This march was not an exact copy of either of the
two marches made by the Duke of Parma into France.
There is some secret. Sickness and weather may defeat an army pursuing a
wrong plan: not that I believe the sickness to have been so great as it
has been reported; but there is a great deal of superfluous humiliation
in this business, a perfect prodigality of disgrace. Some advantage,
real or imaginary, must compensate to a great sovereign and to a great
general for so immense a loss of reputation. Longwy, situated as it is,
might (one should think) be evacuated without a capitulation with a
republic just proclaimed by the king of Prussia as an usurping and
rebellious body. He was not far from Luxembourg. He might have taken
away the obnoxious French in his flight. It does not appear to have been
necessary that those magistrates who declared for their own king, on the
faith and under the immediate protection of the king of Prussia, should
be delivered over to the gallows. It was not necessary that the
emigrant nobility and gentry who served with the king of Prussia's army,
under his immediate command, should be excluded from the cartel, and
given up to be hanged as rebels.
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