Page:15 decisive battles of the world Vol 2 (London).djvu/287

Rh completed all preparations for the campaign, broke up from its cantonments, and marching from Luxembourg upon Longwy, crossed the French frontier. Sixty thousand Prussians, trained in the school, and many of them under the eye of the Oreat Frederick, heirs of the glories of the Seven Years War, and universally esteemed the best troops in Europe, marched in one column against the central point of attack. Forty-five thousand Austrians, the greater part of whom were picked troops, and had served in the recent Turkish war, supplied two formidable corps that supported the flanks of the Prussians. There was also a powerful body of Hessians; and, leagued with the Germans against the Parisian democracy, came fifteen thousand of the noblest and the bravest amongst the sons of France. In these corps of emigrants, many of the highest born of the French nobility, scions of houses whose chivalric trophies had for centuries filled Europe with renown, served as rank and file. They looked on the road to Paris as the path which they were to carve out by their swords to victory, to honour, to the rescue of their king, to reunion with their families, to the recovery of their patrimony, and to the restoration of their order.

Over this imposing army the Allied Sovereigns