FORE:Dumouriez had no sooner come into office than he laid down a great military plan. He proposed that wherever France extended to what he called her natural limitsthat is, to the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the seathey should act only on the defensive; but in the Netherlands, where the territory did not extend to the Rhine, and in Savoy, where it did not extend to the Alps, there they should act on the offensive, and carry France to what he called its boundaries by the genuine laws of nature. This plan was adopted. The Austrians had only thirty thousand men in Belgium, and Lafayette was to make a dash on that division of the Netherlands. From Namur he was to push on for Lige, which would make him complete master of the country, and was to be strengthened by a reinforcement of thirty thousand infantry, so that he would be seventy-five thousand strong before the Emperor could advance to his attack. Further, while Lafayette was marching from Givet on Namur, a division of his army of ten thousand men, under General Biron, was to march upon Mons, where Beaulieu, the Austrian general, was posted with only two thousand five hundred men. On the same day Major-General Theobald Dillon was to advance with three thousand six hundred men from Lille, in Tournay, and to surprise that place. The French calculated on the support of the Belgians who had been strongly inoculated with the spirit of the Revolution. The two smaller divisions were punctual in their movements; but Lafayette, instead of marching simultaneously, remained strengthening himself in his position at Givet. General Biron set out from Valenciennes, and, on the 29th of April, crossed the Belgian frontiers, and the next day marched towards Mons. But no sooner did the French cavalry come in sight of some light troops, said only to amount to about five hundred men, than they fled, crying that they were betrayed. Beaulieu's horse pursued and captured Biron's baggage and military chest. On the very same day, Dillon's division, on their march from Lille to Tournay, fled with the very same cry from nine hundred Austrians who had issued from Tournay. The French officers in vain endeavoured, in both cases, to rally their forces, and Dillon was murdered by his own men on re-entering Lille with a lieutenant-colonel and an unsworn priest. Lafayette, hearing this strange news, did not venture to quit Givet.At the Church of St. Anne, Shandon, under a kind of shed attached to a guard-house, lay huddled up in their filthy fetid rags about forty human creaturesmen, women, children, and infants of the tenderest agestarving and fever-stricken, most of them in a dying state, some dead, and all gaunt, yellow, hideous from the combined effects of famine and disease. Under this open shed they had remained during the night, and until that hourabout ten in the morningwhen the funeral procession was passing by, and their indescribable misery was beheld by the leading citizens of Cork, including the mayor, and several members of the board of guardians. The odour which proceeded from that huddled-up heap of human beings was of itself enough to generate a plague.
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