Hilaire Belloc - The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc

Now it so happened that Clerfayt, though a most able man, and one who had proved himself a prompt and active general, woefully miscalculated the time-table of his march and the difficulties before him.

He got his orders, as I have said, at ten o’clock on the Friday morning. Whether to give his men a meal, or for whatever other reason, he did not break up until between one and two. He then began ploughing forward with his sixteen thousand men and more, in two huge columns, through the sandy country that forms the plain north of the River Lys. He ought to have known the difficulty of rapid advance over such a terrain, but he does not seem to have provided for it with any care, and when night fell, so far from finding himself in possession of Wervicq and master of the crossing of the river there, the heads of his columns had only reached the great highway between Menin and Ypres, nearly three miles short of his goal. 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. If he further considers that it was only the heads of the columns that had reached the high road by dark, and that two great bodies of men were stretched out two miles and more behind, and if he will add to all this the fact that fighting would have to be done before Wervicq, three miles away, could be occupied, let alone the river crossed, he will discover that Clerfayt had missed his appointment not by three miles only in space, but by the equivalent of half a day in time.

Even so he should have pushed on and have found himself at least in contact with the French posts before his advance was halted. He did not do so. He passed the night in bivouac with the heads of his columns no further south than the great high road.

So much for Clerfayt. The Republic would have cut off his head.

While Clerfayt was thus mishandling his distant and all-important department of the combined scheme, the corresponding advance from the valley of the Scheldt northward was proceeding in a manner which is best appreciated by taking the five columns seriatim and in three groups: the first group consisting of the first column (Bussche), the second group of the second and third columns (Otto and York), the third group of the fourth and fifth (Kinsky and the Arch-Duke).

This column, as we have seen, consisted of only 4000 men, Hanoverians. Its function and general plan was to give the French the impression that they were being attacked by considerable forces at the very extremity of their advanced wedge, and thus to “hold” them there while the great bulk of the allies were really encircling them to the south and cutting them off from Lille.

When we bear this object in view, we shall see that Bussche with his little force did not do so badly. His orders were to advance with two-thirds of his men against Mouscron, a little place about five miles in front of the village of St. Leger where he was concentrated; the remaining third going up the high road towards Courtrai. This last decision, namely, to detach a third of his troops, has been severely criticised, especially by English authorities, but the criticism is hardly just if we consider what Bussche had been sent out to do. He was, of course, to take Mouscron if he could and hold it, and if that had been the main object of the orders given him, it would indeed have been folly to weaken his already weak body by the detaching of a whole third of it four miles away upon the high road to the eastward. But the capture of Mouscron was not the main object set before Bussche. The main object was to “hold” the large French forces in the Courtrai district and to give them the impression of a main attack coming in that direction, and with that object in view it was very wise so to separate his force as to give Souham the idea that the French northern extremity was being attacked in several places at once.

With the early morning, then, of Saturday the 17th, Bussche sent rather less than 1500 men up the high road towards Courtrai, and, with rather more than 2500, marched boldly up against Mouscron, where, considering the immensely superior forces that the French could bring against him, it is not surprising that he was badly hammered. Indeed, but for the fact that the French were unprepared (as we saw in the section “The Preliminaries of the Battle”), he could not have done as much as he did, which was, at the first onslaught, to rush Mouscron and to hold it in the forenoon of that day. But the French, thoroughly alarmed by the event (which was precisely what the plan of the allies intended they should be), easily brought up overwhelming reinforcements, and Bussche’s little force was driven out of the town. It was not only driven out of the town, it was pressed hard down the road as far as Dottignies within a mile or two of the place from which it had started; but there it rallied and stood, and for the rest of the day kept the French engaged without further misfortune. A student of the whole action, careful to keep its proportions in mind and not to exaggerate a single instance, will not regard Bussche’s gallant attempt and failure before Mouscron as any part of the general breakdown. On the contrary, the stand which his little force made against far superior numbers, and the active cannonade which he kept up upon this extreme edge of the French front, would have been one of the major conditions determining the success of the allies if their enormously larger forces in other parts of the field had all of them kept their time-table and done what was expected of them.

On turning to the second group (the second column under Otto and the third under York), we discover a record of continuous success throughout the whole of that day, Saturday the 17th of May, which deserved a better fate than befell them upon the morrow.

(A) The Second Column under Otto

The second column under Otto, consisting of twelve battalions and ten squadrons, certain of the latter being English horse, and the whole command numbering some 10,000 men, advanced with the early morning of that same Saturday the 17th simultaneously with Bussche from Bailleul to Leers. It drove the French outposts in, carried Leers, and advanced further to Wattrelos. It carried Wattrelos.

It continued its successful march another three miles, still pressing in and thrusting off to its right the French soldiers of Compere’s command, until it came to what was then the little market-town of Tourcoing. It carried Tourcoing and held it. This uninterrupted series of successes had brought Otto’s troops forward by some eight miles from their starting-point, and had filled the whole morning, and Otto stood during the afternoon in possession of this advanced point, right on the line between Courtrai and Lille, and having fully accomplished the object which his superiors had set him.

From the somewhat higher roll of land which his cavalry could reach, and from which they could observe the valley of the Lys four miles beyond, they must have strained their eyes to catch some hint of Clerfayt’s troops, upon whose presence across the river on their side they had so confidently calculated, and which, had Clerfayt kept to his time-table and crossed the Lys at dawn, would now have been in the close neighbourhood of Tourcoing and in junction with this successful second column.

But there was no sign of any such welcome sight. The dull rolling plain, with its occasional low crests falling towards the river, betrayed the presence of troops in more than one position to the north and west. But those troops were not moving: they were holding positions, or, if moving, were obviously doing so with the object of contesting the passage of the river. They were French troops, not Austrian, that thus showed distinctly in rare and insufficient numbers along the southern bank of the Lys, and indeed, as we know, Clerfayt, during the whole of that afternoon of the 17th, was painfully bringing up his delayed pontoons, and was, until it was far advanced, upon the wrong side of the river.