he object of highest
importance. At St. Pierre all semblance of a road disappeared.
Thenceforth an army, horse and foot, laden with all the munitions of a
campaign, a park of forty field-pieces included, were to be urged up and
along airy ridges of rock and eternal snow, where the goatherd, the
hunter of the chamois, and the outlaw-smuggler are alone accustomed to
venture; amidst precipices where to slip a foot is death; beneath
glaciers from which the percussion of a musket-shot is often sufficient
to hurl an avalanche; across bottomless chasms caked over with frost or
snow-drift; and breathing

"The difficult air of the iced mountain top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite."[34]

The transport of the artillery and ammunition was the most difficult
point; and to this, accordingly, the Chief Consul gave his personal
superintendence. The guns were dismounted, grooved into the trunks of
trees hollowed out so as to suit each calibre, and then dragged on by
sheer strength of muscle--not less than an hundred soldiers being
sometimes harnessed to a single cannon. The carriages and wheels, being
taken to pieces, were slung on poles, and borne on men's shoulders. The
powder and shot, packed into boxes of fir-wood, formed the lading of all
the mules that could be collected over a wide range of the Alpine
country. These preparations had been made during the week that elapsed
between Buonaparte's arrival at Geneva and the commencement of Lannes's
march. He himself travelled sometimes on a mule, but mostly on foot,
cheering on the soldiers who had the burden of the great guns. The
fatigue undergone is not to be described. The men in front durst not
halt to breathe, because the least stoppage there might have thrown the
column behind into confusion, on the brink of deadly precipices; and
those in the rear had to flounder knee deep, through snow and ice
trampled into sludge by the feet and hoofs of the preceding divisions.
Happily the march of Napoleon was not harassed, like that of Hannibal,
by the assaults of living enemies. The mountaineers, on the contrary,
flocked in to reap the liberal rewards which he offered to all who were
willing to lighten the drudgery of his troops.

On the 16th of May Napoleon slept at the convent of St. Maurice; and, in
the course of the four following days, the whole army passed the Great
St. Bernard. It was on the 20th that Buonaparte himsel