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This was the beginning of a series of marches and counter-marches on the part of the two generals, which lasted far into June, without any advantage on either side.
The perpetual marches and counter-marches of the armies, the assaults and burnings of towns and villages, the fierce demeanour of the justly embittered Prussians, and the native barbarism of the Russians, had spread devastation and horror through some of the fairest provinces of France.
Nearly all the boys in the valley between twelve and sixteen became enlisted on the one side or the other, and there were councils of war, marches, and counter-marches without number, occasional skirmishes, but no decisive engagements.
And notwithstanding the sharpness of the weather, the small stock of our provisions, and the marches and counter-marches we were continually obliged to make, and which gave us but seldom the opportunity of washing the only shirt we had upon our back, not one amongst us fell sick.
Hence it was that operations, languid and indecisive beyond any recorded in history, marches and counter-marches, pillaging expeditions and blockades, bloodless capitulations and equally bloodless combats, make up the military history of Italy during the course of nearly two centuries. Mighty armies fight from sunrise to sunset. A great victory is won.
And yet it cannot be that this interior fact should be in violent contradiction with logic. The head ought not to hinder the heart. With the future believer, a parallel work goes on in the feelings and in the thought. If we are not able to reproduce the marches and counter-marches, or follow their repeatedly broken line, we can at least shew the main halting-places.
As it was, the allies dulled the ardour of their troops by marches, counter-marches, and interminable councils-of-war, while Napoleon's columns were threading their way along those valleys at the average rate of fifteen miles a day, in order to turn the allied left and cut the connection between Prussia and Saxony.
Our soldiers were as brave as ever trod the earth, and thoroughly imbued with the cause for which they were fighting; but the suspicion that at headquarters there might be inefficiency or drunkenness; that marches and counter-marches had no definite purpose; that their lives might be uselessly thrown away you would have to go through it to realize it!
After a night and a day of marches, counter-marches, stratagems, fatigues, unheard-of perils, the prince, still, carrying the child, one of whose legs is broken, arrives at his father's camp, and says, with the utmost simplicity, "I had promised his mother that I would act a brother's part by him and I have done so." "That is admirable!" cried the count.
This particular commander was pretty nearly as ignorant of the sieges and battles of his own campaign as the magistrates who were questioning him; both sides, prosecution and defence, were lost in a fog of effectives, objectives, munitions and ammunitions, marches and counter-marches.
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