army,
resounding from one hill to another, and heard above the cannon's roar,
reassured the troops, and made the Duke of Brunswick pause, for such
hearts promised equally terrible hands. Kellermann still advanced at the
head of his column. The Duc de Chartres, his sword in one hand and a
tricolored flag in the other, followed the horse artillery with the
cavalry. The Duke of Brunswick, with the quick eye of a veteran soldier,
and that economy of human life that characterizes an able general, saw
that this attack would fail when opposed to such enthusiasm; and he
re-formed the head of his columns, sounded the retreat, and slowly
retired to his positions unpursued.

The fire ceased on both sides and the battle was as it were suspended
until four in the evening, when the King of Prussia, indignant at the
hesitation of his army, formed in person, and with the flower of his
infantry and cavalry, three formidable columns of attack; then riding
down the line, he bitterly reproached them with suffering the standard
of the monarch to be thus humiliated. At the voice of their sovereign
the troops marched to the conflict, and the King, surrounded by the Duke
of Brunswick and his principal officers, marched in the first rank,
exposed to the fire of the French, which mowed down his staff around
him. Intrepid as the blood of Frederick, he commanded as a king jealous
of the honor of his nation, and exposed himself like a soldier who holds
his life but lightly compared to victory. All was in vain; the Prussian
columns, assailed by the fire of twenty-four pieces of cannon, in
position on the heights of Valmy, retreated at nightfall, leaving behind
them eight hundred dead. Not to have been defeated was to the French
army a victory. Kellermann felt this so fully that he assumed the name
of Valmy in after-years,[39] and in his will bequeathed his heart to the
village of that name, in order that it might repose on the theatre of
his greatest renown, and sleep amid the companions of his first field.

While the French army fought and triumphed at Valmy, the Convention
decreed the Republic at Paris.

Dumouriez returned to his camp amid the roar of Kellermann's cannon; but
while he congratulated himself on the success of a day that strengthened
the patriotic feelings of the army, and that rendered the first attack
on the country fatal to her enemies, he was too clear-sighted not to
perceive the faults of Kellermann and the temerity of his po