WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.
Similar panics, or repulses almost equally discreditable, occurred whenever Rochambeau, or Lückner, or Lafayette, the earliest French generals in the war, brought their troops into the presence of the enemy. Meanwhile the allied sovereigns had gradually collected on the Rhine a veteran and finely-disciplined army for the invasion of France, which for numbers, equipment, and martial renown, both of generals and men, was equal to any that Germany had ever sent forth to conquer. Their design was to strike boldly and decisively at the heart of France, and, penetrating the country through the Ardennes, to proceed by Chalons upon Paris. The obstacles that lay in their way seemed insignificant. The disorder and imbecility of the French armies had been even augmented by the forced flight of Lafayette and a sudden change of generals. The only troops posted on or near the track by which the allies were about to advance were the 23,000 men at Sedan, whom Lafayette had commanded, and a corps of 20,000 near Metz, the command of which had just been transferred from Lückner to Kellermann. There were only three fortresses which it was necessary for the allies to capture or mask-Sedan, Longwy, and Verdun. The defences and stores of all these three were known to be wretchedly dismantled and insufficient; and when once these feeble barriers were overcome and Châlons reached, a fertile and unprotected country seemed to invite the invaders to that " military promenade to Paris" which they gayly talked of accomplishing. At the end of July, the allied army, having fully completed all preparations for the campaign, broke up from its cantonments, and, marching from Luxembourg upon Longwy, crossed the French frontier. Sixty thousand Prussians, trained in the schools, and many of them under the eye of the Great Frederick, heirs of the glories of the Seven Years War, and universally esteemed the best troops in Europe, marched in one column against the central point of attack. Forty-five thousand Austrians, the greater part of whom, were picked troops, and had served in the recent Turkish war, supplied two formidable corps that supported the flanks of the Prussians. There was also a powerful body of Hessians; and leagued with the Germans against the Parisian democracy came 15,000 of the noblest and the bravest among the sons of France. In these corps of emigrants, many of the highest born of the French nobility, scions of houses whose chivalric trophies had for centuries filled Europe with renown, served as rank and file. They looked on the road to Paris as the path, which they were to carve out by their swords to victory, to honor, to the rescue of their king, to reunion with their families, to the recovery of their patrimony, and to the restoration of their order. Over this imposing army the allied sovereigns placed as generalissimo the Duke of Brunswick, one of the minor reigning princes of Germany, a statesman of no mean capacity, and who had acquired in the Seven Years' War a military reputation second only to that of the Great Frederick himself. He had been deputed a few years before to quell the popular movements, which then took place in Holland, and he had put down the attempted revolution in that country with a promptitude which appeared to augur equal success to the army that now marched under his orders on a similar mission into France. Moving majestically forward, with leisurely deliberation, that seemed to show the consciousness of superior strength, and a steady purpose of doing their work thoroughly, the allies appeared before Longwy on the 20th of August, and the dispirited and despondent garrison opened the gates of that fortress to them after the first shower of bombs. On the 2d of September, the still more important stronghold of Verdun capitulated after scarcely the shadow of resistance. Brunswick's superior force was now interposed between Kellermann's troops on the left and the other French army near Sedan, which Lafayette's flight had, for the time, left destitute of a commander.
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