The alarming decree of the Assembly that _the country was in danger_, and the call for every man to arm, had thrown all France into commotion. The restless, violent, and irresponsible are ever the first to volunteer for war. These were rapidly organized in the departments into regiments and battalions, and sent on to Paris. Thus, notwithstanding the veto of the king, an immense force was fast gathering in the capital, and a force who felt that the king himself was the secret treacherous foe from whom they had the most to fear. The Assembly, dreading conspiracy at home more than open war from abroad, now sent the king's troops, upon whose fidelity to the nation they could not rely, to the frontiers. The court opposed this measure, as they did not wish to strengthen even the feeble resistance which they supposed the allies would have to encounter, and also wished to retain these troops for their own protection against any desperate insurrection of the people. The king consequently wished to interpose his veto, but was advised that he could not safely adopt that measure in the then exasperated state of the public mind. The removal of these troops very decidedly weakened the strength of the Royalists in Paris. Such was the state of affairs on the 28th of July, when the allied army, amounting in its three great divisions to one hundred and thirty-eight thousand men, commenced its march upon France. [Illustration: THE PRUSSIANS CROSSING THE FRONTIERS OF FRANCE.] The Duke of Brunswick was to pass the Rhine at Coblentz, ascend the left bank of the Moselle, and march upon Paris by the route of Longwy, Verdun, and Chalons. His immense force of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, with its enormous array of heavy guns and its long lines of baggage and munition wagons, covered a space of forty miles. The Prince of Hohenlohe, marching in a parallel line some twenty miles on his left, led a division of the emigrants and the Hessian troops. His route led him through Thionville and Metz. The Count de Clairfayt, an Austrian field-marshal, who has been esteemed the ablest general opposed to the French during the Revolutionary war, conducted the Austrian troops and another division of the emigrants along other parallel roads upon the right, to fall upon La Fayette, who was stationed before Sedan and Mézieres. It was supposed that he would easily scatter the feeble forces which Louis XVI. had permitted to be stationed there; and then he was to press rapidly upon Paris by Rheims and Soissons.[343]