who narrates this incident,[1] thus apostrophizes the French general :
"Patience, O Dumouriez! this uncertain heap of shriekers, mutineers, were they once drilled and inured, will become a phalanxed mass of fighters; and wheel and whirl to order swiftly, like the wind or the whirlwind; tanned mustachio-figures, often barefoot, even bare-backed, with sinews of iron, who require only bread and gunpowder; very sons of fire, the adroitest, hastiest, hottest ever seen, perhaps, since Attila's time."
Such phalanxed masses of fighters did the Carmagnoles ultimately become; but France ran a fearful risk in being obliged to rely on them, when the process of their transmutation had barely commenced.
The first events, indeed, of the war were disastrous and disgraceful to France, even beyond what might have been expected from the chaotic state in which it found her armies as well as her government. In the hopes of profiting by the unprepared state of Austria, then the mistress of the Netherlands, the French opened the campaign of 1792 by an invasion of Flanders, with forces whose muster-rolls showed a numerical overwhelming superiority to the enemy, and seemed to promise a speedy conquest of that old battle-field of Europe. But the first flash of an
- ↑ Carlyle
