March 15.
On the 15th Coburg at last resumed his advance
with forty-two thousand men; and on the 16th
Dumouriez marched with forty-eight thousand to
March 18. meet him. On the 18th the decisive action was fought at Neerwinden, when the French were totally defeated, with a loss of five thousand men and three guns. The volunteers and the National Guards were the troops that failed in the battle; and after it the men broke up and fled by whole battalions. Ten thousand deserted in the ten days following the action, and Dumouriez was fain to form a rearguard out of his artillery and his few battalions of the Line, and to fall back on Louvain. Coburg, who had lost about three thousand men, made little attempt at pursuit, keeping his main body halted at Tirlemont until the 22nd, but exhorting the Duke of Brunswick-Oels to hasten from Bois-le-Duc to Malines to cut off Dumouriez's retreat to Antwerp. The Duke, who had already permitted Flers to withdraw with impunity the bulk of his forces to Antwerp, was evidently not disposed to second Austrian operations with Prussian troops, for he refused to move. However, the advance of the Austrians compelled
Mar. 23-24. Dumouriez to evacuate first Louvain and then
March 25. Brussels; and on the 25th, finding himself obliged to abandon Namur also, he opened negotiations with Coburg. He had quarrelled with the Convention beyond hope of reconciliation over the iniquity of its rule in Belgium; and he now proposed that the French should retreat from the whole country, and that he should march to Paris to re-establish the monarchy, the Allies meanwhile halting on the frontier and receiving the fortress of Condé as a guarantee. An agreement to this effect was duly made with the
March 27. Chief of the Austrian Staff on the 27th, and a circular
