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He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow teeth in a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona and this in face of the sombre fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the many-buttoned brotherhood.
Napoleon preferred to cross the Ticino, enter Milan, effect a junction with Moncey who was approaching with twenty thousand men by the Saint-Gothard pass, then to cross the Po at Piacenza, expecting to get before Mélas more certainly in that direction than if he came down too soon upon his line of retreat.
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?
This circumstance made the two young men even more intimate. So Leopold, knowing Rodolphe well, was not surprised to find him stopping at a village and giving up the projected journey to Saint-Gothard, on the strength of a single glance at the upper window of a house.
In that sublime land, in the heart of a mass of rock riven by a gorge, a valley as wide as the Avenue de Neuilly in Paris, but a hundred fathoms deep and broken into ravines, flows a torrent coming from some tremendous height of the Saint-Gothard on the Simplon, which has formed a pool, I know not how many yards deep or how many feet long and wide, hemmed in by splintered cliffs of granite on which meadows find a place, with fir-trees between them, and enormous elms, and where violets also grow, and strawberries.
August 15, battle of Novi; this time it was more than a check, it was a defeat. Take note of it, general, for it is the last. At the very moment we were fighting at Novi, Massena was maintaining his position at Zug and Lucerne, and strengthening himself on the Aar and on the Rhine; while Lecourbe, on August 14 and 15, took the Saint-Gothard.
After breakfast, Rodolphe at once made himself at home by depositing in his room such property as he had brought with him for the journey to the Saint-Gothard, and he watched Leopold as he set out, moved by the spirit of routine, to carry out the excursion for himself and his friend.
A and A A indicate the front of operations of the armies of the Rhine and of the reserve; B and B B, that of Kray and Mélas; C C C C, the passes of the Saint-Bernard, of the Simplon, of the Saint-Gothard, and of the Splugen; D indicates the two lines of operations of the army of the reserve; E, the two lines of retreat of Mélas; H J K, the French divisions preserving their line of retreat.
We have already seen how we are to recognize these lines and these decisive points, whether permanent or temporary. Napoleon has afforded instruction on this point by the roads of the Simplon and Mont-Cenis; and Austria since 1815 has profited by it in the roads from the Tyrol to Lombardy, the Saint-Gothard, and the Splugen, as well as by different fortified places projected or completed.
From Rheinfelden to the Jura, toward Soleure, it was but two short marches, and there was the mouth of the trap in which the French army was placed. This was, then, the pivot of the defense. But how could he leave Schaffhausen unprotected? how abandon Rheineck and the Saint-Gothard? how open the Valais and the approach by Berne, without surrendering the whole of Switzerland to the Coalition?
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