invaders to that "military promenade to Paris" which they gayly talked of accomplishing.
At the end of July, the allied army, having fully completed all preparations for the campaign, broke up from its cantonments, and, marching from Luxembourg upon Longwy, crossed the French frontier. Sixty thousand Prussians, trained in the schools, and many of them under the eye of the Great Frederic, heirs of the glories of the Seven Years' War, and universally esteemed the best troops in Europe, marched in one column against the central point of attack. Forty-five thousand Austrians, the greater part of whom were picked troops, and had served in the recent Turkish war, supplied two formidable corps that supported the flanks of the Prussians. There was also a powerful body of Hessians; and leagued with the Germans against the Parisian democracy came 15,000 of the noblest and the bravest among the sons of France. In these corps of emigrants, many of the highest born of the French nobility, scions of houses whose chivalric trophies had for centuries filled Europe with renown, served as rank and file. They looked on the road to Paris as the path which they were to carve out by their swords to victory, to honor, to the rescue of their king, to reunion with their families, to the recovery of their patrimony, and to the restoration of their order.[1]
Over this imposing army the allied sovereigns placed as generalissimo the Duke of Brunswick, one of the minor reigning princes of Germany, a statesman of no mean capacity, and who had acquired in the Seven Years' War a military reputation second only to that of the Great Frederic himself. He had been deputed a few years before to quell the popular movements which then took place in Holland, and he had put down the attempted revolution in that country with a promptitude which appeared to augur equal success to the army that now marched under his orders on a similar mission into France.
Moving majestically forward, with leisurely deliberation, that seemed to show the consciousness of superior strength, and a steady purpose of doing their work thoroughly, the allies appeared before Longwy on the 20th of August, and the dispirited and despondent garrison opened the gates of that fortress to them after the first shower of bombs. On the 2d of September, the
- ↑ See Scott, "Life of Napoleon," vol. i., c. xi.
