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A battle took place at Tarvis, amid the highest mountains, whence it was afterward known as "the battle above the clouds." The archduke, with a handful of Hungarian hussars, valiantly defended the pass against sixteen thousand French under Massena, nor turned to fly until eight only of his men remained. Generals Bayalich and Ocskay, instead of supporting him, had yielded.
They followed up this success by an infantry attack, supported by a large number of heavy and field guns. Farther north another army operated against Tarvis along two routes, one of which goes over the Pontafel Pass and is traversed by the railroad running between Vienna and Venice, while the other is a coach road leading from Plezzo over the Predil Pass to the Save Valley.
From Cortina, which is Italian now, we swung toward the north again, re-crossed the Line of the Armistice at Tarvis, and, just as night was falling, came tearing into Villach, which, like Innsbruck, was occupied, under the terms of the Armistice, by Italian troops.
He then attacked and routed the enemy's guard on the Pontebba pass, occupied Tarvis, and thus cut off their communication with the Puster valley, by which the Austrian detachment from the Rhine was to arrive. It was in this campaign that Bernadotte laid the foundation of his future greatness. He was the son of a lawyer in Pau, where he was born in 1764.
Our route from Klagenfurt led back through Villach to Tarvis and thence over the Predil Pass to the Friuli plain and Udine, a journey which we expected to accomplish in a single day; but there were delays in re-crossing the Line of the Armistice and other and more serious delays in the mountains, caused by torrential rains which had in places washed out the road, so that it was already nightfall when, emerging from the gloomy defile of the Predil Pass, we saw before us the twinkling lights of the Alpini cantonment at Caporetto, that mountain hamlet of black memories where, in the summer of 1917, the Austro-German armies, aided by bad Italian generalship and Italian treachery, smashed through the Italian lines and forced them back in a headlong retreat which was checked only by the heroic stand on the Piave.
Bonaparte wooed the stupefied Carinthians with his softly worded proclamations, and his advancing columns were unharassed by the peasantry while he pushed farther on, capturing Klagenfurt, and seizing both Triest and Fiume, the only harbors on the Austrian shore. He then returned with the main body of his troops, and, crossing the pass of Tarvis, entered Germany at Villach.
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