790 Chapter XXXII
through the passes from Italy, arrived too late, since without Korsakov he was too
weak to challenge Masséna alone. The great Russian commander, the hero of
Odessa, the counter- revolutionary by whose orders the dummies used in bayonet
practice were called “French republicans,” and who was remembered in Poland as
the butcher of Praga, was obliged to retire with his Russian host into the Haps-
burg dominions. Far away in America, on the northernmost frontier of New York
State, the settlers learned of this news with such pleasure that they named one of
their new towns Masséna.
Meanwhile, late in August, in an unopposed amphibious operation, a combined
force of British and Russians, under the Duke of York, landed on the tongue of
land between the North Sea and the Zuyder Zee. Against them, on a line across
the middle of the peninsula, stood a force of French, with several thousand Dutch
troops under General Daendels, all commanded by the French General Brune. The
strategy of the invaders depended on a rising of the Dutch against the Batavian
Republic. The Orangist émigrés, though never numerous, had excellent connec-
tions with the British government and royal family, so that their accounts of Dutch
restlessness under French tyranny had been well received in England; Grenville
had thought, on July 30, that the country “unanimously” favored the British, as he
imagined that it had done in 1787. It is true that Henry Dundas was more skepti-
cal, reminding his colleague of the false hopes once put in the American Loyal-
ists.^21 In any case, no rising took place in the Batavian Republic. The Russians were
no more welcome to the Dutch than to the Swiss, especially since, far more poorly
supplied than the British, they did a great deal of pillaging in the small territory
that they occupied. The country remained calm. A party of Orangist émigrés, en-
tering from the German side, was easily put to flight by the National Guard of
Arnhem. The main invasion force, floundering in useless maneuvers among the
polders, hemmed in by Brune and Daendels, waited for weeks for news of an in-
surrection that never came. Sir Ralph Abercrombie, the chief actual commander
under the Duke of York, suffered a gradual disillusionment. Two weeks after the
landing, while still hopeful, he remarked that “the Prince [of Orange] has been
deceived in thinking he had more friends than enemies in this country.” The truth
dawned on him a month later, just before the final collapse: “The grounds on which
this great undertaking were founded have failed. We have found no cooperation in
the country.”^22 On October 10 Brune, thinking it best to get the invaders off the
Continent while preserving his own forces intact for employment elsewhere,
signed the Convention of Alkmaar with the Duke of York. The Anglo- Russians
returned to their ships, and departed. They had captured some of what remained of
the Dutch navy; that was all.
The Tsar Paul, much displeased at the fortunes of his armies in Western Europe,
where they had been so unsuccessful against the enemy and so little appreciated by
their friends, recalled Suvorov and refused to take any further part in the war. Ex-
cept in Italy, it was clear by October that the conservative counter- offensive had
been repulsed by the New Republican Order, in a kind of ideological showdown
21 Ibid., 208, 215.
22 Ibid., 387; Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken, III, 429.