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In an hour the cart was taken off its wheels and hoisted, piece by piece, to the top of the embankment at the foot of the tower itself, a work that was somewhat like that of the soldiers who carried the artillery over the pass of the Grand Saint-Bernard.
He had enemies in front of Basel, at Waldshut, at Schaffhausen, at Feldkirch, and at Chur; Bellegarde threatened the Saint-Gothard, and the Italian army menaced the Simplon and the Saint-Bernard. How was he to defend such a circumference? and how could he leave open one of these great valleys, thus risking every thing?
There they found traces of Lannes' division. As the slope was very steep, the soldiers had cut a sort of stairway in the ice. The men now scaled it. The fathers of Saint-Bernard were awaiting them on the summit. As each gun came up the men were taken by squads into the hospice. When the soldiers left the convent they pressed the hands of the monks and embraced the dogs.
Indeed, these skillful marches are but applications of the great principle of throwing the mass of the forces upon the decisive point; and this point is to be determined from the considerations given in Article XIX. What was the passage of the Saint-Bernard but a line of operations directed against an extremity of the strategic front of the enemy, and thence upon his line of retreat?
I shall have to strike a great blow; that's the only condition on which I can get peace. I shall cross the Alps" he pointed to the great Saint-Bernard "I shall fall upon Melas when he least expects me, and rout him utterly." "Oh! trust you for that!"
In the same campaign the first objective point of Napoleon was to fall upon the right of Mélas by the Saint-Bernard, and to seize his line of communications: hence Saint-Bernard, Ivrea, and Piacenza were decisive points only by reason of the march of Mélas upon Nice.
The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the direction of liberty. The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison.
If Napoleon in 1800, after passing the Saint-Bernard, had marched upon Asti or Alessandria, and had fought at Marengo without having previously protected himself on the side of Lombardy and of the left bank of the Po, he would have been more thoroughly cut off from his line of retreat than Mélas from his; but, having in his possession the secondary points of Casale and Pavia on the side of the Saint-Bernard, and Savona and Tenda toward the Apennines, in case of reverse he had every means of regaining the Var or the Valais.
In it, it developed that the First Consul was really sending fifty thousand francs as a gift to the monks of Saint-Bernard, by post; but that this money was in reality a trap devised for the capture of the Companions of Jehu, if all means failed to surprise them in the Chartreuse of Seillon or some other refuge. It now-remained to be seen how these bandits should be captured.
«La dernier village qu'on rencontre, avant d'arriver au Saint-Bernard, est le bourg Saint-Pierre, on mont insensiblement jusqu'