It will be noticed that the corps of Clerfaye and of the Duke of York had exchanged the places which they had occupied during the previous year, pursuant to the design of the British Ministers that the Duke of York should be kept under the immediate eye of Coburg. The first result of this interference was to spoil Clerfaye’s temper for the whole campaign; for he judged his force too weak for its task of defending the maritime provinces; and indeed it was only by the positive orders of Coburg that he consented to hold the command.[217] The whole arrangement, in fact, was calculated to cause confusion. It was bad enough that the lines of retreat for the British and Austrians should be in exactly opposite directions; and the obvious course, upon the change of the Duke of York’s station, would have been to have shifted his base to Antwerp. But far from this, not only was his base continued at Ostend, but, to make matters worse, a brigade of British was placed under Clerfaye’s command, and a respectable number of Austrians under the Duke of York’s; so that in case of mishap, not only must the lines of retreat for the right and right centre intersect each other, but neither corps could retire upon its base without leading several of its regiments in the wrong direction. Meanwhile on the French side Carnot had girded himself for a supreme effort. “We must finish matters this year,” he wrote to Pichegru on the 11th of February; “unless we make rapid progress and annihilate the enemy to the last man within three months, all is lost. To begin again next year would mean for us to perish of hunger and exhaustion.” He therefore decided to combine the armies of the North, of the Ardennes and of the Moselle, and to mass two hundred and fifty thousand men along the line from Dunkirk to the Meuse. Of these about one hundred thousand were to move upon Ypres, march thence upon Ghent, master maritime Flanders, and then wheel eastward upon Brussels; while at the same time another hundred thousand were to advance upon Namur and Liège, and sever communication with Luxemburg. In other words, he designed to turn and envelop both flanks of the Allied Army, leaving about fifty thousand men to stand on the defensive in the intermediate space between Bouchain and Maubeuge.