The old fashion of fighting had been, roughly speaking, for the armies to advance in a mass, firing as they went, until one yielded and fell back or until they clashed together with the bayonet. Now the new method was introduced of keeping a big body of troops in reserve, to throw in, and so gain a decision in the battle, after the first encounter of the others. And gradually that disposition of the troops developed into the throwing forward of a single line of shooters in advance of the main body--skirmishers as they came to be called, when the thinning of the line was brought to its extreme. Together with that new way of fighting battles, there came in a new idea of war. For the old idea had been chiefly to capture some important city or fortress of the enemy, and so to gain a decision in the campaign. The new idea was that a decision might be most quickly and convincingly reached by destroying the enemy's army. And, with that new idea, the value of time seems to have been appreciated more fully--the importance, that is to say, of arriving in numbers at a certain place before the enemy could have time to mass his forces there, and so of beating his armies piecemeal, before they could be concentrated. As a very rough sketch, that may perhaps serve {163} to give a notion of the way in which war and battles were changing. It was out of the great danger menacing her very life as a nation that France was now able to draw new strength. The Government passed a decree that all men of suitable age were liable to conscription to the army. They were called on to fight for their own hearths and homes. It was not unlike the idea which had inspired the earliest Roman legions. [Sidenote: Republican victories] The Allies had lost their opportunity. They did not drive their stroke home. France, with much reinforced armies, took the offensive again. She poured into the Netherlands and into Holland. It was indeed only due to the inexperience of her own commanders, and to the interference of her Government with the generals, that the defeats of the Allies were no heavier than they were. A conclusion, for the time being, of the fighting on that front was reached in 1795, when the Austrians retired from the Netherlands--which were then annexed to the French Republic--when Prussia made a separate peace with her, when the English armies were withdrawn, and when Holland was allowed to retain her nominal independence with the style of the Batavian Republic.