to the victorious
republicans.

It is needless to describe the remaining stages in Bonaparte's
campaign against Austria. Hitherto he had contended against fairly
good, though discontented and discouraged troops, badly led, and
hampered by the mountain barrier which separated them from their real
base of operations. In the last part of the war he fought against
troops demoralized by an almost unbroken chain of disasters. The
Austrians were now led by a brave and intelligent general, the
Archduke Charles; but he was hampered by rigorous instructions from
Vienna, by senile and indolent generals, by the indignation or despair
of the younger officers at the official favouritism which left them in
obscurity, and by the apathy of soldiers who had lost heart. Neither
his skill nor the natural strength of their positions in Friuli and
Carinthia could avail against veterans flushed with victory and
marshalled with unerring sagacity. The rest of the war only served to
emphasize the truth of Napoleon's later statement, that the moral
element constitutes three-fourths of an army's strength. The barriers
offered by the River Tagliamento and the many commanding heights of
the Carnic and the Noric Alps were as nothing to the triumphant
republicans; and from the heights that guard the province of Styria,
the genius of Napoleon flashed as a terrifying portent to the Court of
Vienna and the potentates of Central Europe. When the tricolour
standards were nearing the town of Leoben, the Emperor Francis sent
envoys to sue for peace;[72] and the preliminaries signed there,
within one hundred miles of the Austrian capital, closed the campaign
which a year previously had opened with so little promise for the
French on the narrow strip of land between the Maritime Alps and the
petty township of Savona.

These brilliant results were due primarily to the consummate
leadership of Bonaparte. His geographical instincts discerned the
means of profiting by natural obstacles and of turning them when they
seemed to screen his opponents. Prompt to divine their plans, he
bewildered them by the audacity of his combinations, which overbore
their columns with superior force at the very time when he seemed
doomed to succumb. Genius so commanding had not been displayed even by
Frederick or Marlborough. And yet these brilliant results could not
have been achieved by an army which rarely exceeded 45,000 men without
the strenuous bravery and tactical skill of