WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

Such was the state of the wrecks of the old army; but the bulk of the forces with which France began the war consisted of raw insurrectionary levies, which were even less to be depended on.

The Carmagnoles, as the revolutionary volunteers were called, flocked, indeed, readily to the frontier from every department. Then the war was proclaimed, and the fierce leaders of the Jacobins shouted that the country was in danger. They were full of zeal and courage, "heated and excited by the scenes of the Revolution, and inflamed by the florid eloquence, the songs, dances, and signal-words with which it had been celebrated. "But they were utterly undisciplined, and turbulently impatient of superior authority or systematic control.

Many ruffians, also, who were gullied with participation in the most sanguinary horrors of Paris, joined the camps, and were pre-eminent alike for misconduct before the enemy and for savage Insubordination against their own officers. On one occasion during the campaign of Valmy,

eight battalions of federates, intoxicated with massacre and sedition, joined the forces under Dumouriez, and soon threatened to uproot all discipline, saying openly that the ancient officers were traitors, and that it was necessary to purge the army, as they had Paris, of its aristocrats.

Dumouriez posted these battalions apart from the others, placed a strong force of cavalry behind them, and two pieces of cannon on their flank. Then, affecting to review them, he halted at the head of the line, surrounded by all his staff, and an escort of a hundred hussars. "Fellows," said he, " for I will not call you either citizens or soldiers, you see before you this artillery, behind you this cavalry.

You are stained with crimes, and I do not tolerate here assassins or executioners. I know that there are scoundrels among you charged to excite you to crime. Drive them from among you, or denounce them to me, for I shall hold you responsible for their conduct"

One of our recent historians of the Revolution, who narrates this incident, 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 Austrian saber, or the first sound of an Austrian gun, was enough to discomfit the French. Their first corps, four thousand strong, that advanced from Lille across the frontier , came suddenly upon a far inferior detachment of the Austrian garrison of Tournay.

Not a shot was fired, nor a bayonet leveled. With one simultaneous cry of panic, the French broke and ran headlong back to Lille, where they completed the specimen of insubordination which they had given in the field by murdering their general and several of their chief officers.

On the same day, another division under Biron, mustering ten thousand sabers and bayonets, saw a few Austrian skirmishers reconnoitering their position. The French advanced posts had scarcely given and received a volley, and only a few balls from the enemy's field-pieces had fallen among the lines, when two regiments of French dragoons raised the cry " We are betrayed," galloped off, and were followed in disgraceful rout by the rest of the whole army.