This was due in all probability to the rapidity with which Moreau was driving the archduke before him. After a brief stand on the Neckar at Cannstadt, the Austrians, only 25,000 strong, fell back to the Rauhe Alb, where they halted again, to cover their magazines at Ulm and Günzburg, towards the end of July. Wartensleben was similarly falling back before Jourdan, though the latter, starting considerably later than Moreau, had not advanced so far. The details of the successive positions occupied by Wartensleben need not be stated; all that concerns the general development of the campaign is the fact that the hitherto independent leader of the “Lower Rhine Army” resented the loss of his freedom of action, and besides lamentations opposed a dull passive resistance to all but the most formal orders of the prince. Many weeks passed before this was overcome sufficiently for his leader even to arrange for the contemplated combination, and in these weeks the archduke was being driven back day by day, and the German principalities were falling away one by one as the French advanced and preached the revolutionary formula. In such circumstances as these—the general facts, if not the causes, were patent enough—it was natural that the confident Paris strategists should think chiefly of the profits of their enterprise and ignore the fears of the generals at the front. But the latter were justified in one important respect; their operating armies had seriously diminished in numbers, Jourdan disposing of not more than 45,000 and Moreau of about 50,000. The archduke had now, owing to the arrival of a few detachments from the Black Forest and elsewhere, about 34,000 men, Wartensleben almost exactly the same, and the former, for some reason which has never been fully explained but has its justification in psychological factors, suddenly turned Neresheim. and fought a long, severe and straggling battle above Neresheim (August 11). This did not, however, give him much respite, and on the 12th and 13th he retired over the Danube. At this date Wartensleben was about Amberg, almost as far away from the other army as he had been on the Rhine, owing to the necessity of retreating round instead of through the principality of Bayreuth, which was a Prussian possession and could therefore make its neutrality respected.

Hitherto Charles had intended to unite his armies on the Danube against Moreau. His later choice of Jourdan’s army as the objective of his combination grew out of circumstances and in particular out of the brilliant reconnaissance work of a cavalry brigadier of the Lower Rhine Army, Nauendorff. This general’s reports—he was working in the country south and south-east of Nürnberg, Wartensleben being at Amberg—indicated first an advance of Jourdan’s army from Forchheim through Nürnberg to the south, and induced the archduke, on the 12th, to begin a concentration of his own army towards Ingolstadt. This was a purely defensive measure, but Nauendorff reported on the 13th and 14th that the main columns of the French were swinging away to the east against Wartensleben’s front and inner flank, and on the 14th he boldly suggested the idea that decided the campaign. “If your Royal Highness will or can advance 12,000 men against Jourdan’s rear, he is lost. We could not have a better opportunity.” When this message arrived at headquarters the archduke had already issued orders to the same effect. Lieutenant Field Marshal Count Latour, with 30,000 men, was to keep Moreau occupied—another expedient of the moment, due to the very close pressure of Moreau’s advance, and the failure of the attempt to put him out of action at Neresheim. The small remainder of the army, with a few detachments gathered en route, in all about 27,000 men, began to recross the Danube on the 14th, and slowly advanced north on a broad front, its leader being now sure that at some point on his line he would encounter the French, whether they were heading for Ratisbon or Amberg. Meanwhile, the Directory had, still acting on the theory of the archduke’s weakness, ordered Moreau to combine the operations with those of Bonaparte in Italian Tirol, and Jourdan to turn both flanks of his immediate opponent, and thus to prevent his joining the archduke, as well as his retreat into Bohemia. And curiously enough it was this latter, and not Moreau’s move, which suggested to the archduke that his chance had come. The chance was, in fact, one dear to the 18th century general, catching his opponent in the act of executing a manœuvre. So far from “exterior lines” being fatal to Jourdan, it was not until the French general began to operate against Wartensleben’s inner flank that the archduke’s opportunity came.

The decisive events of the campaign can be described very briefly, the ideas that directed them having been made clear. The long thin line of the archduke wrapped itself round Jourdan’s right flank near Amberg, while Wartensleben Amberg and Würzburg. fought him in front. The battle (August 24) was a series of engagements between the various columns that met; it was a repetition in fact of Fleurus, without the intensity of fighting spirit that redeems that battle from dulness. Success followed, not upon bravery or even tactics, but upon the pre-existing strategical conditions. At the end of the day the French retired, and next morning the archduke began another wide extension to his left, hoping to head them off. This consumed several days. In the course of it Jourdan attempted to take advantage of his opponent’s dissemination to regain the direct road to Würzburg, but the attempt was defeated by an almost fortuitous combination of forces at the threatened point. More effective, indeed, than this indirect pursuit was the very active hostility of the peasantry, who had suffered in Jourdan’s advance and retaliated so effectually during his retreat that the army became thoroughly demoralized, both by want of food and by the strain of incessant sniping. Defeated again at Würzburg on the 3rd of September, Jourdan continued his retreat to the Lahn, and finally withdrew the shattered army over the Rhine, partly by Düsseldorf, partly by Neuwied. In the last engagement on the Lahn the young and brilliant Marceau was mortally wounded. Far away in Bavaria, Moreau had meantime been driving Latour from one line of resistance to another. On receiving the news of Jourdan’s reverses, however, he made a rapid and successful retreat to Strassburg, evading the prince’s army, which had ascended the Rhine valley to head him off, in the nick of time.

This celebrated campaign is pre-eminently strategical in its character, in that the positions and movements anterior to the battle preordained its issue. 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? The answer will not be supplied by any theory of “exterior and interior lines.” It lies far deeper. So far as it is possible to summarize it in one phrase, it lies in the fact that though the Directory meant this campaign to be the final word on the Revolutionary War, for the nation at large this final word had been said at Fleurus. 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.

The War in Italy 1793-97

Hitherto we have ignored the operations on the Italian frontier, partly because they were of minor importance and partly because the conditions out of which Napoleon’s first campaign arose can be best considered in connexion with that campaign itself, from which indeed the previous operations derive such light as they possess. It has been mentioned that in 1792 the French overran Savoy and Nice. In 1793 the Sardinian army and a small auxiliary corps of Austrians waged a desultory mountain warfare against the Army of the Alps about Briançon and the Army of Italy on the Var. That furious offensive on the part of the French, which signalized the year 1793 elsewhere, was made impossible here by the counter-revolution in the cities of the Midi.

In 1794, when this had been crushed, the intention of the French government was to take the offensive against the Austro-Sardinians. The first operation was to be the capture of Oneglia. The concentration of large forces in the lower Rhone valley had naturally infringed upon the areas told off for the provisioning of the Armies of the Alps (Kellermann) and of Italy (Dumerbion); indeed, the sullen population could hardly be induced to feed the troops suppressing the revolt, still less the distant frontier armies. Thus the only source of supply was the Riviera of Genoa: “Our connexion with this district is imperilled by the corsairs of Oneglia (a Sardinian town) owing to the cessation of our operations afloat. The army is living from hand to mouth,” wrote the younger Robespierre in September 1793. Vessels bearing supplies from Genoa could not avoid the corsairs by taking the open sea, for there the British fleet was supreme. Carnot therefore ordered the Army of Italy to capture Oneglia, and 21,000 men (the rest of the 67,000 effectives were held back for coast defence) began operations in April. The French left moved against the enemy’s positions on the main road over the Col di Tenda, the centre towards Ponte di Nava, and the right Saorgio. along the Riviera. All met with success, thanks to Masséna’s bold handling of the centre column. Not only was Oneglia captured, but also the Col di Tenda. Napoleon Bonaparte served in these affairs on the headquarter staff. Meantime the Army of the Alps had possessed itself of the Little St Bernard and Mont Cenis, and the Republicans were now masters of several routes into Piedmont (May). But the Alpine roads merely led to fortresses, and both Carnot and Bonaparte—Napoleon had by now captivated the younger Robespierre and become the leading spirit in Dumerbion’s army—considered that the Army of the Alps should be weakened to the profit of the Army of Italy, and that the time had come to disregard the feeble neutrality of Genoa, and to advance over the Col di Tenda.

Napoleon’s first suggestion for a rapid condensation of the French cordon, and an irresistible blow on the centre of the Allies by Tenda-Coni,[7] came to nothing owing to the waste of time in negotiations between the generals and the Napoleon in 1794. distant Committee, and meanwhile new factors came into play. 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.” In the domain of tactics he was and remains the principal exponent of the art of breaking the equilibrium, and already he imagined the solution of problems of policy and strategy on the same lines. “Austria is the great enemy; Austria crushed, Germany, Spain, Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse, but concentrate our attack.” Napoleon argued that Austria could be effectively wounded by an offensive against Piedmont, and even more effectively by an ulterior advance from Italian soil into Germany. In pursuance of the single aim he asked for the appointment of a single commander-in-chief to hold sway from Bayonne to the Lake of Geneva, and for the rejection of all schemes for “revolutionizing” Italy till after the defeat of the arch-enemy.

Operations, however, did not after all take either of these forms. The younger Robespierre perished with his brother in the coup d’état of 9th Thermidor, the advance was suspended, and Bonaparte, amongst other leading spirits of the Army of Italy, was arrested and imprisoned. Profiting by this moment, Austria increased her auxiliary corps. An Austrian general took command of the whole of the allied forces, and pronounced a threat from the region of Cairo (where the Austrians took their place on the left wing of the combined army) towards the Riviera. The French, still dependent on Genoa for supplies, had to take the offensive at once to save themselves from starvation, and the result was the expedition of Dego, planned chiefly by Napoleon, who had been released from prison and was at headquarters, though unemployed. The movement began on the 17th of September; and although the Austrian general Colloredo repulsed an attack at Dego (Sept. 21) he retreated to Acqui, and the incipient offensive of the Allies ended abruptly.

The first months of the winter of 1794-1795 were spent in re-equipping the troops, who stood in sore need after their rapid movements in the mountains. For the future operations, the enforced condensation of the army on its right wing with the object of protecting its line of supply to Genoa and the dangers of its cramped situation on the Riviera suggested a plan roughly resembling one already recommended by Napoleon, who had since the affair of Dego become convinced that the way into Italy was through the Apennines and not the Alps. The essence of this was to anticipate the enemy by a very early and rapid advance from Vado towards Carcare by the Ceva road, the only good road of which the French disposed and which they significantly called the chemin de canon.