Custine, who was in Landau, meditated an invasion of the German provinces on the Lower Rhine. The king listened at last to these arguments, and assented to the conclusion of a secret convention between the two commanders in chief, by which the duke of Brunswick engaged to retire to the Meuse, on condition that he should not be pursued. Three commissioners of the Convention, who had arrived at the camp of Dumouriez, executed this agreement, without communicating it to the subordinate generals.

At the moment when the Prussians were expecting orders for the fight, they were surprised by directions to retreat-a movement that appeared, from the circumstances under which it was to be effected, more dangerous than a battle would have been. On the 1st of October the army commenced this retreat. The sufferings of men and cattle were dreadful: their route was strewed with wrecks and corpses. Great as the losses were, to those who were ignorant of the secret convention, it appeared nothing less than a miraculous piece of good fortune that the whole army was not taken or destroyed, but allowed to prosecute its march unmolested, from the banks of the Aisne to beyond the Moselle. Instead, however, of pursuing, the French moved on peacefully in the rear of the Prussians, and even permitted the garrisons of the two fortresses, under conventions which required of them nothing more than the evacuation of those places, to join the main army without obstruction. The capitulations of the fortresses were worded like agreements between friendly powers: and the French pointed it out as a remarkable circumstance that their generals had signed them as generals of the republic, and affixed to them the seal of the French people along with that of the king of Prussia. On the 23rd of October, the day after the surrender of Longwy, on which the allied army re-entered

the territory of Luxemburg, terminated this unfortunate campaign. The loss sustained by the army from the enemy," says general Canitz,* "did not amount to one thousand men by far the greater part of the infantry never fired a shot; the cavalry scarcely struck a stroke ; the artillery only, with ten thousand discharges, shattered the limbs of a few hundred French."

As though the emigrants alone were to blame for this failure, their chiefs were afterwards treated with coldness by the monarchs; and the great mass of these unfortunate men, to whose arrogance too much indulgence had previously been shown, were even subjected to measures of immoderate severity, at the same time that a decree of the Convention declared them to have forfeited all their estates and property left behind in France, and pronounced the penalty of death against them all without distinction, no matter whether they had quitted their country from fear or party-spirit, whether they had returned to it of their own accord or been taken in arms, whether as wives they had accompanied their husbands or as children their parents. The corps of the princes were in consequence dissolved; that of Condé alone was taken into the imperial service, but the numerous nobles of whom it was composed were obliged to be content with the pay of private horse-soldiers.

* In his classical work on the Prussian Cavalry, i., 146. Massenbach alleges that the grounds of the duke of Brunswick's conduct during this campaign lay in his character; and the author of the Memoires d'un homme d'état, ascribed, but erroneously, to the pen of Prince Hardenberg, asserts that he deferred to the wishes of England, which would not have been pleased to see this important affair decided by Austria and Prussia alone.

CHAPTER XVIII.

WAR ON THE RHINE AND IN BELGIUM, AND MILITARY SYSTEM OF THAT TIME.

While the Germans were pleased to denounce the French emigrants as the authors of the disasters which had befallen them, events on the Middle and Lower Rhine showed that the counsels of foreigners were not needed for the ruin of Germany. The Middle Rhine, which the corps of count Erbach was to have covered, was left exposed, because that corps had been obliged to follow the main army. The Austrians had, nevertheless, left under the protection of 2000 men their principal magazine at Spire-a rambling and ill-fortified placein the neighbourhood of which, at Landau, general Custine was collecting a considerable force. Breaking up suddenly, Custine made prisoners of the garrison in Spire, which the Austrians had neglected to withdraw to Mentz; and, invited by messages from the latter city, he soon advanced to this bulwark of the empire, for the defence of which the sovereign and government had left, at their flight, a weak garrison and a still weaker commandant: his name was Gymnich. As the French had not brought cannon with them, the garrison of 4000 men would have sufficed to defend the fortress at least till the arrival of the Hessians, who had been summoned from Darmstadt. But such was the terror excited by an enemy, so lately an object of supreme contempt, that Gymnich capitulated on the 21st of October with the French partisan, whose chief strength consisted in threats and boasting, and thought himself most fortunate in the terms which enabled him to withdraw his garrison unmolested by the bridge across the Rhine to Cassel, and

VOL. I.

bound him not to serve for a year only: indeed, he would fain have detained an Austrian captain, who escaped this disgrace by marching off with several hundred imperial troops, that he might participate in so advantageous a convention.

It was not, however, the natural imbecility alone of the commandant that operated in favour of the enemy: his conquest was facilitated by the influence of a revolutionary party in Mentz, consisting chiefly of members of the order of the Illuminati, who beheld all their plans for the improvement of the world realised under the new reign of French happiness, and were anxious to transplant it to the soil of Germany. It was this party which had invited Custine, and completely disheartened the spiritless Gymnich, by means of his sub-commandant Eikemeier, their colleague. Immediately after the entry of the French, the Paris system was aped, a Jacobinclub established, a tree of liberty, hammered together with dry wood, an apt symbol of French glory, solemnly erected, the celebration of the republican festivals enjoined, and persecution let loose against the partisans of the elector. The follies and excesses committed at that time in Mentz were doubly revolting in their German form. History laments to have to name among the authors and participators in them, a man of superior abilities and understanding, the circumnavigator, George Forster, whom the elector had invited to Mentz, and appointed professor and librarian. The predominant idea at first was the foundation of a Rhenish-German republic, after the French model; but the National Convention, summoned to meet at Mentz in execution of this scheme, soon became convinced that the new commonwealth was too weak to stand upon its own legs, and therefore sent deputies to Paris to propose a union with the mighty sister-republic. In point of fact, however,

this union had already taken place, for the whole territory occupied by the French was treated like a conquered country, and subjected to heavy burdens and extortions, in spite of all the lofty phrases about liberty and fraternity.

Fortunately, Custine, while taking part in all these fooleries, lost the opportunity to reduce the whole of the country lower down the Rhine. He might have sur prised Coblentz, which was unguarded, and Ehrenbreitstein, extended a hand to the army which Dumouriez was conducting to the Netherlands, and thus obliged the Prussians to evacuate entirely the left bank of the Rhine. He chose rather to send a detachment under general Neuwinger, to take possession of Frankfurt (October 22), that he might wring a ransom of 1,500,000 dollars from that neutral imperial city, the magistrates of which had carefully avoided every thing that was likely to offend republican France. Prussia and Hesse, indeed, soon hastened to put a stop to the system of plunder, and recovered Frankfurt on the 2d of December, by an assault, favoured by the lower class of the population. The re-capture of Mentz, a much harder task, and requiring the employment of a strong force, was reserved for the ensuing campaign.

At other points, the state of things was still worse. In the month of September, the French army of the South, under Montesquiou, entered the dominions of the king of Sardinia, without any declaration of war, and without resistance took possession of the provinces of Savoy and Nice, which were immediately incorporated as two new departments with France, though their sovereign, Victor Emanuel, had merely manifested at different times his aversion to the ruling powers there, without having resolved upon any serious attack or defence. Dumouriez, who, after the retreat of the Prussians, had reinforced