"In a month Mont Cenis will be ours."
It should be pointed out that the men who had to second him in this enterprise were used to mountain warfare; they stuck at nothing short of the impossible; now they were about to overcome the impossible: the soldiers would have to pass where no mountaineer had ever passed, paths whose snows the foot of man had never trodden, where only the hoofs of chamois or the eagle's talons had pressed.
My father had three thousand iron crampons (frost-nails) made for distribution among his soldiers, and they were bidden to practise the use of these in crossing the most difficult places.
Spring came, and with it the possibility of action; but the Piedmontese too had been busy, and were preparing to give their enemies a warm reception. Mont Cenis, the Valaisan, and the Little St. Bernard bristled with guns. My father decided he must begin by seizing St. Bernard and the Valaisan. The enemy he wanted to get at were bivouacking among the clouds. It was a war with Titans: and the heavens had to be climbed.
On the evening of April 24th General Bagdelaune received instructions to scale the Little St. Bernard and to be ready by daybreak to attack it.
My father reserved Mont Valaisan to himself.
General Bagdelaune set out at nine at night; he marched for six hours in the region of precipices without the least sign of paths, trusting in guides who themselves several times got confused in the darkness and misled our soldiers. At last, at break of day, they reached the redoubt, and attacked it with that courage and fury of which his men had so many times before given proof; but the redoubt was a hard nut to crack. The mountain seemed like a flaming volcano; three times Bagdelaune rallied his men to the attack and three times they were driven back. Suddenly the muzzles of the cannon of an outlying fort, which my father had just stormed, were turned on them; a hail of bullets overwhelmed the defenders of St. Bernard; my father had been the first to succeed in his enterprise, he had turned the Piedmontese cannon against themselves. Mont Valaisan, which should have protected St. Bernard, now destroyed it. The French, seeing the help that had so unexpectedly come to them, made a fourth dash. The Piedmontese, intimidated by this effectual diversion, did not even attempt to offer resistance, but fled on all sides; General Bagdelaune sent two battalions of new recruits from the Côte d'Or with the 2nd battalion of light infantry in pursuit of them; for three leagues the Piedmontese were followed and hunted down like chamois in bloody tracks; twenty pieces of cannon, six howitzers, thirteen pieces of mountain artillery, two hundred muskets, and two hundred prisoners were the trophies from this twofold victory.
But there was still Mont Cenis to take.
The possession of this last redoubt would complete the effective occupation of the whole of the Savoy, and to gain it the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Alps concentrated all his attention. The Piedmontese would thus be cut off from all means of pouring down the defiles into this duchy at their own sweet will, and they would be compelled to camp in the plains of Piedmont.
Several attempts had been already made and proved abortive; in one of these attempts, tried in the month of February, General Sarret had lost his life. His foot slipped, and he fell to the bottom of a precipice, where his body was buried beneath the snows.