at St. Helena" he summed up his
convictions respecting the Peninsula in this statesmanlike utterance:
"Italy, isolated within its natural limits, separated by the sea and
by very high mountains from the rest of Europe, seems called to be a
great and powerful nation.... Unity in manners, language, literature
ought finally, in a future more or less remote, to unite its
inhabitants under a single government.... Rome is beyond doubt the
capital which the Italians will one day choose." A prophetic saying:
it came from a man who, as conqueror and organizer, awakened that
people from the torpor of centuries and breathed into it something of
his own indomitable energy.

And then again, the Austrian possessions south of the Alps were
difficult to hold for purely military reasons. They were separated
from Vienna by difficult mountain ranges through which armies
struggled with difficulty. True, Mantua was a formidable stronghold,
but no fortress could make the Milanese other than a weak and
straggling territory, the retention of which by the Court of Vienna
was a defiance to the gospel of nature of which Rousseau was the
herald and Bonaparte the militant exponent.

The Austro-Sardinian forces were now occupying the pass which
separates the Apennines from the Maritime Alps north of the town of
Savona. They were accordingly near the headwaters of the Bormida and
the Tanaro, two of the chief affluents of the River Po: and roads
following those river valleys led, the one north-east, in the
direction of Milan, the other north-west towards Turin, the Sardinian
capital. A wedge of mountainous country separated these roads as they
diverged from the neighbourhood of Montenotte. Here obviously was the
vulnerable point of the Austro-Sardinian position. Here therefore
Bonaparte purposed to deliver his first strokes, foreseeing that,
should he sever the allies, he would have in his favour every
advantage both political and topographical.

All this was possible to a commander who could overcome the initial
difficulties. But these difficulties were enormous. The position of
the French Army of Italy in March, 1796, was precarious. Its
detachments, echelonned near the coast from Savona to Loano, and
thence to Nice, or inland to the Col di Tende, comprised in all
42,000 men, as against the Austro-Sardinian forces amounting to
52,000 men.[36] Moreover, the allies occupied strong positions on the
northern slopes of the Maritime Alps and Apennine