XX. projects military and civil he held in avowed con- BOOK tempt, dismissed suddenly from his high and painful pre-eminence and his successor, general 1794. Clairfait, after the most gallant efforts, was compelled early in October to repass the Rhine at Cologne. The French pursued the Imperial troops to the very margin of the river; and as the rear of the Austrian army embarked, the question was loudly and insultingly asked, if that was the road to Paris? About the end of September the siege of Maestricht was formally commenced, and lasted to the beginning of November, during which interval the attack and defence were conducted with heroic bravery. The atmosphere seemed filled with balls, bombs, and shells, and scarcely was a place of safety left in the whole circuit of the city. Two thousand buildings, public and private, were said to be destroyed, and a general storm was intended on the 4th of November, when the governor, moved by the situation of the inhabitants, and the entreaties of the magistrates, consented to articles of capitulation with general Kleber, who entered the place on the same day. chegru Maese and After this conquest the French armies enjoyed General Pisome weeks of comparative repose; but general passes the Pichegru had still greater designs in contem- Waal. plation, and only waited for the advantage of XX. BOOK the frost which set in with unusual rigor about the middle of December. In the course of a 1794. week the Maese and the Waal were frozen over, and on the 27th a strong column of French crossed the former of those rivers, while another corps made themselves masters of the Bommel. But the French general did not make his grand movement till the 10th of January, 1795, when the main body of his forces crossed the Waal at different points, and made a general attack upon the lines of the allies, extending between Nimeguen and Arnheim, under the command of general Walmoden, the duke of York having before this time prudently returned to England. Disastrous The allies were defeated in every quarter. A the English precipitate retreat was ordered towards Amersfort retreat of army. - and Deventer. In this retreat, which differed little from a flight, the wretched fugitives were exposed to every species of distress which it is possible for human-nature to suffer. From the want of common necessaries in the allied army, a dreadful sickness and mortality prevailed, and the harassed and dispirited troops, exposed to the intense severity of the weather, the drifting snow, and heavy falls of sleet and rain, almost without clothing, frequently without sustenance, without medicines, without tents, littered down in cold and damp churches and other public buildings, expired daily and nightly by hun dreds, the compassionable victims of a fatal and BOOK unparalleled delusion*. XX. This last retreat was equivalent to a formal 1794. surrender of Holland into the hands of the French. In vain had the stadtholder endea- * General Harcourt, in his dispatch of January 21, from ́ Deventer, expresses to the commander in chief his satisfaction at having burnt all the vessels containing forage and stores upon the Leck, and effecting the destruction of most of the ammunition contained in fifteen ordnance vessels at Rotterdam.-It is, however, certain, that immense quantities of ammunition and stores fell into the hands of the French. A private letter from an officer, dated from Osnaburg, February 13, says, "The sufferings and loss of the army have been dreadful: In one of our marches during the night over a large frozen morass, where an accident obliged me to remain behind the army for near an hour, my only direction when the dawn came, to point the route the army had taken, was the miserable victims that were lying every where dead or dying of cold, famine, and fatigue, in the road the army had marched. The frost was most intense; and the groans and lamentations of the wretched groups I passed still ring in my ears. Never shall I forget the horrors of that night. Our loss in stores is beyond all credibility. The quantity of every description destroyed at Helvoetsluys, Rotterdam, Doesburg, and Deventer, exceeds all calculation. No defeat could have more disastrous consequences than this un fortunate retreat has been attended with.". XX. BOOK Dort, surrendered to the French without resistance; and the stadtholder with his family, not 1794. without difficulty, and attended by all the marks of popular resentment during his short abode at the Hague, made his escape in an open boat from Scheveling on the 19th of January. On the succeeding day general Pichegru, who had to the con- conducted himself with uniform mildness and Amsterdam surrenders queror. moderation, made his public entry into Amsterdam; and, by order of the States-General, every other fortress in the republic opened its gates to the French. On the 27th of January the provisional representatives of the people of Holland assembled, and a decree immediately passed for the total abolition of the stadtholderate, and for the establishment, under the protection of the republic of France, of a new provisional government for the United Provinces.-SUCH WAS the termination of this ever-memorable camp aign, conceived on the part of the British ministry in the spirit of madness, and conducted in that of the most complete imbecility. The events of the war in which the Austrians and the auxiliary army of Prussians on the side of the Moselle were engaged, during these transactions in the Low Countries, are of little comparative moment. At the conclusion of May, the Prussian general, Mullendorf, who was obliged to make some XX. slight show of co-operation, surprised the French BOOK in their entrenchments at Keyserslautern, and defeated them with considerable loss. In the month 1794. of July the French in their turn, under the brave general Desaix, attacked the Prussians, and carried, amid a terrible fire, the important posts occupied by prince Hohenloe on the Platoberg, a high mountain in the territory of Deux-Ponts. In a few days they repeated their attack upon the whole chain of posts from Neustadt to the Rhine with splendid success, and both Austrians and Prussians, each reproaching the other, were obliged to retreat with the greatest precipitation. The Imperial army re-crossed the Rhine, and the Prussians retired towards Guntersbloom and Mentz. The recent acquisition of Keyserslautern was abandoned to the republicans, who again occupied the cities of Worms, Spire, and Treves and this was the whole equivalent received from the king of Prussia in return for the enormous subsidy of two millions granted by the British parliament to that selfish, crafty, and unprincipled monarch, who, in a note trans mitted to the circles of Franconia and Suabia, indignantly complained "that the Imperial court had put a false construction upon the treaty with England, who, though pledged to pay the subsidy, had no right to dispose at her pleasure of the Prussian army,' |