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Had they speedily reinforced their detachment at Bard, there can be little doubt that Bonaparte's movements could have been seriously hampered. But, up to May 21st, Melas was ignorant that his distant rear was being assailed, and the 3,000 Austrians who guarded the vale of the Dora Baltea were divided, part being at Bard and others at Ivrea.

"The boulders from Mont Blanc, upon the plain below Ivrea, assure us that the glacier which transported them existed for a prodigious length of time. Their present distance from the cliffs from which they were derived is about 420,000 feet, and if we assume that they traveled at the rate of 400 feet per annum, their journey must have occupied them no less than 1,055 years!

"The great peaks rose several thousand feet above the glaciers, and then, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured down their showers of rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense piles of angular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivrea. "The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions.

In this way the whole army was after a delay of four days once more united; and after a further three days' march through the valley of the Doria, which was ever widening and displaying greater fertility, and whose inhabitants the Salassi, clients of the Insubres, hailed in the Carthaginians their allies and deliverers, the army arrived about the middle of September in the plain of Ivrea, where the exhausted troops were quartered in the villages, that by good nourishment and a fortnight's repose they might recruit from their unparalleled hardships.

"There we mounted horses I had in readiness, and rode away from Ivrea. We were bound for the castle of Canossa, a strong-hold of considerable importance, where my royal companion believed she could find refuge, at least for a time. I cannot tell you of all the adventures we had upon that difficult journey.

Thus the great vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.

But suddenly the march of the vanguard was arrested by an obstacle unforeseen, or, at least, grievously under-estimated. Midway between Aosta and Ivrea the Dora flows through a defile, not more than fifty yards in width: the heights on either hand rise precipitous; and in the midst an abrupt conical rock, crowned with the fortress of St.

I have little doubt that if the marine Pliocene strata which underlie a great part of the moraine below Ivrea were exposed to view in a vertical section, those fundamental strata would be found not to participate in the least degree in the plications of the sands and gravels of the overlying glacial drift.

He had reached the valley before the rest of the army, entered the Aosta, and received his orders to march upon Ivrea, at the entrance to the plains of Piedmont. There, however, he encountered an obstacle which no one had foreseen. The fortress of Bard is situated about twenty-four miles from Aosta.

Count O'Donnell used to say that so long as he had this talisman with him, he would never be wounded, and it is a fact that though he led his regiment in the thick of the fight at Borgoforte, Nago, Arco, Vercelli, Ivrea, Verrua, Chivasso, Cassano, and other battles in the Italian Campaign of 1701-7, and at Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Arleux, Denain, Douai, Bouchain, and Fuesnoy, in the Netherlands, he always came through scathless.