By near midday, the area around Liège was still so mild it felt like a bright, sunny day; even wearing a coat seemed a little too warm. Yet by the afternoon the weather turned sharply colder. The sky darkened at once, and then a biting north wind began to howl. Only after dusk did the wind gradually ease, but at night the temperature dropped to just two degrees.

  Late at night, General Moncey was in his corps headquarters, working under a multi-branch candelabrum of burning candles as he signed off on a thick stack of documents. From time to time he had to pause and hold his stiff, chilled hands nearer the brazier for warmth. In fact, the entire Meuse headquarters was a cluster of simple wooden sheds, slightly larger than the usual, divided by partitions into two levels: men lived above, offices were below. Beginning two days earlier, these rough huts had replaced the white canvas tents that could not keep out the cold; they now stood in rows throughout the French camp.

  These were the results of work begun a week earlier, when the engineering units of the Army of the North were ordered to lead several thousand German and Dutch prisoners in hard labour. Fortunately, both banks of the Meuse were covered in broad forests, so timber was abundant. The engineers needed only to draft the layout, supervise the build, and provide the labourers with hammers, nails, saws, and other tools. When the schedule tightened at the end, and manpower was still short, the engineer regiment was even permitted to hire three thousand sturdy labourers from several nearby villages—men who brought their own tools—paying them in canned provisions or livres.

  Now, at last, the huts that could accommodate eighty thousand officers and men had been completed before the sudden cold set in, though there had been no time to strip the bark from the logs. In a campaign abroad, General Moncey—born to the household of a civilian lawyer—was not particular about such things. Even so, the wind kept forcing its way in through the gaps between the boards, chilling the commander of the Army of the Meuse until he had to set down his steel pen again and again and rub his hands; the firewood in the brazier was close to going out.

  “Dennis, put more wood on the brazier—quickly!” General Moncey called out twice. Dennis was his aide-de-camp, a major.

  At once a young officer in a blue uniform came in from the outer room. Yet instead of adding wood to the brazier, he draped a black fur cloak over General Moncey’s shoulders.

  Moncey looked up in surprise, and only then did he recognise a very familiar face smiling at him. The visitor was his old comrade and former subordinate, General Hoche—now the new commander of the Army of the North, and also one of the earliest officers to follow Marshal André, a man of the innermost circle.

  “Don’t look at me like that. This isn’t a bribe. It’s a winter gift the Commander-in-Chief sent down from Sedan to all frontline commanders. They say these were coalition winter supplies seized by General Custine’s Army of the Moselle in Luxembourg City—fine sable pelts, all of them. I brought one to you the moment I received mine.”

  Hoche laughed, plainly pleased with himself. As he spoke, he crouched and, with exaggerated care, dragged the brazier several yards farther into the outer room, lest a stray spark land on the costly fur. Of course, such a cloak could be worn only inside an office; when inspecting the camp, a French general was required to wear the knee-length leather coat that marked his rank.

  The climate around Liège was naturally far colder than Lille by the sea, and far colder than Reims in the south. Yet the nearby Meuse, and the presence of steam merchant vessels on the river, ensured the supplies of the two corps—eighty thousand men in all. Only shelter had to be built by their own hands.

  Even after winter passed, most of these simple wooden huts would remain as the Army of the Meuse’s quarters, at least until 1793, when the great northern campaign to conquer the Dutch provinces began.

  As for General Custine, he was plainly far more compliant than the former commander of the Army of the North, General Fardel. In matters great and small, Custine made a point of reporting and requesting instructions from the Command Headquarters. Most of those papers did not even merit André’s signature of “seen”; the General Staff usually sorted them, extracted the essentials, and reported only the key points to the Commander-in-Chief. Still, as a reward for loyalty, André had already submitted an application to the Committee of Twelve to promote Custine to Lieutenant General of the Republic’s army.

  Since October eighth, when the Army of the Moselle formally crossed the north-eastern border, Custine’s progress had been astonishing. In no more than three to five days, he occupied the entire Duchy of Luxembourg. By late November, the Army of the Moselle had in succession taken Luxembourg, Trier, Aachen, Koblenz, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg—electorates, prince-archbishoprics, or free cities. At the end of the eighteenth century, there were still more than two hundred states and free cities within the German lands.

  At present, the Army of the Moselle’s main force was turning south to cooperate with the Rhine Army advancing from the opposite direction, and to besiege Mainz, a strong fortified city on the Rhine. Once Liège and Mainz were taken, the campaign of 1792 would, in effect, be drawing to a close.

  Hoche turned back and continued, “Oh—and one more thing. Tonight I made the rounds of the camp on your behalf. The men have all moved into the huts. They leak a little, but at least they can stand up to strong winds and snow. Once the Dutch merchants deliver tar, we can seal the gaps between the boards.”

  Moncey glanced at his former subordinate and asked in an even tone, “So. What have you come to ask of me?” As he spoke, he casually removed his spectacles, held them in his hand, and gently wiped the lenses with a piece of deerskin.

  “Give me two batteries—the Ougrée battery in the south and the Lantin battery. Better yet, give me the city of Liège as well.” Facing Moncey, Hoche adopted an almost pleading expression. A week earlier, when the Army of the North and the Army of the Meuse joined forces, the Command Headquarters had appointed General Moncey as supreme commander for the remainder of the operation.

  To Hoche’s shock, Moncey shook his head. “My friend, that is impossible.”

  Hoche grew anxious and pressed again. “Then Lantin, at least—and the city of Liège as well.”

  Of the four corps in the north, the Army of the North had fought the most humiliating October. The entire corps had been thrown into chaos by only a few thousand Austrian troops, and it had even lost the commander of the western column. Worse still, Hoche, commanding the eastern column, had been forced to concentrate all his forces to deal with Archduke Charles of Austria’s attacks from the rear. By abandoning the blockade of the Namur line, the eastern column had wrecked the Northern Command Headquarters’ overall plan to encircle and destroy the Bohemian Corps, and in the end had allowed twenty thousand Austrian troops to retreat successfully into the fortress of Liège.

  Although the Army of the North’s early failures were not chiefly Hoche’s fault—and although he belonged to the innermost circle around Marshal André—he could still be elevated to command the Army of the North despite an unfavourable campaign. Yet the former palace stable-boy’s son was not satisfied with that. He wanted to redeem the Army of the North through victory: to take the fortress of Liège and annihilate what remained of the Bohemian Corps.

  Instead, his superior refused him. Hoche was so frustrated he looked ready to tear the black sable cloak back off Moncey’s shoulders.

  Moncey burst out laughing. For once, the honest man even showed a sly, triumphant look. “What I mean is this: you and your corps must take on the remaining four batteries, and the assault on the city of Liège.”

  Moving the Army of the North’s main force to Liège had been Moncey’s own proposal to Marshal André. He hoped that victory here would wash away Hoche’s earlier shame. He also hoped to lure Archduke Charles of Austria—still lurking in Antwerp—into coming out to cause trouble. But the Habsburg prince, chastened by experience, did not take the bait.

  In truth, the Army of the Meuse alone was strong enough to take the entire fortress of Liège. The hard-fought battle on the right bank of the Meuse ten days earlier had already proved that fact.

  Under Hoche’s grateful gaze, Moncey continued with a warning. “You must be careful. The Austrian garrison seems to have learned from its defeat on the right bank and changed its defensive scheme west of the Meuse. They have laid far more minefields, and they have dug a trench in front of the batteries and parapets to stop both infantry and cavalry. They have even cleared all shrubs and weeds within 500 metres of the forward works, to prevent our sharpshooters from creeping close under cover.

  “But there is good news as well. General Senarmont has sent five heavy artillery companies by steamship to support the operation. At the latest, by tomorrow at dusk they will be placed under Colonel Laclos’s heavy artillery regiment. In addition, the three Meuse No. 1 gunboats have completed their refit and can be recommitted to the fight at any moment.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  ...

  When the French barrage ended, Captain Scharnhorst of the artillery handed command to his deputy. He returned to his room and, without delay, pulled half a bottle of Champagne from beneath his bed and poured himself a drink, savouring a brief pocket of quiet. His post lay at the southernmost end of the defensive system, the Lantin battery; two kilometres behind the battery line stood the city of Liège.

  Before long, the battery commander, Lieutenant Colonel Blount, came in. A fellow Hanoverian, he laughed the moment he opened the door, stared at the Champagne in the captain’s hand, and shouted, “The moment you ran off, I knew you had a bottle of Reims Champagne hidden in here. Pour me a large glass. Damn it, the red wine the Dutch sell is foul enough to kill a man.”

  With a resigned expression, Scharnhorst poured half a glass and handed it over to his commander and countryman.

  “To another day alive.”

  “To life.”

  Their glasses touched lightly, and they drank.

  Scharnhorst pointed east. “Comte de Latour still hasn’t decided to give it up?”

  The lieutenant colonel nodded, his face heavy. “I think our commander has read too much Scripture. Even Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg has surrendered, and he still wants to hold out—still thinks he is some kind of God-Favoured.”

  Ever since Comte de Latour tore up the summons to surrender and, in front of the envoys outside the walls, insulted the French Commander-in-Chief André, the French army had ceased all persuasion and accelerated the siege.

  Since November eleventh, the French had resumed the bombardment of the fortress of Liège’s remaining four batteries. During five consecutive days of artillery duels, the French 12-pound guns—light, flexible, and easy to emplace—seemed no less destructive than the ponderous Austrian 24-pounders mounted in the batteries. They also appeared to shoot with unnerving accuracy, and both sides’ effective range lay between 1.8 and 2 kilometres.

  Over those five days, the Austrian battery gunners, protected by good cover, lost forty-five guns; French losses were estimated at more than fifty. Yet French supplies could be carried forward without interruption by steam merchant vessels along the Meuse. If five guns were destroyed today, perhaps six could be replaced tomorrow—perhaps even more.

  In short, the French had more guns and could bring up still more; the Austrian guns dwindled by the day. Each battery now averaged only four to five pieces, for a total of just seventeen. Scharnhorst’s company, the best-preserved of all, now had only eighty gunners left, every man wounded. The other one hundred and twenty were either in the frozen ground or in the aid stations, clinging to life. Captain Scharnhorst himself, by contrast, had not a scratch on him.

  As for reinforcements, there was no hope. The nearest Austrian force was still pinned in the port of Antwerp, surviving only because of a British diplomatic note that granted it, at best, a precarious safety.

  Even under heavy French encirclement, Austrian supplies had, until at least a week earlier, still trickled in from time to time. Dutch shipowners in the north, unable to resist the lure of gold florins, would take the risk under cover of darkness, rowing to the foot of Liège’s heights to trade supplies with the Austrians.

  Now, however, even the most reckless Dutch shipowner no longer dared risk being sunk by running the French fire-control line on the Meuse. In recent days, three French steam gunboats—now back under power—had sunk sixteen vessels of various sizes, and had refused to rescue those who fell into the water. Acting as forward commander, General Hoche enforced the rules of engagement with severity, leaving these “civilian-clad spies who aided the enemy” to freeze and drown in the Meuse.

  In Scharnhorst’s room, Lieutenant Colonel Blount explained all this in a grave tone.

  “We have only thirteen guns left, my friend. Thirteen—hardly a lucky number. The field commanders of the four batteries have just compiled their reports. The Bressoux battery and the Flémalle battery have been hit the worst; they have only two and three guns left, respectively. We are the best of them. If nothing changes, it will be tomorrow—at the latest, the day after—when the French cavalry and infantry launch their ground assault.”

  Blount paused, poured the remaining Champagne into their glasses, drank his in one pull, and then hurled the empty glass to the floor, smashing it. In a hollow voice, the Austrian commander added, “Damn it. I only hope there is sun tomorrow, so it can guide me to the road to Heaven, instead of down into Hell.”

  “Did you not send your infantry battalion to relay the minefield in the forward works?” Scharnhorst asked.

  “No one dares go beyond the parapet,” Blount replied. “French sharpshooters can hide and pick a man off from 500 metres away. And their fifty guns can wipe out in one hour what a mining party builds in a whole day. My engineer company has only twenty-five men left. I will not throw them away.”

  Before he left, Blount quietly urged Scharnhorst not to die for the Habsburgs. When the French stormed the infantry parapet, he said, Scharnhorst should abandon resistance at once. Living mattered more than anything. Scharnhorst agreed without hesitation and nodded hard.

  ...

  On November eighteenth, after a full week of violent bombardment, the batteries on the left bank of the Meuse that blocked the French advance on Liège—Bressoux, Flémalle, Ougrée, and Lantin—were reduced to ruins. Their surface structures had been swept clean by iron shot. According to the results of the last bombardment, only seven guns remained across the four batteries, and the surviving Austrian gunners were fewer than one hundred.

  The moment to attack had come. At about ten o’clock in the morning, amid the roar of more than one hundred guns, General Hoche issued his assault orders with crisp precision: Brigadier General Oudinot’s First Volunteer Infantry Brigade would serve as the main effort against Bressoux and Flémalle; on the other flank, the Second Infantry Brigade under General Pichegru would take Ougrée and Lantin.

  A month earlier, Pichegru still held only the rank of colonel. While serving as commandant of Metz’s defences after its recapture, he received a transfer order from the Northern Command Headquarters, reassigning him from the Rhine Army to the Army of the North to command an infantry brigade. Two weeks earlier, Commander Hoche granted Pichegru an acting general’s rank. Only yesterday did Pichegru learn why: Colonel Suchet of the General Staff had seized an opportunity to recommend him vigorously to Marshal André. (See chapter one hundred and sixty-seven.)

  The narrative now returns to the battlefield. General Hoche concentrated all four light cavalry regiments of the Army of the North on his left and right, with two infantry divisions behind them as solid support for the assault force. The light cavalry’s main task was to screen the attacking infantry’s flanks, preventing Austrian sorties from the city and counterattacks from the parapet line. Once the trench was filled by the infantry, the light cavalry could also charge directly into the batteries’ defensive works.

  In fact, this textbook assault drill lasted less than twenty minutes. Bressoux, Flémalle, Ougrée, and Lantin all fell in quick succession. Under the intimidation of French artillery and cavalry, the aristocratic commanders of two Austrian cavalry regiments flatly refused Comte de Latour’s order to sortie, declaring that they would rather face a court-martial than ride out to die for nothing.

  Thus the Bohemian Corps commander could only watch as French infantry, bayonets fixed, climbed the trench with ease, crossed the parapet, stormed the four batteries, and accepted the surrender of the remaining defenders. There was no doubt that the French artillery, which held an overwhelming advantage, played a decisive role.

  By the end of the fighting on November eighteenth, the Bohemian Corps held only the city of Liège itself. Its remaining strength was reduced to just ten thousand men. Worse still, with ammunition, food, drink, and medicine all in severe shortage, morale had fallen close to the bottom.

  Over the following week, General Hoche did not rush a storming attack on the city. He continued with sustained bombardment instead. All captured 24-pound guns were turned around, and, together with the French 12-pound André cannon, brought to bear on Liège. Before long, warehouses and hospitals inside the city burst into flames. Twenty-four hours later, the city’s remaining thirty guns were silenced, yet the French fire did not let up. Within seven days, one hundred and sixty heavy guns fired ninety thousand rounds in total, including large numbers of heated shot—a crude incendiary round, solid rather than hollow.

  In late November, as Liège’s soldiers and civilians endured the constant shelling outside the walls, they discovered a graver problem still: water. The city stood on high ground more than one hundred metres above the left bank of the Meuse, and river water could not supply the heights. In ordinary times, mountain springs and streams from the nearby hills met the daily needs of the city’s many thousands of inhabitants. But after French engineers used large quantities of explosives to cut the upstream channels, the people of Liège were forced to survive on rainwater alone—often unable even to draw water to fight fires.

  A thin, intermittent drizzle was plainly not enough, to say nothing of the filth of unfiltered rainwater. In a crowded city it could easily lead to intestinal epidemics—what Christians called plague.

  Before long, the president of Liège’s municipal council, taking advantage of darkness, slipped out through a gate with the tacit consent and indulgence of the Austrian noble officers. He went to visit General Hoche outside the walls, hoping to surrender on behalf of the entire population of Liège, including the officers and men of the Bohemian Corps.

  Hoche rejected him at once. He told the envoy, “The terms and guarantees themselves are not the problem. The only problem is Comte de Latour. That coarse Bohemian soldier once insulted our Commander-in-Chief. In a few days, the great Marshal André will come to the Liège front to inspect matters, and so...”

  “So we either kill Comte de Latour, or we die with him and the city of Liège.” That night, Austrian officers gathered to relay the result of the council president’s meeting with the French. After a long, silent pause, several junior officers—now authorised—took the pistols on the table and slipped them into their coats.

  At dawn the next morning, as the Bohemian Corps commander made his routine inspection of the camp and the defences, he was ambushed at the instigation of noble officers. To ensure the result, every bullet had been smeared with a fast-acting poison. Comte de Latour died with his eyes open; even half his own guard detachment had taken part in the officers’ mutiny.

  On November twenty-eighth, after days of relentless rain, the weather finally cleared into a bright, sunny day.

  That afternoon, after Comte de Latour “fell under French artillery fire,” the Austrian troops, led by their noble officers, chose to lay down their arms. By then, the entire Bohemian Corps numbered fewer than seven thousand. As for the losses among the city’s inhabitants... they could not, of course, be blamed on the victor. The histories would have to record them as the product of Austrian intrigue.

  That same day, Captain Scharnhorst—now resting in the prisoner-of-war camp—ran into the same problem as Captain Marcus: he had no money to pay the standard self-ransom of four thousand five hundred thalers. Fortunately, the Bohemian Corps had dawdled for weeks in the Ardennes Forest and never entered France. Compared with Marcus, his ransom would not be increased by thirty percent. Even so, Scharnhorst, a peasant by birth, could never pay four thousand five hundred thalers. There was only one way out: the Hanoverian would have to throw in his lot with the French, and put on the blue uniform.