Array Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - The Collected Works of Napoleon Bonaparte

Bonaparte now turned his entire attention to the Austrians, who were in control of Lombardy. Rushing down the southern bank of the Po, he crossed it at Piacenza. Beaulieu, the Austrian commander, withdrew beyond the Adda River. There was no way to get at him but to cross the river by the bridge of Lodi, a bridge 350 feet long and swept on the other side by cannon. To cross it in the face of a raking fire was necessary but was well-nigh impossible. Bonaparte ordered his grenadiers forward. Halfway over they were mowed down by the Austrian fire and began to recoil. Bonaparte and other generals rushed to the head of the columns, risked their lives, inspired their men, and the result was that they got across in the very teeth of the murderous fire and seized the Austrian batteries. "Of all the actions in which the soldiers under my command have been engaged," reported Bonaparte to the Directory, "none has equaled the tremendous passage of the bridge of Lodi."

From that day Bonaparte was the idol of his soldiers. He had shown reckless courage, contempt of death. Thenceforth they called him affectionately "The Little Corporal." The Austrians retreated to the farther side of the Mincio and to the mighty fortress of Mantua. On May 16 Bonaparte made a triumphal entry into Milan. He sent a force to begin the siege of Mantua. That was the key to the situation. He could not advance into the Alps and against Vienna until he had taken it. On the other hand if Austria lost Mantua, she would lose her hold upon Italy.

Four times during the next eight months, from June, 1796 to January, 1797, Austria sent down armies from the Alps in the attempt to relieve the beleaguered fortress. Each time they were defeated by the prodigious activity, the precision of aim, of the French general, who continued his policy of attacking his enemy piecemeal, before their divisions could unite. By this policy his inferior forces, for his numbers were inferior to the total of the opposed army, were always as a matter of fact so applied as to be superior to the enemy on methods of the battlefield, for he attacked when the enemy was divided. It was youth against age, Bonaparte being twenty-seven, Wurmser and the other Austrian generals almost seventy. It was new methods against old, originality against the spirit of routine. The Austrians came down from the Alpine passes in two divisions. Here was Bonaparte's chance, and wonderfully did he use it. In war, said Moreau to him two years later, "the greater number always beat the lesser." "You are right," replied Bonaparte. "Whenever, with smaller forces, I was in the presence of a great army, arranging mine rapidly, I fell like a thunderbolt upon one of its wings, tumbled it over, profited by the disorder which always ensued to attack the enemy elsewhere, always with my entire force. Thus I defeated him in detail and victory was always the triumph of the larger number over the smaller." All this was accomplished only by forced marches. "It is our legs that win his battles," said his soldiers. He shot his troops back and forth like a shuttle. By the rapidity of his movements he made up for his numerical weakness. Of course this success was rendered possible by the mistake of his opponents in dividing their forces when they should have kept them united.

Even thus, with his own ability and the mistakes of his enemies co-operating, the contest was severe, the outcome at times trembled in the balance. Thus at Arcola, the battle raged for three days. Again, as at Lodi, success depended upon the control of a bridge. Only a few miles separated the two Austrian divisions. If the Austrians could hold the bridge, then their junction would probably be completed. Bonaparte seized a flag and rushed upon the bridge, accompanied by his staff. The Austrians leveled a murderous fire at them. The columns fell back, several officers having been shot down. They refused to desert their general but dragged him with them by his arms and clothes. He fell into a morass and began to sink. "Forward to save the General! " was the cry and immediately the French fury broke loose, they drove back the Austrians and rescued their hero. He had, however, not repeated the exploit of Lodi. He had not crossed the bridge. But the next day his army was victorious and the Austrians retreated once more. The three days' battle was over (November 15-17, 1796).

Two months later a new Austrian army came down from the Alps for the relief of Mantua and another desperate battle occurred, at Rivoli. On January 13-14, 1797, Bonaparte inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Austrians, routed them, and sent them spinning back into the Alps again. Two weeks later Mantua surrendered. Bonaparte now marched up into the Alps, constantly outgeneraling his brilliant new opponent, the young Archduke Charles, forcing him steadily back. When on April 7 he reached the little town of Leoben, about 100 miles from Vienna, Austria sued for peace. A memorable and crowded year of effort was thus brought to a brilliant close. In its twelve months' march across northern Italy the French had fought eighteen big battles, and sixty-five smaller ones. "You have, besides that," said Bonaparte in a bulletin to the army, "sent 30,000,000 francs from the public treasury to Paris. You have enriched the Museum of Paris with 300 masterpieces of ancient and modern Italy, which it has taken thirty ages to produce. You have conquered the most beautiful country of Europe. The French colors float for the first time upon the borders of the Adriatic." In another proclamation he told them they were forever covered with glory, that when they had completed their task and returned to their homes their fellow-citizens, when pointing to them, would say, " He was of the Army of Italy:"

Thus rose his star to full meridian splendor. No wonder he believed in it.

All through this Italian campaign Bonaparte acted as if he were the head of the state, not its servant. He sometimes followed the advice of the Directors, more often he ignored it, frequently he acted in defiance of it. Military matters did not alone occupy his attention. He tried his hand at political manipulation, with the same confidence and the same success which he had shown on the field of battle. He became a creator and a destroyer of states. Italy was not at that time a united country but was a collection of small independent states. None of these escaped the transforming touch of the young conquerer. He changed the old aristocratic Republic of Genoa into the Ligurian Republic, giving it a constitution similar to that of France. He forced doubtful princes, like the Dukes of Parma and Modena, to submission and heavy payments. He forced the Pope to a similar humiliation, taking some of his states, sparing most of them, and levying heavy exactions. His most notorious act, next to the conquest of the successive Austrian armies, was the overthrow, on a flimsy pretext and with diabolic guile, of the famous old Republic (1797) of Venice.

"Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;

And was the safeguard of the West: the worth

Of Venice did not fall below her birth,

Venice, the Eldest Child of Liberty."

Such was the thought that came to the poet Wordsworth as he contemplated this outrage, resembling in abysmal immorality the contemporary partition of Poland at the hands of the monarchs of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. At least this clear, bright, pagan republican general could have claimed, had he cared to, that he was no worse than the kings of the eighteenth century who asserted that their rule was ordained of God. Bonaparte was no worse; he was also no better; he was, moreover, far more able. He conquered Venice, one of the oldest and proudest states in Europe, and held it as a pawn in the game of diplomacy, to which he turned with eagerness and talent, now that the war was over.

Austria had agreed in April, 1797, to the preliminary peace of Leoben. The following summer was devoted to the making of the final peace, that of Campo Formio, concluded October 17, 1797. During these months Bonaparte lived in state in the splendid villa of Montebello, near Milan, basking in the dazzling sunshine of his sudden and amazing fortune. There he kept a veritable court, receiving ambassadors, talking intimately with artists and men of letters, surrounded by young officers, who had caught the swift contagion of his personality and who were advancing with his advance to prosperity and renown. There, too, at Montebello, were Josephine and the brothers and the sisters of the young victor and also his mother, who kept a level head in prosperity as she had in adversity, all irradiated with the new glamour of their changed position in life. The young man who a few years before had pawned his watch and had eaten six-cent dinners in cheap Parisian restaurants now dined in public in the old manner of French kings, allowing the curious to gaze upon him. A bodyguard of Polish lancers attended whenever he rode forth.