a good deal of scattered information concerning the state and movement of the armies, and are of some value as exhibiting (however imperfectly) details of the system of interference both on the part of the Committee in Paris, and of the Representatives on the spot, with the discipline of the troops and the plans of the commanders, which under less extraordinary circumstances must have insured general defeat, but which, by the absurdities of the assailants from without, and the wild insanity of the anarchists within, produced ultimate and incalculable successes. The most interesting of these letters are Carnot's* first appearance in the character of the military Mentor of the Revolution. He had been sent, like so many other deputies, on a mission to the army of the North, whence his reports were so satisfactory to the Committee of Public Safety, that they soon recalled him to the Convention, elected him-at the same time as Robespierre -into their own body, and intrusted him with the principal direction of the military service. He was, in fact, the real minister of the war department. We are well aware that Carnot's merits in this matter have been very much over-rated, and we hope on another occasion to give our readers some truer account of this man, whose fame has been exaggerated, and whose crimes extenuated, with more industry than those of any other member of that atrocious Committee of Salut Public. But though we rate Carnot's military merit infinitely lower than it has of late been a fashion to do, it is beyond doubt that he had no inconsiderable share and influence in the first campaigns of the republic, and our readers will therefore be not unwilling to see one or two of his earlier reports on the state of the army. Some of those reports, detailing occurrences, were read at the time in the Convention. We select one which has not been, that we know of, before published, and which opens more general views. Though professing to be the joint composition of him and a colleague (such a colleague!), we presume that it was altogether composed by Carnot. 'L. CARNOT et DUQUESNOY, Representatives of the People to the NATIONAL CONVENTION. 'Dunkirk, 16th April, 1793. 'We have just returned from inspecting the frontiers from Lille to Dunkirk, where we now are. This space, you are aware, has no fortresses in the first line, unless Bergues be an exception, which, however, * There were two Carnots in the Legislative Assembly; the elder brother, the Carnot, Lazare, was re-elected into the Convention; the second, sometimes called Claud, and sometimes Charles, also a distinguished officer, was employed in 1793 as commissioner of the Executive Council with the army of the North, and a clever report from him on the state of the fortresses on that frontier is to be found in this volume. There were two or three other brothers, all, we believe, lawyers. ought ought rather to be considered as forming one with Dunkirk, for the fall of the one would involve the loss of the other. To fill this interval a camp has been formed on the hill of Cassel. This camp is in a very strong position; but its communications are ill secured, and can hardly be made better. It would require a great number of troops to cover this frontier, and we have very few. Dunkirk ought to have at least 12,000 men, and it has but 1600. Public opinion here is sound, and if an attack be made the place will be defended with spirit. We are threatened with one, but hitherto the enemies' preparations are not formidable. We have plenty of artillery and provisions. General Pascal, who commands in Dunkirk, is, they say, a good officer. O'Moran, who commands at Cassel, is still better [he was guillotined soon after]. The lieutenant-colonel of the first battalion de l'Orne, whom the Minister of War has lately appointed to command in Bergues, is extremely fit for that service; but it is odious that this venerable soldier, who, counting by campaigns, has eighty-seven years of service, has not been made a general-officer in the last promotion. 'We must not conceal from you that there is a great deal of lassitude and disgust amongst the troops-that the army is infested with plunderers, who destroy the villages; and that the indifference, cowardice, and want of republican spirit, give us considerable uneasiness. 'One terrible scourge destroys our armies-the flocks of women and girls which follow them. You may reckon that there are as many of them as of soldiers. The barracks and quarters are overflowing with them, and the profligacy of manners is at the height. They enervate the troops, and destroy by disease ten times as many as the sword of the enemy. We do not doubt that this is the chief cause which lowers the courage of the troops. It is urgent that you should pass a law of the most extreme severity on this point. The abuse is difficult to eradicate. We, your deputies, cannot do it without the sanction of a new law, very positive and very strong. The existing law is on their side-it allows lodgings to the wives of soldiers; of course, if you believe them, the whole army is married. At Douai, where we once saw the garrison reduced to 350 men, there were no less than 3000 women in the barracks, so that, in fact, there was no room for a corps of the army of Dumouriez, which marched in. We insist on this point, because the army is gone if you do not apply an immediate and effective remedy to this principle of dissolution. 'Another abuse is the constant creation of new corps, when we cannot even complete the old ones. The recruits of the new contingents are obstinate in forming new battalions and independent companies. We have no other means of stopping this practice but by alleging that the Convention has forbidden the formation of any new corps till the old ones shall be complete. If then the Convention should give way on this point, we could no longer check the disorder. There are we know not how many corps that have three times as many officers as men. 'The Commissioners of the Convention, We We are tempted by the celebrity of the writer to give another letter, in the same style, and in his single name. 'CARNOT to the Committee of PUBLIC SAFETY. 'St. Omer, 22 Mai, 1793. "We acquainted you, dear colleagues, with the project we had formed of an expedition on Furnes and Nieuport. The execution of it was preparing when we were informed by General Lamarlière that 10,000 Dutch had just arrived at Menin, and in consequence there was anothe deliberation yesterday at Cassel between the four generals, Stettenhoffen, Champion, O'Moran, and Richardot, and at which I was present (my colleague, Duquesnoy, being at Douai). It was there decided that next Sunday the expedition on Furnes and Nieuport should take place, but that, instead of going from the camp of La Madelaine to Ypres, as had been at first agreed on, they should go to Menin, where the Dutch are, in order to draw the garrison of Ypres, which is of 3000 men, that way, or at least to keep it in check, and prevent its coming to the succour of Furnes and Nieuport. I have been preaching this expedition for six weeks past, but General O'Moran, who is very circumspect, always feared to compromise himself; and it must be confessed that we are in want of many essential articles, and that the enemy, who-I know not how-is acquainted with all our resolutions, are considerably reinforced; I therefore think there would now be great imprudence in attempting to take Ostend. However, when we have reached Nieuport, if we see any means of advancing farther, we shall not stop short. I am told that you have had under consideration the question whether the great inundation of the country round Condé ought to be tried. You are imposed on when you are told that the loss would be of 14,000,000 frc. [about 560,000l.];-it is at the most of three to four millions, [120,000l. to 130,000/];-but even that loss would be lamentable, and I think it ought not to be done, unless we were certain, by this means, of relieving the place, or drowning the enemy in their posts. In truth, ignorant people are always great destroyers of suburbs-great drowners of countries, whilst well-informed men are great preservers [conservateurs]; these, instead of destroying suburbs, make them advantageous posts for the defence of the town; instead of inundating beforehand, they wait till the enemy surround the town, to drown them in their camps. "The proposition for ravaging the country can only be made for the purpose of turning the inhabitants against us. Be on your guard against all such suggestions. I have seen with a great deal of pain the frightful inundations at Lille and Douai carried to their fullest extent, when it would have been sufficient to have prepared for them; and I am absolutely opposed to their being extended to Dunkirk, in spite of the threats of the enemy. It is right to inform you that the supplies lately furnished by the commissaries are detestable; the wine is the very worst sort: I shall draw up a procès verbal on that subject. The materials for the clothing of the soldiers are as bad as those last year; those only which are made in the government establishment are good for anything: I send you a sample of the cloth of which the breeches are made. You will see that it is merely stuff for lining. [This complaint concerning the breeches of the Sans Culottes is rather droll.] 'Your laws and our decrees, on the supplies of provisions, produce the best effect: provisions and forage begin to abound; and corn is fallen of itself below the price fixed in the department of the Pas de Calais. 'L. CARNOT.' The expedition thus suggested against Furnes, whatever it may have been in the conception,-of which we are not now to judge,—was, though temporarily successful, a lamentable failure in its results, and was altogether so small a matter that it would hardly be remembered if it had not been the coup d'essai of one of whom it is now the fashion to talk as a gigantic military genius. It appears from the London Gazette (8th June, 1793) and the Moniteur (of the 6th), which, strange to say, agree almost verbatim in all the details of the action, that the Dutch force, of about 1200 men, were driven out of the place by between 4000 and 5000 French under the command of General O'Moran and the direction of Carnot. The French, after a short halt in Furnes, pursued the road to Nieuport with the avowed purpose of trying a coup de main on that place-but there ends all that we have hitherto known of the affair. This volume gives us Carnot's confidential report to the Committee of Public Safety. It is really a curious, and we dare say a tolerably accurate narrative, and we regret that it is too long to be extracted, but the sum is, that the French were so undisciplined and disorderly, and became so disorganised by their first success in taking Furnes, that it was equally impossible to keep them in the place, or to get them well out of it;-that an attempt was made to make a hourra from Furnes on Nieuport;-but they were unable even to march, and were at length forced to retreat in extreme confusion, evacuating, after having shamefully plundered the town, and getting back, as well as they could, to their original positions: while the Dutch had been so energetic in their retreat that they never discovered the enemy's confusion and distress, and marched quietly back to Furnes, when they heard next day-(God knows how)— that the French had retired. This is an early and remarkable instance of the qualities that ultimately determined the fate of the war-the uncalculating activity of revolutionary adventure, saved from self-destruction by the slow, timid, and disjointed movements of the allies. Indeed the perusal of this class of the present correspondence revives the painful feelings with which we have always, on less detailed information, considered this campaign. We never did, and cannot to this hour, discover how the allies, and especially the the English, could have been so blinded and paralysed as to have done so little at a moment when it appears the French were really incapable of making any serious resistance. We say nothing of the strange neglect of La Vendée, or the still stranger blunder of the allies which sent the garrisons of the captured fortresses on the frontier* to fight against the royalists of the interior. But the actual conduct of the armies in Flanders seems to us to have been in every possible point-except perhaps personal courage-most lamentable. The smaller and more immediate causes of individual events we perhaps shall never know; but there are two main and cardinal points in the system of operations sufficient to account for the general result-first, the independency of the several armies, with the inevitable jealousies and mal-entendus of their commanders-and secondly, the old system of never advancing till you had taken all the fortresses. It seems to us that, if the allies had acted with common firmness and activity, the French armies-along the whole line from Strasbourg to Dunkirk -must have been annihilated;-a catastrophe to which, as armies, they themselves would not have been at all averse. It has been said, cleverly but falsely, that during this Reign of Terror all the virtue and honour of France took refuge in the army. We must, on the contrary, say that everything we have seen or read upon this subject, and more especially in the book before us, convinces us that it was impossible that anything could be less inspired by a true military spirit, or more degraded, both in morals and technicalities, than these armies. Offensive courage-which is the instinct of any body of human creatures-they had-and nothing else; and if their antagonists-the allies—had not been paralysed -both in counsel and in action-by politics or something worse at head-quarters, the result must have been entirely different.† But this would be too wide a discussion to pursue by means of these fragments of correspondence. We therefore pass on to the only question on which the publication has afforded any new light, and that seems to emerge without the editor's participation or knowledge; at least he gives no sign or note that the letters which he copies are in any way connected with the melancholy and hitherto unaccountable catastrophe which, in our opinion, they, mainly, if not, alone, produced. We mean the fate of General Custine, who, our readers will recollect, after having enjoyed great Jacobin popularity, and been intrusted, on the flight of Dumouriez, with the chief command of the army of the North, *For instance, the garrison of Mentz-20,000 men, and that of Valenciennes 7000— were immediately conveyed by post-horses into La Vendée, where their services were fatal to the royal cause.-Thiers, iii., 93-95. This opinion is singularly confirmed by the late debates in the French Chamber on the fortifications of Paris. was |