party to defend the Tuileries against
any force which could be brought against it; but assuming that the
Tuileries could not be defended, and that the King and Queen should be
massacred, they believed that their own position would be improved.
Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was
determined, therefore, that, regardless of consequences to their
friends, the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and,
marching by way of Sierk and Rodemach, occupy Chalons. Their entry into
Chalons, which they were confident could not be held against them,
because of the feeling throughout the country, was to be the signal for
the rising in Vendee and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris
from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Chalons the allies
would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but
vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had
been.

All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11,
1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army
crossed the frontier at Redagne. On August 20, 1792, Longwy was
invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte
d'Artois "there was not one of us," wrote Las Casas, "who did not see
himself, in a fortnight, triumphant, in his own home, surrounded by his
humbled and submissive vassals." At length from their bivouacs at
Saint-Remy and at Suippes the nobles saw in the distance the towers of
Chalons.

The panic at Chalons was so great that orders were given to cut the
bridge across the Marne, but it was not until about September 2, that
the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several
weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that
Rouerie was probably conspiring among the Royalists and nonjuring
priests, but they did not appreciate the imminence of the danger. On
September 3, at latest, Danton certainly heard the details of the plot
from a spy, and it was then, while others quailed, that he incited Paris
to audacity. This was Danton's culmination.

As we look back, the weakness of the Germans seems to have been
psychological rather than physical. At Valmy the numbers engaged were
not unequal, and while the French were, for the most part, raw and
ill-compacted levies, with few trained officers, the German regiments
were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset,
during the S