Adopting this, the only rational system, the rational mode of proceeding upon it was to commence with an effective siege of Lisle, which the French generals must have seen taken before their faces, or be forced to fight. A plentiful country of friends, from whence to draw supplies, would have been behind them; a plentiful country of enemies, from whence to force supplies, would have been before them. Good towns were always within reach to deposit their hospitals and magazines. The march from Lisle to Paris is through a less defensible country, and the distance is hardly so great as from Longwy to Paris.
If the old politic and military ideas had governed, the advanced guard would have been formed of those who best knew the country and had some interest in it, supported by some of the best light troops and light artillery, whilst the grand solid body of an army disciplined to perfection proceeded leisurely, and in close connection with all its stores, provisions, and heavy cannon, to support the expedite body in case of misadventure, or to improve and complete its success.
The direct contrary of all this was put in practice. In consequence of the original sin of this project, the army of the French princes was everywhere thrown into the rear, and no part of it brought forward to the last moment, the time of the commencement of the secret negotiation. This naturally made an ill impression on the people, and furnished an occasion for the rebels at Paris to give out that the faithful subjects of the king were distrusted, despised, and abhorred by his allies. The march was directed through a skirt of Lorraine, and thence into a part of Champagne, the Duke of Brunswick leaving all the strongest places behind him,—leaving also behind him the strength of his artillery,—and by this means giving a superiority to the French, in the only way in which the present France is able to oppose a German force.
In consequence of the adoption of those false politics, which turned everything on the king's sole and single person, the whole plan of the war was reduced to nothing but a coup de main, in order to set that prince at liberty. If that failed, everything was to be given up.
The scheme of a coup de main might (under favorable circumstances) be very fit for a partisan at the head of a light corps, by whose failure nothing material would be deranged. But for a royal army of eighty thousand men, headed by a king in person, who was to march an hundred and fifty miles through an enemy's country,—surely, this was a plan unheard of.
Although this plan was not well chosen, and proceeded upon principles altogether ill-judged and impolitic, the superiority of the military force might in a great degree have supplied the defects, and furnished a corrective to the mistakes. The greater probability was, that the Duke of Brunswick would make his way to Paris over the bellies of the rabble of drunkards, robbers, assassins, rioters, mutineers, and half-grown boys, under the ill-obeyed command of a theatrical, vaporing, reduced captain of cavalry, who opposed that great commander and great army. But—Diis aliter visum. He began to treat,—the winds blew and the rains beat,—the house fell, because it was built upon sand,—and great was the fall thereof. This march was not an exact copy of either of the two marches made by the Duke of Parma into France.
There is some secret. Sickness and weather may defeat an army pursuing a wrong plan: not that I believe the sickness to have been so great as it has been reported; but there is a great deal of superfluous humiliation in this business, a perfect prodigality of disgrace. Some advantage, real or imaginary, must compensate to a great sovereign and to a great general for so immense a loss of reputation. Longwy, situated as it is, might (one should think) be evacuated without a capitulation with a republic just proclaimed by the king of Prussia as an usurping and rebellious body. He was not far from Luxembourg. He might have taken away the obnoxious French in his flight. It does not appear to have been necessary that those magistrates who declared for their own king, on the faith and under the immediate protection of the king of Prussia, should be delivered over to the gallows. It was not necessary that the emigrant nobility and gentry who served with the king of Prussia's army, under his immediate command, should be excluded from the cartel, and given up to be hanged as rebels. Never was so gross and so cruel a breach of the public faith, not with an enemy, but with a friend. Dumouriez has dropped very singular hints. Custine has spoken out more broadly. These accounts have never been contradicted. They tend to make an eternal rupture between the powers. The French have given out, that the Duke of Brunswick endeavored to negotiate some name and place for the captive king, amongst the murderers and proscribers of those who have lost their all for his cause. Even this has not been denied.
It is singular, and, indeed, a thing, under all its circumstances, inconceivable, that everything should by the Emperor be abandoned to the king of Prussia. That monarch was considered as principal. In the nature of things, as well as in his position with regard to the war, he was only an ally, and a new ally, with crossing interests in many particulars, and of a policy rather uncertain. At best, and supposing him to act with the greatest fidelity, the Emperor and the Empire to him must be but secondary objects. Countries out of Germany must affect him in a still more remote manner. France, other than from the fear of its doctrinal principles, can to him be no object at all. Accordingly, the Rhine, Sardinia, and the Swiss are left to their fate. The king of Prussia has no direct and immediate concern with France; consequentially, to be sure, a great deal: but the Emperor touches France directly in many parts; he is a near neighbor to Sardinia, by his Milanese territories; he borders on Switzerland; Cologne, possessed by his uncle, is between Mentz, Treves, and the king of Prussia's territories on the Lower Rhine. The Emperor is the natural guardian of Italy and Germany,—the natural balance against the ambition of France, whether republican or monarchical. His ministers and his generals, therefore, ought to have had their full share in every material consultation,—which I suspect they had not. If he has no minister capable of plans of policy which comprehend the superintendency of a war, or no general with the least of a political head, things have been as they must be. However, in all the parts of this strange proceeding there must be a secret.
It is probably known to ministers. I do not mean to penetrate into it. My speculations on this head must be only conjectural. If the king of Prussia, under the pretext or on the reality of some information relative to ill practice on the part of the court of Vienna, takes advantage of his being admitted into the heart of the Emperor's dominions in the character of an ally, afterwards to join the common enemy, and to enable France to seize the Netherlands, and to reduce and humble the Empire, I cannot conceive, upon every principle, anything more alarming for this country, separately, and as a part of the general system. After all, we may be looking in vain in the regions of politics for what is only the operation of temper and character upon accidental circumstances. But I never knew accidents to decide the whole of any great business; and I never knew temper to act, but that some system of politics agreeable to its peculiar spirit was blended with it, strengthened it, and got strength from it. Therefore the politics can hardly be put out of the question.
Great mistakes have been committed: at least I hope so. If there have been none, the case in future is desperate. I have endeavored to point out some of those which have occurred to me, and most of them very early.