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The news of Hoche's expedition brought about a run for gold which forced on the Bank a suspension of specie payments. It was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke passed away, protesting to the last against the peace which, in spite of his previous failure, Pitt was again striving to bring about by fresh negotiations at Lille.
He himself at the time tells Joseph that he is attached to the topographical bureau of the Comite de Saint Public, for the direction of the armies in the place of Carnot. The artillery generals were in excess of their establishment, and Bonaparte, as junior in age, was ordered on 13th June to join Hoche's army at Brest to command a brigade of infantry.
They were routed with a loss of six thousand prisoners. Another considerable force was nearly surrounded when a sudden stop was put to Hoche's career by the arrival of a courier from Leoben. Though, soon after, the ministry of war was offered to him, he declined.
Hoche himself was the inventor of a plan of harassing the English enemy which long remained in favour. He proposed to organise what was called a Chouannerie in England. As that country had no Chouans of her own, the want was to be supplied by sending over an expedition composed of convicts. Hoche's ideas were approved and adopted by the eminent Carnot.
The momentary humiliation of France in Jourdan's defeat, the deplorable condition of British finances as shown by the fall of the three per cents to fifty-three, the unsettled and dangerous state of Ireland, with the menace of Hoche's invasion impending, these circumstances created in London a feeling that perhaps the time was propitious for negotiating with France, where too there was considerable agitation for peace.
He himself at the time tells Joseph that he is attached to the topographical bureau of the Comite de Saint Public, for the direction of the armies in the place of Carnot. The artillery generals were in excess of their establishment, and Bonaparte, as junior in age, was ordered on 13th June to join Hoche's army at Brest to command a brigade of infantry.
He chose the commander of the fleet, and also chose or regulated the choice of the junior flag officers and several of the captains. Admiral Morard de Galles was not, and did not consider himself, equal to the task for which Hoche's favour had selected him.
I say nothing of Hoche's projected landing in Ireland; for that was a failure, and is, at the same time, an example of the difficulties to be apprehended in such attempts.
He so fired Carnot, one of the Directory, and still more General Hoche, with a belief of the feasibility of his scheme of descent, that, in December of the same year a French fleet of forty-three vessels containing fifteen thousand troops were actually despatched under Hoche's command, Wolfe Tone being on board of one of them, which vessels, slipping past the English fleet in the Channel, bore down upon the Irish coast, and suddenly appeared off Cape Clear.
It is not necessary to rate Hoche's capacity very highly in order to understand that he, who had seen something of war on a grand scale, would not have committed himself to the command of so small a body, without cavalry, without means of transport on land, without supplies, with but an insignificant artillery and that not furnished with horses, and, as was avowed, without hope of subsequent reinforcement or of open communications with its base that he would not have staked his reputation on the fate of a body so conditioned, if he had been permitted by the naval conditions of the case to lead a larger, more effectually organised, and better supplied army.
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