stature, weight, education, or morals
since the closing years of the Thirty Years' War. The roads were
somewhat better, the conformation of mountains, hills, and valleys was
better known, and like his great predecessors, though unlike his
contemporaries, Bonaparte knew the use of a map; but in the main
little was changed in the conditions for moving and manoeuvering
troops. News traveled slowly, the semaphore telegraph was but slowly
coming into use, and the fastest couriers rode from Nice to Paris or
from Paris to Berlin in seven days. Firearms of every description were
little improved: Prussia actually claimed that she had been forced to
negotiate for peace because France controlled the production of
gun-flints. The forging of cannon was finer, and the artillery arm was
on the whole more efficient. In France there had been considerable
change for the better in the manual and in tactics; the rest of Europe
followed the old and more formal ways. Outside the republic, ceremony
still held sway in court and camp; youthful energy was stifled in
routine; and the generals opposed to Bonaparte were for the most part
men advanced in years, wedded to tradition, and incapable of quickly
adapting their ideas to meet advances and attacks based on conceptions
radically different from their own. It was at times a positive misery
to the new conqueror that his opponents were such inefficient fossils.
Young and at the same time capable; using the natural advantages of
his territory to support the bravery of his troops; with a mind which
was not only accurate and decisive, but comprehensive in its
observations; unhampered by control or by principle; opposed to
generals who could not think of a boy of twenty-six as their equal;
with the best army and the finest theater of war in Europe; finally,
with a genius independently developed, and with conceptions of his
profession which summarized the experience of his greatest
predecessors, Bonaparte performed feats that seemed miraculous even
when compared with those of Hoche, Jourdan, or Moreau, which had
already so astounded the world.

Within eleven days the Austrians and Sardinians were separated, the
latter having been defeated and forced to sign an armistice. After a
rest of two days, a fortnight saw him victorious in Lombardy, and
entering Milan as a conqueror. Two weeks elapsed, and again he set
forth to reduce to his sway in less than a month the most of central
Italy. Against an enemy