the foot of rocks, floating pale carcasses of men.  In vain!  Islettes Village, with its church-steeple, rises intact in the Mountain-pass, between the embosoming heights; your forced marchings and climbings have become forced slidings, and tumblings back.  From the hill-tops thou seest nothing but dumb crags, and endless wet moaning woods; the Clermont Vache (huge Cow that she is) disclosing herself (See Helen Maria Williams.  Letters, iii. 79-81.) at intervals; flinging off her cloud-blanket, and soon taking it on again, drowned in the pouring Heaven.  The Argonne Passes will not force:  by must skirt the Argonne; go round by the end of it.

But fancy whether the Emigrant Seigneurs have not got their brilliancy dulled a little; whether that ’Foot Regiment in red-facings with nankeen trousers’ could be in field-day order!  In place of gasconading, a sort of desperation, and hydrophobia from excess of water, is threatening to supervene.  Young Prince de Ligne, son of that brave literary De Ligne the Thundergod of Dandies, fell backwards; shot dead in Grand-Pre, the Northmost of the Passes:  Brunswick is skirting and rounding, laboriously, by the extremity of the South.  Four days; days of a rain as of Noah,—­without fire, without food!  For fire you cut down green trees, and produce smoke; for food you eat green grapes, and produce colic, pestilential dysentery, (Greek).  And the Peasants assassinate us, they do not join us; shrill women cry shame on us, threaten to draw their very scissors on us!  O ye hapless dulled-bright Seigneurs, and hydrophobic splashed Nankeens;—­but O, ten times more, ye poor sackerment-ing ghastly-visaged Hessians and Hulans, fallen on your backs; who had no call to die there, except compulsion and three-halfpence a-day!  Nor has Mrs. Le Blanc of the Golden Arm a good time of it, in her bower of dripping rushes.  Assassinating Peasants are hanged; Old-Constituent Honourable members, though of venerable age, ride in carts with their hands tied; these are the woes of war.

Thus they; sprawling and wriggling, far and wide, on the slopes and passes of the Argonne;—­a loss to Brunswick of five-and-twenty disastrous days.  There is wriggling and struggling; facing, backing, and right-about facing; as the positions shift, and the Argonne gets partly rounded, partly forced:—­but still Dumouriez, force him, round him as you will, sticks like a rooted fixture on the ground; fixture with many hinges; wheeling now this way, now that; shewing always new front, in the most unexpected manner:  nowise consenting to take himself away.  Recruits stream up on him:  full of heart; yet rather difficult to deal with.  Behind Grand-Pre, for example, Grand-Pre which is on the wrong-side of the Argonne, for we are now forced and rounded,—­the full heart, in one of those wheelings and shewings of new front, did as it were overset itself, as full hearts are liable to do; and there rose a shriek of sauve qui peut, and a death-panic which had nigh ruined all!