obvious. If the war had begun,
Ratisbon was too near the Austrian frontier for a point of assembly, as
the corps might thus be thrown separately into the midst of two hundred
thousand enemies; but by fixing upon Ulm as the point of rendezvous the
army would be concentrated sooner, or, at any rate, the enemy would have
five or six marches more to make before reaching-it,--which was a
highly-important consideration as the parties were then situated.

No great talent was needed to understand this. Hostilities having
commenced, however, but a few days after Berthier's arrival at Munich,
this too celebrated chief of staff was so foolish as to adhere to a
literal obedience of the order he had received, without conceiving its
obvious intention: he not only desired the army to assemble at Ratisbon,
but even obliged Davoust to return toward that city, when that marshal
had had the good sense to fall back from Amberg toward Ingolstadt.

Napoleon, having, by good fortune, been informed by telegraph of the
passage of the Inn twenty-four hours after its occurrence, came with the
speed of lightning to Abensberg, just as Davoust was on the point of
being surrounded and his army cut in two or scattered by a mass of one
hundred and eighty thousand enemies. We know how wonderfully Napoleon
succeeded in rallying his army, and what victories he gained on the
glorious days of Abensberg, Siegberg, Landshut, Eckmuehl, and Ratisbon,
that repaired the faults committed by his chief of staff with his
contemptible logistics.

We shall finish these illustrations with a notice of the events which
preceded and were simultaneous with the passage of the Danube before the
battle of Wagram. The measures taken to bring to a specified point of
the island of Lobau the corps of the Viceroy of Italy from Hungary, that
of Marmont from Styria, that of Bernadotte from Linz, are less wonderful
than the famous imperial decree of thirty-one articles which regulated
the details of the passage and the formation of the troops in the plains
of Enzersdorf, in presence of one hundred and forty thousand Austrians
and five hundred cannon, as if the operation had been a military _fete_.
These masses were all assembled upon the island on the evening of the
4th of July; three bridges were immediately thrown over an arm of the
Danube one hundred and fifty yards wide, on a very dark night and amidst
torrents of rain; one hundred and fifty thousand men passed over the
bridges