Читать книгу The Collected Works - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 83

1. These dates are important in another aspect of the matter—the authorship of the plan. I will, therefore, return to them in more detail at the close of this section.

2. I pay no attention to the ridiculous suggestion that the delay was due to the contemporary peril in Poland, and to Thugut’s anxiety to have Austrian troops in the east rather than on the western frontier. People who write modern history thus seem to forget that the electric telegraph did not exist in the eighteenth century. The more reasonable pretension that the Austrians hesitated between marching north to effect the plan against Souham, and marching east to relieve the pressure upon Kaunitz, who was hard pressed upon the Sambre, deserves consideration. But Kaunitz’s despatch, telling how he had been forced to fall back, did not reach headquarters until the 12th, and if immediate orders had been given for the northern march, that march would have begun before the news of Kaunitz’s reverse had arrived. The only reasonable explanation in this as in most problems in human history, is the psychological one. You have to explain the delay of George III.’s son, and Joseph II.’s nephew. To anyone not obsessed by the superstition of rank, the mere portraits of these eminent soldiers would be enough to explain it.

3. Fortescue, vol. iv., part i., p. 255.

4. After so many allusions to his youth, I may as well give the date of his birth. Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of King George III. of England, was not yet thirty when he suffered at Tourcoing, having been born in 1765. He had the misfortune to die in 1827.

5. The reader not indifferent to comedy will hear with pleasure that, among various accounts of Kinsky’s communication with the Arch-Duke Charles at this juncture, one describes that Royalty as inaccessible after the fatigue of the day. His colleague is represented as asking in vain for an interview, and receiving from a servant the reply “that his Imperial Highness must not be disturbed, as he was occupied in having a fit.”

6. At a point somewhat below Wervicq: much where the private ferry now plies.