It had to be said: in eighteenth-century Europe, whether Prussian or French, they were all shrewd merchants who liked to use yesterday’s allies as bargaining chips, and they felt no guilt at all across the negotiating table. At least for Brunswick and André, there was no unease of conscience and no sense of moral reproach.

  One of them wanted to end this thoroughly wretched “French tour” as quickly as possible, hurry off to the East European plain, and claw back lost wealth and land from Poland’s weak but well-heeled country gentry. The other did not wish to fight this impoverished north German to the death. In truth, he preferred Prussia—Europe’s notorious troublemaker—to make Central Europe as chaotic as possible, so as to draw Russian and Austrian anger onto itself and thereby lighten André’s next strategic step: the full occupation of the Low Countries, meaning Belgium and the Netherlands.

  On that basis, the agreement came together with remarkable ease. Duc de Brunswick, in tacit understanding, accepted André’s proposal and agreed that once the French took over the Moon Bay fortress and the coalition main body had laid down its arms, the departure of Crown Prince Wilhelm III and Princess Louise would be postponed by another twenty-four hours.

  As the Valmy campaign came to its close, the strategic plan laid down by the Northern Command Headquarters and the General Staff called for General Moncey to lead forty thousand of the Army of the Meuse north by one hundred kilometers to Sedan and Charleville-Mézières. Thereafter, following the Meuse downstream into the Ardennes forest, he was to support General Lefebvre, who was holding back the Austrian forces, the Bohemian Corps.

  At the same time, part of the main strength of the Army of the North under General Hoche would pivot east, press toward Namur, and coordinate with the Army of the Meuse advancing from the south. The aim was to encircle and annihilate—or at least cripple—the Bohemian Corps, laying a firm foundation for the occupation of the Austrian Netherlands, Belgium, before the year’s end, and fulfilling the Northern Command Headquarters’ 1792 counteroffensive intent. (Note: in the manuscript, for plot purposes, the commander of the Bohemian Corps is corrected to Comte de Latour.)

  With more than fifty thousand Prussian troops effectively trapped on the French battlefield, the Prussian prince had no reason to let the Austrians walk away unscathed, only to mass troops on the frontier from time to time and threaten the rich and beautiful Silesia that Frederick the Great had won. So it was best that the French should take the Austrian Netherlands, while the two sides continued to grind each other down for seven years—no, for thirty—along both banks of the Rhine, in the Alpine regions, Switzerland, and across the plains of northern Italy.

  In geopolitical terms, André’s thinking was very close to that of the Prussian prince. Yet his desire for Prussia’s western lands was long premeditated. It had to be said that, as for coastal East Frisia, the Prussian enclave that Berlin valued more than the rest, André was instead openly indifferent.

  Even in the twenty-first century, East Frisia remains within Germany, a tourist destination famed for its natural scenery—in other words, so poor that it has little left but lakes, marshes, forests, birds, potatoes, and saline ground. If André did not intend to use East Frisia as a bargaining chip with the British, he would not have wanted to touch it at all. A confidential dispatch from Marquis de Chauvelin, the ambassador in London, reported that the Electorate of Hanover wished to seek another Atlantic outlet to the sea, and that Hanover’s relations with the Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger, were poor enough to be exploited.

  What André truly wanted, on the other hand, was Upper Guelders, Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg. They sounded like unfamiliar, barren names; yet within a few decades, those regions, together with neighboring lands, would acquire a new title: the famous Ruhr industrial district, the richest urban-industrial region in all Germany, the terrain that would push the second German Empire to the rank of Europe’s foremost great power.

  To put it plainly, Duisburg, Bochum, Krefeld, M?nchengladbach, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Münster, and farther south Cologne and Bonn, all lay within or near that zone. Although more than half of those cities still belonged to the traditional domains of various north German electors, or fell within the influence of powerful archbishoprics, André was certain he would bring them into his hands by intimidation and inducement alike.

  André had already ordered General Custine to begin forming the fourth corps of the Northern Command Headquarters: the Army of the Moselle, the new one using the old name, with General Custine as its commander. In addition, General Augereau and General Macdonald would serve respectively as deputy commander and chief of staff of the Army of the Moselle.

  This corps would have a total strength of forty-two thousand. Besides the twenty thousand troops General Custine already possessed from the former Army of the Rhine, André would fold in the second wave of the Command Headquarters’ general reserve. Of those, twenty thousand soldiers were mainly new recruits from the Suippes camp, volunteers from the provinces; while the noncommissioned officers and junior and mid-level officers mostly came from the Bacourt camp, or were graduates of the various military schools in Reims, the accelerated programs.

  According to the plan, Custine’s force, the Army of the Moselle, would move northeast to the area between the fortresses of Montmédy and Longwy, first intercepting and destroying coalition remnants trying to escape back to northern Germany. It would then continue north, cross the border, and occupy the Duchy of Luxembourg, Trier, Mainz, Koblenz, Bonn, Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg. In addition, André emphasized that, absent an order from the Northern Command Headquarters, the Army of the Moselle was not to pursue the enemy to more than five kilometers beyond the east bank of the Rhine.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  This was because it formed part of the secret treaty between André and Brunswick: the French army had to halt on the west bank of the Rhine within German lands. Even across the river, in the territories held in trust by the joint bank, only fewer than one hundred police or gendarmerie could be stationed. To strengthen mutual confidence, the French and Prussian armies would exchange unarmed military observers in certain sensitive areas or cities along the Rhine to supervise compliance with the agreement.

  In the final text of the Secret Treaty of Valmy, Prussia had to pay France twenty million thalers in war compensation, including the redemption of the army, within two weeks, with the French United Commercial Bank providing guaranteed financing, in effect, debt. As collateral, Prussia’s western German territories would be placed under the bank’s trusteeship for five years, including administrative, public order, and taxation rights, while judicial authority could be negotiated. In addition, France agreed to cut Prussian officers’ redemption payments by half, and any shortfall could be financed through loans from the French United Commercial Bank.

  As for the more than fifty thousand Prussian soldiers, after excluding those already killed or otherwise lost to non-combat attrition such as disease, a total of six thousand, the remaining forty-four thousand Prussian prisoners of war would be released in three batches. The first batch of six thousand, mainly wounded and sick soldiers and other non-combatants, would be released within two weeks after treatment by French military surgeons. The second batch, thirty thousand prisoners, had to serve two months of labor before being returned to Prussia. The remaining eight thousand Prussian prisoners would continue labor service until May 1793...

  Using pledged territory to recover captured Prussian soldiers was a result both sides found acceptable. Within the framework of the Secret Treaty of Valmy, André and Brunswick stipulated a five-year peace period between France and Prussia. As for what came afterward, that was simply a matter of husbanding strength and then fighting again to the bitter end. But before that, André needed to absorb the rich northern and southern Netherlands and, together with France’s northern provinces, integrate them into his political and military power, preparing for further advances east. Prussia, for its part, needed first to partition Poland, take wealth and land, then close its doors and heal, and, once its strength returned, seek a renewed decisive war against André’s France and wipe away the humiliation.

  In truth, both Duc de Brunswick and André saw very clearly that the five-year secret treaty was only a screen. The decisive question was who would recover national strength faster, who would build the stronger army, and who would therefore be able to break the treaty first and reopen the war. In the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, Frederick the Great had often done exactly that. His conquest of Silesia and his march into Saxony were both wars begun without a formal declaration. André was no fool either. If the Poles had fully accepted the “blood price” André demanded in exchange for sending troops, then the Kingdom of Prussia, standing between France and Poland, would have been in grave danger. In the eighteenth century, no Frenchman was more wary of Prussia than André.

  On August twenty-ninth, 1792, one hour after André and Brunswick signed the Secret Treaty of Valmy, the forty thousand-strong Prusso-Austrian Coalition garrison in the Moon Bay fortress, under their commanders’ orders, burned their regimental colors, with André’s permission, formed up, marched out of camp, and surrendered their arms to the French troops sent to take over.

  During the process, the émigré detachment’s noble officers, led by Comte de Bercy and Colonel Pirotto, refused to surrender to the French in blue uniforms. The French rebels then launched a mutiny inside the coalition camp, but it was quickly suppressed by the combined action of General Clermont-Clifford and General Hess. In the end, almost all the émigré noble officers, including Comte de Bercy and Colonel Roto, died in the upheaval.

  Afterward, many doubted whether the émigré detachment’s mutiny had truly been spontaneous. They believed it was a Prussian prince’s calculated act: in order to secure the treaty, and at the request of the French Commander-in-Chief André, he carried out a ruthless massacre of the French rebel officers. After all, the émigré detachment’s rank-and-file soldiers suffered almost no casualties, yet the noble officers were virtually wiped out. However, both André and Duc de Brunswick denied it.

  Those protesting were not limited to the émigré rebels. Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg also issued a stern protest at the Prussian prince’s shameless conduct: he had signed a separate armistice with André behind the back of the coalition chief of staff, placing the unprepared Austrian monarchy upon the altar of victorious France. With the Valmy fighting ended, tens of thousands of French troops would soon march north into the Austrian Netherlands.

  Yet Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg’s protest plainly achieved little. André did not bother to answer it. Before long, the French Commander-in-Chief also refused the peace talks Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg proposed. In reality, there was nothing left to discuss. Under the General Staff’s plan, beginning next month at least one hundred thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand French troops would be sent in succession to the Austrian Netherlands theater. At that moment, Austria’s defending forces were still under fifty thousand, and within them, one fifth of the soldiers were unreliable locals from the Austrian Netherlands, Flemings and Walloons. Once the thirty thousand of the Bohemian Corps were encircled and annihilated, or badly mauled, by superior French forces, the Austrian Netherlands would inevitably fall into French hands.

  On this point, André’s view was perfectly clear: take the Austrian Netherlands first, and talk afterward. As for the warning letter the Austrian marshal wished to send to the commander of the Bohemian Corps, Comte de Latour, it never managed to leave the prisoner camp.

  Note: The character "Marquis de Chauffran" has been corrected to the historical Marquis de Chauvelin. I misread the name in my research, and all previous chapters have been revised. Sorry for the oversight!