FOUNDS PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 49 
requisite to create for it some able chiefs: our colleague 
knew, with a certain Athenian general, that an army of 
Deer commanded by a Lion, would be worth more than 
an army of Lions commanded by a Deer. Carnot dug 
without intermission in the fruitful and inexhaustible 
mine of junior officers; as I before said, his penetrat- 
ing eye sought in the most obscure ranks for talent 
united with courage, with disinterestedness, and elevated 
it rapidly to the highest grades. It was necessary to 
coérdinate so many various movements! Carnot, like 
Atlas in the fable, carried alone, during several years, 
the weight of all the military events in Europe; he 
wrote with his own hand to the generals; he gave them 
detailed orders, wherein all the eventualities were mi- 
nutely foreseen; his plans, the one that he addressed to 
Pichegru, for instance, on the 21 Ventose, year IL., 
seemed the result of real divination. Facts occurred 
so entirely justifying the forethought of our colleague, 
that to write an account of the memorable campaign of 
1794, there would be scarcely a few proper names of 
villages to be altered in the instructions that he addressed 
to the commander-in-chief. The places where attacks 
were to be made, those where they were to limit them- 
selves to demonstrations, to skirmishes; the strength of 
each garrison, of each post, all is indicated, all is regu- 
lated with admirable precision. It was by orders from 
Carnot that Hoche one day disappeared from before the 
Prussian army, traversed the Vosges, and, uniting him- 
self to the army of the Rhine, went to strike a decisive 
blow on Wurmsur, which occasioned the deliverance of 
Alsace. 
In 1793, while the enemy was expecting, according to 
the classic principles of strategy, to see our troops ad- 
3 
