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Updated: May 10, 2025
For instance, the march of Napoleon by the Saint-Bernard to fall upon the communications of Mélas, those made in 1805 by Donauwerth to cut off Mack, and in 1806 by Gera to turn the Prussians, the march of Suwaroff from Turin to the Trebbia to meet Macdonald, that of the Russian army on Taroutin, then upon Krasnoi, were decisive operations, not because of their relation to Logistics, but on account of their strategic relations.
"But," interrupted Bonaparte bitterly, "this is an apology you are making for yourself." "Be it so. I will divide my discourse into two parts. The first will be a contestable apology; the second an array of incontestable facts. I will set aside the apology and proceed to facts. June 17 and 18, the battle of the Trebbia.
In the case of the Trebbia, which rises high in the Apennines and empties into the Po at Piacenza, it was otherwise, that river rolling pebbles and coarse gravel into the channel of the principal stream.
But those young generals of the Republic and the Empire were sometimes found unequal to the work of contending against the old generals of the Coalitionists. Suvaroff was in his seventieth year when he defeated Macdonald at the Battle of the Trebbia, the Frenchman being but thirty-four; and a few months later he defeated Joubert, who was thirty, at Novi.
Macdonald wished to fight without Moreau; he crossed the Trebbia, attacked the enemy, was defeated and retreated to Modena. June 20, battle of Tortona; Moreau defeated the Austrian Bellegarde. July 22, surrender of the citadel of Alexandria to the Austro-Russians. So far the scale turns to defeat. July 30, surrender of Mantua, another check.
A man looking over Carthage Bay, especially a man looking at those sodden pools that were the sound harbours of Carthage, might be in an uninhabited world; and the loop of the Trebbia is the same, and the edge of Fontenoy; and even here in England that hillside looking south up which the Normans charged at Battle is a quiet and a drowsy sort of place.... So it was here in Flanders.
This success was followed by the arrival of Melas from Vienna, of Bellegarde from the Tyrol, and lastly, by that of the Russian vanguard under Suwarow, who took the chief command and beat the whole of the French forces in Italy; Moreau, at Cassano and Marengo, in May; Macdonald, on his advance from Lower Italy, on the Trebbia, in June; and finally, Joubert, in the great battle of Novi, in which Joubert was killed, August the 15th, 1799.
Suvaroff got between them and, after three days' hard fighting, from the 17th to the 19th of June, inflicted a second severe defeat on the French, at La Trebbia. These reverses shattered the whole French domination of Italy; their armies were defeated, their vassal republics sank, that of Naples under horrible conditions of royalist reprisal and massacre.
That of Moreau in 1796, which was magnified in importance by party spirit, was creditable, but not at all extraordinary. The retreat of Lecourbe from Engadin to Altorf, and that of Macdonald by Pontremoli after the defeat of the Trebbia, as also that of Suwaroff from the Muttenthal to Chur, were glorious feats of arms, but partial in character and of short duration.
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