ONE:Pichegru, on his part, having driven back Clairfait, turned round on the Duke of York, who lay at Tournay. There he met with a severe repulse, and fell back with heavy loss; but Clairfait having again advanced to regain Courtrai, Pichegru once more engaged and defeated him. Clairfait then fell back into Flanders, to cover Ghent, Bruges, and Ostend. Pichegru, urged on against his better judgment by St. Just, who was the Commissioner from the Convention, sent Kleber and Marceau across the Sambre to attack General Kaunitz; but Kaunitz gave the French a severe defeat, killing four thousand of them; and had the Austrians been as rapid as they were brave, they might have nearly exterminated the whole of the French division. This success inspirited the Allies to advance actively, but the Duke of York, not taking into account the habitual slowness of German troops, shot ahead, expecting to fall in with Clairfait's columns at Turcoing; but there he only found the French, under Souham and Bonnaud, who well nigh enveloped him by their vast numbers, totally defeated, and nearly took him prisoner. This gave such a panic to the Austrians, that the entire army fell back, and Francis II., thoroughly discouraged, withdrew from the command and left it to the Prince of Coburg. The Duke of York rallied, and maintained his ground at Tournay against Pichegru, and Kaunitz followed up his advantage against Kleber and Moreau, driving them across the Sambre; but these were only temporary successes. Jourdain, finding no Prussians in the Moselle, drew nearer to the camp of Pichegru. There were various conflicts at Ypres, Charleroi, and on the plains of Fleurus. The Allies drove the French three times across the Sambre, but they returned with fresh and never-ending forces, and compelled the Allies to a general retreat. Bruges opened its gates to the French; Pichegru, aided by Moreau, compelled the Duke of York to retire successively on Oudenarde, Tournay, and Antwerp, places filled with the fame of Marlborough. At Antwerp the Duke of York was joined by Lord Moira, with ten thousand men, intended originally for La Vende, but too late to prevent the massacre of Savenay. The English garrison quitted Ostend, and came round to Antwerp; and the British occupied that town, whilst Clairfait lay at Louvain, and the two armies, unitedly, protected Mechlin.
TWO:
ONE:
TWO:In less than an hour the troop was ready, the men flannel-shirted and gauntleted, their soft felt hats pulled over their eyes, standing reins in hand, foot in stirrup, beside the fine, big horses that Crook had substituted for the broncos of the plains cavalry of former years. Down by the corrals the pack-mules were ready, too, grunting under their aparejos and packs. A thick, hot wind, fraught with sand, was beginning, presaging one of the fearful dust storms of the southwest. The air dried the very blood in the veins. The flies, sticky and insistent, clung and buzzed about the horses' eyes and nostrils. Bunches of tumbleweed and hay went whirling across the parade.
ONE:That was a clinching statement.A man, coming silently from some concealment, in a dory, undetected in their busy absorption, held something menacingly businesslike and sending sun glints from its blue steel. Its hollow nose covered both at the range he had.
TWO:The time for the last grand conflict for the recovery of their forfeited throne in Great Britain by the Stuarts was come. The Pretender had grown old and cautious, but the young prince, Charles Edward, who had been permitted by his father, and encouraged by France, to attempt this great object in 1744, had not at all abated his enthusiasm for it, though Providence had appeared to fight against him, and France, after the failure of Dunkirk, had seemed to abandon the design altogether. When he received the news of the battle of Fontenoy he was at the Chateau de Navarre, near Evreux, the seat of his attached friend, the young Duke de Bouillon. He wrote to Murray of Broughton to announce his determination to attempt the enterprise at all hazards. He had been assured by Murray himself that his friends in Scotland discountenanced any rising unless six thousand men and ten thousand stand of arms could be brought over; and that, without these, they would not even engage to join him. The announcement, therefore, that he was coming threw the friends of the old dynasty in Scotland into the greatest alarm. All but the Duke of Perth condemned the enterprise in the strongest terms, and wrote letters to induce him to postpone his voyage. But these remonstrances arrived too late; if, indeed, they would have had any effect had they reached him earlier. Charles Edward had lost no time in making his preparations.The fault of this last, crowning breach of faith was not all with the Red-men by any means. But the difficulty would be to have that believed. The world at large,or such part of it as was deigning to take heed of this struggle against heavy odds, this contest between the prehistoric and the makers of history,the world at large would not go into the details, if indeed it were ever to hear them. It would know just this, that a band of Indians, terrible in the very smallness of their numbers, were meeting the oncoming line of civilization from the East with that of the savagery of the West, as a prairie fire is met and checked in its advance by another fire kindled and set on to stop it. It would know that the blood of the masters of the land was being spilled upon the thirsty, unreclaimed ground by those who were, in right and justice, for the welfare of humanity, masters no more. It would know that the voice which should have been that of authority and command was often turned to helpless complaint or shrieks for mercy. And it[Pg 304] would not stop for the causes of these things; it could not be expected to. It would know that a man had come who had promised peace, confidently promised it in the event of certain other promises being fulfilled, and that he had failed of his purpose. The world would say that Crook had held in his grasp the Apaches and the future peace of an empire as large as that of Great Britain and Ireland, France and Germany in one, and that he had let it slip through nerveless fingers. It was signal failure.
