wonder that an army composed of the scum of a revolutionary populace,
without knowledge of arms, suspicious, violent, unused to every form of
military restraint, should defy organization in three months? Perhaps no
sovereign ever entered upon a great conflict less prepared than did
Louis when he declared war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia--for
Francis was not yet crowned Emperor of Austria. But that unhappy monarch
found himself in a situation from which the only issue was a recourse to
arms. Confronted on the one hand by a republican party of daily
increasing power and on the other by an aristocratical one openly allied
with sovereigns who were suspected of a desire to partition his dominion
among themselves as Poland had been, his one hope lay in warring his way
out between the two.

That Louis should be the advocate and leader of this war was the one
inspiration of Narbonne, and, had the King persevered in this, he might
have saved himself and his throne. But, with his fatal vacillation,
after having entered upon military preparations and committed himself to
Narbonne's policy, he suddenly abandoned him as he had abandoned so many
of his advisers. Grave replaced the dismissed and chagrined young
minister, and Dumouriez, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, took into his
hands all the power and glory of the war movement. He developed and
supplemented the plans which Narbonne had already formed, and, by the
New Year, a vast army was assembled and the frontier divided into three
great military districts. On the left, the territory from Dunkirk to
Philippeville was defended by the army under Rochambeau, forty thousand
foot and eight thousand cavalry strong; Lafayette, with his army of the
centre, of more than a hundred thousand men and some seven thousand
horse, commanded between Philippeville and Weissenberg, while Luckner,
with his army of the Rhine, stretched from Weissenberg to Bâle.
Dumouriez's diplomatic negotiations were apparently nearly as successful