It is needless to describe the remaining stages in Bonaparte’s campaign against Austria.  Hitherto he had contended against fairly good, though discontented and discouraged troops, badly led, and hampered by the mountain barrier which separated them from their real base of operations.  In the last part of the war he fought against troops demoralized by an almost unbroken chain of disasters.  The Austrians were now led by a brave and intelligent general, the Archduke Charles; but he was hampered by rigorous instructions from Vienna, by senile and indolent generals, by the indignation or despair of the younger officers at the official favouritism which left them in obscurity, and by the apathy of soldiers who had lost heart.  Neither his skill nor the natural strength of their positions in Friuli and Carinthia could avail against veterans flushed with victory and marshalled with unerring sagacity.  The rest of the war only served to emphasize the truth of Napoleon’s later statement, that the moral element constitutes three-fourths of an army’s strength.  The barriers offered by the River Tagliamento and the many commanding heights of the Carnic and the Noric Alps were as nothing to the triumphant republicans; and from the heights that guard the province of Styria, the genius of Napoleon flashed as a terrifying portent to the Court of Vienna and the potentates of Central Europe.  When the tricolour standards were nearing the town of Leoben, the Emperor Francis sent envoys to sue for peace;[72] and the preliminaries signed there, within one hundred miles of the Austrian capital, closed the campaign which a year previously had opened with so little promise for the French on the narrow strip of land between the Maritime Alps and the petty township of Savona.

These brilliant results were due primarily to the consummate leadership of Bonaparte.  His geographical instincts discerned the means of profiting by natural obstacles and of turning them when they seemed to screen his opponents.  Prompt to divine their plans, he bewildered them by the audacity of his combinations, which overbore their columns with superior force at the very time when he seemed doomed to succumb.  Genius so commanding had not been displayed even by Frederick or Marlborough.  And yet these brilliant results could not have been achieved by an army which rarely exceeded 45,000 men without the strenuous bravery and tactical skill of the best generals of division, Augereau, Massena, and Joubert, as well as of officers who had shown their worth in many a doubtful fight; Lannes, the hero of Lodi and Arcola; Marmont, noted for his daring advance of the guns at Castiglione; Victor, who justified his name by hard fighting at La Favorita; Murat, the beau sabreur, and Junot, both dashing cavalry generals; and many more whose daring earned them a soldier’s death in order to gain glory for France and liberty for Italy.  Still less ought the soldiery to be forgotten; those troops, whose tattered uniforms bespoke their ceaseless