Italy is listened to—­Austria dares to tell us, who are armed only in our own defence, to lay down those arms and put ourselves in her power.  Such an outrageous suggestion surely merits a condign response, and I have indignantly refused her request.  I announce this to you in the certainty that you will make the wrong done to your King and to your nation your own.  Hence mine is a proclamation of war:  arm yourselves therefore in readiness for it!

“You will be confronted by an ancient enemy who is both valiant and disciplined, but against whom you need not fear to measure your strength, for you may remember with pride Goito, Pastrengo, Santa Lucia, Sommacampagna, and, above all, Custozza, where four brigades fought for three days against the enemy’s five corps d’armee.  I will be your leader.  Your prowess in action has already been tested in the past, and when fighting under my magnanimous father I myself proudly recognized your valor.  I am convinced that on the field of honor and glory you will know how to justify, as well as to augment, your military renown.

“You will have as comrades those intrepid French troops—­the conquerors in so many distinguished campaigns—­with whom you fought side by side at Tchernaya, whom Napoleon III, always prompt to further the defence of a righteous cause and the victory of civilization, generously sends in great numbers to our aid.  March then, confident of success, and wreathe with fresh laurels that standard which, rallying from all quarters the flower of Italian youth to its threefold colors, points out your task of accomplishing that righteous and sacred enterprise—­the independence of Italy, wherein we find our war-cry.”

The Austrian army to the number of one hundred seventy thousand men—­besides those remaining in the Lombardo-Venetian fortresses—­was commanded by General Gyulai, the successor of Radetzky, who had died the year before, at the age of ninety-one.  Gyulai meant to attack and rout the Sardinian army before it could join its French allies.  On April 29th he crossed the Ticino; then spreading out his forces along the Sesia, he reconnoitred as far as Chivasso.  These districts abound in cultivated rice-fields and are intersected by many canals:  it was therefore easy, by flooding the ground, to hinder the march of the Austrian troops on Turin.

Meanwhile, the Sardinian army, composed of sixty thousand men, awaited the arrival of the French forces on the right bank of the Po.  On May 12th Napoleon III, already preceded into Italy by one hundred twenty thousand of his men, debarked at Genoa, and on the 14th was at Alessandria, where, near the mouth of the Tanaro, the allied armies met.  The Austrian troops covered a long tract, from Novara to Vercelli, then extended down the line of the Sesia as far as the Po, and thence reached the mouth of the Tanaro.  Gyulai, seeing the enemy concentrated on the right bank of the Po, believed that Napoleon.  III intended