Among these multiplied disasters, with the Sardinians also operating on the Alpine frontier and the Spaniards entering their country by the eastern Pyrenees, France was confronted in every quarter by disciplined armies to which she could as yet oppose only raw and ragged levies. She found her safety in the stern energy of a legislature which silenced faction by terror, in her central position, which of itself separated from one another many of the centres of disturbance, and in the military policy of the allies, which increased instead of seeking to diminish the dissemination of force which was to some extent unavoidable. The Spaniards could not combine with the Sardinians, Toulon could not help Lyon, La Vendée had to stand apart from all the others; but in the east it was possible for the Austrians, Prussians and British to direct against the forces standing between them and Paris a combination of effort which, in the then condition of the French army, might have been irresistible. Instead of so doing, the Austrians and British on the northeastern frontier decided, early in August, to cease their advance and to separate; the Austrians sitting down before Le Quesnoy, and the British undertaking to besiege the seaport of Dunkirk. On the Rhine, the mutual jealousies of Austria and Prussia, and the sluggish movements of routine generals, caused a similar failure to support each other, and a similar dilatory action.
The opportunities thus lost by the allies, and the time conceded to the French, were improved to the full by the Committee of Public Safety and by the commissioners sent from the Convention to the headquarters of every army. Men, for the most part, without pity as without fear, their administration, stained as it was with blood, was effectual to the salvation of France. From the minister in the cabinet to the general in the field, and down to the raw recruit forced from his home, each man felt his life to depend upon his submission and his activity. In the imminent danger of the country and the hot haste of men who worked not only under urgent pressure, but often with a zeal as blindly ignorant as it was patriotic, many blunders and injustices were committed; but they attained the desired end of impressing the resistless energy of the Convention upon each unit of the masses it was wielding. If ever, for good or ill, men had the single eye, it was to be found in the French soldiers of 1793, as they starved and bled and died that the country might live. Given time—and the allies gave it—units animated by such a spirit, and driven forward by such an impetus as the Committee knew how to impart, were soon knit into an overpowering organism, as superior in temper as they were in numbers to the trained machines before them.
Where there was conscious life to feel enthusiasm or fear, the contagion of the rulers' temper caught; but the fiery spirit of the Convention could not possess the stately ships of war that floated in the ports of the republic, nor make them yield, to the yet unskilled hands of the new officers, the docile obedience which their old masters had commanded from those beautiful, delicately poised machines. It was a vain hope to conjure victory at sea by harsh decrees, [67] pitched in unison to the passions of the times, but addressed to men whose abilities did not respond to their own courage nor to the calls thus made upon them. To the inexperience of the officers was added the further difficulty of the indiscipline of the crews, that had increased to a ruinous extent during the four years' paralysis of the executive government. With the triumph of the Jacobin party had now come a unity which, however terrible, was efficient. In September, 1793, in the mutiny of the Brest fleet in Quiberon Bay, the seamen again prevailed over their officers, and even over the commissioner of the Convention; but it was the last flagrant outburst. The past weakness of other authorities had played into the hands of the Mountain; now that the latter was supreme, it resolutely enjoined and soon obtained submission. Years of insubordination and license had, however, sapped the organization and drill of the crews; and the new officers were not the men to restore them. The Convention and its commissioners therefore lacked the proper instruments through which they could impart direction as well as energy to the movement of the fleet. Ships were there and guns, men also to handle the one and fight the other; but between these and the government was needed an adequate official staff, which no longer existed. The same administrative weakness that had allowed discipline to perish, had also entailed upon the naval arsenals the penury of resources that was felt everywhere in the land. From all these circumstances arose an impotence which caused the year 1793 to be barren of serious naval effort on the part of France.
Great Britain herself was in this first year of war unprepared to take a vigorous initiative. In 1792 she had in commission at home but twelve ships-of-the-line, and but sixteen thousand seamen were allowed for the fleet. Not till December 20, six weeks only before the declaration of war, did Parliament increase these to twenty-five thousand, a number less than one fourth that employed in the last year of the American war. In the Mediterranean and in the colonies there was not then present a single ship-of-the-line, properly so called. Fortunately, of the one hundred and thirteen actually borne on the roll of the line-of-battle as cruising ships, at the beginning of 1793, between eighty and ninety were reported in good condition, owing to the two alarms of war in 1790 and 1791; and provident administration had kept on hand in the British dockyards the necessary equipments, which had disappeared from those of France. More difficulty was experienced in manning than in equipping; but at the end of 1793, there were eighty-five of the line actually in commission. From twenty to twenty-five were allotted to the Channel fleet, cruising from thence to Cape Finisterre, under the command of Lord Howe; a like number to the Mediterranean under Lord Hood; and from ten to twelve to the West Indies. A reserve of twenty-five ships remained in the Channel ports, Portsmouth and Plymouth, ready for sea, and employed, as occasion demanded, for convoys, to fill vacancies of disabled ships in the cruising fleets, or to strengthen the latter in case of special need.
The mobilization of the fleet, though energetic when once begun, was nevertheless tardy, and Great Britain had reason to be thankful that years of civil commotion and executive impotence had so greatly deteriorated the enemy's navy, and also, at a critical moment, had thrown so large a portion of it into her hands at Toulon. With a widely scattered empire, with numerous exposed and isolated points, with a smaller population and an army comparatively insignificant in numbers, war with France threw her—and must inevitably always throw her—at first upon the defensive, unless she could at once lay her grasp firmly upon some vital chord of the enemy's communications, and so force him to fight there. She could not assume the offensive by landing on French soil. No force she could send would be capable of resisting the numbers brought against it, much less of injuring the enemy; nor should the flattering hopes of such a force serving as a nucleus, round which to crystallize French rebellion, have been suffered to delude her, after the bitter deceptions of the recent American struggle. What hopes had not Great Britain then based upon old loyalty, and upon discontent with the new order of things! Yet, though such discontent undoubtedly existed—and that among men of her own race recently her subjects—the expeditions sent among them rallied no decisive following, kindled no fire of resistance. The natives of the soil, among whom such a force appears, either view it with jealous suspicion or expect it to do all the work; not unfrequently are both jealous and inactive. It is well, then, to give malcontents all the assistance they evidently require in material of war, to keep alive as a diversion every such focus of trouble, to secure wherever possible, as at Toulon, a fortified port by which to maintain free entrance for supplies to the country of the insurgents; but it is not safe to reckon on the hatred of the latter for their own countrymen outweighing their dislike for the foreigner. It is not good policy to send a force that, from its own numbers, is incapable of successful independent action, relying upon the support of the natives in a civil war. Such support can never relieve such expeditions from the necessity, common to all military advances, of guarding their communications while operating on their front; which is only another way of saying again that such expeditions, to be successful, must be capable of independent action adequate to the end proposed. Risings, such as occurred in many quarters of France in 1793, are useful diversions; but a diversion is only a subordinate part in the drama of war. It is either a deceit, whose success depends rather upon the incapacity of the opponent than upon its own merits; or it is an indirect use of forces which, from their character or position, cannot be made to conduce directly to the main effort of the enterprise in hand. To enlarge such diversions by bodies of troops which might be strengthening the armies on the central theatre of war is a mistake, which increases in ever greater proportion as