concentration for attack he had, in concert with the Directory, added another, that of expansion in a given territory for sustenance. He had still a third, that war must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors. Trite and simple as these aphorisms now appear, they were all original and absolutely new, at least in the quick, fierce application of them made by Bonaparte. The traditions of chivalry, the incessant warfare of two centuries and a half, the humane conceptions of the Church, the regard for human life, the difficulty of communications, the scarcity of munitions and arms,-all these and other elements had combined to make war under mediocre generals a stately ceremonial, and to diminish the number of actual battles, which took place, when they did, only after careful preparation, as an unpleasant necessity, by a sort of common agreement, and with all the ceremony of a duel.

Turenne, Marlborough, and Frederick, all men of cold-blooded temperament, had been the greatest generals of their respective ages, and were successful much in proportion to their lack of sentiment and disregard of conventionalities. Their notions and their conduct displayed the same instincts as those of Bonaparte, being enlarged and invigorated by the same study of great campaigns which had also fed his inchoate genius and made possible his consummate achievement. He had much the same apparatus for warfare as they. The men of Europe had not materially changed in stature, weight, education, or morals since the closing years of the Thirty Years' War. The roads were somewhat better, the conformation of mountains, hills, and valleys was better known, and like his great predecessors, though unlike his contemporaries, Bonaparte knew the use of a map; but in the main little was changed in the conditions for moving and manoeuvering troops. News traveled slowly, for the fastest couriers rode from Nice to Paris or from Paris to Berlin in seven days. Muskets and small firearms of every description were little improved. Prussia actually claimed that she had been forced to negotiate for peace because France controlled the production of gun-flints. There had been some improvement in the forging of cannon, and the artillery arm was on the whole more efficient. In France there had been considerable change for the better in the manual and in tactics; the rest of Europe followed the old and more formal ways. Outside the republic, ceremony still held sway in court and camp; youthful energy was stifled in routine; and the generals opposed to Bonaparte were for the most part men advanced in years, wedded to tradition, and incapable of quickly adapting their ideas to meet advances and attacks based on

conceptions radically different from their own. It was at times a positive misery to the new conqueror that his opponents were such inefficient fossils. Young and at the same time capable; using the natural advantages of his territory to support the bravery of his troops; with a mind which was not only accurate and decisive, but comprehensive in its observations; unhampered by control or by principle; opposed to generals who could not think of a boy of twenty-seven as their equal; with the best army and the finest theater of war in Europe; finally, with a geniusindependently developed, and with conceptions of his profession which summarized the experience of his greatest predecessors, Napoleon performed feats which seemed miraculous even when compared with those of Hoche, Jourdan, or Moreau, which had already so astounded the world.

Within eleven days the Austrians and Sardinians were separated, the latter defeated and forced to sign an armistice. After a rest of two days, a fortnight saw him victorious in Lombardy, and entering Milan as a conqueror. Two weeks elapsed, and again he set forth to reduce to his sway in less than a month the most of central Italy. Against an enemy now desperate and at bay his operations fell into four divisions, each resulting in an advance- the first, of nine days, against Wurmser and Quasdanowich; a second, of sixteen days, against Wurmser; a third, of twelve days, against Alvinczy; and a fourth, of thirty days, until he captured Mantua and opened the mountain-passes to his army. Within fifteen days after opening hostilities against the Pope, he forced him to sign the treaty of Tolentino; and within thirty-six days of their setting foot on the road from Mantua to Vienna, the French were at Leoben, distant only ninety miles from the Austrian capital, and dictating terms to the empire. In the year between March 27, 1796, and April 7, 1797, Bonaparte humbled the most haughty dynasty in Europe, toppled the central European state system, and initiated the process which has given a predominance apparently final to Prussia, then considered but as a parvenu.

It is impossible to estimate the enormous sums of money which he exacted for the conduct of a war that he chose to say was carried on to emancipate Italy. The soldiers of his army were well dressed, well fed, and well equipped from the day of their entry into Milan; the arrears of their pay were not only settled, but they were given license to prey on the country until a point was reached which seemed to jeopardize success, when common pillage was promptly stopped by the severest examples. The treasury of the Directory was not filled as were those of the conquering officers, but it was no longer empty. In short,

France reached the apex of her revolutionary greatness; and as she was now the foremost power on the Continent, the shaky monarchies in neighboring lands were forced to consider again questions which in 1795 they had hoped were settled. As Bonaparte foresaw, the destinies of Europe had indeed hung on the fate of Italy.

Europe had grown accustomed to military surprises in the few preceding years. The armies of the French republic, fired by devotion to their principles and their nation, had accomplished marvels. But nothing in the least foreshadowing this had been wrought even by them. Then, as now, curiosity was inflamed, and the most careful study was expended in analyzing the process by which such miracles had been performed. The investigators and their readers were so overpowered by the spectacle and its results that they were prevented by a sort of awe-stricken credulity from recognizing the truth; and even yet the notion of a supernatural influence fighting on Bonaparte's side has not entirely disappeared. But the facts as we know them reveal cleverness dealing with incapacity, energy such as had not yet been seen fighting with languor, an embodied principle of great vitality warring with a lifeless, vanishing system. The consequences were startling, but logical; the details sound like a romance from the land of Eblis.

THE CONQUEST OF PIEDMONT AND THE

MILANESE.

VICTOR AMADEUS of Sardinia was not unaccustomed to the loss of territory in the north, because from immemorial times his house had relinquished picturesque but unfruitful lands beyond the Alps to gain fertile fields below them. It was a hard blow, to be sure, that Savoy, which gave name to his family, and Nice, with its beautiful and commanding site, should have been lost to his crown. But so far, in every general European convulsion some substantial morsels had fallen to the lot of his predecessors, who had looked on Italy "as an artichoke to be eaten leaf by leaf"; and it was probable that a slice of Lombardy would be his own prize at the next pacification. He had spent his reign in strengthening his army, and as the foremost military power in Italy this young and vigorous people were, with the help of Austria, defending the passes into their territory. The road from their capital to Savona on the sea wound by Ceva and Millesimo over the main ridge of the Apennines, at the summit of which it was joined by the highway through Dego and Cairo leading southwestward from Milan through Alessandria. The Piedmontese, under Colli, were guarding the approach to their own capital; the Austrians, under Beaulieu, that to Milan.

Collectively their numbers were about equal to those of the French; but the two armies were separated.

Beaulieu began operations on April 10 by ordering an attack on the French division of Laharpe, which had been thrown forward to Voltri. The Austrians under Argenteau were to fall on its rear from Montenotte, a village to the north of Savona, with the idea of driving that wing of Bonaparte's army back along the shore road, on which it was hoped they would fall under the fire of Nelson's guns. Laharpe, however, retreated to Savona in perfect safety; for the English fleet was not near. Thereupon Bonaparte, suddenly revealing the new formation of his army in a north and south line, assumed the offensive. Argenteau, having been held temporarily in check by the desperate resistance of a handful of French soldiers under Colonel Rampon, was surprised and overwhelmed at Montenotte on the twelfth by a force much larger than his own. Next day Masséna and Augereau drove back toward Dego an Austrian division which had reached Millesimo on its way to join Colli; and on the fifteenth, at that place, Bonaparte himself destroyed the remnant of Argenteau's corps. On the sixteenth Beaulieu abandoned the mountains to make a stand at Acqui in the plain. Thus the whole Austrian force was not only driven back, but was entirely separated from the Piedmontese.

Bonaparte had a foolish plan in his pocket, which had been furnished by the Directory in a temporary reversion to official tradition, ordering him to advance into Lombardy, leaving behind the hostile Piedmontese on his left, and the uncertain Genoese on his right. He disregarded it, apparently without hesitation, and throwing his force northwestward toward Ceva, where the Piedmontese were posted, terrified them into a retreat. They were overtaken, however, at Mondovi on April 22, and utterly routed, losing not only their best troops, but their field-pieces and baggage train. Three days later Bonaparte pushed onward and occupied Cherasco, which was distant from Turin, the Piedmontese capital, but twenty-five miles by a short, easy, and now open road. On the twenty-seventh the Sardinians, isolated in a mountain amphitheater, and with no prospect of relief from their discomfited ally, made overtures for an armistice preliminary to peace. These were readily accepted by Bonaparte, without a thought of possible displeasure on the part of the French government; and although he had no authorization from them to perform such functions, he was defiantly careless of instructions in this as in every subsequent step he took. The negotiation during which the French stipulated for the surrender to them of Coni and

Tortona, the famous "keys of the Alps," with other strongholds of minor importance, demanding also the right to cross and recross Piedmontese territory at will—was completed on the twenty-eighth. Amadeus being safe, Bonaparte was free to deal with Beaulieu.

This short campaign was in some respects insignificant, especially when compared as to numbers and results with what was to follow. But the names of Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Mondovi, and Cherasco were ever dear to Bonaparte, and stand in a high place on his monuments. Amadeus was the father-in-law of Louis XVIII., and his court had been a nest of plotting emigrants. The loss of his fortresses robbed him of his power. By the terms of the treaty he was to banish the French royalists from his lands. Stripped thus of both force and prestige, he did not long survive the disgrace, and died, leaving to Charles Emmanuel, his son, no real dominion but that of Sardinia. Moreover, for Bonaparte, a military and political aspirant in his first independence, everything, absolutely everything, was at stake in those earliest engagements: on the event hung his career. They passed-those spring days like a marvel. Success was in the air-not the success of accident, but the resultant of forethought and careful combination. The generals, infected by their leader's spirit, vied with each other in daring and gallantry. For happy desperation Rampon's famous stand remains unsurpassed in the annals of war.

From the heights of Ceva the leader of conquering and now devoted soldiers could show to them and their equally enthusiastic officers the fertile and well-watered land into which he had promised to lead them - the historic fields of Lombardy. Nothing comparable to that inexhaustible storehouse can be found in France, generous as is her soil. Walled in on the north and west by the majestic masses of the Alps, and to the south by the smaller but still mighty bastions of the Apennines, these plains owe to the mountains not only their fertility and prosperity, but their very existence. Numberless rills which rise amid the icy summits of the great chain, or the lower peaks of the minor one, combine into ever growing streams of pleasant waters which finally unite in the sluggish but impressive Po. Melting snows and torrential rains fill these watercourses with the rich detritus of the hills, which renews from year to year the soil it originally created. A genial climate and a grateful soil return to the industrious inhabitants an ample reward for their labors. In the fiercest heats of summer the pausing traveler will hear the soft sounds of slow-running waters in the irrigation sluices which on every side supply any lack of rain. Wheat, barley, and rice, maize, fruit, and wine, are but a few

of the staples. Great farmsteads, with barns whose mighty lofts and groaning mows attest the importance of Lombard agriculture, are grouped into hamlets which abound at the shortest intervals. And to the vision of one who sees them first from a mountain-top through the dim haze of a sunny day, towns and cities seem strewn as if they were grain from the hand of a sower. The measure of bewilderment is full when memory recalls that this garden of Italy has been the prize for which from remotest antiquity the nations of Europe have fought, and that the record of the ages is indelibly written in the walls and ornaments of the myriad structures - theaters, palaces, and churches. - which lie so quietly below. Surely the dullest sansculotte in Bonaparte's army must have been roused to new sensations by the sight. What rosy visions took shape in the mind of their leader we can only imagine.

Piedmont having submitted, the promised descent into these rich plains was not an instant deferred. "Hannibal," said the commanding general to his staff, "took the Alps by storm. We have turned their flank." Pausing only to announce his feats to the Directory in modest phrase, and to recommend for preferment those who, like Lannes and Lanusse, had earned distinction, he set forth on May 30. Neither Genoa, Tuscany, nor Venice was to be given time for arming; Beaulieu must be met while his men were still dispirited, and before the arrival of reinforcements: for a great army of 30,000 men was immediately to be despatched under Wurmser to maintain the power of Austria in Italy. Beaulieu was a typical Austrian general, seventy-one years old, but still hale, a stickler for precedent, and looking to experience as his only guide. Relying on the principles of strategy as he had learned them, he had taken up what he considered a strong position for the defense of Milan, his line stretching northeasterly beyond the Ticino from Valenza, the spot where rumors, diligently spread by Bonaparte, likewise declared that the French would attempt to force a passage. Confirmed in his own judgment by these reports, the old and wary Austrian commander stood brave and expectant, while the young and daring adventurer opposed to him marched swiftly by on the right bank fifty miles onward to Piacenza, and made his crossing on May 7 in common ferry-boats and by a pontoon bridge, meeting with little or no resistance from the few Austrian cavalry who had been sent out merely to reconnoiter the line. The outwitted army was virtually outflanked, and inthe greatest danger. Beaulieu had barely time to break camp and march in hot haste northeasterly to Lodi, where, behind the swift current of the Adda, he made a final stand for the defense of Milan, the

CAPTURE OF A DUTCH FLEET

BY HUSSARS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, JANUARY, 1795.

(SEE

PAGE 803.)

VOL. XLIX.- 103.