between him
and Paris: which he should have preoccupied;--which how now to get
possession of? Also the rain it raineth every day; and we are in a
hungry Champagne Pouilleuse, a land flowing only with ditch-water. How
to cross this Mountain-wall of the Argonne; or what in the world to do
with it?--there are marchings and wet splashings by steep paths,
with sackerments and guttural interjections; forcings of Argonne
Passes,--which unhappily will not force. Through the woods, volleying
War reverberates, like huge gong-music, or Moloch's kettledrum, borne
by the echoes; swoln torrents boil angrily round the foot of rocks,
floating pale carcasses of men. In vain! Islettes Village, with
its church-steeple, rises intact in the Mountain-pass, between the
embosoming heights; your forced marchings and climbings have become
forced slidings, and tumblings back. From the hill-tops thou seest
nothing but dumb crags, and endless wet moaning woods; the Clermont
Vache (huge Cow that she is) disclosing herself (See Helen Maria
Williams. Letters, iii. 79-81.) at intervals; flinging off her
cloud-blanket, and soon taking it on again, drowned in the pouring
Heaven. The Argonne Passes will not force: by must skirt the Argonne; go
round by the end of it.

But fancy whether the Emigrant Seigneurs have not got their brilliancy
dulled a little; whether that 'Foot Regiment in red-facings with nankeen
trousers' could be in field-day order! In place of gasconading, a sort
of desperation, and hydrophobia from excess of water, is threatening to
supervene. Young Prince de Ligne, son of that brave literary De Ligne
the Thundergod of Dandies, fell backwards; shot dead in Grand-Pre,
the Northmost of the Passes: Brunswick is skirting and rounding,
laboriously, by the extremity of the South. Four days; days of a rain as
of Noah,--without fire, without food! For fire you cut down green trees,
and produce smoke; for food you eat green grapes, and produce colic,
pestilential dysentery, (Greek). And the Peasants assassinate us, they
do not join us; shrill women cry shame on us, threaten to draw
their very scissors on us! O ye hapless dulled-bright Seigneurs,
and hydrophobic splashed Nankeens;--but O, ten times more, ye poor
sackerment-ing ghastly-visaged Hessians and Hulans, fallen on
your backs; who had no call to die there, except compulsion and
three-halfpence a-day! Nor has Mrs. Le Blanc of the Golden Arm a good
time of it, in her bower of dripping rushes