In André’s twenty-first century, the assessment of Archduke Charles of Austria before 1805 ran as follows:

  He excelled not at attack but at defense; he clung too rigidly to traditional strategy; his aim was not to annihilate the enemy, but to seize cities and territory. Worse still, he was indecisive, lacking that iron will expected of a commander…

  Yet in June 1792, the hot-blooded young Archduke Charles of Austria became one of the few senior officers at Brussels headquarters who advocated a bold offensive. At an impromptu council of war, General Archduke Charles of Austria spoke with fervor to the commander before him—Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg—alongside the Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Duc de Teschen, and other high-ranking generals:

  “As we have seen for ourselves, the French are utterly unfit for war. Their commanders are timid and cautious, devoid of the chivalric spirit that drives a man forward. Noble officers flee in droves; the common soldiers are untrained, unpaid, ill-supplied, and low in morale—the weapons in their hands have rotted into nothing but firewood!”

  As he spoke, and after his request was granted by his superiors, his aide—an Army Captain—brought in a heap of standard French weapons captured on the battlefield, and laid them with careful precision in the center of the council chamber’s floor. The aide then turned and withdrew.

  General Archduke Charles stepped forward. Pointing at the pile, he continued:

  “This saber is covered in rust—at least half a year without any maintenance. And this Model 1777 musket, once renowned across Europe, has a bore and powder chamber corroded just as badly. My men field-tested twenty captured muskets: out of every ten loads, only four or five fired successfully—far below our own rate. Yet that is not the point. The point is this: among nearly 3,000 Model 1777 muskets I captured at Tournai, more than 80% had never even been loaded…”

  “Thank you, General Archduke Charles of Austria,” Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg said lightly—one sentence, delivered with austere authority—and the young subordinate was dismissed to wait outside.

  But toward the Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Duc de Teschen, the commander was markedly respectful. For Duc de Teschen was not only a member of the House of Habsburg; he was also deputy commander of the forces in the Austrian Netherlands, and the supreme director of logistics.

  “And your view, Your Highness?” Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg asked.

  Duc de Teschen, nearing fifty, was sallow-faced and perpetually infirm. Ever since a grave illness five years earlier, his health had never recovered; sometimes he could not even manage two sentences without growing short of breath. Even so, the weakened Duc still had to leave his sickroom and come to headquarters—solely to secure a chance for “little Karl” to distinguish himself among the many talents of the Habsburg dynasty…

  More than ten minutes later, General Archduke Charles accompanied his adoptive father away from headquarters in a luxurious carriage.

  “Why only two cavalry regiments?” the young man demanded, openly dissatisfied. He had asked for a cavalry brigade, an infantry division, and five artillery companies in support—his objective being to seize Lille and destroy the French defensive works there.

  Duc de Teschen endured the discomfort of the swaying carriage and explained with patient restraint:

  “This is already the greatest concession Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg would make. The main battlefield will not be on the Netherlandish frontier. And French agents are stirring discontent among the people here.

  “…cough… cough…

  “Since mid-to-late May, a series of civic riots has broken out in Ghent, Namur, Antwerp, Mons, and Liège. More than 100 have been killed or wounded. The city districts have been taken over by Austrian troops, and a curfew of five weeks has been imposed.

  “…cough… cough… cough…

  “So our principal duty—including General Josef Alvinczy’s division—has shifted from resisting a French invasion to preventing a repeat of the great Brabant uprising of 1790. And the purpose of your cavalry is not to take cities and territory, but to raid the towns around Lille—harassing the French and drawing the Army of the North toward you. Control the tempo. Do not become entangled in prolonged fighting.”

  Even in those rambling words, the Governor kept one point back.

  On the night before his adopted son returned to the governor’s palace, Gordissal, a Colonel—the former commander of the Saxon Cavalry Regiment who had defected from the French—was kidnapped on his way back to camp after leaving a brothel. He was still missing.

  Soon afterward, the city gendarmerie examined the site and concluded the kidnapping was likely the work of French spies operating in Brussels. Austria might have won the first clash, but the Austrian Netherlands were far from secure, because France’s true strength had not yet revealed itself.

  Intelligence from the front reported that Marshal de Rochambeau, the former commander of the Army of the North, had temporarily handed command to General Lameth. In practice, however, the real supreme authority lay with a young man not yet thirty—trained as a lawyer—named André Franck. His rank was Lieutenant General, and his official position was Plenipotentiary Representative to the Army of the North, jointly appointed by the French Assembly and cabinet. It was hardly surprising that, upon learning this, Karl’s competitive blood rose.

  …

  According to the original plan, Lieutenant General André was to reach the Army of the North’s base at Lille by late May. Yet two days earlier, the westward detachment under General Berthier had already arrived at headquarters.

  With Marshal de Rochambeau’s assistance, Moncey’s infantry brigade quickly took control of Lille and its surrounding fortifications. Hoche’s cavalry began working with Colonel Brune’s 1st Gendarmerie Regiment to enforce discipline and security within and around the camp.

  On May 27, Marshal de Rochambeau reported to the cabinet’s Ministry of War, assumed all blame for the defeats, announced his immediate resignation as commander of the Army of the North, and returned to Paris to face questioning at hearings convened by the cabinet and the Assembly.

  On the 28th, by orders issued on the road under the Plenipotentiary’s signature, 13 mutinous soldiers involved in the murder of General Dillon, after a court-martial confirmed their crimes, were executed by firing squad in public.

  On the afternoon of May 29, André, escorted by a unit of gendarmes, traveled from Paris to the outskirts of Lille, more than 200 kilometers away. In the unsteady carriage, his chief concern was not the fighting at the front, but the political movements in Paris behind him.

  Reports from the Military Intelligence Office claimed that 30,000 elite troops of the Bohemian corps had assembled outside Brussels. Yet their target was no longer the Army of the North south of the Austro-French line; instead they were preparing to turn east and withdraw into German territory. Some said the Bohemian corps would be dispatched to participate in the war of the Second Partition of Poland.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  However, an intelligence note from Comte de Talleyrand—serving as a diplomatic envoy far away in Rotterdam—corrected the Military Intelligence Office’s misjudgment. That dissolute former bishop learned, from the mistress of a Prussian prince in the United Provinces, that Prussia and the Austrian Empire were forming a powerful expeditionary army that would include the Bohemian corps, commanded by Duc de Brunswick, with French émigré nobles from Koblenz acting as guides, and would then invade France. As for the precise timetable and the exact axis of advance, they remained unknown; both monarchs had left those decisions to the allied commander.

  Upon hearing this, André finally felt some of the weight lift from his chest—history had returned, once again, to its original track.

  It must be said: before taking the field, André had been deeply uneasy. He feared the Austrians might suddenly change their medicine and throw their full weight against the French line from Dunkirk to Lille. If the Army of the North had been entirely his own core troops, that would have been manageable—he had full confidence in winning such a defensive war. But in truth he could mobilize no more than the westward detachment of fewer than 10,000 men.

  In a letter sent ahead from Lille, General Berthier wrote to Plenipotentiary André: morale there was shattered, spirits low, and confidence drained away. Weary officers spent their days in taverns; soldier-bandits plundered villagers and harassed townsfolk. In just two days, the gendarmes had arrested more than 200 men for breaches of discipline, and twenty-three had been executed by firing squad.

  By André’s rules, wartime courts-martial imposed no hard labor. Minor offenses meant a few days’ confinement; serious ones meant execution by firing squad the very day. The rest were dismissed and reduced in rank. Even so, it only restored discipline to something barely resembling normality. As for morale and belief in victory—at present, that was a fantasy.

  All signs suggested the pressure placed on junior officers and common soldiers was already near the limit. André had no desire to trigger a massive mutiny in the Army of the North. He therefore instructed Berthier to ease the crackdown for the moment, while increasing the distribution of pay and provisions, ensuring food supplies for both men and horses.

  If necessary, Berthier could invoke André’s plenipotentiary authority and march troops to “collect” supplies by force from the Lille municipal authorities or the Nord departmental administration. The final line, however, was written for Colonel Brune of the 1st Gendarmerie Regiment—because Berthier, as chief of staff, was too timid to carry out such high-handed measures himself.

  Back in Paris after André’s departure, the Legislative Assembly passed a new law deporting all clergy who refused to swear obedience to the Civil Constitution. In effect, it formally authorized a “righteous” campaign of pursuit and trial against non-juring priests. Although Louis XVI, troubled by conscience, vetoed the law a week later, it could no longer stop the hysteria: within days, more than twenty priests or nuns were killed in the greater Paris area, and more than 300 were thrown into prison.

  To protest the King’s vetoes of Assembly bills, the Assembly passed yet another decree and worked with Paris City Hall to disband the palace guard stationed at the Tuileries—more than 2,000 men in total, created in 1791 at Barnave’s proposal. Responsibility for protecting the palace and the royal family was handed to fewer than 800 Swiss mercenaries, and to the unreliable Paris National Guard.

  Not long after, the “patriotic” cabinet moved as well. War Minister Servan proposed recruiting a volunteer force of 50,000 men from the National Guard across the eighty-three departments. Yet the very next day, under protest from the Minister of Finance, the number was reduced to 20,000. Servan planned to select 5 men from each commune, with the scheme administered by Minister of the Interior Roland; the force would assemble in the outskirts of Paris in mid-to-late June, to defend against enemies both foreign and domestic.

  That fevered idea immediately triggered a brawl between the Constitutionalists and Brissot’s faction. The Constitutionalist nobles who controlled the Paris garrison firmly opposed any provincial troops being stationed in the capital. They even organized an armed demonstration involving 8,000 National Guardsmen, and at one point surrounded the Legislative Assembly…

  “Damn it,” André snarled, crushing the paper intelligence into a ball in his fist. In a moment of impulse, he wanted to ride back to Paris and throw those squabbling politicians into the Seine to cool their heads.

  But once his temper settled, André knew it was not the time—at least not yet. The three armies had not fallen into his hands. He could not act rashly. He had to wait, and wait for the right moment.

  When the carriage was still about two kilometers from camp, André changed into a sharply tailored blue general’s uniform and donned a bicorne with a red-white-and-blue cockade. He stepped down from the coach, mounted a chestnut warhorse brought by an attendant, and rode toward Lille camp under the guard’s escort.

  At four o’clock that afternoon on May 29—clear weather, a light breeze—the Lille camp, serving as the Army of the North’s headquarters, lay northeast of the city, less than one kilometer from the walls, beside the quiet Lys River.

  The Army of the North’s commanders, led by the acting commander General Lameth, stood in formation at the parade ground entrance, awaiting the Plenipotentiary’s arrival. To the generals’ left stood a band in neat uniform, bright-eyed and alert; to the right were the volunteer units chosen for review. If one looked closely, many soldiers in the rear ranks were ragged; many were barefoot, without even decent shoes. Yet the entire formation still stood straight-backed and high-headed, visibly excited—because they knew the Plenipotentiary had deliberately chosen volunteers as the troops to be inspected.

  A month earlier, in battle, this unit—formerly the 2nd Battalion of the Paris Volunteers—had returned to camp without significant loss, and had even captured an enemy cannon along the way, taking prisoner several Austrian stragglers. In view of this, the newly appointed chief of staff, General Berthier, acting on orders signed by Plenipotentiary André, merged the 2nd Paris Volunteers with two other volunteer battalions that had performed passably well, forming the 1st French Volunteer Regiment.

  The former Major of the 2nd Paris Volunteers, twenty-five-year-old Nicolas Charles Oudinot

  Before signing the appointment, André had conducted inquiries for quite some time, waiting until he confirmed that this Oudinot was indeed the man from the Meuse department who would later be celebrated as the bravest grenadier—an “Imperial Marshal.” Unlike the historical track, Oudinot, while running his family’s brewing business in the northern suburbs of Paris, had joined the National Guard in the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève district, and had paid to obtain—through sponsorship, by perfectly ordinary means—the title of Lieutenant Colonel in the Guard. In February 1792, when Paris began raising northern expeditionary forces from within the National Guard, Oudinot and his comrades all volunteered…

  Back among the general officers, the short, worried-looking General Fardel nudged the tall Vicomte de Beauharnais at his side. Then the noble general jerked his chin toward the troops under review and muttered in complaint:

  “Alexandre, look at your new men. They don’t even have proper shoes. Aren’t you worried the Plenipotentiary will dress you down?”

  Beauharnais shrugged helplessly. “You can’t blame me for this. I only learned the 1st French Volunteer Regiment was today’s review unit when headquarters sent the order to assemble. You know I’ve applied to the quartermaster twice already, and nothing came of it.”

  “Gentlemen, you can’t blame General Charles Pichegru,” said a General named Aoste from the front rank, turning to speak up for his friend the quartermaster. Like Beauharnais and Fardel, Aoste was a soldier of old noble stock, and about the same age. “After buying food and paying out wages, the Army of the North doesn’t have a single livre left in its purse.”

  Beauharnais’s younger brother—Augustin, standing in the rear—leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially:

  “Brother, I heard that wherever this Plenipotentiary André goes, he kills freely. He likes to take heads to ‘consecrate the flag.’ In Bordeaux, it was an unlucky tax farmer, and the local customs director; in Reims, it was a poor Comte, and more than fifty officials; in the Army of the Moselle, the logistics quartermaster was shot; and now that he’s come to the Army of the North…”

  “Shut up, Augustin!” Beauharnais, Fardel, and Aoste barked in unison. The commotion was loud enough to draw the attention of the other generals.

  General Lameth, the acting commander, frowned. He turned as if to rebuke his colleagues—but the words rose to his lips and died there. For in truth, as Augustin de Beauharnais had said, Plenipotentiary André had the habit of making an example in blood. No one knew which unlucky man it would be today.

  While they were still lost in such thoughts, Charles Malo Fran?ois Lameth—the brother at his side, formerly the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court and now a brigade commander—tugged lightly at his sleeve, signaling his elder brother to look toward the camp entrance at once.