the
duty of observing Maubeuge and Valenciennes, while the bulk of the army
pursued the remains of Dampierre's forces. After gaining several
victories, however, two hundred thousand men were engaged in carrying on
a few sieges and were not gaining a foot of ground. While they
threatened France with invasion, they placed fifteen or sixteen bodies
of troops, defensively, to cover their own frontier! When Valenciennes
and Mayence capitulated, instead of falling with all their forces upon
the camp at Cambray, they flew off, excentrically, to Dunkirk on one
side and Landau on the other.

It is not less astonishing that, after making the greatest efforts in
the beginning of the campaign upon the right of the general field, they
should have shifted them afterward to the extreme left, so that while
the allies were operating in Flanders they were in no manner seconded or
aided by the imposing army upon the Rhine; and when, in its turn, this
army took up the offensive, the allies remained inactive upon the
Sambre. Do not these false combinations resemble those of Soubise and
Broglie in 1761, and all the operations of the Seven Years' War?

In 1794 the phase of affairs is wholly changed. The French from a
painful defensive pass to a brilliant offensive. The combinations of
this campaign were doubtless well considered; but it is wrong to
represent them as forming a new system of war. To be convinced of this,
it is only necessary to observe that the respective positions of the
armies in this campaign and in that of 1757 were almost identical, and
the direction of the operations is quite the same. The French had four
corps, which constituted two armies, as the King of Prussia had four
divisions, which composed two armies.

These two large bodies took a concentric direction leading on Brussels,
as Frederick and Schwerin had adopted in 1757 on Prague. The only
difference between the two plans is that the Austrian troops in Flanders
were not so much scattered as those of Brown in Bohemia; but this
difference is certainly not favorable to the plan of 1794. The position
of the North Sea was also unfavorable for the latter plan. To outflank
the Austrian right, Pichegru was thrown between the sea and the mass of
the enemy,--a direction as dangerous and faulty as could be given to
great operations. This movement was the same as that of Benningsen on
the Lower Vistula which almost lost the Russian army in 1807. The fate
of the Prussian arm