The War of the First Coalition pitted Revolutionary France against most of the rest of Europe. By 1794, the Austrian Netherlands - roughly modern Belgium - had become the campaign's main battlefield. The Coalition strategy, planned by the Austrian Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was to attack the French centre while holding the wings. French strategy, drawn up in Paris by Lazare Carnot, did the opposite: attack hard on both flanks while holding the centre. The two armies missed each other. Coburg's centre force took Landrecies on the southern flank in April; Pichegru's western flank pushed Count Clerfayt's Austrian corps back through Courtrai and Menin into a corner of Flanders. In mid-May the Austrians attacked the French at Tourcoing and were repulsed with heavy losses, because their columns had failed to coordinate. By late May the Coalition was shifting troops east to defend Charleroi against another French push - and Pichegru saw his opening on the abandoned west.

Austrian Major-General Paul von Salis commanded the defence of Ypres. His 7,000 men were a mixed force: two battalions of the Stuart Infantry Regiment Nr. 18, third battalions from the Schröder and Callenberg regiments, a company of O'Donnell Freikorps - and a substantial Hessian contingent on loan from the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. The Hessians, two battalions each of the Erbprinz, Lossberg, and Prinz Karl infantry regiments under generals Heinrich von Borcke and Georg von Lengerke, brought twelve field pieces with them. These were professional soldiers - some of the Hessian units had a Lossberg battalion that had served with the British against the Americans at Trenton in 1776, captured by Washington. Now they were inside a Belgian fortress with French Revolutionary infantry digging trenches in the fields outside, and twenty days to live as a coherent garrison.

Clerfayt's Austrian corps - outnumbered, exhausted from weeks of retreating, and short of cavalry - had to try to lift the siege from outside. He made three attempts. The first, in early June, was beaten off without much fighting. The second, more serious, cost the Coalition 600 killed and wounded and 400 captured against perhaps a thousand French losses. The third, at Hooglede on 13 June, was the largest and most desperate. Clerfayt threw 19,000 troops - Austrians, British grenadiers of the 38th and 55th Foot, Hanoverian battalions under General von Hammerstein, French royalist emigres of the Loyal Emigrants Battalion - against the French covering force at 7:00 AM. General Jacques MacDonald's brigade (the future Napoleonic marshal, then a brigadier) held its ground for six hours under repeated cavalry charges. Eventually French reinforcements arrived on both his flanks and the worn-out Coalition troops withdrew. Clerfayt had lost 900 more men. The French had lost 1,300 and one cannon. Ypres was on its own.

Inside the fortress, General-major von Salis was running out of options. The walls were not what they should have been; the outworks Joseph II had slighted were never going to hold under sustained bombardment. The French besiegers under Jean Victor Marie Moreau - another name later to become famous, Napoleon's rival and the victor of Hohenlinden - were working steadily forward with the methodical siegecraft Vauban himself had developed. Three relief attempts had failed. No fourth was coming. On 17 or 18 June 1794 (the sources disagree), the garrison capitulated. The Austrians and Hessians marched out as prisoners of war. Pichegru had Ypres. A week later, on 26 June, the main French army under Jourdan won the decisive Battle of Fleurus on the eastern flank, breaking the Coalition position in the Austrian Netherlands altogether.

Ypres in June 1794 is one of those small battles that becomes interesting in hindsight. The French commanders included men who would shape European warfare for the next twenty years. Jacques MacDonald, the Scottish-descended brigadier who held the line at Hooglede, became a Marshal of France under Napoleon. Jean Victor Marie Moreau, who ran the siege itself, became one of the most successful Revolutionary generals before falling out with Napoleon and dying at Dresden in 1813, fighting on the Allied side against his former emperor. Jean-Charles Pichegru, the overall commander, would later conspire against Napoleon and die in a Paris prison cell. Jan Willem de Winter, whose brigade tipped the balance at Hooglede, became an admiral and was beaten by Admiral Adam Duncan at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. Ypres was their training ground - and a step on the long road toward the empire that the Revolution did not yet know it was building.