Hilaire Belloc

“ Literature, Sociology, Art, Nature, all receive her attention in turn, and on each she stamps the impression of her own personality. The prose is soft and rhythmic, infused with the atmosphere of the country-side, while the lyrics scattered throughout the volume reflect a temperament that has remained equable under the most severe trials. No book more aptly expresses the spirit of Christianity and good fellowship as understood in England. ”

“ Bussche, with his small body of 4000 Hanoverians, the first column, had the task of “holding” the apex of the French wedge when the attack should begin. That is, it was his task to do no more with his inferior forces than send one portion up the road towards Courtrai, so that the advanced French troops there should be engaged while another part of his small command should attack the little town of Mouscron, which the French held, of course, for it was within their wedge of occupation. ”

“ She has won themes from the city’s life without that capitulation to the merely actual which is the pitfall of so many artists. London is seen grieving, sordid, grey, as well as magical and alluring. All who love the London of to-day must perforce respond to the appeal which lies in these moving and poignant verses. ”

“ But, at any rate, from Roubaix one overlooks that depression for some miles; one sees five miles distant the fortifications of Lille, and the intervening country is open enough to betray the presence of troops. Indeed, once Roubaix was captured, the English commander could see across those fields, a couple of hours’ march away, the tents of the great French camp at Sainghin under the walls of the fortress. ”

“ For that upon which soldiers chiefly look is the power of a regiment to reform. The Guards, thus broken up under conditions which made formation for the moment impossible, and would have excused the destruction of any other force, cleared themselves of the welter, recovered their formation, held the road, permitted the British cavalry to collect itself and once more form a rearguard, and the retreat upon Lannoy was resumed by this fragment of York’s command in good order: in good order, although it was subjected to heavy and increasing fire upon either side. ”

“ The delay of the fifth column was the chief cause of the disaster.
Meanwhile, another failure to synchronise, and that a most grave one, was taking place miles away in the north with Clerfayt’s command beyond the Lys.
It is self-evident that where one isolated and distant body is being asked to co-operate with comrades who are in touch with the commander-in-chief, and with each other, the exact observation of orders on the part of that isolated body is of supreme importance to the success of the combination. ”

“ Therefore it was that although Bussche’s insufficient force was driven out of Mouscron at last by superior numbers, Otto and York succeeded in sweeping all the resistance before them, and, in the course of that Saturday, reached the first Tourcoing, the second Roubaix, and even Mouveaux.
The whole problem of warfare consists in a comparison between the information that each side has of the movements of the other. The whole art of success in war pivots upon the using of your enemy’s ignorance. ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that instead of all four columns of nearly sixty thousand men barring the road between Souham and Lille and effecting the isolation of the French “wedge” round Courtrai, a bare, unsupported twenty thousand found themselves that night alone: holding Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lannoy, Mouveaux, and thrust forward isolated in the midst of overwhelmingly superior and rapidly gathering numbers. ”

“ Between 55,000 and 60,000 men would then be lying united across the line which joined the 40,000 of the enemy to the north with the 20,000 to the south. If such a junction were effected even at the eleventh hour, so long as it took place before the 20,000 French outside Lille and the 40,000 to the north moved upon them, the allies would have won a decisive action, and the surrender of all Souham’s command would have been the matter of a few hours. For a force cut in two is a force destroyed. ”

“ So far as the terrain is concerned, then, what we have to consider is country, flat, but containing low defensive positions, largely cut up, especially between the Scheldt and Roubaix, by hedges and walls, though more open elsewhere, and particularly open towards the north: a serious obstacle to the advance of one body in the shape of the River Lys; and another obstacle, irritating rather than formidable in character, but sufficient both by its course and its marshy soil to complicate the advance, namely, the little River Marque. ”

“ If any considerable body lagged behind the rest, if part of the great force marching up from the south, for instance, failed to keep in line with the general advance, or if Clerfayt bungled or delayed, the junction would be imperfect or might even not take place at all, and the number of men present to cut off the French when a partial and imperfect junction had been effected, might be too small to maintain itself astraddle of the French communications, and to prevent the great French force from breaking its way through back to Lille. ”

“ He must have heard from eight o’clock till noon the fire of his retreating comrades falling back in their disastrous retreat, and, rightly judging that he would have after mid-day the whole French army to face, he withdrew to the river, and had the luck to cross it the next day without loss: a thing that the French now free from the enemy to the south should never have permitted. ”

“ Such a formation invites a concentration of your opponents against the isolated body, and may lead to its destruction.
It was precisely in this position that Pichegru placed a portion of his forces by the ill-advised advance he made down the valley of the Lys to Courtrai.
Taking advantage of the way in which the main forces of the allies were tied to the siege of Landrecies, the French commander wisely moved forward the whole of his forces to the north and west, pushing the enemy back before him to the line Ypres-Menin, and besieging Menin itself. ”

“ By the 22nd of April the garrison of Landrecies was contained, the beleaguering troops had encircled it, and the siege was begun.
After certain actions (most of them partial, and one of peculiar brilliance in the history of the British cavalry) , actions each of interest, and some upon a considerable scale, but serving only to confuse the reader if they were here detailed, Landrecies fell after eight days’ siege, upon the 30th of [Pg 22] April. An advance of the Austrian centre, after this success, was naturally expected by the French. ”

“ The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy. ”

“ If the time-table had been observed, the Arch-Duke and Kinsky, over 25,000 men, [Pg 85] should have been across the Marque before dawn, should have pushed back the French forces outside Lille, and should, long before noon, have been covering those fields between Roubaix and Lille with their advancing squadrons and battalions. There was no sign of them. If, or when, the French body near Lille were free to advance and attack the Duke of York’s left flank, there was no one between to prevent their doing so. ”

“ The Marque made all the difference. It compelled the fifth column to take its roundabout road, and the fourth, detained by the delay of the fifth, was held, as we shall see in what follows, for a whole day at one of the crossings of the river.
The little stream has a deep and muddy bottom, and the fields upon its banks are occasionally marshy. This feature has been exaggerated, as have the other features I have mentioned, in order to explain or excuse the defeat, but, at any rate, it prevented the use of crossing places other than bridges. ”

“ In this book the author has reviewed the existing position of the doctor and indicated the signs of a new sociological era in which he will be called upon to accept new and important functions. The profession has in the past consisted of a mere mob of unorganised units; that of the future will be a disciplined army of experts co-operating for the good of the State. “The Doctor and His Work” may be described as a summary of the modern medical point of view. It appeals not less to the lay than to the professional reader. ”

“ York spared him two Austrian battalions, but with reluctance, for he knew that the attack must soon develop upon his side also. In spite of the peril, in the vain hope that Clerfayt might yet appear, Mouveaux and Tourcoing were still held, and upon the latter position, between five and six o’clock in the morning, fell the first shots of the French advance. The resistance at Tourcoing could not last long against such odds, and Montfrault, after a gallant attempt to hold the town, yielded to a violent artillery attack and prepared to retreat. ”

“ York had left the bridges over the Marque unguarded. Why, we do not know. Whether from sheer inadvertence, or because he hoped that Kinsky had detached men for the purpose, for one reason or another he had left those passages free, and, by the bridge of Hempempont against Lannoy, by that of Breuck against Roubaix, Bonnaud’s and Osten’s men poured over. ”

“ I pay no attention to the ridiculous suggestion that the delay was due to the contemporary peril in Poland, and to Thugut’s anxiety to have Austrian troops in the east rather than on the western frontier. People who write modern history thus seem to forget that the electric telegraph did not exist in the eighteenth century. The more reasonable pretension that the Austrians hesitated between marching north to effect the plan against Souham, and marching east to relieve the pressure upon Kaunitz, who was hard pressed upon the Sambre, deserves consideration. ”

“ The first is the necessity for a national education which will evoke, foster, develop and not level down and destroy all the peculiar and unique characteristics which go to make a nation a nation, and endow it with an individuality distinct from that of all other nations. ”

“ In case he should be attacked, the attack might take one of many forms. It might try to drive him over the Lys, where Clerfayt would be ready to meet him; or it might be a general attack upon Courtrai as a centre; or it might be (what had, as we have seen, been actually determined) an attempt to cut him and all his 40,000 off from the main French line.
This main French line ran through the town of Lille, and Lille not only had its garrison, but also at Sainghin, outside the fortifications to the south-east, a camp, under Bonnaud, of 20,000 men. ”

“ It was one of those successes in which one gets the better of one’s opponent in one chance part of the general contest, but so triumphs without a set plan, with no calculation upon what should follow upon the achievement, and therefore with every prospect of finding oneself in a worse posture after it than before. ”

“ Three miles may sound a short distance to the civilian reader, but if he will consider the efforts of a great body of men and vehicles, pushing forward through the late hours of an afternoon by wretched lanes full of loose sand, and finding the darkness upon them with that distance still to do, he would perceive the importance of the gap. ”

“ A Siberian hound, whose sire was a wolf, tells his own story. The book, in fact, is a very clever satire on human nature, a satire which gains much charm and piquancy from its coming from the mouth of a masterful self-respecting hound. ”

“ In imposing upon her son the temptations of leisure and great wealth he is a means of making him a prey to inherited weakness, and the train of events thus set in motion leads to an unexpected outcome. The author is equally familiar with life in either country, and the book is an earnest attempt to represent the enervating influences of a certain type of existence prevailing among the monied classes in New York to-day. ”

“ Now it was to this fifth column, the 16,000 men or more under the Arch-Duke Charles, that the great work of the day was assigned. From Pont-à-Marcq they must attack a great French body quite equal to their own in numbers, even when part of Kinsky’s force had joined them, which French force lay in the camp at Sainghin. They must thrust this force back towards Lille, pour up northward, and arrive in support of Otto and York by the time these two commanders were respectively at Tourcoing and Mouveaux. ”

“ The king, who has already abdicated in favour of his son, whom he desired to marry the Princess of Spain, resolves to put an end to his life also, but is persuaded by his minister that the task of living as king will be a greater punishment for all the misery he has created. ”

“ They, all lying in much the same region and able to receive and transmit orders with rapidity, may correct an error before it has developed evil consequences. But the isolated commander co-operating from a distance, and receiving orders from headquarters only after a long delay, is under no such advantage. Thus the tardiness of the fifth column was, as we have [Pg 73] seen, communicated to the fourth, and the third, second, and first, all in one line, could or should have easily appreciated the general situation along the Scheldt. ”

“ No troops could have stood the pressure, and at any rate the defence broke down—with this result: that the British troops holding Mouveaux, Abercrombie’s Dragoons, and the Brigade of Guards, were cut off from their comrades in Roubaix. Meanwhile, Tourcoing having been carried and the Austrians driven out from thence, the eastern and western forces of the French had come into touch in the depression between Mouveaux and Roubaix, and it seemed as though the surrender or destruction of that force was imminent. ”

“ To these four columns (which I will beg the reader to remember by their numbers of first, second, third, and fourth, as well as by the names of their commanders, Bussche, Otto, York, and Kinsky) a fifth must be added, the appreciation of whose movements and failure is the whole explanation of the coming battle.
The fifth column was a body of no less than 16,000 men coming from the main Austrian body far south, and ordered to be at St Amand upon the Scheldt somewhat before the concentration of the other four columns, and to advance from St Amand to Pont-à-Marcq. ”

“ It was not seven o’clock, it was between three and four o’clock by the time the Arch-Duke was well across the Marque and the French retired; but still, if the men of this fifth column had been machines, Kinsky was now free to effect his junction across the Bridge of Bouvines, and the combined force would have reached the neighbourhood of Mouveaux and Tourcoing by nightfall, or shortly after dark.
But the men of the fifth column were not machines, and at that hour of the mid-afternoon of Saturday they had come to the limits of physical endurance. ”

“ It is still to Clerfayt [Pg 55] and towards the north alone that he directs an offensive and vigorous movement.
In a word, he was a good twenty-four hours behind with his information. He was wasting troops north of the Lys in looking for Clerfayt at a time when that General was already on the march to Wervicq, and he was leaving a scattered line of insufficient bodies to meet what he did not in the least expect, the rapid advance of Bussche, Otto, and York during that Saturday upon Mouscron, Tourcoing, and Roubaix. ”

“ Tourcoing is rather a battle for military than for civilian historians, but those who find recreation in military problems upon their own account, apart from their political connection, will always discover the accidents of this engagement, its unexpected developments, and its final issue to be of surpassing interest. ”

“ Of the troops which were, it will be remembered, dispersed to the north of the Lys, only one brigade was left upon the wrong side of the river to keep an eye on Clerfayt; all the rest were recalled across the stream and sent forward to take up positions north of Otto’s and Kinsky’s columns. Meanwhile the bulk of the French troops lying between Courtrai and [Pg 107] Tourcoing were disposed in such fashion as to attack from the north and east, south and westward. Some 40,000 men all told were ready to close in with the first light from both sides upon the two isolated bodies of the allies. ”

“ Tourcoing is an action the preliminaries of which are easy to describe, and need occupy little of our space, because it was a battle in which the plan of one side was developed and prosecuted almost to its conclusion without a corresponding plan upon the other side. ”