His name was Jean-Henri Stengel; he was forty-nine years of age, born at Neustadt in the Palatinate, and had served France since 1760. In May 1793, as a brigadier general in the armies of the Republic, he stood before the Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal to answer for a single day in March when everything had given way.
The bill of indictment was precise. Stengel commanded the vanguard of the Army of Belgium; he had long received intelligence that the Prussians were descending upon the banks of the Roer, and he had made light of these warnings. On the first of March, assailed by superior numbers, he had been compelled to fall back: cavalry, artillery, and infantry tumbled together in a rout that bore more resemblance to a flight than to a retreat. The troops, having reached Aix-la-Chapelle, found its gates shut fast and the enemy already masters of the town. Several battalions had been cut to pieces, foremost among them the Third Battalion of Paris. To this were added darker charges: enemy heralds closeted with him for hours on end, and clandestine journeys to Jülich, to the court of the Elector Palatine.
The colonel of the Third Battalion of Paris came forward to recount the disaster from the soldier’s vantage. His men, marooned along the Roer throughout January and February, had begged him to petition the general for relief or reinforcements. Stengel had merely replied: “Are you afraid?” They had answered that they were not; though they were to perish to the last man, they would not yield an inch. “The event bore them out,” the witness declared. Encircled, summoned to surrender, they discharged three rounds of canister shot, and were thereafter butchered or taken captive. For more than two months, he added, they had set eyes on neither general nor aide-de-camp.
A lieutenant-colonel of the Thirteenth Battalion completed the grim portrait: two months spent sleeping upon bare straw without undressing, in the dead of winter; a river whose bed he had sounded himself, which the horses crossed with water up to their bellies; hussar officers who, on the eve of the assault, had watched through their field-glasses as the enemy camp struck its tents, and who had written to the general without ever receiving a word in reply.
Stengel mounted his defense like a man of figures. The supreme command was not his; it belonged to Valence. He had fifty-five cantonments to oversee, twenty-one thousand men for fourteen leagues of frontage, along the banks of a river fordable in twenty places. Daily he had written to Liège for reinforcements, and receiving none, had none to dispatch. A letter of his was read aloud, in which he had already lamented the perils of his position. And the treasonous traffic with the enemy? “Let them produce a single letter, a single line!” They took him, he said, for a visionary.
The gazette breaks off with the hearings, and the verdict is nowhere recorded. There remains one of the oldest riddles of war: when an overextended line snaps, who broke it—the man who held it, or those who gave it to him to hold?
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1793, Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal, case of Jean-Henri Stengel, brigadier general.