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If there could be any doubt on this point, it ought to be dispelled by Massena's campaign in Switzerland, where he sustained himself only by attacking the enemy at every opportunity, even when he was obliged to seek him on the Grimsel and the Saint-Gothard. Napoleon's course was similar in 1796 in the Tyrol, when he was opposed to Wurmser and Alvinzi.
We can go to Brussels, Liege, Aix-la-Chapelle; then up the Rhine to Strasburg. We will cross Switzerland, and go down into Italy by the Saint-Gothard. Will that do?" "Yes." "What are you looking at?" "I am looking at you; indeed you are adorable like that! One would say you were carrying me off." "And they would be right, pardieu!" "Oh, I think you swore, Eugenie."
It was reinforced on the Ticino by a corps of twelve thousand men detached from the Army of the Rhine by Moreau, who, after the two victories he had just won, could afford to lend this contingent to the Army of Italy. He had sent them by the Saint-Gothard. Thus strengthened, the First Consul entered Milan without striking a blow.
If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road.
Before the arrival of Souvarow, Masséna pounced like a lion on Korsakoff, surprising him in his camp at Zurich and driving him back to the Rhine after inflicting tremendous losses! Then, turning on Souvarow, whom the heroic resistance of General Molitor had held up for three days in the Saint-Gothard, he defeated him as he had defeated his lieutenant, Korsakoff.
We cannot be better convinced of these truths than by the consideration of the position of Massena in Switzerland in 1799. After Jourdan's defeat at Stockach, he occupied the line from Basel by Schaffhausen and Rheineck to Saint-Gothard, and thence by La Furca to Mont-Blanc.
The Austrians, ready to cross the Rhine, threatened Alsace and Lorraine; Italy was in the hands of the Russians, whom Souvarow was leading into Switzerland through the Saint-Gothard pass. France, on the point of being invaded over both its frontiers, at the Rhine and at the Alps, pinned all its hopes on Masséna, and was not disappointed in her expectations.
Poor boy! he could not come by the Saint-Gothard, nor by the Mont-Cenis, nor by the Simplon; he came by sea, by Marseilles, and had to cross France. Well, in three weeks we shall be at Geneva, and living at our ease. Come, Rodolphe," she added, seeing sadness overspread the Parisian's face, "is not the Lake of Geneva quite as good as the Lake of Lucerne?"
As for detailed strategic maneuvers, they may be comprehended by reading the events of Suwaroff's expedition by the Saint-Gothard upon the Muttenthal. While we must approve his maneuvers in endeavoring to capture Lecourbe in the valley of the Reuss, we must also admire the presence of mind, activity, and unyielding firmness which saved that general and his division.
Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century. It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Spluegen and yet awhile longer the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by the rivers of Eden.
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