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Updated: May 9, 2025
Here the Sambre, a small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond like the rim of a saucer. The town most of it is on this side.
After that happened the second time I guessed my letter to the President of France might prove a menace, and, tearing it into little pieces, dropped it over a bridge, and with regret watched that historical document from the ex-President of one republic to the President of another float down the Sambre toward the sea. By noon I decided I would not be able to make the distance.
In 1794, he was employed, as a general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the general, without much distinction, except that he was accused by him of being the cause of all the disasters of the last campaign, by the complete rout he suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August, 1796.
All the rest of that day the Fourth corps were filing over the bridge, and we learned at night, that the whole army had passed the Sambre, and that there had been fighting near Charleroi, at Marchiennes, and Jumet.
In spite of a few protests, the proposal was adopted, on October 1, 1795, and the country divided into nine departments Lys, Escaut, Deux Nèthes, Meuse Inférieure, Dyle, Ourthe, Jemappes, Sambre et Meuse and Forêts. The régime of the Directoire was equally hateful to the Belgians, who derived scant benefit from their annexation.
The army was kept thus available for movement in any necessary direction, till certain intelligence arrived on the 15th of June that the French had crossed the frontier in large force near Thuin, that they had driven back the Prussian advanced troops under General Ziethen, and were also moving across the Sambre upon Charleroi.
When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again, only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food. In the woods and fields about Alne she began to breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air after being shut in a wooden trap.
In those very days which saw the greatest peril in the West, the last days of August, during which the Franco-British Allies were falling back from the Sambre, pursued by the numbers we have seen upon an earlier page, the third and the second Russian armies effected their junction, the moment of their first joining hands being apparently that same Monday, the 24th of August, during which Sir John French was falling back upon Maubeuge.
There was even talk of a court martial. The day was lost in consequence of the absence of the Archduke, who suffered from fits like Julius Cæsar, and is said to have been lying unconscious many miles away. For a month longer the allies held their ground and repeatedly repressed Jourdan in his attempts to cross the Sambre.
First, its fortifications, so long as they held out, commanded the crossings both of the Sambre and of the Meuse within the angle of which the French defensive lay; secondly, its fortified zone formed the support whereupon the whole French right reposed.
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