Battle of Hondschoote (1793) - Background

Background

See also the Siege of Dunkirk (1793)

By the month of August 1793, the allied Coalition Army under command of the Austrian Prince of Coburg had taken Condé, Valenciennes, and Le Cateau and were poised on the Franco Belgian border. The Allies planned to next besiege Cambrai, however the British government ordered the Duke of York's Anglo-Hanoverian corps to instead seize the coastal port of Dunkirk, the possession of which they believed would be a valuable military base and bargaining counter. The defences of Dunkirk, 8,000 men under the command of Joseph Souham, were thought to be in a poor state of repair and vulnerable to capture. York concentrated at Menin and split his command in two forces, the right column of 22,000 British troops he led directly to invest the town of Dunkirk, while to protect his left flank the 14,500 man covering army of Marshal Freytag consisting of the Hanoverian troops and ten squadrons of British cavalry. The Duke of York drove Souham's men back into Dunkirk, taking the Rosendahl suburb on 24 August then digging in to besiege Dunkirk from the East side. The siege looked as though it might be a protracted affair, as York had neither siege artillery nor the man power to properly surround the town.

Arriving at Poperinge on 20 August, Hessian troops under Freytag's command drove the French from Oost-Capel and Rexpoede back to Bergues, and two days later from Wormhout and Esquelbecque, surrounding fortified Bergues with detachments. Then Freytag spread his corps in a thin military cordon over 21 miles across the villages to the south. His left lay at Poperinge, covered by Ypres, his right lay at Houtkerque on the Upper Yser. Between these locations his command was split into a number of small outposts in the villages between. Freytag was an experienced commander and had seen much service in the seven years war commanding light troops, however at Hondschoote his trust in the cordon system of linked army outposts was to prove fatal.

The new French commander of the Armée du Nord was Jean Nicolas Houchard, a brave and experienced subordinate general but patently out of his depth as Commander-in-Chief. Formerly one of Custine's closest deputies, he was in his element leading the charge of a cavalry regiment, but had neither the acumen or confidence to head an army the size of the Armée du Nord. Custine had prophesised that the command of an army would be “an evil present” to him, "Custine certainly could judge men, and he was right in this case, for all who knew the worthy old Houchard considered him as lost when given a charge so much beyond his powers”. Paris was in the grip of the Reign of Terror, hanging over him was the spectre of suspicion, Custine himself was under arrest for failing in the field and would shortly die on the scaffold. Placed between the zealous harangues of the Représentant en missions and the inadequate condition of the rag-tag troops he commanded Houchard was acutely aware that the leadership of the 'Nord' could be a fatal command, and his confidence both in himself and his subordinates was greatly undermined. Houchard wrote on taking command “My life is poisoned... everywhere calumny has preceded me, everywhere I have suffered the last agony, since I have found nothing but distrust in all the persons who do not know me”

Nevertheless, following the Levée en Masse the troops under his command were being rapidly reinforced with new recruits. Lazare Carnot, newly elected to the Committee of Public Safety, had galvanised the command structure and had ordered a rapid concentration of forces south of Freytag's position. By 24 August, 20,000 men were in Cassel entrenched camp, 4,000 at Lille, and between 12 and 15,000 more were en route from the Moselle front.

The Anglo-Hanoverians were aware that the French were strengthening their front and asked for reinforcements from Coburg, but the Austrians were tied down with the siege of Le Quesnoy. The only concessions made were for a corps under Beaulieu to be moved up to Bouvines and Orchies, while the lackluster Dutch troops of the Prince of Orange spread out between Lannoy to Menin.

On 27 August Houchard launched 15,000 men in three columns against Orange and Beaulieu's forces towards Tourcoing and Menin. Macdonald's column was beaten back from Lannoy, and the same fate befell the command of Dumas at Lincelles. At Tourcoing, faced by Houchard's central column the Dutch abandoned the village after a stiff fight, but the French then dispersed to plunder, only to flee on the sight of two small bodies of enemy cavalry. Houchard had intended to threaten Menin, a determined attack through here would almost certainly have cut off the entire British corps, but confusion reigned in the French camp, Houchard lost 7 guns as he fell back due to his civilian artillery drivers cutting their traces, and the opportunity was missed.