against the pride, power, and oppression of the Convention.

If it was really true that the allied monarchs wished to re-establish the fallen throne of Louis XVI.,--if, as they had so proudly announced in their manifestos, it was to restore order to bleeding and desolated France, and to repress the Republic and its horrors,--they had displayed their standards in the Netherlands, never were circumstances more favourable to them than after the retreat of Kilmaine towards the Scheldt: but the secret measures of wily diplomatists had more influence then, on events, than the arms of the allied kings.

It appears that, in the second campaign, when the allies were masters of Conde and Valenciennes, and saw that the road to Paris was almost open to them, the Austrians wished to take their revenge locally for the cruel deeds of which they had been spectators in the Camp de la Lune; and were more intent upon gratifying this sentiment than advancing into the heart of France.

The Prince of Coburg had shown himself from the first frank, loyal, and gallant; he had promised to Dumourier to concur in his daring project for re-establishing the monarchy, and for that purpose had engaged to form an auxiliary force to aid him, while solemnly renouncing all projects of aggrandizement for the crown of Austria. But for these engagements he had not received from his cabinet either instructions or authority. When Thugut was supreme director of the Austrian affairs, it was to these rash promises of the prince his consent was required; he disapproved of them so strongly, that they were cancelled by the Emperor of Austria, and a congress met at Antwerp, where, in concert with Britain, it was decided that in the result of the war the allies ought to find indemnities for the past, and guarantees for the future peace of Europe.

These were the expressions of the protocol which the members of the congress comprehended without difficulty; but French diplomatists loudly declared that a projected dismemberment of France was clearly announced in its phraseology.

One thing is certain: not a reference was made therein to the House of Bourbon, or to the throne of Louis--that throne of which Dumourier, in concert with the Prince of Coburg, had so boldly promised the restoration in his manifesto of the 5th April; and not a measure was taken for the advantage or safety of the beautiful and unhappy Marie Antoinette, then languishing in prison at Paris, and over whose devoted head hung the blade of the guillotine, and whom a simple menace from her nephew the Emperor, threatening the advance of his armies, might perhaps have saved.

At all events, it seemed sufficiently evident to the jealous and excitable French that the allies were no longer true to the interests of the fallen Bourbons; and equally so that it was not to restore them the Austrians at least made war. It was in _his own name_--not that of Louis XVII., king of France and Navarre--their emperor took possession of those fortified places and provinces which his armies overran; and after he became master of Conde and Valenciennes, he no longer cared to define or form a frontier for those districts of the Netherlands which once he proposed to cede to the Prussians; but which Thugut now wished to preserve to the descendants of Rudolph of Hapsburg.

At the same time the Duke of York, who from his own cabinet had received orders and instructions similar to those given to the Prince of Coburg, in the name of George III., resolved to seize upon Dunkerque, which the English had coveted of old; but he did not wait for the departure of a British fleet prepared for this object. The naval squadron was delayed, and in the meantime the duke deliberated with the Austrian general under the ramparts of Valenciennes, to learn if, before engaging in new sieges, they might not give to the French army a final blow which would deprive Kilmaine of all power of interrupting their combined operations.

This was a very simple question, yet they were fourteen days in coming to a conclusion. Though Valenciennes, as already stated, had capitulated on the 28th of July, it was not until the 8th of August that the Austro-British army was in motion, and its advance guard beheld the camp of Caesar; this on the very day after Kilmaine had wisely evacuated the fortifications and retreated southwards.

It is said that he fully anticipated the march of the combined armies; and this was sufficiently probable, for we know that the committees of the National Convention had mysterious means of procuring secret intelligence, not only from the cabinets of the allies, but from the staff officers of the German troops!

Kilmaine in retiring only obeyed the dictates of wisdom and necessity, and quitted a position which he could not defend, as his army was reduced by defeat and desertion, mutinous, or as the French style it, _demoralized_.

If the allies had wished to follow and engage him upon the Scarpe or the Somme, a last effort could easily have been made to disperse his troops completely, and then seize upon Paris, where they might have torn the Revolution from its very basis. But such was not the intention of the allied generals. "Their aim on this occasion," says a French writer, "was to profit by our disorders and revolutions to make themselves masters of our places and provinces after assuring themselves of indemnities and guarantees, and to leave the volcano to consume itself, as a Prussian prince said, not long ago: it must be admitted, that never had this policy shown itself more evidently in its shameful nudity!" But the reader must bear in mind that these are the opinions of a Frenchman and a sympathizer with the Convention.

Such was the state of matters when Kilmaine, having abandoned the untenable camp of Caesar, and fallen back beyond the Scarpe, a navigable river of French Flanders (but still a narrower barrier than the Scheldt) prepared again for retreat, and marched towards the Somme, another river which falls into the British Channel between Crotoy and Sainte Valori. This was his last position--his last asylum; and now the chiefs of the allies, instead of pushing on in pursuit of his retiring bands to complete the triumphs so well begun, faced about, and wheeled off to seize Dunkerque and Quesnay.

It was in autumn that the Royal Duke appeared before the former; and there his troops received a check which proved but the commencement of a long series of disasters; the latter was stormed by the Austrians, and retaken by the French in the following year.

But what must astonish us, even at this epoch of deception and duplicity, political insanity and revenge, is the startling fact that the brave Kilmaine, who had rendered such gallant services to that new and most faithless Republic--he who by a judicious retreat (executed _against_ the advice of the meddling and presumptuous representatives of the people, and in consequence thereof perilled his life) had preserved to shattered France her most important army, was precisely for that reason denounced to the Convention, arrested by its orders, and flung into a loathsome prisons at Paris, where he passed a year; being but too happy, in the obscurity of his dungeon, that he had not perished on the scaffold like the gallant Custine, his predecessor in the command; like his old colonel and protector Biron, and like Houchard, who for the brief period of fifteen days had been his successor, and who, after winning a signal and decided victory over the Duke of York--a victory alike honourable to himself and to the arms of France, expiated by a cruel death the grave fault of having forgotten for a moment the powers of a bullying representative of the people!

Kilmaine only recovered his liberty after the fall of Robespierre; but he still remained for some time in Paris, without military employment, though he eagerly and anxiously sought it. He found himself there at the epoch of the insurrection of the 22nd May, 1795, and with much zeal and valour he seconded General Pichegru in the struggle made by that officer to defend the National Convention against the excited mobs of the Parisian fauxbourgs. Amid a thousand dangers Kilmaine continued to fight for the Convention until the 13th Vendemaire of the year following, actively co-operating with Bonaparte and the revolutionary party.

Being appointed to the command of a division in the army of Italy, he marched with Napoleon across the Alps to the invasion of that country, and shared in the glory of his first victories, and in that brilliant campaign in which the French destroyed two armies, took two hundred and eighty pieces of cannon, and forty-nine stand of colours from the Austrians, who were commanded by the veteran Wurmser, the bravest of all brave men.

At the head of his division Kilmaine fought with remarkable courage at Castiglione delle Stiviere, a fortified town in Lombardy, where, in the beginning of August, 1796, several severe engagements took place between the French and Austrians, which resulted in the discomfiture of the latter. Mantua was the next scene of Kilmaine's achievements; and in July that ancient city, after fifty years of peace, beheld the army of Napoleon before its walls, while all the country on the right bank of the Po was laid under contribution.

The whole direction and charge of the siege of Mantua was committed to Kilmaine by Bonaparte in September, when Wurmser, after being successful against General Massena, was overthrown by Augereau and our Irish soldier, and after a six days' contest shut himself up in the city on the 12th, after which the siege was pressed with great vigour. Twice after this did an Austrian army under Alvinzi attempt its relief, and twice were they baffled by the besiegers; on the last occasion an advancing corps of seven thousand men were compelled to surrender to Bonaparte and Kilmaine within gunshot of the walls, and the position of the aged Wurmser, his garrison, and the Mantuans, became desperate in the extreme.

In an action before Mantua in October, Kilmaine had his horse killed under him, and a rumour was spread through France and Britain that he was killed. Wurmser made several furious sallies, and on one occasion was severely routed by Bonaparte. In the _Courier du Bas Rhin_, we are told that the French repulsed him with the loss of eleven hundred men and five pieces of cannon, and that "their dispositions were made by General Kilmaine, commander of the siege of Mantua." Bonaparte, in his dispatch to the Directory, dated the first day of October, writes thus:--

"On the 20th of September, the enemy advanced towards Castellocio, with a body of horse 12,000 strong. Pursuant to the orders they had received, our advanced posts fell back, but the enemy did not push forward any further. On the 23rd September, they proceeded to Governolo, along the right bank of the Mincio, but were repulsed, after a very brisk cannonade, with the loss of eleven hundred men and five pieces of cannon.

"_Le General Kilmaine_, who commands the two divisions which press the siege of Mantua, remained on the 29th ultimo in his former position, and was still in hopes that the enemy would attempt a sortie to carry forage into the place; but instead they took up a position before the gate of Pradello, near the Carthusian convent and the chapel of Cerese. The brave General Kilmaine made his arrangements for an attack, and advanced in two columns against these two points; but he had scarcely begun to march when the enemy evacuated their camps, their rear having fired only a few musket-shots at him. The advanced posts of General Vaubois have come up with the Austrian division which defends the Tyrol, and made one hundred and ten prisoners."

In November a series of sanguinary actions were fought between the French and Austrians at Arcola, where the latter were completely overthrown; and there fell Citizen Elliot, a Scotsman, who was one of Bonaparte's principal aides-de-camp. During this time Kilmaine was at Vicenza with three thousand men; all the French cavalry were sent there to be under his orders; and though still commanding the operations against Mantua, he shared in the disastrous battle fought near Vicenza by the aged Alvinzi, who was advancing to raise the siege. Despairing to reach Mantua, the latter fell back upon the Vicenza road, and was routed after a bloody conflict of eight hours' duration.

Early in December, Wurmser led a sortie, sword in hand, against Kilmaine. The Imperialists sallied out of Mantua at seven in the morning, and almost in the dark, under a furious cannonade, which lasted all day; "but General Kilmaine," says Bonaparte, "made him return, as usual, faster than he came out, and took from him two hundred men, one howitzer, and two pieces of cannon. This is his third unsuccessful attempt." So energetic were the measures, and so able the precautions of Kilmaine, that Wurmser, seeing all hope of succour at an end, surrendered, after a long, desperate, and disastrous defence, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 3rd February, 1797, giving up his soldiers as prisoners of war. The following is a translation of Kilmaine's brief letter on this important acquisition:--

"Kilmaine, General de Division and Commandant of Lombardy, to the Minister of War. Milan, 17 Pluviose (Feb. 5), 1797.

"Citizen Minister--I avail myself of a courier which General Bonaparte sends from Romagna (in order to announce to the Directory the defeat of the Papal troops), to acquaint you with the capture of Mantua, the news of which I received yesterday evening by a courier from Mantua itself. I thought it necessary to announce this circumstance, because General Bonaparte, who is occupied in Romagna annihilating the troops of his Holiness, may probably have been ignorant of this fact when _his_ courier departed. The garrison are our prisoners of war, and are to be sent into Germany in order to be exchanged. I have not yet received the articles of capitulation; but the commander-in-chief will not fail to send them by the first courier.

"Kilmaine."

The capture of Mantua was celebrated in Paris by the firing of cannon and the erection of arches in honour of Bonaparte and the Irish Commandant of Lombardy, and a general joy was diffused through every heart in the city on the fall of what they styled the _Gibraltar_ of Italy; while Bonaparte, loaded with the diamonds of the vanquished Pope, and the spoils of our Lady of Loretto, pushed on to seek fresh conquests and new laurels.

Kilmaine remained for some time in command at Mantua after its capitulation.

During the siege and other events, a revolutionary spirit had pervaded the Venetian States. Peschiera, a fortified town in the province of Verona, and Brescia, a large city in the beautiful plain on the Garza, had been both seized, garrisoned, and republicanized by the French. The people rose in arms, fired by new and absurd ideas of liberty and equality, and frightful scenes of bloodshed ensued when the more loyal and sensible inhabitants resisted these new patriots; but the latter, on being joined by fifteen hundred banditti from Bergamo, pressed the Venetian troops, who were driven out with great slaughter.

On hearing of these things, the politic Kilmaine wrote from Mantua to the French general commanding in Brescia, desiring him "_not_ to interfere in behalf of these insurgents, lest by so doing he might infringe that strict neutrality which the generals of the French Republic were bound to observe."

In April, however, he was compelled, by the violent proceedings of the Italians against the French garrison in Verona, to unite his forces to those of Generals Victor and La Hotze, and march to the succour of General Ballaud, who was there assailed by forty-five thousand men, whose war-cry was _Viva San Marco!_ who had cut to pieces six hundred Frenchmen, taken two thousand more after a four hours' contest, and driven the rest into the castle. From its ramparts Ballaud threatened to lay in ruins the unfortunate city, which had enjoyed profound peace for ages, until Bonaparte arrived on the banks of the Adige, and added it to the new kingdom of Italy.

On the 24th the insurgent Veronese capitulated, for on the approach of Kilmaine the governor, the two proveditori, and the Venetian general Stratico, fled with all their cavalry; on which he took as hostages the bishop, four of the principal nobles of the city, and several cavaliers of distinction, and peace was thus restored for a time. He disarmed all the insurgents, and seized three thousand slaves, whom he marched under an escort to Milan. In every way Kilmaine aided Napoleon most efficiently in these operations which preceded the capture and subjugation of Venice; and thus gave his great leader a thousand causes to admire and appreciate him during those campaigns which were so disastrous to Italy, but so glorious to the arms of France. During his command in Lombardy he settled or compromised the contested question of the free navigation of the Lake of Lugano, in the south of Switzerland, which had occasioned many angry disputes between the jealous Switzers and the aggressive generals of the French army in Italy. By his intervention it was satisfactorily arranged that France should have the open navigation of the lake by boats of any size: but the cantons violated the treaty; on which Napoleon threatened to send a column of his troops among them, if they did not behave more amicably towards their faithful and ancient allies.

At this time General Sir John Acton, the favourite minister of Naples at Milan, was a soldier of fortune, and the intimate friend of Kilmaine. The story of Acton is rather a singular one.

He was the son of a Jacobite gentleman who had emigrated to France and settled at Besancon. An unsuccessful love adventure forced him to leave that city, at the college of which he was studying physic with every prospect of distinction. Repairing to Toulon, he enlisted in a battalion of French marines. From this corps he passed into the Neapolitan service, and distinguished himself at sea against a Barbary corsair; on which he received a commission in the marines of Naples, and rose to the rank of general, Counsellor of State, and Knight of San Gennaro and Saint Stephen. He possessed a high spirit, great courage, good address, and a handsome figure; and he soon became at the Court of Naples what the Prince of Peace was at Madrid--the favourite and lover of the Queen. He died in 1811. Another of Kilmaine's friends was the veteran general O'Cher, a _chef de brigade_, who had been upwards of forty years in the service of Louis XVI. and of the Republic, and held an important command in the army of Italy.

In the _Memoirs_ published by General Count Montholon, and which were written by that faithful officer at St. Helena, we have the following descriptive reference to the Commandant of Lombardy:--

"Kilmaine, being an excellent cavalry officer, had coolness and foresight; he was well fitted to command a corps of observation, detached upon those arduous or delicate commissions which require spirit, discernment, and sound judgment. He rendered important services to the army, of which he was one of the principal generals, notwithstanding the delicacy of his health. He had a great knowledge of the Austrian troops: familiar with their _tactiques_, he did not allow himself to be imposed upon by those rumours which they were in the habit of spreading in the rear of an army, nor to be dismayed by those heads of columns which they were wont to display in every direction, to deceive as to the real strength of their forces. His political opinions were very moderate."

These are the words of a brother soldier, who must have known him well in the land of his adoption.