Milan.
Argenteau's attack partly succeeded: but the stubborn bravery of a
French detachment checked it before the redoubt which commanded the
southern prolongation of the heights named Monte-Legino.[41]

Such was the position of affairs when Bonaparte hurried up. On the
following day (April 12th), massing the French columns of attack
under cover of an early morning mist, he moved them to their
positions, so that the first struggling rays of sunlight revealed to
the astonished Austrians the presence of an army ready to crush their
front and turn their flanks. For a time the Imperialists struggled
bravely against the superior forces in their front; but when Massena
pressed round their right wing, they gave way and beat a speedy
retreat to save themselves from entire capture. Bonaparte took no
active share in the battle: he was, very properly, intent on the wider
problem of severing the Austrians from their allies, first by the
turning movement of Massena, and then by pouring other troops into the
gap thus made. In this he entirely succeeded. The radical defects in
the Austrian dispositions left them utterly unable to withstand the
blows which he now showered upon them. The Sardinians were too far
away on the west to help Argenteau in his hour of need: they were in
and beyond Ceva, intent on covering the road to Turin: whereas, as
Napoleon himself subsequently wrote, they should have been near enough
to their allies to form one powerful army, which, at Dego or
Montenotte, would have defended both Turin and Milan. "United, the two
forces would have been superior to the French army: separated, they
were lost."

The configuration of the ground favoured Bonaparte's plan of driving
the Imperialists down the valley of the Bormida in a north-easterly
direction; and the natural desire of a beaten general to fall back
towards his base of supplies also impelled Beaulieu and Argenteau to
retire towards Milan. But that would sever their connections with the
Sardinians, whose base of supplies, Turin, lay in a north-westerly
direction.

Bonaparte therefore hurled his forces at once against the Austrians
and a Sardinian contingent at Millesimo, and defeated them, Augereau's
division cutting off the retreat of twelve hundred of their men under
Provera. Weakened by this second blow, the allies fell back on the
intrenched village of Dego. Their position was of a strength
proportionate to its strategic importance; for its loss would
co