In October, on the Austrian Netherlands front, the long-planned French ambush—one hundred and ten thousand troops (including sixty thousand from the Army of the Meuse and fifty thousand from the Army of the North) against the thirty thousand-strong Bohemian corps—was disrupted by the harassment tactics successfully executed by Archduke Charles of Austria. As a result, the French destroyed only sixteen thousand Austrian troops (including the mobile force under Archduke Charles of Austria): four thousand killed and twelve thousand captured. Meanwhile, French casualties also reached five thousand, including the dead and seriously wounded; more than sixty percent came from the Army of the North’s western column—the force that had belonged to the late General Aoste.

  The remaining twenty thousand Austrians of the Bohemian corps, under the command of Comte de Latour, successfully withdrew to the fortress of Liège, at the confluence of the Meuse and the Ourthe. North of it lay the Dutch border; to the south, the Ardennes Forest. It was the throat of the route by which the Army of the Meuse would pass through the Austrian Netherlands to strike the German princes in the west—a position easy to hold and hard to take.

  Although the Army of the Meuse outnumbered the Austrians by three to one, possessed numerous artillery pieces, and even had the heavy firepower of three Meuse No. 1 gunboats, after several small probing attacks ended in failure, General Moncey, the army’s commander, had no choice but to abandon any notion of a quick decision and instead adopt a long siege to force a surrender.

  Two weeks later, at the request of General Custine, commander of the Army of the Moselle, the Northern Command Headquarters ordered General Lefebvre to lead an eastward detachment of a little over nine thousand men. Detaching from the main body of the Army of the Meuse, the column was to cross the Meuse and continue east. Its task was to assist the Army of the Moselle in attacking Aachen, fifty kilometres to the east—the former capital of Charlemagne, and the political center of the Frankish realm before its ninth-century partition.

  At the mouth of the Scheldt, Austrian forces in the river port of Antwerp, reinforced by troops withdrawn from Brussels, Ghent, and other places, had risen to more than twenty thousand. Though wounded, Archduke Charles of Austria still accepted the post of defensive commander and directed this battered remnant in battle.

  Outside Antwerp, the acting commander of the Army of the North—General Hoche, appointed in crisis—carefully surveyed the terrain and the city’s defenses and then, with clear reluctance, telegraphed Commander-in-Chief André that he could not shake this fortified river port until the French fleet arrived to support him.

  Surcouf’s Dunkirk squadron, sailing north under Colonel Surcouf, had already reached the Meuse estuary and prepared to attack Antwerp through the river channel. In the end, however, the Northern Command Headquarters issued no order for a general assault. Instead, it instructed the northern detachment to return at once to Dunkirk to refit.

  The reason was that the British ambassador in Paris, Duke of Dorset, sent diplomatic notes—separately—to the French cabinet ministers, to the National Convention, and to the Northern Command Headquarters, demanding that the French fleet not approach the Meuse estuary, not enter Dutch waterways, and under no circumstances blockade the channel or bombard this international commercial city.

  Very quickly, the National Convention and the cabinet ministers—now adept at passing responsibility—jointly pushed this thorny diplomatic issue over to the Northern Command Headquarters for full handling. By then André had moved his headquarters to Sedan. In the study at Marguerite’s manor outside the city, and in Madame Marguerite’s presence, he furiously smashed a costly set of English bone china—and then returned in silence to his chair and smoked a cigarette.

  Half an hour later, the commander-in-chief still suppressed his anger. He ordered General Hoche to suspend the siege of Antwerp. He also promised to compensate the manor’s mistress with an even more expensive set of Oriental porcelain.

  There was no doubt that the British were testing André’s limits. Previously, the British consul-general in Brussels had demanded that the French cease blocking the Meuse channel along the Dutch border, and had even ordered them not to use river gunboats to bombard the fortress of Liège—but André and the Army of the Meuse ignored him. The military blockade and fighting at Liège touched no British commercial interest; it was simply the irritation of watching an old rival advance from victory to victory.

  Antwerp, however, was different. It was not only the largest seaport of the Austrian Netherlands and the second city after Brussels; it was also a northern European trade center. Each year, the British moved goods worth tens of millions of pounds through Antwerp’s harbor. Let the French fire a single shot outside the walls, and London merchants would erupt at once—bringing the ambassador rushing in to negotiate.

  Though angered beyond measure, André understood that this was not yet the moment to break outright with Britain. At minimum, he had ordered several thousand tons of natural saltpeter from British merchantmen, and half of it had not yet arrived in port for delivery. In early November, the Army of the North lifted its river-and-sea blockade of Antwerp and restored free passage for merchant shipping of all nations.

  By late October, the entire Austrian Netherlands held only two strongpoints: Antwerp and the fortress of Liège. Total Austrian strength had fallen to forty thousand, and nearly thirty percent consisted of Austrian Netherlands auxiliary troops of ambiguous loyalty—especially around Antwerp. Mons, Bruges, Brussels, Namur, Hasselt, Leuven, and Tournai—along with other large and mid-sized cities—were by then entirely in French hands.

  Overall, the French had, in the Austrian Netherlands, largely achieved the Northern Command Headquarters’ initial strategic design: to occupy the French-speaking belt of central and southern Belgium—the western Flemish plain, the central uplands, and the southeastern Ardennes plateau—what Louis XIV and Parisian politicians had long yearned for as “Brabanca.”

  What left André deeply dissatisfied was the failure to annihilate the main Austrian force, which would make future fighting considerably harder—above all in the direction of Liège. Had the Army of the North’s commander, General Fardel, strictly executed the General Staff’s plan instead of having Aoste scramble for personal glory, many of these accidents would never have occurred.

  Now Aoste had paid for his recklessness with his life, and Fardel, too, had been removed and imprisoned by André’s order. André had originally wanted to send the former commander of the Army of the North before a military tribunal, but after a political transaction with the Brissot faction, he ultimately agreed to pardon Fardel and allow him to return to Paris to report.

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  In early November, the Northern Command Headquarters formally appointed General Hoche as commander of the Army of the North. The new commander’s first task was to lead the Army of the North’s main force once again to assist the Army of the Meuse in besieging Liège. Three days earlier, André had accepted the suggestion of the Austrian Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg and prepared to hold peace talks on December first, in Brussels, with a visiting plenipotentiary envoy from Vienna.

  Therefore, Moncey and Hoche had to take the fortress of Liège within four weeks. If they failed, the Bohemian corps could not serve as the Northern Command Headquarters’ leverage over the Viennese envoy. Put more plainly: without tens of thousands of prisoners—and noble officers—in hand, André could not extract more thaler silver or florin gold from the Austrian moneyed grandees.

  This patriotic war had nearly emptied the reserves André had built up over several years, whether by seizure or by careful management. In order not to grind himself to death against Prussia—just as poor—he had proactively proposed to Berlin a “loss-making” scheme of exchanging land for prisoners, pushing his influence into the future Ruhr. As for the ten million thalers he had squeezed from other coalition officers and émigré nobles (such as the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne), it amounted to roughly thirty-eight million livres.

  Yet after compensating more than one hundred thousand residents of the occupied regions for all categories of property loss; paying in full the back pay, allowances, and stipends of two hundred thousand officers and men across the four armies (the latter two limited to officers and NCOs); distributing condolence payments and pensions to the families of the fallen and to those retiring with severe wounds; and, lastly, repaying part of the principal and interest due to the United Bank as debts matured—after all that, the usable funds left in the Northern Command Headquarters’ treasury were scarcely anything.

  Of course, in the cities the French had taken—Bruges, Brussels, Namur, Hasselt, Leuven, and others—vast wealth had been left behind by fleeing Austrian nobles and the Catholic Church. But these were war dividends belonging to all officers and men, Commander-in-Chief André included. Ouvrard, Perrier, and the chief accountant Bernard, together with the gendarmerie command, would form a War Requisition Commission to levy, manage, and auction the whole. It should be noted that the public treasury of the Northern Command Headquarters could receive no more than ten percent of the overall proceeds, and only after three to six months.

  …

  Antwerp (Anvers) lay on the right bank of the Scheldt. Originally a frontier fortress of the Frankish realm, it developed in the ninth century into an important trading port. After the fifteenth century, Antwerp once became one of Europe’s richest cities, only to decline a little over a century later—until it rose again in the eighteenth century. Seen from atop the city walls, the medieval-style buildings stood packed together in layers; the streets, with their antique air, were narrow and winding.

  After inspecting a stretch of wall, Archduke Charles of Austria was utterly spent. A distance of only half a league had drained the last of his strength, and worse still, the gunshot wound in his abdomen was beginning to throb again. Though he tried to hold out a little longer, his weakened body betrayed the stubborn Habsburg prince. Only because his aide-de-camp reacted quickly and supported him from the side did the archduke avoid collapsing when darkness swam before his eyes.

  At the aide-de-camp’s urging, the young defensive commander finally agreed to rest for a moment. Seated on a small stool atop the wall, Archduke Charles of Austria could see the city’s bustle below: crowded markets, carriages and foot traffic flowing without end, and around the irregularly shaped square stood the City Hall, the cathedral, and the chamber of commerce.

  But if he turned to look beyond the walls, the view was far less pleasing. Tricolors and battle flags, and under them an unbroken spread of French tents and artillery positions, were visible everywhere within five kilometres of Antwerp. Although the French no longer bombarded Antwerp and had lifted the blockade of the Scheldt channel, they still maintained strategic pressure on the city by land.

  Two or three times, Archduke Charles of Austria had wanted to repeat his old trick—leading a mobile cavalry force out for a sudden strike, to punish the French camp below and blunt its arrogance. Duc de Teschen quickly stamped out the young man’s reckless idea. The governor of the Austrian Netherlands had already given assurances to the British consul: the Austrians would not initiate attacks on the French outside the city. This was the condition for the Army of the North’s cessation of bombardment and for not sealing off the sea-and-river approaches. If Austria violated the tripartite peace arrangement first, Britain would no longer prevent the French fleet from sailing up to Antwerp’s walls.

  Moreover, within Antwerp’s garrison, Flemish and Walloon soldiers serving as auxiliaries made up more than half the troops. If Archduke Charles of Austria moved the Austrian main force outside the city, the mutual hostility between Flemings and Walloons could easily erupt into internal fighting—the outcome might be the handover of Antwerp to the French outside the walls.

  Earlier, Duc de Teschen and others had abandoned Bruges and Brussels precisely because Walloon assemblies and militia organizations inside those cities, stirred up by French agents, openly raised slogans and banners welcoming the French, forcing Austrian nobles and Austrian troops to depart peacefully.

  For these reasons, Archduke Charles of Austria could only hope that Comte de Latour’s Bohemian corps might retreat to Aachen, in the western German hills. Unfortunately, bad news came from the Meuse: French steam-driven gunboats had somehow slipped swiftly to the forward reaches of the river and sunk several Austrian supply vessels moored at the river port of Liège. Deprived of supplies, the twenty thousand-strong Bohemian corps had no choice but to hold out within the fortress of Liège.

  A few days earlier, Archduke Charles of Austria suddenly noticed that the French besieging Antwerp seemed far fewer. After careful reconnaissance, he concluded that fewer than twenty thousand French remained outside the city. As for the thirty thousand who had departed, they were most likely dispatched one hundred and twenty kilometres to the southwest, toward the fortress of Liège, to join the siege there.

  This morning, Antwerp received what Comte de Latour described as his final report from the fortress of Liège: “November third—French reinforcements have arrived… the whole of Liège is now ringed by more than eighty thousand French… Long live the great Holy Roman Empire!”

  Duc de Teschen read it with a heavy heart and collapsed on the spot. Fortunately, physicians arrived in time and saved—extended—the governor’s life. Yet the doctors warned Archduke Charles of Austria that Duc de Teschen must lie in bed and rest for at least one month, and must not be angered or provoked; perhaps, they said, he could hold on until 1793.

  And this was the true reason Archduke Charles of Austria could not go out to fight. Since defeat had become unavoidable, he could not also lose his closest kin. Now his only hope was that the envoy from Vienna had already reached a peace agreement with the French commander, so that the brave imperial soldiers might return home alive.

  Compared with those aged and muddleheaded Austrian generals, Archduke Charles of Austria was still very young. He had time, energy, and opportunity—and the Habsburg family’s limitless backing—to learn from the French, retrain a new Austrian army, and prepare to meet the French again on the Swiss front and the northern Italian front.

  As for this Low Countries territory, so far from Austria proper, the Holy Roman Emperor—his own elder brother, Francis II—had long intended to abandon it. Only the firm opposition of Duc de Teschen and the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg had kept him from saying so openly. Now that the governor lay sick here and the commander-in-chief had become André’s prisoner, abandoning the Netherlands had become merely a question of time—and of price.