pressed round their right wing, they gave way and beat a speedy retreat to save themselves from entire capture.  Bonaparte took no active share in the battle:  he was, very properly, intent on the wider problem of severing the Austrians from their allies, first by the turning movement of Massena, and then by pouring other troops into the gap thus made.  In this he entirely succeeded.  The radical defects in the Austrian dispositions left them utterly unable to withstand the blows which he now showered upon them.  The Sardinians were too far away on the west to help Argenteau in his hour of need:  they were in and beyond Ceva, intent on covering the road to Turin:  whereas, as Napoleon himself subsequently wrote, they should have been near enough to their allies to form one powerful army, which, at Dego or Montenotte, would have defended both Turin and Milan.  “United, the two forces would have been superior to the French army:  separated, they were lost.”

The configuration of the ground favoured Bonaparte’s plan of driving the Imperialists down the valley of the Bormida in a north-easterly direction; and the natural desire of a beaten general to fall back towards his base of supplies also impelled Beaulieu and Argenteau to retire towards Milan.  But that would sever their connections with the Sardinians, whose base of supplies, Turin, lay in a north-westerly direction.

Bonaparte therefore hurled his forces at once against the Austrians and a Sardinian contingent at Millesimo, and defeated them, Augereau’s division cutting off the retreat of twelve hundred of their men under Provera.  Weakened by this second blow, the allies fell back on the intrenched village of Dego.  Their position was of a strength proportionate to its strategic importance; for its loss would completely sever all connection between their two main armies save by devious routes many miles in their rear.  They therefore clung desperately to the six mamelons and redoubts which barred the valley and dominated some of the neighbouring heights.  Yet such was the superiority of the French in numbers that these positions were speedily turned by Massena, whom Bonaparte again intrusted with the movement on the enemy’s flank and rear.  A strange event followed.  The victors, while pillaging the country for the supplies which Bonaparte’s sharpest orders failed to draw from the magazines and stores on the sea-coast, were attacked in the dead of night by five Austrian battalions that had been ordered up to support their countrymen at Dego.  These, after straying among the mountains, found themselves among bands of the marauding French, whom they easily scattered, seizing Dego itself.  Apprised of this mishap, Bonaparte hurried up more troops from the rear, and on the 15th recovered the prize which had so nearly been snatched from his grasp.  Had Beaulieu at this time thrown all his forces on the French, he might have retrieved his first misfortunes:  but foresight and energy were not to be found at the Austrian headquarters:  the surprise at Dego was the work of a colonel; and for many years to come the incompetence of their aged commanders was to paralyze the fine fighting qualities of the “white-coats.”  In three conflicts they had been outmanoeuvred and outnumbered, and drew in their shattered columns to Acqui.