Zittau towards Prague and Vienna.  The thought that he might for a time be cut off from France troubled him not:  “400,000 men,” he said, “resting on a system of strongholds, on a river like the Elbe, are not to be turned.”  In truth, he thought little about the Bohemian army.  If 40,000 Russians had entered Bohemia, they would not reach Prague till the 25th; so he wrote to St. Cyr On the 17th, the day when hostilities could first begin; and he evidently believed that Dresden would be safe till September.  Its defence seemed assured by the skill of that master of defensive warfare, St. Cyr, by the barrier of the Erz Mountains, and still more by Austrian slowness.

Of this characteristic of theirs he cherished great hopes.  Their finances were in dire disorder; and Fouche, who had just returned from a tour in the Hapsburg States, reported that the best way of striking at that Power would be “to affect its paper currency, on which all its armaments depend."[346] And truly if the transport of a great army over a mountain range had depended solely on the almost bankrupt exchequer at Vienna, Dresden would have been safe until Michaelmas; but, beside the material aid brought by the Russians and Prussians into Bohemia, England also gave her financial support.  In pursuance of the secret article agreed on at Reichenbach, Cathcart now advanced L250,000 at once; and the knowledge that our financial support was given to the federative paper notes issued by the allies enabled the Court of Vienna privately to raise loans and to wage war with a vigour wholly unexpected by Napoleon.[347]

Certainly the allied Grand Army suffered from no lack of advisers.  The Czar, the Emperor Francis, and the King of Prussia were there; as a compliment to Austria, the command was intrusted to Field-Marshal Schwarzenberg, a man of diplomatic ability rather than of military genius.  By his side were the Russians, Wittgenstein, Barclay, and Toll, the Prussian Knesebeck, the Swiss Jomini, and, above all, Moreau.

The last-named, as we have seen, came over on the inducement of Bernadotte, and was received with great honour by the allied sovereigns.  Jomini also was welcomed for his knowledge of the art of war.  This great writer had long served as a French general; but the ill-treatment that he had lately suffered at Berthier’s hands led him, on August 14th, to quit the French service and pass over to the allies.  His account of his desertion, however, makes it clear that he had not penetrated Napoleon’s designs, for the best of all reasons, because the Emperor kept them to himself to the very last moment.[348]