Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
When in March, 1793, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire joined the coalition, France was at war with all her neighbors. The Austrians defeated Dumouriez at Neerwinden and drove the French out of the Netherlands.
Marechal de Villeroy took Huy in three days, losing only a sub-engineer and some soldiers. On the 29th of July we attacked at dawn the Prince of Orange at Neerwinden, and after twelve hours of hard fighting, under a blazing sun, entirely routed him. I was of the third squadron of the Royal Roussillon, and made five charges.
The chief army of all, the army of Sambre et Meuse, was commanded by Kléber, Moreau, Reynier, Marceau, and Ney. Better still, on the Rhine were Hoche, Desaix, and St. Cyr. Best of all, in the Apennines, the French were led by Bonaparte and Masséna. All these armaments had scarcely begun when the victory of Neerwinden and the flight of Dumouriez brought the Austrians up to the Belgian frontier.
This has been true from antiquity, when the cavalryman was of a superior caste to the infantryman, and ought to have been braver. Anybody advancing, cavalry or infantry, ought to scout and reconnoiter as soon as possible the terrain on which it acts. Conde forgot this at Neerwinden. The 55th forgot it at Solferino. Everybody forgets it.
William's batteries did much execution before the French artillery could be so placed as to return the fire. It was eight o'clock before the close fighting began. The village of Neerwinden was regarded by both commanders as the point on which every thing depended.
The duke of Coburg commanded the main body of the Austrians in the Netherlands, where he was at first merely opposed by the old French army, whose general, Dumouriez, after unsuccessfully grasping at the supreme power, entered into a secret agreement with the coalition, allowed himself to be defeated at Aldenhovenl and Neerwinden, and finally deserted to the Austrians.
That assuredly was not the opinion of the Prince who had, at the head of Ormond's Life Guards, driven the French household troops, till, then invincible, back over the ruins of Neerwinden, and whose eagle eye and applauding voice had followed Cutts's grenadiers up the glacis of Namur.
Marechal de Villeroy took Huy in three days, losing only a sub-engineer and some soldiers. On the 29th of July we attacked at dawn the Prince of Orange at Neerwinden, and after twelve hours of hard fighting, under a blazing sun, entirely routed him. I was of the third squadron of the Royal Roussillon, and made five charges.
More than ten thousand of the best troops of Lewis had fallen. Neerwinden was a spectacle at which the oldest soldiers stood aghast. The streets were piled breast high with corpses. Among the slain were some great lords and some renowned warriors. Montchevreuil was there, and the mutilated trunk of the Duke of Uzes, first in order of precedence among the whole aristocracy of France.
He conducted the siege of Maestricht and commanded the left wing of the French army at the disastrous battle of Neerwinden, March, 1793, in which Belgium was reconquered by the Austrians. Dumouriez now declared against the Convention, but his troops having refused to follow him, he went over to the Austrians in company with the Duke of Chartres, Louis Philippe.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking