The plain is of a peculiar nature, difficult to be seized by those who have not known it, but, once perceived, a thing not easily forgotten, so distinctive is it and so much apart from all that bounds it. In formation the soil is chalky, but not of that chalk which bears the green swards of Sussex or Normandy; not of that chalk over which the trout streams of the Vexin or Hampshire run so clear. It is a chalk kneaded, as it were, with clayey thickness, so that it bears only stunted trees or none, is sterile to the plough; and the waters which run sluggishly in the shallow dips of it are turbid, like milk and water mixed, and all their fords are muddy and difficult to pass. Those who drink of these waters and who live by them are few. It is an inhospitable land. For the shape of it, it is of an odd, rolling, confused sort, which, in describing it, I have often compared, and shall here compare again, to the slightly lifted waves of a sea, rounded, and heaving indiscriminately, where currents meet near the land a day after a gale. You will find no direction or set of up and down in these billows. Standing upon the summit of any one, others are seen around you as low, as smooth, as untenanted as that one from which you gaze, and between you and them lie broad and slight depressions a mile or two across, and hardly deep enough to hide the sparse villages of those plains. Such is the Champagne Pouilleuse. If a man stands upon any one of these slight [Illustration: UNIFORMS OF THE ARMY OF FRENCH EMIGRANTS _To face p. 172_ ] rolls of hungry land, ploughed desperately for insufficient harvest here and there, hedgeless, and almost featureless, and looks directly eastward towards Germany and the roads by which invasions come, he will perceive, running black and distinct all along the horizon, a low ridge, even enough in outline. If the weather is clear, he may perceive it to be wooded. It stands no more than three hundred feet above the average level of the plain, but it bounds it absolutely. This ridge is the range of hills that, with its forest, is called “the Argonne.” This ridge barring the main approach to Paris along the roads from the east, traversed in one steep pass by the main road which leads to Paris from the Germanies, Dumouriez held with his insufficient and patchwork forces, calling on Kellermann to bring up at all speed reinforcements from the south, and knowing well in his heart that even with those reinforcements he had not the quality of men who in the shock that was coming could withstand the famous discipline of the Prussians and the training of their Austrian allies. For Dumouriez, precise in temper, a soldier of the old strict armies, and one in very doubtful allegiance to the Revolutionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere volunteers, and misjudging what the future might make even of such undisciplined men, thought, if anything, too little of the material, bad as it was, which he had to his hand.