These conditions having been formally accepted, an army of weak and wounded men laboriously descended the heights and marched out to the place appointed for the laying down of arms. General Gates was on this occasion extremely courteous, and the Colonial troops were soon fraternizing with the English soldiers and striving in every way to supply their many needs and wants.
General Clinton, who was but fifty miles down the river with supplies and men, heard with dismay of Burgoyne’s surrender. Lord Howe’s plans were all broken up by this sudden change of fortune. And the far away, sleepily stubborn British Parliament felt the first cold intimation that it might possibly be wrong and Burke might possibly be right in their respective estimates of the rebel children in the wide awake, wonderful New World.
And so the failure of the New York plans, culminating in Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, proved to be one of the mighty little things potential of results that change the destinies of nations.
[Chapter XVI.]
VALMY
“Bury my heart in Valmy,” said Kellerman, soldier of the Seven Years’ War, victor of Valmy, Marshal of France under the first Napoleon, and court favorite of the Bourbons—as the shadows of old-age death deepened into darkness. And they buried his heart in Valmy.
A simple monument on the crest of the hill, the bloodiest spot of the one-time battle ground, tells to the thoughtful stranger the story of a restless heart o’er whom as o’er Madame de Stael and many another heir of a checkered heritage might be engraved as epitaph, “Here rests one who never rested.”
The era ushered in by the battle of Valmy was especially prolific of men whose political principles changed violently from one extreme to the other; only to rebound again and again, until, at length, weariness and cynic scorn of good in anything caused them to drift in perplexed acquiescence wherever the tide rolled longest and strongest. Talleyrand, Dumouriez, Marquis de la Rouarie, Kellerman, La Fayette, Mirabeau, Duc de Chartres, and even Napoleon Bonaparte were, in great measure, moulded into their respective historic moulds by the lurid lightning play of antithetic forces ever fatefully flashing and slashing and crashing around them.