even Years' War, no adversary had been able to endure. Yet
these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having
seriously tried the French position, and their officers, apparently, did
not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French
gentlemen implored the Prussian King to support them if they alone
should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of
Brunswick the King decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as
little heart in the war as Charles Fox, or, possibly, Pitt, or as his
own troops. And yet he was so strong that Dumouriez, after his victory,
hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans, if
aroused, should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne.

To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which,
as a compact power, they never recovered. The rising in Vendee
temporarily collapsed with the check at Chalons, and they were left
literally naked unto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes,
preferring the guillotine to starvation, others, disguised in peasants'
blouses, tried to reach Rouerie in La Vendee, some died from hardship,
some committed suicide, while the bulk regained Liege and there waited
as suppliants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men, who
had entered so gayly upon a conflict whose significance they could not
comprehend, had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of
them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries
of history, and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible,
because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own
intellectual limitations.

When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters
of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative
magnitude no one could measure. If Chalons fell, Vendee would rise, and
the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendee
did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless
atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests. In March, 1793,
one hundred thousand peasants were under arms.

Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Chalons
were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to
Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young
and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified
with the name of an o