complete; its attendant
imperious manner was suffered to develop but slowly. In Bonaparte was
perceptible, as Victor Hugo says, the shadowy outline of Napoleon.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Bassano and Arcola.

The Austrian System -- The Austrian Strategy -- Castiglione
-- French Gains -- Bassano -- The French in the Tyrol -- The
French Defeated in Germany -- Bonaparte and Alvinczy --
Austrian Successes -- Caldiero -- First Battle of Arcola --
Second Battle of Arcola.

[Sidenote: 1796.]

Meantime the end of July had come. The Emperor Francis had decided. At
the risk of defeat on the Rhine he must retain his Italian possessions
and prestige. He was still the Roman emperor, inheritor of an
immemorial dignity, overlord of the fairest lands in the peninsula.
Wurmser, considered by Austria her greatest general, had therefore
been recalled to Vienna from the west, and sent at the head of
twenty-five thousand fresh troops to collect the columns of Beaulieu's
army, which was scattered in the Tyrol. This done, he was to assume
the chief command, and advance to the relief of Mantua. The first part
of his task was successfully completed, and already, according to the
direction of the Aulic Council of the empire, and in pursuance of the
same hitherto universal but vicious system of cabinet campaigning
which Bonaparte had just repudiated, he was moving down from the Alps
in three columns with a total force of about forty-seven thousand men.
There were about fifteen thousand in the garrison of Mantua. Bonaparte
was much weaker, having only forty-two thousand, and of these some
eight thousand were occupied in the siege of that place. Wurmser was a
master of the old school, working like an automaton under the hand of
his government, and commanding according to well-worn precept his
well-equipped battalions, every soldier of which was a recruit so
costly that destructive battles were made as infrequent as possible,
because to fight many meant financial ruin. In consequence, like all
the best generals of his class, he made war as far as possible a
series of manoeuvers. Opposed to him was an emancipated genius with
neither directors nor public council to hamper him. In the tradition
of the Revolution, as in the mind of Frederick the Great, war was no
game, but a bloody decision, and the quicker the conclusion was tried
the better. The national conscription, under the hands of Dubois de
Crance, had secured men i