battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another, he spoke the truth, and like a good soldier.  The new movements that followed his arrival and advice caused surprise to the Austrians, and surprise soon passed into panic.  The panic extended to a portion of the cavalry, no one has ever been able to say why; and it galloped off the field toward the Bormida, shouting, “To the bridges!” The panic then reached to men of all arms, and cavalry, artillery, and infantry were soon crowded together on the banks of the stream which they had crossed in high hopes but a few hours before.  The artillery sought to cross by a ford, but failed, and the French made prisoners, and seized guns, horses, baggage, and all the rest of the trophies of victory.  Thus a battle which confirmed the Consular government of Bonaparte, which prepared the way for the creation of the French Empire, and which settled the fate of Europe for years, was decided by the panic cries of a few horse-soldiers.  The Austrian cavalry has long and justly been reputed second to no other in the world, and in 1800 it was a veteran body, and had been steadily engaged in war, with small interruption, for eight years; but neither its experience, nor its valor, nor regard for the character which it had to maintain, could save it from the common lot of armies.  It became terrified, and senselessly fled, and its evil example was swiftly communicated to the other troops:  for there is nothing so contagious as a panic, every man that runs thinking, that, while he is himself ignorant of the existence of any peculiar danger, all the others must know of it, and are acting upon their knowledge.  That Austrian panic made the conqueror master of Italy, and with France and Italy at his command he could aspire to the dominion of Europe.  The man who began the panic at Marengo really opened the way to Vienna to the legions of France, and to Berlin, and (but that brought compensation) to Moscow also.

There were panics in most of the great battles of the French Empire, or those battles were followed by panics.  At Austerlitz the Austrians suffered from them; and though the Russian soldiers are among the steadiest of men, and keep up discipline under very extraordinary difficulties, they fared no better than their associates on that terrible field.  They had more than one panic, and the confusion was prodigious.  It was while flying in terror, that the dense, yet disorderly crowds sought to escape over some ponds, the ice of which broke, and two thousand of them were ingulfed.  One of their generals, writing of that day, said,—­“I had previously seen some lost battles, but I had no conception of such a defeat.”  Jena was followed by panics which extended throughout the army and over the monarchy, so that the Prussian army and the Prussian kingdom disappeared in a month, though Napoleon had anticipated a long, difficult, and doubtful contest with so renowned a military organization as that which had been created by the immortal Frederick; and he