The disasters of the French in upper Italy were fatal to their ascendancy in the south, and Macdonald received orders to abandon the Parthenopean Republic, and unite his forces with those of Moreau. His retreat was exposed to great dangers by the universal insurrection of the peasants; but he accomplished it with great rapidity and skill. The two French commanders then concerted measures to dislodge the allies from their conquests—a project which seemed not unlikely to be fulfilled, so obstinately had the Aulic council adhered to the old system of dispersing the troops all over the territory which they occupied. Though the allies had above a hundred thousand men in the field, they could hardly assemble thirty thousand at any one point; and Macdonald might easily have destroyed them in detail could he have fallen upon them at once; but the time he spent in reorganising his army in Tuscany, and in concerting measures with Moreau, was well employed by Suvarov in promptly concentrating his forces. Macdonald advanced against him with an army of thirty-seven thousand men, taking Modena on his way, and driving Hohenzollern out of it after a bloody engagement. The two armies met on the Trebbia, where a first and indecisive action took place on the 17th of June; it was renewed on each of the two following days, and victory finally remained with the Russians. In this terrible battle of three days, the most obstinately contested and bloody that had occurred since the beginning of the war, the loss on both sides was excessive; that of the French was above twelve thousand in killed and wounded, and that of the allies not much less. But nearly equal losses told with very unequal severity on the respective combatants; those of the allies would speedily be retrieved by large reinforcements, but the republicans had expended their last resources, were cut off from Moreau, and had no second army to fall back upon. Macdonald with infinite difficulty regained the positions he had occupied before the advance to the Trebbia, after losing an immense number of prisoners.

The fall of the citadel of Turin on the 20th of June was of great importance to the allies; for besides disengaging their besieging force it put into their hands one of the strongest fortresses in Piedmont, and an immense quantity of artillery and ammunition. This event, and Suvarov’s victory on the Trebbia, checked the successful operations of Moreau, and compelled him to fall back to his former defensive position on the Apennines. Again, contrary to Suvarov’s wishes, the allied forces were divided for the purpose of reducing Mantua and Alexandria, and occupying Tuscany. After the fall of those two fortresses, Suvarov laid siege to Tortona, when Joubert, who had meanwhile superseded Moreau, marched against him at the head of the combined forces of the French. On the 15th of August, another desperate battle was fought at Novi, in which Joubert was killed, but from which neither side derived any particular advantage. The French returned to their former positions, and the Italian campaign was ended.

Suvarov now received orders to join his forces with those under Korsakov, who was on the Upper Rhine with thirty thousand men. The archduke Charles might, even without this fresh reinforcement, have already annihilated Massena had he not remained for three months, from June to August, in complete inactivity; at the very moment of Suvarov’s expected arrival, he allowed the important passes of the St. Gotthard to be again carried by a coup-de-main by the French, under General Lecourbe, who drove the Austrians from the Simplon, the Furka, the Grimsel, and the Devil’s Bridge. The archduke, after an unsuccessful attempt to push across the Aar at Dettingen, suddenly quitted the scene of war and advanced down the Rhine for the purpose of supporting the English expedition under the duke of York against Holland. This unexpected turn in affairs proceeded from Vienna. The Viennese cabinet was jealous of Russia. Suvarov played the master in Italy, favoured Sardinia at the expense of the house of Habsburg, and deprived the Austrians of the laurels and the advantages they had won. The archduke, accordingly, received orders to remain inactive, to abandon the Russians, and finally to withdraw to the north; by this movement Suvarov’s triumphant progress was checked, he was compelled to cross the Alps to the aid of Korsakov, and to involve himself in a mountain warfare ill-suited to the habits of his soldiery.

Korsakov, whom Bavaria had been bribed with Russian gold to furnish with a corps one thousand strong, was supported solely by Kray and Hotze with twenty thousand men. Massena, taking advantage of the departure of the archduke and the non-arrival of Suvarov, crossed the Limmat at Dietikon and shut Korsakov, who had imprudently stationed himself with his whole army in Zurich, so closely in that, after an engagement that lasted two days, from the 15th to the 17th of September, the Russian general was compelled to abandon his artillery and to force his way through the enemy. Ten thousand men were all that escaped. Hotze, who had advanced from the Grisons to Schwyz to Suvarov’s rencontre, was, at the same time, defeated and killed at Schanis. Suvarov, although aware that the road across the St. Gotthard was blocked by the Lake of Lucerne, on which there were no boats, had the temerity to attempt the passage. In Airolo, he was obstinately opposed by the French under Lecourbe, and, although Shveikovski contrived to turn this strong position by scaling the pathless rocks, numbers of the men were, owing to Suvarov’s impatience, sacrificed before it.

On the 24th of September, 1799, he at length climbed the St. Gotthard, and a bloody engagement, in which the French were worsted, took place on the Oberalpsee. Lecourbe blew up the Devil’s Bridge, but, leaving the Urnerloch open, the Russians pushed through that rocky gorge, and, dashing through the foaming Reuss, scaled the opposite rocks and drove the French from their position behind the Devil’s Bridge. Altorf on the lake was reached in safety by the Russian general, who was compelled, owing to the want of boats, to seek his way through the valleys of Schächen and Muotta, across the almost impassable rocks, to Schwyz. The heavy rains rendered the undertaking still more arduous; the Russians, owing to the badness of the road, were speedily barefoot; the provisions were also exhausted. In this wretched state they reached Muotta on the 29th of September and learned the discouraging news of Korsakov’s defeat. Massena had already set off in the hope of cutting off Suvarov, but had missed his way. He reached Altorr, where he joined Lecourbe on the 29th, when Suvarov was already at Muotta, whence Massena found on his arrival that he had again retired across the Bragelburg, through the Klönthal. He was opposed on the lake of Klönthal by Molitor, who was, however, forced to retire by Auffenberg, who had joined Suvarov at Altorf and formed his advanced guard, Rosen, at the same time, beating off Massena with the rearguard, taking five cannon and one thousand of his men prisoners. On the 1st of October, Suvarov entered Glarus, where he rested until the 4th, when he crossed the Panixer Mountains through snow two feet deep to the valley of the Rhine, which he reached on the 10th, after losing the whole of his beasts of burden and two hundred of his men down the precipices; and here ended his extraordinary march, which had cost him the whole of his artillery, almost all his horses, and a third of his men.

The archduke had, meanwhile, tarried on the Rhine, where he had taken Philippsburg and Mannheim, but had been unable to prevent the defeat of the English expedition under the duke of York by General Brune at Bergen, on the 19th of September. The archduke now, for the first time, made a retrograde movement, and approached Korsakov and Suvarov. The different leaders, however, did nothing but find fault with each other, and the czar, perceiving his project frustrated, suddenly recalled his troops, and the campaign came to a close.

Paul’s anger fell without measure or reason on his armies and their chiefs. All the officers who were missing, that is to say who were prisoners in France, were broken as deserters, and Suvarov, instead of being well received with well merited honours, was deprived of his command and not suffered to see the emperor’s face. This unjust severity broke the veteran’s heart. He died soon after his return to St. Petersburg; and no Russian courtier, nor any member of the diplomatic body except the English ambassador, followed his remains to the grave.

PAUL RECONCILED WITH FRANCE (1800 A.D.)

[1800 A.D.]

Frustrated in the objects for which he had engaged in war, Paul was now in a mood easily to be moved to turn his arms against the allies who had deceived his hopes. He had fought for the re-establishment of monarchy in France, and of the old status quo in Europe; and the only result had been the aggrandisement of Austria, his own immediate neighbour, of whom he had much more reason to be jealous than of the remote power of France. The rapid steps, too, which Bonaparte was taking for the restoration of monarchical forms in that country were especially calculated to conciliate Paul’s good-will towards the first consul. The latter and his able ministers promptly availed themselves of this favourable disposition through the connections they had made in St. Petersburg. Fouché had such confidential correspondence even with ladies in the Russian capital, that he afterwards received the earliest and most correct intelligence of the emperor’s murder. Two persons at the court of St. Petersburg were next gained over to France, or rather to Bonaparte’s rising empire; these were the minister Rostoptchin, and the emperor’s favourite, the Turk Kutaisov, who had risen with unusual rapidity from the situation of the emperor’s barber to the rank of one of the first Russian nobles. He was also nearly connected by relationship with Rostoptchin.