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Updated: May 5, 2025
Between Jones and Nassau existed extreme jealousy. In fact, the only officer in high position with whom Jones stood on an amicable footing was the distinguished General Suwarrow. Early in the campaign the Russian had advised Jones to allow Potemkin to take the credit of any success that might result, and to hold his tongue, two things which Jones, unfortunately, was quite incapable of doing.
On the one hand the cool valour, the scientific, methodical, and tenacious genius of Barclay, whose mind, German like his birth, was for calculating every thing, even the chances of the hazard, bent on owing all to his tactics, and nothing to fortune; on the other the martial, bold, and vehement instinct of Bagration, an old Russian of the school of Suwarrow, dissatisfied at being under a general who was his junior in the service terrible in battle, but acquainted with no other book than nature, no other instructor than memory, no other counsels than his own inspirations.
In Upper Italy their armies were in full retreat, having been forced back from the Adige to the Adda, whence an urgent message was sent to Macdonald, Championnet's successor at Naples, to fall back to the northward and effect a junction with the main body, soon to be sorely pressed by an overwhelming force of the Austro-Russians, at whose head was the famous Suwarrow.
Gothard against Suwarrow are well known. Naturally disgraced for the part he took with Moreau, he was not again employed till the Cent Jours, when he did good service, although he had disapproved of the defection of Ney from the Royalist cause.
The Emperor Paul, of Russia, resenting the style in which his army under Suwarrow had been supported, withdrew it altogether from the field of its victories; and that hare-brained autocrat, happening to take up an enthusiastic personal admiration for Buonaparte, was not likely for the present to be brought back into the Antigallican league.
In the midst of it the French general Masséna, commanding in Switzerland, the centre of the great hostile front which extended from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, made a vehement and sustained attack upon the Austro-Russians at Zurich, on the 25th of September. Gaining a complete victory, he drove the enemy back beyond the point where Suwarrow expected to make his junction.
And who was Suwarrow? Behold his portrait. Born in a village of the Ukraine, the boy was sent by his father, an army officer, to the military academy at St. Petersburg, whence he entered the army as a common soldier, and ever after, for more than sixty years, he lived in incessant battles in Sweden, Turkey, Poland.
No courtier of the Russian court, and no diplomatist, except the English ambassador, followed the war-worn veteran to the grave. Suwarrow was the idol of his men, whose favorite title for him was "Father Suvarof," and who were ready at command to follow him to the cannon's mouth. In all his long career he never lost a battle, and only once in his life of war acted on the defensive.
The Austro-Russian army spread over the whole plain below. At five o'clock in the morning of the 15th of August, 1799, the fierce battle of Novi commenced. Suwarrow, a fierce fighter, but totally unacquainted with the science of strategy, in characteristic words gave the order of battle. "Kray," said he, "will attack the left the Russians the center Melas the right."
Here all who had escaped from the field took refuge, occupying Praga, the eastern suburb of the city, where twenty-six thousand Poles, with over one hundred cannon and mortars, defended the bridges over the Vistula. Suwarrow, the greatest of the Russian generals, was quickly at the city gates.
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