"
--If this can be applied with truth to any armies, it must be to those of
France. We have seen them successively and implicitly adopting all the
new constitutions and strange gods which faction and extravagance could
devise--we have seen them alternately the dupes and slaves of all
parties: at one period abandoning their King and their religion: at
another adulating Robespierre, and deifying Marat.--These, I confess are
dispositions to make good soldiers, but convey to me no idea of
enthusiasts or republicans.
The bulletin of the Convention is periodically furnished with splendid
feats of heroism performed by individuals of their armies, and I have no
doubt but some of them are true. There are, however, many which have
been very peaceably culled from old memoirs, and that so unskilfully,
that the hero of the present year loses a leg or an arm in the same
exploit, and uttering the self-same sentences, as one who lived two
centuries ago. There is likewise a sort of jobbing in the edifying
scenes which occasionally occur in the Convention--if a soldier happen to
be wounded who has relationship, acquaintance, or connexion, with a
Deputy, a tale of extraordinary valour and extraordinary devotion to the
cause is invented or adopted; the invalid is presented in form at the bar
of the Assembly, receives the fraternal embrace and the promise of a
pension, and the feats of the hero, along with the munificence of the
Convention, are ordered to circulate in the next bulletin.
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