at bay an army toiling up from the valley; but, as at Thermopylae, the position is liable to be outflanked by an enterprising foe, who should scale the footpath leading over the western offshoots of Monte Baldo, and, fording the stream at its foot, should then advance eastwards against the village.  This, in part, was Alvintzy’s plan, and having nearly 28,000 men,[71] he doubted not that his enveloping tactics must capture Joubert’s division of 10,000 men.  So daunted was even this brave general by the superior force of his foes that he had ordered a retreat southwards when an aide-de-camp arrived at full gallop and ordered him to hold Rivoli at all costs.  Bonaparte’s arrival at 4 a.m. explained the order, and an attack made during the darkness wrested from the Austrians the chapel on the San Marco ridge which stands on the ridge above the zigzag track.  The reflection of the Austrian watch-fires in the wintry sky showed him their general position.  To an unskilled observer the wide sweep of the glare portended ruin for the French.  To the eye of Bonaparte the sight brought hope.  It proved that his foes were still bent on their old plan of enveloping him:  and from information which he treacherously received from Alvintzy’s staff he must have known that that commander had far fewer than the 45,000 men which he ascribed to him in bulletins.

[Illustration:  NEIGHBOURHOOD OF RIVOLI.]

Yet the full dawn of that January day saw the Imperialists flushed with success, as their six separate columns drove in the French outposts and moved towards Rivoli.  Of these, one was on the eastern side of the Adige and merely cannonaded across the valley:  another column wound painfully with most of the artillery and cavalry along the western bank, making for the village of Incanale and the foot of the zigzag leading up to Rivoli:  three others denied over Monte Baldo by difficult paths impassable to cannon:  while the sixth and westernmost column, winding along the ridge near Lake Garda, likewise lacked the power which field-guns and horsemen would have added to its important turning movement.  Never have natural obstacles told more potently on the fortunes of war than at Rivoli; for on the side where the assailants most needed horses and guns they could not be used; while on the eastern edge of their broken front their cannon and horse, crowded together in the valley of the Adige, had to climb the winding road under the plunging fire of the French infantry and artillery.  Nevertheless, such was the ardour of the Austrian attack, that the tide of battle at first set strongly in their favour.  Driving the French from the San Marco ridge and pressing their centre hard between Monte Baldo and Rivoli, they made it possible for their troops in the valley to struggle on towards the foot of the zigzag; and on the west their distant right wing was already beginning to threaten the French rear.  Despite the arrival of Massena’s troops from Verona about 9 a.m.,