At the news of the retreat of Grandpré, Kellermann, believing Dumouriez defeated, and fearful of falling himself among the Prussian forces, whom he supposed to be at the extremity of the defile of Argonne, had retreated as far as Vitry. Couriers from Dumouriez reassuring him, he again advanced, but with the slowness of a man who fears an ambush at every step. He hesitated while he obeyed. On the other side, Beurnonville, the friend and confidant of Dumouriez, had met the fugitives of Chazot's corps. Wholly disconcerted by their statements of the complete rout of his general, Beurnonville, with some dragoons, had ascended a hill, whence he perceived Argonne, and the bare heaths which extend from Grandpré to Sainte-Menehould. It was on the morning of the 17th, at the moment when Dumouriez's army was moving from Dammartin to Sainte-Menehould. At the sight of this body of troops, whose uniforms and flags he could not distinguish in the heavy mist, Beurnonville had no doubt but that it was the Prussian army advancing in pursuit of the French. He immediately faced about, and advanced to Châlons by forced marches, in order to join his general. Hearing his mistake at Châlons, Beurnonville gave only twelve hours' rest to his harassed men, and arrived on the 19th with the ten thousand warlike soldiers whom he had led so far to the field of battle. Dumouriez passed them all in review, recognizing all the officers by their names, and the soldiers by their countenances, while they all saluted their leader with the loudest acclamations. The battalions and squadrons which he had carefully formed, disciplined, and accustomed to fire during the dilatory proceedings of Luckner with the army of the North, defiled before him, covered with the dust of their long march, their horses jaded, uniforms torn, shoes in holes, but their arms as perfect and as bright as if they were on parade. Dumouriez had scarcely dismounted when Westermann and Thouvenot, his two confidential staff officers, came to inform him that the Prussian army, _en masse_, had passed the peak of Argonne, and were deploying on the hills of La Lune, on the other side of the Tourbe, opposite to him. At the same instant young Macdonald, his aide-de-camp, who had been sent, on the previous evening, on the road to Vitry, came galloping up, and brought him intelligence of the approach of the long-expected Kellermann, who at the head of twenty thousand men of the army of Metz, and some thousands of volunteers of Lorraine, was only at two hours' distance. Thus the fortune of the Revolution and the genius of Dumouriez, seconding each other, brought at the appointed hour and to the fixed spot, from the two extremities of France and from the depths of Germany, the forces which were to assail and those which were to defend the empire.