第378章

But indeed do not these long-flowing hair-queues of a Jeunesse Doree in semi-military costume betoken, unconsciously, another still more important tendency? The Republic, abhorrent of her Guillotine, loves her Army.

And with cause. For, surely, if good fighting be a kind of honour, as it is, in its season; and be with the vulgar of men, even the chief kind of honour, then here is good fighting, in good season, if there ever was.

These Sons of the Republic, they rose, in mad wrath, to deliver her from Slavery and Cimmeria. And have they not done it? Through Maritime Alps, through gorges of Pyrenees, through Low Countries, Northward along the Rhine-valley, far is Cimmeria hurled back from the sacred Motherland.

Fierce as fire, they have carried her Tricolor over the faces of all her enemies;--over scarped heights, over cannon-batteries; down, as with the Vengeur, into the dead deep sea. She has 'Eleven hundred thousand fighters on foot,' this Republic: 'At one particular moment she had,' or supposed she had, 'seventeen hundred thousand.' (Toulongeon, iii. c. 7; v. c. 10 (p. 194).) Like a ring of lightning, they, volleying and ca-ira-ing, begirdle her from shore to shore. Cimmerian Coalition of Despots recoils; smitten with astonishment, and strange pangs.

Such a fire is in these Gaelic Republican men; high-blazing; which no Coalition can withstand! Not scutcheons, with four degrees of nobility; but ci-devant Serjeants, who have had to clutch Generalship out of the cannon's throat, a Pichegru, a Jourdan, a Hoche, lead them on. They have bread, they have iron; 'with bread and iron you can get to China.'--See Pichegru's soldiers, this hard winter, in their looped and windowed destitution, in their 'straw-rope shoes and cloaks of bass-mat,' how they overrun Holland, like a demon-host, the ice having bridged all waters; and rush shouting from victory to victory! Ships in the Texel are taken by huzzars on horseback: fled is York; fled is the Stadtholder, glad to escape to England, and leave Holland to fraternise. (19th January, 1795 (Montgaillard, iv. 287-311).) Such a Gaelic fire, we say, blazes in this People, like the conflagration of grass and dry-jungle; which no mortal can withstand--for the moment.