Page:British campaigns in Flanders, 1690-1794; being extracts from "A history of the British army," (IA britishcampaigns00fort).pdf/279

 and the useful service of the little band of Workers had been accomplished only with great difficulty and by constant concessions to the party of violence. Representatives of the people vested with arbitrary powers still accompanied the armies, interfering with the operations, punishing by summary execution the slightest fault or failure, whether realised or merely suspected, levying barbarous and oppressive requisitions, and thus driving officers, men, and civil population alike to despair. In no army was this policy of terror more ruthlessly pursued than in that of the Rhine, where unlimited powers were exercised by the representatives Lebas and St. Just, of whom the latter, a young man of twenty-six, gave himself the airs of omnipotent Jove, with a guillotine for thunderbolt. A campaign, however, cannot be won solely by decapitation of one's own troops; and in the winter of 1793-1794 this fact began to impress itself, in respect not only of the army but of France at large, upon some of the ruling men in Paris. But it was no easy matter to convince the unspeakable rogues of the Commune of Paris that terror, which had brought to them personally enormous profit, was, as a national policy, a failure. Early in December 1793 the Committee of Public Safety took several measures to abridge the powers of the Commune; and some of the men who had in earlier days been most violent favoured the reaction towards a milder rule; but none the less Collot d'Herbois, who had been the author of most atrocious cruelties at Lyons since the recapture of the city, continued to obtain official approval of his conduct. Dread of summary restoration of order by some victorious General continually haunted the minds of many of the leaders, and notably of Robespierre; and, since the only idea of this last was to support whichever