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The French army, consisting of five corps d'armee, the Guard, four cavalry corps and 344 guns total fighting strength 124,500 Napoleon had succeeded in assembling with wonderful celerity and secrecy south of the Sambre within an easy march of Charleroi. Its officers and soldiers were alike veterans but its organisation was somewhat defective.
When the retreat is made down the bank of a river, wooden houses may be thrown into the stream, also fire-ships and mills, a means the Austrians used in 1796 against Jourdan's army, near Neuwied on the Rhine, where they nearly compromised the army of the Sambre and the Meuse. The Archduke Charles did the same thing at Essling in 1809.
In a fortnight's close and painful application, which, by the bye, did my uncle Toby's wound, upon his groin, no good, he was enabled, by the help of some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together with Gobesius's military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from the Flemish, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity; and before he was two full months gone, he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order; but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than what his first motive made necessary, my uncle Toby was able to cross the Maes and Sambre; make diversions as far as Vauban's line, the abbey of Salsines, &c. and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their attacks, as of that of the gate of St.
As this was the principal attack of which my uncle Toby was an eye-witness at Namur, the army of the besiegers being cut off, by the confluence of the Maes and Sambre, from seeing much of each other's operations, my uncle Toby was generally more eloquent and particular in his account of it; and the many perplexities he was in, arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counterscarp, the glacis and covered-way, the half-moon and ravelin, as to make his company fully comprehend where and what he was about.
The children who played together to-day by the Sambre and Oise Canal, each at his own father's threshold, when and where might they next meet? For some time past the subject of barges had occupied a great deal of our talk, and we had projected an old age on the canals of Europe.
"So much the better," he replied, "that is what I want." This village was called Chatelet. It is on the river Sambre, the water is very deep, yellow, and clayey, and those who are so unfortunate as to fall into it, find it very difficult to get out of, for the banks are perpendicular, as we found out afterward.
The German right, opposing the British, was under command of General von Kluck; General von Buelow and General von Hausen commanded the German center opposing the Franco-Belgian forces between the Sambre and Namur and the Meuse. The Grand Duke Albrecht of Wuerttemberg operated between Charleroi and the French border fortress of Maubeuge.
Three French armies, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth, were strung along the frontier from Montmédy across the Meuse and the Sambre to a point north-west of Charleroi, where the British took up their position stretching through Binche, Mons, and along the canal from Mons to Condé.
The Austrians endeavoured with the same want of success, to cover Brussels and Maestricht: they were pursued and beaten by the army of Jourdan, which since its union had taken the name of the army of the Sambre et Meuse, and which did not leave them behind the Roer, as Dumouriez had done, but drove them beyond the Rhine.
XXXIII. Having divided the army, he orders T. Labienus to proceed with three legions towards the ocean into those parts which border on the Menappii; he sends C. Trebonius with a like number of legions to lay waste that district which lies contiguous to the Aduatuci; he himself determines to go with the remaining three to the river Sambre, which flows into the Meuse, and to the most remote parts of Arduenna, whither he heard that Ambiorix had gone with a few horse.
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