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It was the first time the border had been quiet for over a generation; and for fifteen years the quiet lasted unbroken. The credit belongs to Wayne and his army, and to the Government which stood behind both. Because it thus finally stood behind them we can forgive its manifold shortcomings and vacillations, its futile efforts to beg a peace, and its reluctance to go to war.
He rebuked the vacillations, the shortcomings, the imbecility, of the Queen's government in offensive terms. He consorted openly with the princes who were on the point of making war upon the Queen-Regent. He made a boast to the Secretary of State Villeroy that he had unravelled all his secret plots against the Netherlands.
The vacillations of Bazaine, whose strategy was far more faulty than that of Napoleon III. had been, together with the delay caused by the defiling of a great part of the army through the narrow streets of Metz, gave the Germans an opportunity such as had not occurred since the year 1805, when Napoleon I. shut up an Austrian army in Ulm.
He narrates in extenso all his vacillations about nothing at all, all his givings way to laziness, all his insincere confidences made to others.
If they would surely be kind to her, she might chance it, she thought. But if Aunt Kate was angry with her vacillations in regard to Wolf, and if Rose had also taken Wolf's side, then she knew that she, Norma, would begin to cry, and disgrace herself, and have good-natured simple old Harry poking about and wondering what was the matter No, she didn't dare risk it.
No: the better plan is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane's, for then I can talk to him more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and regrets." So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbé.
Nevertheless, in the midst of these vacillations of the royal will, it is impossible for history to misunderstand that from the month of November 1790 the king vaguely meditated a plan of escape from Paris in collusion with the emperor.
His conscripts profited immensely by the training of those nine weeks: his forces now threatened Austria on the side of Bavaria and Illyria, as well as from the newly intrenched camp south of Dresden: his cavalry was re-recovering its old efficiency: Murat, in answer to his imperious summons, ended his long vacillations and joined the army at Dresden on August 14th.
It need hardly be said that the result of these vacillations was deplorable, unsteadying the defenders, and giving the assailants time to bring up troops and cannon, and thereby strengthen their grip on every important point.
But if not for the purpose of history, the letters generally have, if read aright, been all but enough for the purpose of biography. With a view to the understanding of the man's character, they have, I think, been enough. From them such a flood of light has been turned upon the writer that all his nobility and all his defects, all his aspirations and all his vacillations, have been made visible.
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