It is not less astonishing that, after making the greatest efforts in the beginning of the campaign upon the right of the general field, they should have shifted them afterward to the extreme left, so that while the allies were operating in Flanders they were in no manner seconded or aided by the imposing army upon the Rhine; and when, in its turn, this army took up the offensive, the allies remained inactive upon the Sambre. Do not these false combinations resemble those of Soubise and Broglie in 1761, and all the operations of the Seven Years' War?
In 1794 the phase of affairs is wholly changed. The French from a painful defensive pass to a brilliant offensive. The combinations of this campaign were doubtless well considered; but it is wrong to represent them as forming a new system of war. To be convinced of this, it is only necessary to observe that the respective positions of the armies in this campaign and in that of 1757 were almost identical, and the direction of the operations is quite the same. The French had four corps, which constituted two armies, as the King of Prussia had four divisions, which composed two armies.
These two large bodies took a concentric direction leading on Brussels, as Frederick and Schwerin had adopted in 1757 on Prague. The only difference between the two plans is that the Austrian troops in Flanders were not so much scattered as those of Brown in Bohemia; but this difference is certainly not favorable to the plan of 1794. The position of the North Sea was also unfavorable for the latter plan. To outflank the Austrian right, Pichegru was thrown between the sea and the mass of the enemy,—a direction as dangerous and faulty as could be given to great operations. This movement was the same as that of Benningsen on the Lower Vistula which almost lost the Russian army in 1807. The fate of the Prussian army, cut off from its communications and forced upon the Baltic, is another proof of this truth.