childish
statesman; and, with an absurdity by no means limited to himself, he
thinks that his talent lies in statesmanship. The result has been, that
the factions have always managed him as they do all men of his calibre.
When he attempted to act for himself, they crushed him without mercy;
when he ceased to be a tool, he necessarily became a victim. The army is
now in retreat. To the French retreat is always ruin; the horseman sells
his horse; the foot-soldier sells his musket; and the artilleryman sells
his powder and ball, breaks up his gun-carriage for a fire, and throws
his gun into the next ditch. The peasantry then fall on them all, repay
their plunder with the pike and the pitchfork, and in three days the
army is dissolved."

"But will Cobourg follow up his blow?" was the question on all sides.

"The commander-in chief," was the answer, "is intelligent and brave. He
has learned his profession under the greatest soldier whom Russia has
produced, or perhaps ever will produce--Suwarrow. But he is himself
under orders. If he were a republican general he would instantly march,
and within a week he would be in the Tuileries. But as an Austrian
commander, he must wait for the opinion of men too far off to know a
single fact of the campaign, too blind to know them if they were on the
spot, and too jealous even of their own general to suffer him to beat
the enemy if victory would throw their own nothingness into the shade."

Every hour now produced its event. A general _feu-de-joie_ announced the
first great success of the campaign; Mayence had been taken, with its
garrison of 20,000 men. The French general Custine, had made an
unsuccessful attack on the lines of the besiegers, to relieve the
fortress in its last extremity, had been beaten, and driven back into
the Vosges, where he was at liberty to starve among the most barren
mountains of France. But this intelligence came qualified by the
formidable rumour that Prussia was already making terms with the French,
that it had acknowledged the government as the "Republic," and even that
the Prussians had sung the _Marsellaise_. Thus we had the light and
shade.

But while politicians tremble, soldiers are gay. What were all those
shiftings and doublings to us? We had all the luxuries of the most
luxurious of all lives, the foreign camp. We had now marched from the
country of fogs and bogs, and were moving through the richest soil, and
not the least beautiful landscape,