There was but one man in the camp who did not coincide in those glittering visions. Let me once more do justice to a prince whose character has been affected by the caprices of fortune. The Duke of Brunswick's language to me, as we saw the Tricolor waving on the walls of Longwy, the first fortress which lay in our road, was—"Sir, your court must not be deceived. We shall probably take the town, and defeat its wavering army; but up to this moment, we have not been joined by a single peasant. The population are against us. This is not a German war; it is more like yours in America. I have but one hundred and twenty thousand men against twenty-five millions." To my remark, "that there might be large body of concealed loyalty in France, which only waited the advance of the Allies to declare itself," his calm and grave reply was: "That I must not suffer my Government to suppose him capable of abandoning the royal cause, while there was hope in military means. That it was his determination to hazard all things rather than chill the coalition. But this let me impress upon your Ministry," said he, with his powerful eye turned full on me; "that if intrigue in the German cabinets, or tardiness on the part of yours, shall be suffered to impede my progress, all is at an end. I know the French; if we pause, they will pour on. If we do not reach Paris, we must prepare to defend Berlin and Vienna. If the war is not ended within a month, it may last for those twenty years."
The commander-in-chief was true to his word. He lost no time. Before night our batteries were in full play upon the bastions of Longwy, and as our tents had not yet overtaken us, I lay down under a vineyard shed in a circle of the staff, with our cloaks for our pillows, listening to the roar of our artillery; until it mingled with my dreams.
We were on horse an hour before daybreak, and the cannonade still continued heavy. It was actively returned, and the ramparts were a circuit of fire. As a spectacle, nothing could be more vivid, striking, and full of interest. To wait for the slow approaches of a formal siege was out of the question. Intelligence had reached us that the scattered French armies, having now ascertained the point at which the burst over the frontier was to be made, had been suddenly combined, and had taken a strong position directly in our way to the capital. A protracted siege would raise the country in our rear, and, thus placed between two fires, the grand army might find itself paralysed at the first step of the campaign. The place must be battered until a breach was made, and stormed à la Turque. Our anxiety during the day was indescribable. With our telescopes constantly in our hands, we watched the effect of every new discharge; we galloped from hill to hill with the impatience of men in actual combat, and every eye and tongue was busy in calculating the distances, the power of guns, and the time which the crumbling works would take to fill up the ditch. The reports of the engineers, towards evening, announced that a practicable breach was made, and three battalions of Austrian grenadiers, and as many of Prussians, were ordered under arms for the assault. To make this gallant enterprize more conspicuous, the whole army was formed in columns, and marched to the heights, which commanded a view of the fortress. The fire from the batteries now became a continued roar, and the guns of Longwy, whose fire had slackened during the day, answered them with an equal thunder; the space between was soon covered with smoke, and when the battalions of grenadiers moved down the hillside, and plunged into the valley, they looked like masses of men disappearing into the depths of ocean. The anxiety now grew intense. I hardly breathed; and yet I had a mingled sensation of delight, eagerness, and yet of uncertainty, to which nothing that I had ever felt before was comparable. I longed to follow those brave men to the assault, and probably would have made some such extravagant blunder, but for seeing Varnhorst's broad visage turned on me with a look of that quiet humour which, of all things on earth, soonest brings a man to his senses. "My good friend," said he, "however fine this affair may be, live in hope of seeing something finer. Never be shot at Longwy, when you may have a chance of scaling the walls of Paris. I have made a vow never to be hanged in the beginning of a revolution, nor to be shot in the beginning of a war. But come, the duke is beckoning to us. Let us follow him."
We saw the general and his staff galloping from the ground where he had remained from the beginning of the assault, to a height still more exposed, and where the guns from the fortress were tearing up the soil. From this spot a large body of troops were seen rushing from the gate of the fortress, and plunging into the valley. The result of this powerful sortie was soon heard, for every thing was invisible under the thick cloud, which grew thicker every moment, in the volleys of musketry, and the shouts of the troops on both sides. Varnhorst now received an order from the chief of the staff, which produced its effect, in the rush of a squadron of Prussian cavalry on the flank of the enemy's column. In a few minutes it was broken, and we saw its wrecks swept along the side of the hill. An universal shout was sent up from the army, and our next sight was the ascent of the Austrian and Prussian standards, gradually rising through the smoke, and making their way towards the glacis. They had reached the foot of the breach, when the fire of the town suddenly ceased. A white flag waved on the rampart, and the drums of the garrison beat the chamade. Longwy had surrendered! All now was triumph and congratulation. We flocked round the duke, and hailed his first conquest as a promise of perpetual success. He was in high spirits at an achievement which was so important to the national impression of his talents and resources. The sortie of the garrison had given the capture an éclât which could not have been obtained by the mere surrender of a strong place. But the most important point of all was, the surrender before the assault. "The sight of our troops is enough," was the universal conclusion. If the fortified barrier of France cannot resist, what will be done by troops as raw as peasants, and officers as raw as their troops? The capitulation was a matter of half an hour, and by nightfall I followed the duke and his escort into the town. It was illuminated by order of the conquerors, and, whether bongrè or malgrè, it looked showy; we had gazers in abundance, as the dashing staff caracoled their way through the streets. I observed, however, that we had no acclamations. To have hissed us, might be a hazardous experiment, while so many Hulans were galloping through the Grande Rue; but we got no smiles. In the midst of the crowd, I met Varnhorst steering his charger with no small difficulty, and carrying a packet of notes in his hand. "Go to your quarters, and dress," said my good-humoured friend. "You will have a busy night of it. The duke has invited the French commandant and his officers to dine with him, and we are to have a ball and supper afterwards for the ladies. Lose no time." He left me wondering at the new world into which I had fallen, and strongly doubting, that he would be able to fill up his ball-room. But I was mistaken. The dinner was handsomely attended, and the ball more handsomely still. "Fortune de la guerre," reconciled the gallant captains of the garrison to the change; and they fully enjoyed the contrast between a night on the ramparts, and the hours spent at the Prussian generalissimo's splendidly furnished table. The ball which followed exhibited a crowd of the belles of Longwy, all as happy as dress and dancing could make them. It was a charming episode in the sullen history of campaigning, and before I flung myself on the embroidered sofa of the mayor's drawing-room, where my billet had been given for the night, I was on terms of eternal "friendship" with a whole group of classic beauties—Aspasias, Psyches and Cleopatras.
But neither love nor luxury, neither the smiles of that fair Champagnaises, nor the delight of treading on the tesselated floors, and feasting on the richness of municipal tables, could now detain us. We were in our saddles by daybreak, and with horses that outstripped the wind, with hearts light as air, and with prospects of endless victory and orders and honours innumerable before us, we galloped along, preceded, surrounded, and followed by the most showy squadrons that ever wore lace and feathers. The delight of this period was indescribable. It was to me a new birth of faculties that resembled a new sense of being, a buoyant and elastic lightness of feelings and frame. The pure air; the perpetual change of scene; the novelty of the landscape; the restless and vivid variety of events, and those too of the most powerful and comprehensive nature; the superb display of the finest army that the Continent had sent to war for the last hundred years; and all this excitement and enjoyment, with an unrivaled vista of matchless conquest in the horizon, a triumphal march through the provinces, to be consummated by the peace of Europe in Paris, filled even my vexed and wearied spirit with new life. If I am right in my theory, that the mind reaches stages of its growth with as much distinctness as the frame, this was one of them. I was conscious from this time of a more matured view of human being, of a clearer knowledge of its impulses, of a more vigorous, firm, and enlarged capacity for dealing with the real concerns of life. I still loved; and, strange, hopeless, and bewildering as that passion was in the breast of one who seemed destined to all the diversities of fortune—it remained without relief, or relaxation through all. It was the vein of gold, or perhaps the stream of fire, beneath the soil, inaccessible to the power of change on the surface, but that surface undergoing every impulse and influence of art and nature.
The army now advanced unopposed. Still we received neither cheers nor reinforcements from the population. Yet we had now begun to be careless on the topic. The intelligence from Paris was favourable in all the leading points. The king was resuming his popularity, though still a prisoner. The Jacobins were exhibiting signs of terror, though still masters of every thing. The recruits were running away, though the decree for the general rising of the country was arming the people. In short, the news was exactly of that checkered order which was calculated to put us all in the highest spirits. The submission of Paris, at least until we were its conquerors, would have deprived us of a triumph on the spot, and the proclamation of a general peace would have been received as the command for a general mourning.
The duke was in the highest animation, and he talked to every one round him, as we marched along, with more than condescension. He was easy, familiar, and flushed with approaching victory. "We have now," said he, "broken through the 'iron barrier,' the pride of Vauban, and the boast of France for these hundred years. To-morrow Verdun will fall. The commandant of Thionville, in desperation at the certainty of our taking the town by assault, has shot himself, and the keys are on their way to me. Nothing but villages now lie in our road, and once past those heights," and he pointed to a range of woody hills on the far horizon, "and we shall send our light troops en promenade to Paris." We all responded in our various ways of congratulation.
"Apropos," said the duke, applying to me, "M. Marston, you have been later on the spot than any of us. What can you tell of this M. Dumourier, who, I see from my letters, is appointed to the forlorn hope of France—the command of the broken armies of Lafayette and Luckner?"
My answer was briefly a hope that the new general would be as much overmatched by the duke's fortunes in the field, as he had been by party in the capital. "Still, he seemed to me a clever, and even a remarkable man, however inexperienced as a soldier."
"If he is the officer of that name who served in the last French war, he is an old acquaintance of mine," observed the duke. "I remember him perfectly. He was a mere boy, who, in a rash skirmish with some of our hussars, was wounded severely and taken prisoner. But as I learned that he was the son of a French literateur of some eminence whom I had met in Paris, and as I had conceived a favourable opinion of the young soldier's gallantry, I gave him his parole and sent him back to his family, who, I think, were Provencals. He was unquestionably spirited and intelligent, and with experience might make either minister or general; but as he has begun by failure in the one capacity, it will be our business to show him that he may find success equally difficult in another. At all events, we have nothing but this minister-general between us and Notre-Dame. He has taken up a position on the Argonne ridge in our front. To force it will be but an affair of three hours. Adieu, gentlemen." He put spurs to his horse, and galloped to one of the columns which approached with trumpets sounding, bearing the captured banner of the church tower of Longwy.