thereby set at ease, than Clerfayt, burning to avenge the death of the
Prince de Ligne and make a decisive attack on this rampart of the French
army, advanced all his columns into this defile, gained the heights,
rushed headlong down on Chazot's column in front and on both flanks,
took his cannon, and compelled Chazot himself to leave the forest for
the plain, cutting off his communication with the camp of Grandpre, and
driving him in full flight on the road to Vouziers. At the same moment
the corps of the emigres attacked General Dubouquet, in the defile of
the Chene-Populeux. Frenchman against Frenchman, their valor was equal:
the one side fighting to save, the other to reconquer, their country.
Dubouquet gave way and retreated upon Chalons. These two disasters came
upon Dumouriez at the same moment. Chazot and Dubouquet seemed to trace
out to him the road. The clamor of his whole army pointed out to him
Chalons as a refuge. Clerfayt, with twenty-five thousand men, was about
to cut off his communication with Chalons. The Duke of Brunswick, with
eighty thousand Prussians, enclosed him on the three other sides in the
camp of Grandpre. His detachments cut off reduced his army to fifteen
thousand men.
A retreat before an enemy, conquering in two partial encounters, was to
prostrate the fortune of France before the foreigner. The "audacity" of
Danton passed into the mind and tactics of Dumouriez. He conceived a
plan even more bold than that of Argonne, and closed his ear to the
timid counsels of art. He dictated to his aides-de-camp orders to the
following effect:
Kellermann was to continue his advance to Sainte-Menehould; Beurnonville
was to march instantly for Rhetel, advancing by the river Aisne, taking
care not to go too near to Argonne, to save its flanks from Clerfayt's
attacks. Dillon was to defend and check the two defiles of Argonne, and
to send out troops beyond the forest in order to perplex the Duke of
Brunswick's motions, and come as soon as possible into communication
with Kellermann's advanced guard. Chazot was to return to Autry. General
Sparre, the commandant at Chalons, was desired to form the advanced camp
at Chalons.
These orders despatched, he prepared his own troops for the manoeuvre
which he himself intended to execute during the night. He sent to the
heights which cover the left of Grandpre on the side of the
Croix-au-Bois, where Clerfayt made him most uneasy, six battalions, six
squadrons, six pieces of cannon, as a lookout, in case of any sudden
attack on the part of the Austrians. At nightfall he caused the park of
artillery to defile in silence by the two bridges which traverse the
Aisne, and halt on the heights of Autry.
The Prince of Hohenlohe requested an interview with Dumouriez that
evening, his motive being to judge of the state of the army. Dumouriez
granted this, and substituted for himself in this conference General
Duval, whose advanced years, white hair, and commanding stature imposed
on the Austrian general. Duval affected an appearance of security,
telling the Prince that Beurnonville was expected next day with eighteen
thousand men, and Kellermann at the head of thirty thousand troops.
Discouraged in his offers of arrangement by Duval, the Austrian chief
withdrew, firmly convinced that Dumouriez meant to await the battle in
his camp.
At midnight Dumouriez left the Chateau of Grandpre, on horseback, and
went to the camp in the pitchy darkness of the night. All was hushed in
repose: he forbade drums to beat or trumpets to sound, but sent round in
a low voice the order to strike the tents and get under arms. The
darkness and confusion were unfavorable to these orders, but before the
first dawn of day the army was in full march. The troops passed in
double file over the bridges of Senuc and Grand Champ, and ranged
themselves in battle array on the eminences of Autry. Thus covered by
the Aisne, Dumouriez gazed upon the foe to see if they followed; but the
mystery of his movements had disconcerted the Duke of Brunswick and
Clerfayt. The army cut down the bridges behind them, and then, advancing
four leagues from Grandpre to Dumartin, encamped there; and in the
morning General Duval dispersed a host of Prussian hussars. Dumouriez
resumed his march next day, and on the 17th entered his camp of
Sainte-Menehould.
The camp of Sainte-Menehould seemed to have been designed by nature to
serve as a citadel for a handful of patriot soldiers, against a vast and
victorious army. Protected in the front by a deep valley, on one side by
the Aisne, and on the other by marshes, the back of the camp was
defended by the shallow branches of the river Auve. Beyond these muddy
streamlets and quagmires arose a solid and narrow piece of ground,
admirably adapted for the station of a second camp; and here the general
intended that Kellermann's division should be placed, then commanding
the two routes of Rheims and Chalons. Dumouriez had studied this
position during his leisure hours at Grandpre, and took up his quarters
with the confidence of a man who knows his ground and seizes on success
with certain hand.
All his arrangements being made and head-quarters established at
Sainte-Menehould, in the centre of the army, Dumouriez, annoyed at the
reports, spread by fugitives, of his having been routed, wrote to the
assembly: "I have been obliged," he wrote to the President, "to abandon
the camp of Grandpre; our retreat was complete, when a panic spread
through the army--ten thousand men fled before one thousand five hundred
Prussian hussars. All is repaired, and I answer for everything."
At the news of the retreat of Grandpre, Kellermann, believing Dumouriez
defeated, and fearful of falling himself among the Prussian forces, whom
he supposed to be at the extremity of the defile of Argonne, had
retreated as far as Vitry. Couriers from Dumouriez reassuring him, he
again advanced, but with the slowness of a man who fears an ambush at
every step. He hesitated while he obeyed. On the other side,
Beurnonville, the friend and confidant of Dumouriez, had met the
fugitives of Chazot's corps. Wholly disconcerted by their statements of
the complete rout of his general, Beurnonville, with some dragoons, had
ascended a hill, whence he perceived Argonne, and the bare heaths which
extend from Grandpre to Sainte-Menehould.
It was on the morning of the 17th, at the moment when Dumouriez's army
was moving from Dammartin to Sainte-Menehould. At the sight of this body
of troops, whose uniforms and flags he could not distinguish in the
heavy mist, Beurnonville had no doubt but that it was the Prussian army
advancing in pursuit of the French. He immediately faced about, and
advanced to Chalons by forced marches, in order to join his general.
Hearing his mistake at Chalons, Beurnonville gave only twelve hours'
rest to his harassed men, and arrived on the 19th with the ten thousand
warlike soldiers whom he had led so far to the field of battle.
Dumouriez passed them all in review, recognizing all the officers by
their names, and the soldiers by their countenances, while they all
saluted their leader with the loudest acclamations. The battalions and
squadrons which he had carefully formed, disciplined, and accustomed to
fire during the dilatory proceedings of Luckner with the army of the
North, defiled before him, covered with the dust of their long march,
their horses jaded, uniforms torn, shoes in holes, but their arms as
perfect and as bright as if they were on parade.
Dumouriez had scarcely dismounted when Westermann and Thouvenot, his two
confidential staff officers, came to inform him that the Prussian army,
_en masse_, had passed the peak of Argonne, and were deploying on the
hills of La Lune, on the other side of the Tourbe, opposite to him. At
the same instant young Macdonald, his aide-de-camp, who had been sent,
on the previous evening, on the road to Vitry, came galloping up, and
brought him intelligence of the approach of the long-expected
Kellermann, who at the head of twenty thousand men of the army of Metz,
and some thousands of volunteers of Lorraine, was only at two hours'
distance. Thus the fortune of the Revolution and the genius of
Dumouriez, seconding each other, brought at the appointed hour and to
the fixed spot, from the two extremities of France and from the depths
of Germany, the forces which were to assail and those which were to
defend the empire.
At the same moment Dumouriez, recalling his isolated detachments,
prepared for a struggle, by concentrating all his scattered forces.
General Dubouquet had retired to Chalons with three thousand men, where
he also expected to find Dumouriez, but had only found in the city ten
battalions of _federes_ and volunteers, who had arrived from Paris, and,
hearing of the retreat of the army, mutinied against their chiefs, cut
off the head of one of their officers, taking others with them,
plundered the army stores, murdered the colonel of the regiment of
Vexin, and then, in confused masses, took the road to Paris, proclaiming
everywhere Dumouriez's treason and demanding his head. Dumouriez was
alarmed lest these ruffians should come in contact with his army, for
such bands sowed sedition wherever they went.
General Stengel, after having ravaged the country between Argonne and
Sainte-Menehould, in order to cut off all supplies from the Prussians,
fell back beyond the Tourbe, and posted himself with the vanguard on the
hills of Lyron, opposite the heights of La Lune, where the Duke of
Brunswick was posted.
Dampierre's camp, separated from that of Dumouriez by the trenches and
shallows of the Auve, was assigned to Kellermann, but he passed beyond
this spot, and posted his entire army and baggage on the heights of
Valmy, in advance of Dampierre, on the left of that of Sainte-Menehould.
The line of Kellermann's encampment, nearer to the enemy, on its left,
touched on its right the line of Dumouriez, and thus formed with the
principal army an angle, against which the enemy could not send forth
its attacking columns without being at once overwhelmed by the French
artillery in both flanks. Dumouriez, perceiving in a moment that
Kellermann, who was too much involved and too much isolated on the
plateau of Valmy, might be turned by the Prussian masses, sent General
Chazot, at the head of eight battalions and eight squadrons, to post
them behind the heights of Gizaucourt, and be under Kellermann's orders.
He next desired General Stengel and Beurnonville to advance to the right
of Valmy with twenty-six battalions--his rapid _coup d'oeil_ assuring
him that this would be the Duke of Brunswick's point of attack.
This plan displayed at a glance the intelligence of the warrior and the
politician. Defiance was thus cast by forty-five thousand men to one
hundred ten thousand soldiers of the coalition.
The French army had its right flank and retreat covered by the Argonne,
which was impassable by the enemy, and defended by its ravines and
forests. The centre, bristling with batteries and natural obstacles, was
impregnable. The army faced the country toward Champagne, leaving behind
it the road clear to Chalons and Lorraine.
"The Prussians," argued Dumouriez, "will either fight or advance on
Paris. If the former, they will find the French army in an intrenched
camp as a field of battle. Obliged, in order to attack the centre, to
pass the Auve, the Tourbe, and the Bionne, under the fire of my
redoubts, they will take Kellermann in flank, who will crush their
attacking columns between his battalions, charging down from Valmy and
the batteries of my _corps d'armee_. If they leave the French army, and
cut off its retreat to Paris by marching on Chalons, the army, facing
about, will follow them to Paris, increasing in number at every step.
The reenforcements of the army of the Rhine and army of the North, which
are on the march; the battalions of scattered volunteers, which I shall
assemble as I cross the revolted provinces, will swell the amount of my
armed troops to sixty thousand or seventy thousand men. The Prussians
will march across a hostile country, and make every step with
hesitation, while each advance will give me fresh troops. I shall await
them under the walls of Paris. An invading army, placed between a
capital of six hundred thousand souls, who close their gates, and a
national army, which cuts off their retreat, is a destroyed army. France
will be saved in the heart of France, instead of on the frontiers; but
still she will be saved."
Thus reasoned Dumouriez, when the first sounds of the Prussian cannon,
resounding from the heights of Valmy, came to announce to him that the
Duke of Brunswick, having perceived the danger of advancing, and thus
leaving the French army behind him, had attacked Kellermann. It was not
the Duke of Brunswick, however, but the young King of Prussia, who had
commanded the attack. The Prussian army, which the generalissimo wished
to extend gradually from Rheims to Argonne, parallel to the French army,
received orders to advance in a body on Kellermann's position. On the
19th it marched to Somme-Tourbe, and remained all night under arms. The
report was spread in the head-quarters of the King of Prussia that the
French were meditating a retreat on Chalons, and that the movements
perceptible in their line were only intended to mask this retrograde
march. The King was vexed at a plan of a campaign which always allowed
them to escape. He thought he should surprise Dumouriez in the false
position of an army which had raised his camp. The Duke of Brunswick,
whose military authority began to suffer with the failure of his
preceding manoeuvres, in vain sought the intervention of General
Koeler to moderate the ardor of the King. The attack was resolved upon.
On the 20th, at 6 A.M., the Duke marched at the head of the Prussian
advanced guard upon Somme-Bionne, with the intention of attacking
Kellermann, and cutting off his retreat by the high road of Chalons. A
thick autumnal fog floated over the plain into the marshy grounds where
the three rivers flow, in the hollow ravines which separated the two
armies, leaving only the points of the precipices and the crests of the
hills shining in the light above this ocean of fog. An unexpected shock
of the cavalry of the two advanced guards alone revealed, in this
darkness, the march of the Prussians to the French. After a rapid
_melee_ and some firing, the advanced guard of the French fell back
upon Valmy, and warned Kellermann of the enemy's approach. The Duke of
Brunswick continued to advance, reached the high road to Chalons,
crossed it, and then deployed his whole army. At ten o'clock, the mist
having suddenly disappeared, showed to the two generals their mutual
situation.
Kellermann's army was en masse in the plain and behind the mill of
Valmy. This bold position projected like a cape into the midst of the
lines of the Prussian bayonets. General Chazot had not, as yet, come up
with his twenty-six battalions to flank Kellermann's left. General
Leveneur, who was to have flanked his right and to unite it with
Dumouriez's army, advanced with hesitation and slowly, fearing to draw
on his feeble force all the weight of the Prussian body, which he saw in
battle array before him. General Valence, who commanded Kellermann's
cavalry, deployed into high line with a regiment of carbineers, some
squadrons of dragoons, and four battalions of grenadiers, between
Gizaucourt and Valmy, thus covering the whole space which Kellermann
could fill up, and where that general was expected. Kellermann's lines
formed in the centre of the heights. His powerful artillery bristled by
the side of the mill of Valmy, the centre and key to the position.
Almost surrounded by semicircular lines of the enemy, which were
perpetually increasing in numbers, and embarrassed on this very narrow
elevation by his twenty-two thousand men, horses, guns, and baggage,
Kellermann was unable to extend the wings of his army.
From this height Kellermann saw come in succession, from the white mist
of the morning, and glitter in the sunshine, the countless Prussian
cavalry, which must envelop him, as in a net, if he were driven from his
position. About noon the Duke of Brunswick, having formed his whole army
into two lines, and decided on his plan of the day, was seen to detach
himself from the centre, and advance toward the declivities of
Gizaucourt and La Lune, at the head of a body of infantry, cavalry, and
three batteries. Fresh troops filled up the space these left.
Such was the horizon of tents, bayonets, horses, cannon, and staff which
displayed itself on September 20th, in the hollows and ravines of
Champagne. At the same hour the convention[37] began its sittings and
deliberations as to a monarchy or a republic. Within and without, France
and liberty sported with destiny.
The exterior aspect of the two armies seemed to declare beforehand the
issue of the campaign. On the side of the Prussians, one hundred ten
thousand combatants; a system of tactics the inheritance of the Great
Frederick; discipline, which converted battalions into machines of war,
and which, destroying all personal will in the soldier, made him bend
submissively to the thought and voice of his officers; an infantry solid
and impenetrable as walls of iron; cavalry mounted on the splendid
horses of Mecklenburg, whose docility, well-controlled ardor, and high
courage were not alarmed either at the fire of artillery nor the glitter
of cold steel; officers trained from their infancy to fighting as a
trade, born, as it were, in uniforms, knowing their troops and known to
them, exercising over their soldiers the twofold ascendency of nobility
and command; as auxiliaries, the picked regiments of the Austrian Army,
recently from the banks of the Danube, where they had been fighting
against the Turks; the emigrant French nobility, bearing with them all
the great names of the monarchy, every soldier of whom fought for his
own cause and had his individual injuries to avenge--his King to save,
his country to recover at the end of his bayonet or the point of his
sabre; Prussian generals, all pupils of a military king, having to
maintain the superiority of their renown in Europe; a generalissimo
which Germany proclaimed its Agamemnon, and which the genius of
Frederick covered with a prestige of invincibility; and, also, a young
King, brave, adored by his people, dear to his troops, avenger of the
cause of all kings, accompanied by representatives of every court on the
field of battle, and supplying the inexperience of war by a personal
bravery which forgot its rank in the sole consideration of its
honor--such was the Prussian army.
In the French camp a numerical inferiority of one against three;
regiments reduced to three or four hundred men by the effect of the laws
of 1790, which only admitted volunteers; these regiments, deprived of
their best officers by emigration, which had induced more than half to
go to the enemy's soil, and by the sudden creation of one hundred
battalions of volunteers, at the head of which they had placed the
officers remaining in France as instructors; these battalions and
regiments, without any _esprit de corps_, regarding each other with
jealousy or contempt; two feelings in the same army--the spirit of
discipline in the old ranks, the spirit of insubordination in the new
corps; old officers suspecting their men, soldiers doubtful of their
officers; a cavalry ill equipped and badly mounted; an infantry
competent and firm in regiments, raw and weak in battalions; pay in
arrear and paid in assignats greatly depreciated; insufficiently armed;
uniforms various, threadbare, torn, often in tatters; many soldiers
without shoes, or substituting handfuls of hay tied round the legs with
cord; the troops arriving from different armies and provinces, unknown
to each other, and scarcely knowing the name of the generals under whom
they had been enlisted--these generals themselves young and rash,
passing suddenly from obeying to command, or, old and methodical, unable
to make their formal modes comply with the dash required in desperate
warfare; and, finally, at the head of this incongruous army, a
general-in-chief fifty-three years of age, new to war, whom everybody
had a right to doubt, mistrustful of his troops, at variance with his
second in command, at issue with his government, whose daring yet
dilatory plan was not understood by any, and who had neither services in
the past nor the spell of victory on his sword to give authority or
confidence to his command--such were the French at Valmy. But the
enthusiasm of the country and the Revolution struggled in the heart of
this army, and the genius of war inspired the soul of Dumouriez.
Uneasy as to Kellermann's position, Dumouriez, on horseback from the
dawn of day, visited his line, extended his troops between
Sainte-Menehould and Gizaucourt, and galloped toward Valmy in order that
he might the better judge himself of the intentions of the Duke of
Brunswick and the point on which the Prussians were to concentrate their
efforts. He there found Kellermann giving his final orders to the
generals, who, on his left and right, were to have the responsibility of
the day. One of these was General Valence, and the other the Duc de
Chartres.
The Duc de Chartres[38] had been welcomed by the old soldiers as a
prince, by the new ones as a patriot, by all as a comrade. His
intrepidity did not carry him away; he controlled it, and it left him
that quickness of perception and that coolness so essential to a
general; amid the hottest fire he neither quickened nor slackened his
pace, for his ardor was as much the effect of reflection as of
calculation, and as grave as duty. His familiarity--martial with the
officers, soldierly with the soldiers, patriotic with the
citizens--caused them to forgive him for being a prince. But beneath the
exterior of a soldier of the people lurked the _arriere pensee_ of a
prince of the blood; and he plunged into all the events of the
Revolution with the entire yet skilful _abandon_ of a mastermind. Men
feared, in spite of his bravery and his exalted enthusiasm for his
country, to catch a glimpse of a throne raised upon its own ruins and by
the hands of a republic. This presentiment, which invariably precedes
great names and destinies, seemed to reveal to the army that, of all the
leaders of the Revolution, he might one day be the most useful or the
most fatal to liberty.
Dumouriez, who had seen the young Duc de Chartres with the army at
Luckner, was struck with his intrepidity and coolness during the action,
and, perceiving a spark of no ordinary fire in this young man, resolved
to attach him to himself.
The Prussians held the heights of La Lune, and had commenced descending
them in battle array. The veteran troops of Frederick the Great, slow
and measured in all their movements, displayed no rash impetuosity and
left naught to chance.
On their side the French did not behold without a feeling of dread this
immense and hitherto invincible army silently advance its first line in
columns of attack, and extend its wings to pierce their centre and cut
off all retreat, either on Chalons or Dumouriez. The soldiers remained
motionless in their position, fearing to expose by a false movement the
narrow battle-field on which they could defend themselves, but did not
dare manoeuvre. The Prussians descended half-way down the heights of
La Lune, and then opened their fire both in front and flank.