said the French Cabinet.  Worse than this, the army was not in the flourishing state of which the King had spoken.  The miseries of the retreat, but infinitely more, the incidents of Milan, though wiped out by the King from his own memory, were vividly recollected by all ranks.  Affection was not the feeling with which the Piedmontese soldiers regarded the ‘fratelli Lombardi.’  Did anyone beside the King believe that this army, which had lost faith in its cause, in its leaders and in itself, was going to beat Radetsky?  The old Field-Marshal might well show the wildest joy when the denunciation of the armistice was communicated to him.  And yet the higher expediency demanded that the sacrifice of Piedmont and of her King for Italy should be consummated.

Rattazzi announced the coming campaign to the Chambers on the 14th of March; the news was well received; there was a general feeling that, whatever happened, the present situation could not be prolonged.  With regard to the numbers they could put in the field, Austria and Sardinia were evenly balanced, each having about 80,000 disposable men.  The request for a French marshal having been refused, the chief command was given to Chrzanowski, a Pole, who did not know Italian, had not studied the theatre of the war, and was so little favoured by nature that, to the impressionable Italians, his appearance seemed ludicrous.  This deplorable appointment was made to satisfy the outcry against Piedmontese generalship; as if it was not enough, the other Polish general, Ramorino, accused of treachery by the revolutionists in 1832, but now praised to the skies by the democratic party, was placed in command of the fifth or Lombard division.

Though Radetsky openly gave the word ‘To Turin!’ Chrzanowski seems to have failed to realise that the Austrians intended to invade Piedmont.  He ordered Ramorino, however, with his 8000 Lombards, to occupy the fork formed by the Po and the Ticino, so as to defend the bridge at Pavia, if, by chance, any fraction of the enemy tried to cross it.  What Ramorino did was to place his division on the right bank of the Po, and to destroy the bridge of boats at Mezzana Corte between himself and the enemy.  The Austrians crossed the Ticino in the night of the 20th of April, not with a fraction, but with a complete army.  Ramorino was deprived of his command, and was afterwards tried by court-martial and shot.  Whether his treason was intentional or involuntary, it is certain that, had he stemmed the Austrian advance even for half a day, the future disasters, if not averted, would not have come so rapidly, because the Piedmontese would have been forewarned.  On the evening of the 21st, General D’Aspre, with 15,000 men, took a portion of the Sardinian army unawares near Mortara, and, owing to the scattered distribution of the Piedmontese, who would have outnumbered him had they been concentrated, he succeeded in forcing his way into Mortara by nightfall.  The moral effect of this first reverse was bad, but Chrzanowski rashly decided staking the whole fate of the campaign in a field-day, for which purpose he gathered what troops he could collect at La Biccocca, a hill capped with a village about a mile and a half from Novara.  Not more than 50,000 men were collected; some had already deserted, and 20,000 were doing nothing on the other side of the Po.