If that failed, everything was to be given up.
The scheme of a _coup de main_ might (under favorable circumstances) be
very fit for a partisan at the head of a light corps, by whose failure
nothing material would be deranged. But for a royal army of eighty
thousand men, headed by a king in person, who was to march an hundred
and fifty miles through an enemy's country,--surely, this was a plan
unheard of.
Although this plan was not well chosen, and proceeded upon principles
altogether ill-judged and impolitic, the superiority of the military
force might in a great degree have supplied the defects, and furnished a
corrective to the mistakes. The greater probability was, that the Duke
of Brunswick would make his way to Paris over the bellies of the rabble
of drunkards, robbers, assassins, rioters, mutineers, and half-grown
boys, under the ill-obeyed command of a theatrical, vaporing, reduced
captain of cavalry, who opposed that great commander and great army.
But--_Diis aliter visum_. He began to treat,--the winds blew and the
rains beat,--the house fell, because it was built upon sand,--and great
was the fall thereof.
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