With a great enemy at the gate, the Jacobins still maintained sufficient unity and cohesion. Whenever the Northern Command Headquarters reported an urgent need for supplies, recruits, grain, and pay, Paris never refused and never haggled. Instead, it simply found the money by any means necessary and delivered what was asked, on time and in full. At the inland wharves of Paris, five two-masted merchant ships laden with military stores departed every day, sailing down the Seine and up the Marne toward Chalons-en-Champagne.

  In mid-September, André had instructed the Military Intelligence Office to spread rumors throughout Lorraine that the French army and the coalition were holding armistice talks. To secure a ceasefire as early as possible, the Northern Command Headquarters had supposedly used Louis XVI’s treasure to bribe the coalition commander, Duc de Brunswick. Paris soon learned of the story.

  To support André’s performance, and at Minister of Justice Danton’s urging, the Legislative Assembly—still not yet dissolved—immediately agreed to pack up the seized treasures taken from the Palais des Tuileries, curios worth fifty million livres, and send them all to Reims for the Northern Command Headquarters to dispose of as it saw fit. In exchange, the Assembly and cabinet had only one demand of André and the Northern Command Headquarters: before the National Convention convened at the end of September, the Prusso-Austrian Coalition must be driven entirely beyond France’s borders.

  André accepted gladly. The next day, the northern commander-in-chief, André, and the chief of staff, Berthier, signed the operational plan code-named “Joan of Arc,” and delegated execution authority to General Moncey, commander of the Army of the Meuse. Thus the curtain rose, formally, on the brilliant and glorious Battle of Valmy.

  …

  After the storm, General Clermont-Clifford crawled out of the special tent reserved for a division commander. The grey-white canvas still dripped steadily. The violent downpour two hours earlier had made the interior leak in several places, forcing this Prussian general—who prided himself on immaculate military appearance—to pull his silver-white wig over hair that was still wet.

  Not far away, loud argument spilled from a large marching tent. Four or five officers were quarreling furiously. Clermont-Clifford knew what it meant: the coalition staff were again squabbling over some triviality, wasting breath on nothing.

  “Damn them,” Clermont-Clifford muttered, enduring the discomfort on his head. “If this kind of arguing could break the French line on the Varennes–Meloncourt front, I’d promote the whole lot of them two ranks.”

  Those loud-mouthed staff officers had been assigned by the Austrian general staff chief, Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg. As commander of the northward detachment, Clermont-Clifford could refuse their advice and overrule them, but he could not simply send this flock of cawing crows back to the main headquarters at Verdun, twenty kilometres behind.

  So he chose to go around them, and to act as if they did not exist.

  On his way to the forward positions, Clermont-Clifford refused the wool cloak his major aide offered him. Under Frederick the Great’s strict orders, Prussian soldiers on campaign—from the king and his marshals down to the lowest private—were forbidden to wear anything except regulation uniform. Many Prussian commanders no longer obeyed the rule, but Clermont-Clifford, fifty-six years of age, still stubbornly kept the promise he had made when he first joined the army: obey orders until death.

  Days of exhaustion had drained the healthy color from his face. He looked pale. Yet his gaze was deep, his expression hard, and even as the left leg that had been shattered in the Seven Years’ War began to ache again, this Prussian general—famous for courage, fearlessness, and stubborn endurance—held himself as straight as a spear.

  “Which regiment is attacking now?” Clermont-Clifford asked, turning at the crest of the slope to his young aide.

  “General, Colonel Ernst von Massenbach’s Fifth Regiment,” the major replied.

  Clermont-Clifford nodded without speaking. He raised a small telescope and fixed it on a height three kilometres ahead. A French tricolor flew there. Since midday yesterday, that blue-white-red banner had remained in view on the hill, whose vertical rise was less than two hundred metres.

  The French main defensive line lay halfway up the slope: a thickened parapet wall. Below it, they had dug a ditch that curved around most of the hill. Their semicircular battery held roughly twenty heavy guns. Built behind the parapet, within five to eight metres, the battery could throw savage canister at close range to support the infantry defense. On muddy roads in rainy weather, solid shot mattered little except to smash earthworks and gun platforms.

  In the three attacks mounted yesterday, and in the first two attacks this morning, more than one thousand Prussian infantry had fallen before the French position, nearly half of them killed by the defenders’ violent artillery fire. Yesterday evening, Prussian gunners, at the cost of losses twice those of the French, managed to destroy one semicircular battery and knock out several French guns. But the next day the French defenders—cunning as they were—unmasked a third battery they had kept hidden, and an infantry regiment from the émigré detachment was caught unprepared and suffered heavily.

  The only tangible result was this: when the battery that had been smashed by cannon collapsed, and the infantry parapet beneath it gave way, rubble and broken masonry, together with the remains of hundreds of dead, filled the ditch that ran around most of the hill. Now Colonel Massenbach’s Fifth Regiment could step across the ditch as if it were level ground and charge straight at the French behind the parapet.

  In the distance, more than one thousand Prussian infantry in dark-blue uniforms formed neat columns. Led by their officers, marching to drums and fifes, they lifted their chests, forced courage into their bodies, and launched the day’s third assault against the French behind the parapet. Soon the crack of muskets and the roar of guns merged with shouting and close combat.

  Yet only twenty-five minutes later, Clermont-Clifford angrily lowered the telescope and tossed it back to the major behind him. He had just watched the Prussian army—once the scourge of continental Europe—be thrown back, for the sixth time, in humiliating disorder by French infantry and artillery. This assault alone had cost roughly two hundred men.

  “Stop the attacks,” Clermont-Clifford ordered, halting and turning to his aide. Then he returned to the divisional headquarters, drove the bickering German crows out of the room, and sat down at the table himself. He took ink, quill, and blank paper. He would write personally to his commander, Duc de Brunswick, to report the situation of the northward detachment and to set down certain views on the war.

  On September sixteenth, General Clermont-Clifford, acting under orders, led 15,000 men—including 1,000 cavalry—and eighteen guns out of Verdun. Following the rough hill roads between the Meuse and the Aire, he advanced from south to north. With friendly forces cooperating, he aimed to open the roads toward Vouziers, Sedan, and Montmedy, then seize them, fulfilling Duc de Brunswick’s strategic purpose: to establish firm defensive pivots around Sedan, Vouziers, and Montmedy, so that more than 100,000 coalition troops could winter there and lay a strategic foundation for the decisive campaign of the spring of 1793.

  However, after only three days, Clermont-Clifford’s northward plan was, in effect, already dead.

  Rain had made the roads slick and the ground a mire. French forces had also wrecked the route thoroughly, using ditches and massive logs to destroy the roadway at every point. As a result, the detachment covered only twenty kilometres in forty-eight hours. After that, the entire force was stopped cold by the French defensive line on the Varennes–Meloncourt front and sat there for a full day and night.

  During that period, the coalition detachment under Clermont-Clifford attacked the French defenders on the Meloncourt heights six times, and each time it was beaten back. Losses reached 2,300 men, including 400 light cavalry, and ten guns. The cavalry losses, in particular, made Clermont-Clifford’s heart ache. Because of staff incompetence and his own carelessness, he had failed to survey the terrain around the heights properly, and that error proved costly.

  When he learned that the French had not dug a defensive ditch on the north side of the hill, Clermont-Clifford ordered a light cavalry regiment to swing around behind the defenders and strike in a surprise attack. No one expected the truth: the northern side was a marsh, and the French had laid grass and leaves over the mud. Most of the four hundred Prussian light cavalry became trapped, man and horse, unable to move. They were reduced to living targets and then shot down one by one by French marksmen rushing to reinforce from the heights, using rifled firearms with an effective range of as much as three hundred metres.

  In the Varennes sector, a bridge over the Aire had been blown in advance by French engineers, forcing the coalition troops assigned to that axis to halt two kilometres from the town, blocked by the swift river. At least there were no combat losses there, but dysentery and other intestinal contagions, along with colds and typhus brought on by cold rain, still spread everywhere. In three days, non-combat casualties alone reached several hundred.

  “…And our food supply for the northward detachment is now insufficient,” Clermont-Clifford wrote. “Even if I were to break the French line by sheer luck, I cannot sustain operations as far as Vouziers or Sedan, twelve leagues away. From Verdun to Meloncourt, in the four-league stretch along the route, there is not a single supply point. The three villages we passed through are completely empty. The peasants blew up their own cellars. They left no flour, no potatoes, no champagne—nothing. Even the game in the forests has been shot out. We cannot find food. The men are exhausted, their faces hollow under long beards. Many have lost their boots in the mud and are often forced to go barefoot…”

  Of course, it was worse than that.

  From the moment the detachment left Verdun, the Prussians found that for three days straight every day brought a hard, relentless rain. The roads were filthy, the mud sucked at the feet, and marshes lay everywhere like traps. The trees in the forest were soaked through; it was nearly impossible to light fires. When men forced kindling to burn, it produced only smoke. Prussian medical officers repeated their warnings not to drink raw water, but thirst drove soldiers to seize unguarded green grapes from vineyards. In truth, sour and rotting unripe fruit was even more likely to trigger dysentery and other contagions.

  An Austrian officer with the detachment described the weather like this: “It is dreadful. It sinks everything into a bottomless swamp. The rain never stops. I loathe the feeling of it—like a funeral held in advance for those marching under the storm.”

  Unable to light campfires, Prussian uniforms—inside and out—remained wet for days without drying once. Many fell ill, catching chills and colds, yet there was not a single intact building that could serve as a station for the sick and wounded. The villagers had torn off roofs and burned them, and pushed down bare walls. In a four-league radius, the coalition could not find even one place to shelter from wind and rain.

  For certain reasons, the Northern Command Headquarters had not issued a formal scorched-earth proclamation in the occupied zones of Lorraine and Alsace. But in Champagne—André’s core base—the farmers obeyed the headquarters’ evacuation order with absolute discipline. The order required that, in the fifty-to-sixty-kilometre zone west, north, and south of Verdun, residents of towns and villages must relocate before September tenth to temporary settlements at Vouziers to the north, Chalons to the west, or Saint-Dizier to the south. On behalf of the Northern Command Headquarters, André promised double compensation for all losses and pledged that within six months after the war of national defense ended, the headquarters would help rebuild the evacuated communities.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “…Commander, I am now quite certain,” Clermont-Clifford continued, “that the French troops opposing me are the main strength of the Army of the Meuse. They fight calmly, shoot accurately, and kill without hesitation. By an order from the French Command Headquarters, all mercenaries from the Duchy of Hesse are executed on the spot when captured. No survivors.

  “Our experiences in these days have led me to suspect that the French commander has laid a vast trap around Verdun, and we have walked directly into it…

  “As your loyal subordinate, I believe there are only two choices. First: withdraw as soon as possible by the route we came, Verdun–étain–Viron, returning to the German states. But if we do that, we will have to abandon all sick and wounded, and even the rearguard. Second: strike forward, counting no losses, seize the Istres mountain pass west of Verdun, force our way through the Argonne Forest, and open the road toward Reims and Chalons—compelling the French Army of the Meuse to come out and fight us to the death.”

  Even now, Clermont-Clifford still held to his belief that the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, with the Prussian army as its core, could defeat the French in a frontal battle, even if the French were numerous and lacked noble officers. The setbacks so far, he told himself, were merely the result of the French holding favorable ground and weather.

  Verdun, the Abbey of Saint-Vanne, the coalition supreme headquarters.

  Before the Revolution began, the Abbey of Saint-Vanne, west of Verdun, had fallen almost into ruin. Only two monks remained. Later, when revolutionary fervor swept the city, the free citizens fixed their furious eyes on the grand cathedral of Verdun and ignored this quiet old monastery. By the time the coalition reached the far bank of the Meuse, the two monks had fled with the city’s refugees, running west through the Argonne forest passes into the Marne to escape the war.

  Strangely enough, during the two or three days when German artillery—Austrian, Prussian, and other imperial contingents—bombarded Verdun, not a single shell landed within fifty metres of the Abbey of Saint-Vanne.

  The cathedral of Verdun, by contrast, served as a refuge for the Royalist Party. Though the coalition artillery commander tried to designate it as a no-fire zone, two solid shots fell there by misfortune. One punched through the rose window of the main hall and smashed the altar where shrines had been arranged. The other struck a senior cleric’s lodging and crushed one royalist nobleman hiding inside. The poor old man had escaped the Revolution’s judgment, only to die under the mouth of friendly guns.

  After entering the city, the coalition commander, Duc de Brunswick—no believer in mysticism—nevertheless chose, without hesitation, to place his supreme headquarters in the Abbey of Saint-Vanne, shabby though it was, and untouched by shells, rather than in the cathedral recommended by the émigré detachment. After all, accidentally killing one’s “own side” carried an unpleasant omen.

  At nine in the morning, after completing his routine inspection of the camp, Duc de Brunswick returned to the abbey. At the top of the steps, a colonel aide approached and whispered a report into the commander’s ear. Brunswick’s face did not change. He walked straight to the meeting room.

  He entered the domed hall, its ceiling painted with frescoes. Inside waited the general staff chief, Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg, and the Prussian crown prince, Wilhelm III. The former wore a worried look; the latter looked full of confidence.

  These two men shared supreme authority with Duc de Brunswick at the coalition Command Headquarters. The Austrian marshal was an upright, competent, courageous soldier, but he lacked the courage to overturn orders issued by the Vienna court. As for the duke’s nephew—the crown prince who, by sheer luck, had become deputy commander of the coalition—Wilhelm III was impulsive and shallow, always posing as Frederick the Great’s heir. Brunswick could not hide his contempt for it.

  As a learned man, Brunswick had lived cautiously and insisted on meticulous study before any decision. As a commander, he hated slaughter. In the Dutch campaign of 1787, which won him the name of “Europe’s great captain,” he had flatly refused a demand from the Prussian king and the Dutch prince to execute republican leaders, and instead exiled imprisoned Patriot civilians of the United Provinces to France or Britain.

  Thus, even under the twin pressures of Sanssouci in Berlin and Sch?nbrunn in Vienna, Brunswick still clung to the coalition Command Headquarters’ earlier deployment, preferring caution and rejecting recklessness. But on the steps just now, his aide’s report had brought bad news.

  After Clermont-Clifford’s northward detachment failed, General Hess’s 10,000-man force, sent south to seize Saint-Dizier, met stubborn resistance at the village of Tigny from French troops with double the numbers. In a valley on the north bank of the Meuse, both sides fought under pouring rain for a full five hours without decision, then withdrew. Losses on both sides combined did not reach one thousand, but General Hess’s mission was over all the same.

  When Brunswick entered the hall, Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg carefully checked that the doors were shut. Crown Prince Wilhelm III, however, sat down with cheerful bluntness and said, “Commander-in-chief, the failures of General Clermont-Clifford and General Hess prove that wintering in the north or foraging in the south is needless complication. We must strike with full force toward Reims and Chalons. Those are the two richest cities in Champagne, with vast wealth and grain, and they lie on the road to Paris…”

  After the king’s flight in June 1791, André used the threat of foreign intervention and internal enemies as justification to place the Marne and the Ardennes under an information blockade. Reinforced registration in town and countryside, strict controls on commerce and travel, and gendarmerie patrols everywhere meant that most enemy agents sent in could survive only twenty-four to thirty-six hours in places like Reims and Chalons.

  The Prussian crown prince did not understand that Champagne’s prosperity had grown alongside formidable military strength. Beyond the 40,000 strategic reserve already called up and the many tens of thousands of recruits training at the Suippes camp, the Northern Command Headquarters could, if the situation worsened, mobilize another 50,000 men in the Marne and the Ardennes. Among them were 30,000 workers from the United Industries base—men of strict discipline and obedience.

  At this moment, the armament factories at Reims and Chalons were running at full capacity, expanded to their limit. In only five days, they could equip a regular infantry regiment and an artillery company fitted with new André guns of six-pound or twelve-pound caliber. Ammunition stores were sufficient to sustain 200,000 main-force troops for six months of medium-intensity consumption. And supplies from Paris were arriving steadily at the port of Chalons.

  It was no exaggeration to say that André had staked everything he had seized and accumulated since 1789—assets measured in the hundreds of millions of livres—on this battle, rather than continuing his earlier habit of playing both sides. In short: succeed, or die. There was no road back.

  None of this was known to the Prussian crown prince, and the coalition commander and his chief of staff knew it no better.

  Inside the coalition Command Headquarters meeting room, Duc de Brunswick watched Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg in silence. The Austrian staff chief said nothing, yet a twitch in his face betrayed him. Brunswick settled onto the central sofa and ignored the crown prince’s reckless proposal. His eyes remained on the chief of staff.

  After a brief silence, Saxe-Coburg, his emotions tangled, told Brunswick that he had no choice but to obey Vienna’s orders. Most Austrian generals, tired of stalemate, strongly supported pushing west to seize Chalons or Reims, driving the battlefield into the Paris Basin and using force to compel the Jacobins to release King Louis XVI, Queen Marie, the Dauphin, and the princess.

  Ashamed, the chief of staff continued, “Your Highness, this war is political in essence, not strategic. We are not facing the army of a normal European state. We are facing French rebels whose minds are ruled by Jacobin madmen. Those men are concentrated in Paris. Therefore we must seize Paris as quickly as possible, or we cannot destroy them.”

  The crown prince hurried to add, “Exactly. We should flood into the Champagne plain and drown the French in a single great battle. With the discipline and skill of the Prussian and Austrian armies, victory in such a battle is assured. Only a decisive political triumph can end the Jacobins’ brutal rule in Paris and rescue France’s rightful monarch and his family. Besides, the ducs, marquis, and comtes of the émigré detachment have already stated, on behalf of the Bourbon family, that all the wealth of the Marne shall belong to the German coalition that saves the French king from peril.”

  Brunswick believed not one word of those extravagant promises from the émigré nobles. Before the war, the émigré detachment had said the Prusso-Austrian Coalition would be welcomed as liberators. Reality was the reverse. In Lorraine, Alsace, and Champagne, the people glared at the Germans with open hostility.

  Now Brunswick’s face darkened. His lips trembled. The stubborn old Prussian soldier still tried to avoid falling into the trap the French commander had laid. But reason told him it was useless. Even the most obedient Prussian officers were sick of endless forests and hills. They wanted bread, wine, and money on the beautiful, rich Champagne plain—and, of course, women.

  As General Clermont-Clifford had written, there were only two choices. Either they withdrew at once along the route back—Verdun–étain–Viron—returning to the German states, abandoning all sick and wounded, and even the rearguard; or they struck forward, counting no losses, seized the Istres mountain pass west of Verdun, forced their way through the Argonne Forest, opened the roads toward Reims and Chalons, and compelled the French Army of the Meuse to come out and fight the Prusso-Austrian Coalition to the death on the Champagne plain.

  The first choice was no longer possible. Brunswick believed that the moment he proposed retreat, Saxe-Coburg would produce a proclamation signed jointly by the monarchs of Prussia and the Austrian Empire, stripping Brunswick of supreme command and installing the young crown prince, Wilhelm III, as the coalition commander.

  So Brunswick compromised. With a calm face, he said, “I will say only one thing, gentlemen. Though I do so unwillingly, I agree that once the next bread convoy arrives, the main force will march west out of Verdun, cross the Argonne Forest, seize the Istres pass, advance on Chalons-en-Champagne—and take it.”

  At those words, the great stone on Saxe-Coburg’s heart finally rolled away, and the dismissal order he had been holding did not need to be produced. The crown prince, however, felt a trace of disappointment. In the coming great victory, he would still serve only as Brunswick’s assistant, not as the coalition’s supreme commander.

  …

  Marcus had to admit that although he disliked the French, they had given him three chances at promotion. The first came at the Battle of Tournai: after victory, he rose from an ordinary NCO to a commissioned second lieutenant. The second came after the Second Battle of Tournai, which ended in disastrous defeat. Marcus nonetheless fought like a man possessed and pulled Archduke Charles of Austria out of the rout back to Brussels. Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg then confirmed Colonel Hock’s dying order promoting Marcus to lieutenant.

  In August of this year, when Saxe-Coburg was reassigned as chief of staff of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, Marcus—who had been sitting idle—was promoted again and sent to the war as a staff officer. The reason Saxe-Coburg brought this brown-skinned, scar-faced man into the staff was a letter of recommendation written before Archduke Charles left the Austrian Netherlands. The evaluation was brief: the hussar captain possessed a sensitive instinct for approaching danger.

  Yet on September twentieth, when the coalition main force resumed its march toward Chalons-en-Champagne, eighty kilometres away, Captain Marcus felt no danger at all. What irritated him was the coalition gendarmerie’s miserable traffic control at the stone bridge over the fortress moat.

  The bridge was so narrow that only one carriage could pass at a time. Yet tens of thousands of soldiers packed it shoulder to shoulder, bayonet to bayonet, crushing the only westward crossing into a solid mass. Below, the Meuse roared, its current swirling around the piers and rushing onward.

  As a staff officer, Captain Marcus would not march alongside the common soldiers—men with broad cheekbones under their caps, sunken cheeks, dead eyes, and boots dragging through the bridge’s mud. He traveled with the coalition headquarters and crossed the river with ease.

  But now the bridge erupted in loud curses. Acting on Saxe-Coburg’s instruction, Marcus went up onto the bridge to put down the disturbance. With two gendarmes, he found the cause: a civilian four-wheeled carriage with a broken axle had jammed itself in the center of the bridge, blocking the baggage wagons. Drivers and soldiers behind it swore helplessly, unable to move it.

  “Whose carriage is this?” the staff captain demanded, first in German, then again in French.

  “Mine,” a richly dressed émigré noble stepped forward. He cast a haughty look at the Austrian officer and spoke in a commanding tone. “Captain, have your men repair the axle at once. When I return to my estate in Reims, I may reward you with one gold louis.”

  “Thank you,” the scar-faced captain replied, performing an exaggerated French hat-sweep. Then he turned to the coalition soldiers around him and said in German, “This honorable French gentleman says that whoever throws his carriage into the Meuse and clears the bridge will be rewarded at once with one gold louis!”

  The moment he spoke, the Prussians and Austrians went mad. They swarmed the carriage, unhitched the reins, freed the two packhorses, and, amid shouting, lifted the broken carriage high. Then they hurled it into the rushing Meuse, drawing a burst of laughter from the crowd.

  As for the French noble who meant to demand satisfaction, he could not even move. More than twenty German soldiers—men who had helped throw the carriage into the river—surrounded him, cursing from every side and demanding the promised payment of one gold louis.