The mothers did more than give themselves or their money, they gave their sons, a more terrible and heartrending travail than that of giving them birth.
Eight hundred thousand men enlisted; France, which had been under great difficulty to raise an army to defend her Thermopylæ of the Argonne and to win the battle of Valmy, had a dozen armies at her command, and a year later began the march to conquer Europe. Frederic-William and Leopold made a grave error when they declared war against the Revolution; had they been satisfied with drawing a kind of protective cordon round France and with surrounding her with an armed girdle, France would in all probability have preyed upon herself. The volcano which threw up such fire and lava would have engulfed everything in the heart of that deep crater called Paris, wherein such days as the 5th and 6th October, as the 20th June, as the 10th August, as the 2nd and 3rd September, as the 21st January, had seethed and burst forth. But they broke open the mountain with two strokes of their swords, and laid bare a channel by which the Revolution flowed out over the whole world.
New regiments, whose very existence had been unsuspected hitherto, kept pouring into the army daily, regiments whose names were not entered on any list.
Only created the day before, they were totally inexperienced, but on they marched against the enemy.
St. Georges had been made colonel of the Free Legion of American cavalry in the South.
Boyer raised the regiment of the hussars de la Liberté et de l'Égalité as his contribution.
They both knew my father, and both wanted to have him under their orders.
St. Georges took him first, as second lieutenant, on the 1st September 1792.
Boyer made him a lieutenant the next day.