Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
joined them.
At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
who was in command of all this French “Army of the North,” was killed,
and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg’s
threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg’s
that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.
Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg’s. The
Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.
Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Condé was the first
object of its attention. Upon July 10 Condé fell. Meanwhile Custine had
been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
at Coburg’s disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
him, though not seriously annoying him.
This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day’s march
distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general’s march
failed. The distance was too much for his troops in the hot summer
weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
Scarpe and save their army intact.
The Duke of York’s talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
failures.
Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.
At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
understand what follows.
The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
earlier part of this book. The action of the Paris Radicals against the
Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, Nîmes, and other
great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Condé
and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
two dates, the fall of Condé and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Condé,
was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.
The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
will therefore summarise the general position of the internal danger
thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
failed--but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
murder of Marat by a Norman woman.
There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
Condé and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.
The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
consider it here also.
The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee which the wisdom
of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-André, who was for
the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of “all
upon one throw.”
It must be remembered that Carnot’s success did not lie in any
revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
when he becomes a soldier;--and he made use of this understanding of
his.
It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.
The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence so
secure--especially after the fall of Valenciennes--that the English
proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg’s and to
secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
commander-in-chief of the Allies.
That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
future successes.
The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
Condé have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
to the sea.
It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
upon the extreme north and west of the line which the French were
attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
disaster.
[Illustration: Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
1793.]
Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
through it.
Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.
The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
to put into line, and marching against such wretched defences as those
of Dunquerque then were, the Duke’s army had not a perfectly easy task
before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.
It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
history backward from future events.
Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
Duke of York’s command had shown throughout the campaign.[6] From
Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day’s march: it took the Duke of York
four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
army proceeded after this purposeless and unfruitful skirmish to the
neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
following sketch map.
[Illustration: Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.]
The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
had with the greatest ease brushed the French posts--mainly of
volunteers--from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
Dunquerque.
Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.
Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.
Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
it covers are each a wing of one combined body; each communicates with
the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
marshy country--the “meres” which the map indicates--yet a junction
between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.
A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
completed. But more important--and never yet explained--was the
Austrians’ abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
longer possible between the Duke of York’s and Freytag’s territories,
and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.
They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
the number was--it was four times as great as Freytag’s now isolated
force--Houchard’s command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
Houchard’s lieutenant upon the right.
It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
fighting and force for force, Houchard’s command found nothing to
encourage it during these first operations.
The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
but an object hardly to be attained.
What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.
The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
and escaped destruction.
The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
make for military success.
Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
opposite him intact.
Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
news from that more important point of the frontier--the direct line of
Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
months before, and Condé also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and the news of that
capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
Coburg marched upon it at once.
Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.
The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
were terse: “Your head shall answer for Maubeuge.” After the receipt of
that message no more came through the lines.
The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended. At risk of
oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
done[7]--and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
Carnot’s genius.
In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
despotically “requisitioned” men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.
Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard’s
command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
understand how the Revolution succeeded.
[Illustration: The rapid eight days’ concentration in front of Maubeuge.
October 1783.]
A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
parallel road, with a similar time table. From the other end of his
line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
day’s march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.
The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
succourable--and it was a question of hours.
Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand
from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
the whole line.
A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
where the French had suffered most the day before.
Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day’s
furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
been rolled up in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
fortress.
Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
wars.
Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
understanding was lacking. The disarrayed “Army of the Rhine” was got
into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers’ battle,
determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
little to turn the tide of the war.
Meanwhile the news had come in that the last of the serious internal
rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
The last confused horde of La Vendée had been driven from the walls of
Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
of Lower Brittany and of Vendée, but the danger to the State and to the
Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its Cæsar, the
Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.
The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side were
perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies--in Alsace they
had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.