and endless wet moaning woods; the Clermont Vache (huge Cow that she is) disclosing herself[1] at intervals; flinging-off her cloud-blanket, and soon taking it on again, drowned in the pouring Heaven. The Argonne Passes will not force: you 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-Pré, 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, ὀλέκοντο δὲ λαοΐ. 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 sackermenting 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
- ↑ See Helen Maria Williams, Letters, iii. 79–81.
