Charles Francis Atkinson and David McDowall Hannay

“ But the fire of a deployed regiment stopped the head of the Austrian column; Masséna, turning about, cut into its flank on the dike; and Augereau, gathering force, was approaching Arcola from the south. The bridge and the village were evacuated soon afterwards, and Masséna and Augereau began to extend in the plain beyond. But the Austrians still sullenly resisted. It was at this moment that Bonaparte secured victory by a mere ruse, but a ruse which would have been unprofitable and ridiculous had it not been based on his fine sense of the moral conditions. ”

“ Napoleon’s own practice in providing for secondary theatres of war was to economize forces and to delay a decision, and the fault of the Austrians, viewed from a purely military standpoint, was that they squandered, instead of economizing, their forces to gain time. If we neglect pure theory, and regard strategy as the handmaiden of statesmanship—which fundamentally it is—we cannot condemn the Vienna authorities unless it be first proved that they grossly exaggerated the possible results of Bonaparte’s threatened irruption. ”

“ Many whispers there were, even in his own army, as to the dangers of passing on without “revolutionizing” aristocratic Genoa and monarchical Piedmont, and of bringing Venice, the pope and the Italian princes into the field against the French. But Bonaparte, flushed with victory, and better informed than the malcontents of the real condition of Italy, never hesitated. His first object was to drive out Beaulieu, his second to push through Tirol, and his only serious restriction the chance that the armistice with Piedmont would not result in a definitive treaty. ”

“ The capture of the pass of Argentera by the right wing of the Army of the Alps suggested that the main effort should be made against the barrier fortress of Demonte, but here again Napoleon proposed a concentration of effort on the primary and economy of force in the secondary objective. About the same time, in a memoir on the war in general, he laid down his most celebrated maxim: “The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.” ”

“ But one young general, Jourdan, anticipating Houchard’s orders, had already brought a strong force from Lille to Cassel, whence he incessantly harried Freytag’s posts. Carnot encouraged the garrisons of Dunkirk and Bergues, and caused the sluices to be opened. The moral of the defenders rose rapidly. Houchard prepared to bring up every available man of the Army of the North, and only waited to make up his mind as to the direction in which his attack should be made. The Allies themselves recognized the extreme danger of their position. ”

“ It raised the reputation of the archduke Charles to the highest point, and deservedly, for he wrested victory from the most desperate circumstances by the skilful and resolute employment of his one advantage. But this was only possible because Moreau and Jourdan were content to accept strategical failure without seeking to redress the balance by hard fighting. The great question of this campaign is, why did Moreau and Jourdan fail against inferior numbers, when in Italy Bonaparte with a similar army against a similar opponent won victory after victory against equal and superior forces? ”

“ No one but Napoleon, even aided by a Berthier, could have achieved so great a task in six weeks, and the great captain, himself doing the work that nowadays is apportioned amongst a crowd of administrative staff officers, still found time to administer France’s affairs at home and abroad, and to think out a general plan of campaign that embraced Moreau’s, Masséna’s and his own armies.
The Army of the Rhine, by far the strongest and best equipped, lay on the upper Rhine. The small and worn-out Army of Italy was watching the Alps and the Apennines from Mont Blanc to Genoa. ”

“ Thus the only completely safe way in which Suvárov could reach the Zürich region was by skirting the lower curve of the S, under protection of Hotze. But this detour would be long and painful, and the ardent old man preferred to cross the mountains once for all at the St Gothard, and to follow the valley of the Reuss to Altdorf and Schwyz—i.e. to strike vertically upward to the centre of the S—and to force his way through the French cordon to Zürich, and if events, so far as concerned his own corps, belied his optimism, they at any rate justified his choice of the shortest route. ”

“ The Austrians were a detachment of Coburg’s army, not an independent force, and when threatened they retired towards Ciney, drawing Jourdan after them in the very direction in which he desired to go. On the 28th the French, after a vain detour made in the hope of forcing Beaulieu to fight—“les esclaves n’osent pas se mesurer avec des hommes libres,” wrote Jourdan in disgust,—reached Ciney, and there heard that the enemy had fallen back to a strongly entrenched position on the east bank of the Meuse near Namur. ”

“ While Mantua stood, Napoleon, for all his energy and sanguineness, could not press forward into Friuli and Carniola, and immunity from a Republican visitation was above all else important for the Vienna statesmen, governing as they did more or less discontented and heterogeneous populations that had not felt the pressure of war for a century and more. The Austrians, so far as is known, desired no more than to hold their own. They no longer possessed the superiority of moral that guarantees victory to one side when both are materially equal. ”

“ Only 200 men guarded the point of passage, but the Austrian engineers had neglected to make a proper examination of the river, and unlike the French, the Austrian generals had no authority to waste their expensive battalions in forcing the passage in boats. No one regarded this war as a struggle for existence, and no one but Suvárov possessed the iron strength of character to send thousands of men to death for the realization of a diplomatic success—for ordinary men, the object of the Coalition was to upset the treaty of Campo Formio. This was the end of the archduke’s campaign in Switzerland. ”

“ Thus the new way had failed to keep back Wurmser, and the old had failed to crush Napoleon. Each was the result of its own conditions. In former wars a commander threatened as Napoleon was, would have fallen back at once to the Adda, abandoning the siege in such good time that he would have been able to bring off his siege artillery. Instead of this Bonaparte hesitated long enough to lose it, which, according to accepted canons was a waste, and held his ground, which was, by the same rules, sheer madness. But Revolutionary discipline was not firm enough to stand a retreat. ”

“ Coburg’s plan of campaign was limited to the objects acceptable to all the Allies alike. He aimed at the conquest of a first-class fortress—Lille or Valenciennes—and chiefly for this reason. War meant to the burgher of Germany and the Netherlands a special form of haute politique with which it was neither his business nor his inclination to meddle. He had no more compunction, therefore, in selling his worst goods at the best price to the army commissaries than in doing so to his ordinary customers. ”

“ Here was the opportunity for the “attack in mass” that had been so freely discussed; but Houchard was now concerned more with the relief of Dunkirk than with the defeat of the enemy. He sent away one division to Dunkirk, another to Bergues, and a third towards Ypres, and left himself only some 20,000 men for the battle. But Wallmoden had only 13,000—so great was the disproportion between end and means in this ill-designed enterprise against Dunkirk. ”

“ Whereas Souham had been in superior force (90,000 against 70,000) , Napoleon (40,000 against 50,000) was not, and yet the Army of Italy was always placed in a position of relative superiority (at first about 3 to 2 and ultimately 2 to 1) to the immediate antagonist. “The essence of strategy,” said Napoleon in 1797, “is, with a weaker army, always to have more force at the crucial point than the enemy. But this art is taught neither by books nor by practice; it is a matter of tact.” ”

“ The Austrians came on time after time over ground that was practically destitute of cover. Villages, farms and fields of corn caught fire. The French grew more and more excited—“No retreat to-day!” they called out to their leaders, and finally, clamouring to be led against the enemy, they had their wish. Lefebvre seized the psychological moment when the fourth attack of the Allies had failed, and (though he did not know it) the order to retreat had come from Coburg. ”

“ But Napoleon’s mind ranged beyond the immediate future. He calculated that once the French advanced the Austrians would seek to cover Lombardy, the Piedmontese Turin, and this separation, already morally accomplished, it was to be the French general’s task to accentuate in fact. Next, Sardinia having been coerced into peace, the Army of Italy would expel the Austrians from Lombardy, and connect its operations with those of the French in South Germany by way of Tirol. The supply question, once the soldiers had gained the rich valley of the Po, would solve itself. ”

“ It was alleged that the Russians would be healthier in Switzerland than the men of the southern plains! From such premises as these the Allied diplomats evolved a new plan of campaign, by which the Anglo-Russians under the duke of York were to reconquer Holland and Belgium, the Archduke Charles to operate on the Middle Rhine, Suvárov in Switzerland and Melas in Piedmont—a plan destitute of every merit but that of simplicity.
It is often said that it is the duty of a commander to resign rather than undertake an operation which he believes to be faulty. ”

“ But Napoleon was no longer there; leaving Vaubois to hold Davidovich as best he might, and posting only 3000 men in Verona, he had collected the rest of his small army between Albaro and Ronco. His plan seems to have been to cross the Adige well in rear of the Austrians, to march north on to the Verona-Vicenza highway, and there, supplying himself from their convoys, to fight to the last. On the 15th he had written to the Directory, “The weakness and the exhaustion of the army causes me to fear the worst. We are perhaps on the eve of losing Italy.” ”

“ The troops were still the nation; they no longer fought for a cause and for bare existence, and Moreau and Jourdan were too closely allied in ideas and sympathies with the misplaced citizen soldiers they commanded to be able to dominate their collective will. In default of a cause, however, soldiers will fight for a man, and this brings us by a natural sequence of ideas to the war in Italy. ”

“ Brescia had a French garrison, but Suvárov soon cowed it into surrender by threats of a massacre, which no one doubted that he would carry into execution. At the same time, dissatisfied with the marching of the Austrian infantry, he sent the following characteristic reproof to their commander: “The march was in the service of the Kaiser. Fair weather is for my lady’s chamber, for dandies, for sluggards. He who dares to cavil against his high duty (der Grosssprecher wider den hohen Dienst) is, as an egoist, instantly to vacate his command. Whoever is in bad health can stay behind. ”

“ Next, when Lannes moved away towards Pavia, Melas thought for a moment that fate had delivered his enemy into his hands, and began to collect such troops as were at hand at Turin with a view to cutting off the retreat of the French on Ivrea while Vukassovich held them in front. It was only when news came of Moncey’s arrival in Italy and of Vukassovich’s fighting retreat on Brescia that the magnitude and purpose of the French column that had penetrated by Ivrea became evident. ”

“ But the Dutch generals refused to advance beyond the Sambre, and Coburg broke up the siege of Maubeuge and retired whence he had come, while Jourdan, so far from pressing forward, was anxiously awaiting a counter-attack, and entrenching himself with all possible energy. So ended the episode of Wattignies, which, alike in its general outline and in its details, gives a perfect picture of the character, at once intense and spasmodic, of the “New French” warfare in the days of the Terror. ”

“ They were often wise and able men, brave and fearless of responsibility in camp and in action. Jourdan led on the reserves, and the men fighting in the bushes on either side of the road heard their drums to right and left. Jourdan fell wounded, but Delbrel headed a wild irregular bayonet charge which checked the Hanoverians, and Houchard himself, in his true place as a cavalry leader, came up with 500 fresh sabres and flung himself on the Allies. ”

“ It is said that the French fought without spirit on the first day, and yet on the second and third Bonaparte had so thoroughly imbued them with his own will to conquer that in the end they prevailed over an enemy nearly twice their own strength.
The climax was reached just in time, for on the 17th Vaubois was completely defeated at Rivoli and withdrew to Peschiera, leaving the Verona and Mantua roads completely open to Davidovich. But on the 19th Napoleon turned upon him, and combining the forces of Vaubois, Masséna and Augereau against him, drove him back to Trent. ”

“ It was a pis aller forced upon him by Moreau’s delay and Masséna’s extremity, and from the moment at which he arrived at Milan he did, as a fact, abandon it altogether in favour of the St Gothard. Lastly, so strongly was he impressed with the necessity of completing the deployment of all his forces, that though he found the Austrians on the Turin side much scattered and could justifiably expect a series of rapid partial victories, Napoleon let them go, and devoted his whole energy to creating for himself a “natural” position about Milan. ”