‘When the balloon goes up’ has become a stock phrase for the beginning of a war. This got me wondering who first decided to make use of balloons in a conflict. Ballooning had begun with the Montgolfier brothers in 1783 but their interest in floating through the air was entirely peaceful. However, it did not take long for the military to realise that this engineering marvel might have other uses.
In 1792, the leaders of Revolutionary France were having difficulty getting on with their neighbouring monarchs and this animosity soon erupted into all-out war. Flash forward two years and, in June 1794, the 70,000-strong French army of the Sambre-Meuse under the command of Jean-Baptiste Jourdan had just taken the surrender of the garrison at Charleroi, much to the annoyance of Prince Frederick Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had only recently arrived with an Austrian and Netherlands army of 52,000 men, specifically to relieve them.
The Prince immediately...