ies had been too
rapid for their cabinets; and we had found ourselves on the frontiers of
France before the guardian genii of Europe, in the shape of the
stiff-skirted and full-wigged privy councillors of Vienna and Berlin,
had made up their minds as to our disposal of the prize. Startling words
suddenly began to make their appearance in the despatches, and
"indemnity for the past and security for the future"--those luckless
phrases which were yet destined to form so large a portion of senatorial
eloquence, and give birth to so prolific an offspring of European
ridicule--figured in diplomacy for the first time; while our pioneers
stood, pickaxe in hand, waiting the order to break ground. We thus lost
day after day. Couriers were busy, while soldiers were yawning
themselves to death; and the only war carried on was in the discontents
of the military councils. Who was to have Valenciennes? whose flag was
to be hoisted on Lille? what army was to garrison Conde? became national
questions. Who was to cut the favourite slices of France, employed all
the gossips of the camp, in imitation of the graver gossips of the
cabinet; and, in the mean time, we were saved the trouble of the
division, by a furious decree from the Convention ordering every man in
France to take up arms--converting all the churches into arsenals,
anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and
recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the
guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, present, and
to come.

Circumstances seldom give an infantry officer more than a view of the
movements in front of his regiment; but my intimacy with Guiscard
allowed me better opportunities. Among his variety of attainments he was
a first-rate engineer, and he was thus constantly employed where any
thing connected with the higher departments of the staff required his
science. He was now attached to the Prussian mission, which moved with
the headquarters of the British force, and our intercourse was
continued. I thus joined the reconnoitring parties under his command,
and received the most important lessons in my new art. But one of my
first questions to him, had been the mode of his escape on the night of
our volunteer reconnoisance.

"Escape? Why, I committed the very blunder against which I had cautioned
you, and fell into the hands of the first hussar patrole I could
possibly have met. But my story is of the briefest k