The French Revolution The Guillotine Author:Thomas Carlyle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DUMOURIEZ SUCH are the last days of August 1792 ; days gloomy, disastrous and of evil omen. What will become of this poor France ? Dumouriez ro... more »de from the Camp of Maulde, eastward to Sedan, on Tuesday last, the 28th of the month ; reviewed that so-called Army left forlorn there by Lafayette: the forlorn soldiers gloomed on him; were heard growling on him, " This is one of them, ce b—e Id, that made War be declared."l Unpromising Army! Recruits flow in, filtering through Depdt after Depot; but recruits merely: in want of all; happy if they have so much as arms. And Longwi has fallen basely ; and Brunswick, and the Prussian King, with his sixty-thousand, will beleaguer Verdun; and Clairfait and Austrians press deeper in, over the Northern marches: " a hundred and fifty thousand " as fear counts, " eighty- thousand " as the returns show, do hem us in ; Cimmerian Kurope behind them. There is Castries-and-Broglie chivalry; Royalist foot "in red facing and nankeen trousers " ; breathing death and the gallows. And lo, finally, at Verdun on Sunday the 2d of September 1792, Brunswick is here. With his King and sixty-thousand, glittering over the heights, from beyond the winding Meuse River, he looks down on us, on our " high citadel" and all our confectionery ovens (for we are celebrated for confectionery); has sentcourteoussummons, in order to spare the effusion of blood!—Resist him to the death ? Every day of retardation precious ? How, 1 Dumouriez, " Memoires," ii. 383. chapter{Section 4O General Beaurepaire (asks the amazed Municipality), shall we resist him ? We, the Verdun Municipals, see no resistance possible. Has he not sixty-thousand, and artillery without end ? Retardation, Patriotism is good ; but so likewise is peaceable baking of pastry, and sleepin...« less