vanguard was on the banks of the Inn:  all the French, except the relics of Dupont’s division, were south of the Danube, and a few vigorous blows at their communications might have greatly embarrassed troops that had little artillery, light stores of ammunition, and lived almost entirely on the produce of the country.  We may picture to ourselves the fierce blows that, in such a case, Frederick the Great would have rained on his assailants as he wheeled round on their rear and turned their turning movements.  With Frederick matched against Napoleon, the Lech and the Danube would have witnessed a very cyclone of war.

But Mack was not Frederick:  and he had to do with a foe who speedily made good an error.  On October 13th, when Mack seemed about to cut off the French from the Main, he received news through Napoleon’s spies that the English had effected a landing at Boulogne, and a revolution had broken out in France.  The tidings found easy entrance into a brain that had a strange bias towards pleasing falsities and rejected disagreeable facts.  At once he leaped to the conclusion that the moves of Soult, Murat, Lannes, Marmont, and Ney round his rear were merely desperate efforts to cut back a way to Alsace.  He therefore held fast to his lines, made only feeble efforts to clear the northern road, and despatched reinforcements to Memmingen.  The next day brought other news; that Memmingen had been invested by Soult; that Ney by a brilliant dash across the Danube at Elchingen had routed an Austrian division there, and was threatening Ulm from the north-east; and that the other French columns were advancing from the south-east.  Yet Mack, still viewing these facts in the twilight of his own fancies, pictured them as the efforts of despair, not as the drawing in of the hunter’s toils.

He was now almost alone in his reading of events.  The Archduke Ferdinand, though nominally in supreme command, had hitherto deferred to Mack’s age and experience, as the Emperor Francis enjoined.  But he now urged the need of instantly marching away to the north with all available forces.  Still Mack clung to his notion that it was the French who were in sore straits; and he forbade the evacuation of Ulm; whereupon the Archduke, with Schwarzenberg, Kollowrath, Gyulai, and all whose instincts or rank prompted and enabled them to defy the madman’s authority, assembled 1,500 horsemen and rode off by the northern road.  It was high time; for Ney, firmly established at Elchingen, was pushing on his vanguard towards the doomed city:  Murat and Lannes were charged to support him on the north bank, while across the river Marmont, and further south Soult, cut off the retreat on Tyrol.