So that the General had to come galloping; and, with thunder-words, with gesture, stroke of drawn sword even, check and rally, and bring back the sense of shame; (Dumouriez, Memoires, iii. 29.)—­nay to seize the first shriekers and ringleaders; ‘shave their heads and eyebrows,’ and pack them forth into the world as a sign.  Thus too (for really the rations are short, and wet camping with hungry stomach brings bad humour) there is like to be mutiny.  Whereupon again Dumouriez ’arrives at the head of their line, with his staff, and an escort of a hundred huzzars.  He had placed some squadrons behind them, the artillery in front; he said to them:  “As for you, for I will neither call you citizens, nor soldiers, nor my men (ni mes enfans), you see before you this artillery, behind you this cavalry.  You have dishonoured yourselves by crimes.  If you amend, and grow to behave like this brave Army which you have the honour of belonging to, you will find in me a good father.  But plunderers and assassins I do not suffer here.  At the smallest mutiny I will have you shivered in pieces (hacher en pieces).  Seek out the scoundrels that are among you, and dismiss them yourselves; I hold you responsible for them."’ (Ibid., Memoires iii. 55.)

Patience, O Dumouriez!  This uncertain heap of shriekers, mutineers, were they once drilled and inured, will become a phalanxed mass of Fighters; and wheel and whirl, to order, swiftly like the wind or the whirlwind:  tanned mustachio-figures; often barefoot, even bare-backed; with sinews of iron; who require only bread and gunpowder:  very Sons of Fire, the adroitest, hastiest, hottest ever seen perhaps since Attila’s time.  They may conquer and overrun amazingly, much as that same Attila did;—­whose Attila’s-Camp and Battlefield thou now seest, on this very ground; (Helen Maria Williams, iii. 32.) who, after sweeping bare the world, was, with difficulty, and days of tough fighting, checked here by Roman Aetius and Fortune; and his dust-cloud made to vanish in the East again!—­

Strangely enough, in this shrieking Confusion of a Soldiery, which we saw long since fallen all suicidally out of square in suicidal collision,—­at Nanci, or on the streets of Metz, where brave Bouille stood with drawn sword; and which has collided and ground itself to pieces worse and worse ever since, down now to such a state:  in this shrieking Confusion, and not elsewhere, lies the first germ of returning Order for France!  Round which, we say, poor France nearly all ground down suicidally likewise into rubbish and Chaos, will be glad to rally; to begin growing, and new-shaping her inorganic dust:  very slowly, through centuries, through Napoleons, Louis Philippes, and other the like media and phases,—­into a new, infinitely preferable France, we can hope!—­