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 uni