LITMIR.BIZ

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Austrian field marshal baron de Colli. Beside them stood 35,000 Austrians under the seventy-one-year-old Field Marshal de Beaulieu, a Belgian by birth. His troops were disciplined, well-trained, steady and motivated, but they were used to set-piece battles and methodical manoeuvres, which would disadvantage them in the tight valleys and boulder-strewn terrain on which they were to fight.

      Bonaparte’s orders were to stage a diversion that would tie down the maximum number of Austrian forces in Italy while the two stronger French armies poised on the Rhine defeated the main Austrian army in Germany and marched on Vienna. But he did not think like a soldier content merely to carry out the task he had been set. He believed that as long as the Habsburgs remained dominant in Italy they would present a threat to France, and that the centuries-old rivalry between the two states for hegemony over the peninsula should be resolved. He had studied the various Franco-Austrian wars over Italy, most recently Marshal Maillebois’ campaigns of 1745–46. He had pored over maps of the area during the past two years, becoming familiar with the lie of the land and making mental notes of which passes were practicable by artillery, where rivers could be forded, and which were the possible lines of advance and retreat not only for his own army but for the enemy as well. He meant to wipe out the threat to France by expelling the Austrians from Italy.

      One weapon in this struggle would be the nascent Italian national movement, which identified the Austrians as oppressors. Many of the nationalists were living in exile in Nice, and Bonaparte held meetings with them. He did not think much of those he met, and had a poor opinion of Italians in general, but he decided to take 150 of them, led by Filippo Buonarroti, along with him. On 31 March he issued a proclamation to the people of Piedmont announcing that the French nation would shortly liberate them.10

      The following day his divisions were on the move. On 4 April he set up headquarters at Albenga, where he heard of the death of his friend Chauvet in Genoa. Collot was shocked by the apparent indifference with which Bonaparte received the news, merely instructing him to take over. Here and on similar occasions he made a show of calm, even brash self-control, hiding the emotional turmoil that comes through in his letters, particularly to Josephine. ‘Not a day has passed without my writing to you, not a night has passed without me pressing you in my arms, I have not drunk a cup of tea without cursing the desire for glory and the ambition which keep me far from the soul of my life,’ he had written from Nice, complaining that her letters were scarce and cold, and that in contrast to his soldiers, only she withheld her trust and remained ‘the joy and the torment’ of his life.11

      To her, he poured out his despair at the news of Chauvet’s death. ‘What is the future? What is the past? What are we?’ he questioned, wondering at the purpose of life, and ‘what magical fluid shrouds us and conceals all that we should most want to know?’ But this was no time to brood, and he must think only of the army. Two days later he wrote to her in more passionate vein, telling of his burning desire for her and sending her a kiss on a point of her body ‘lower than the heart, much, much lower’.12

      On 9 April Bonaparte transferred to Savona as his three corps took up their positions, with Masséna on the right, Augereau in the centre and Sérurier to their left. But it was the Austrians who struck first. Beaulieu had misinterpreted a French reconnaissance along the coast as the vanguard of an attack on Genoa, and, assuming that the whole French army would be following, decided to drive in its flank through Montenotte and Monte Legino. His attack on what he assumed to be the French flank ran head-on into the units at Monte Legino preparing to attack.13

      Bonaparte had intended to strike at the gap where the Alps ended and the Apennines began, which was the juncture between the Sardinians and their Austrian allies. While Sérurier pinned down the Sardinians frontally and Augereau turned their flank at Millesimo, Masséna was to move into the gap between the two armies. Bonaparte calculated that if he inserted a wedge between the two and prised them apart, strategic imperatives would force the Sardinians to fall back in a northerly direction towards their base at Turin and the Austrians to retreat eastwards towards theirs at Milan. He would then be able to defeat them separately. His studies had convinced him that it was superior numbers that won battles, and that the art of war could be reduced to the one principle of bringing greater forces to bear at a given point.14

      As they sheltered from the torrential rain that night, planning to renew their attack the next morning, the Austrians at Monte Legino were unaware that, quickly appraising the situation, Bonaparte had ordered Masséna to veer right and make a forced march through the night to Montenotte in their rear. ‘Everything suggests that today and tomorrow will go down in history,’ Berthier wrote to Masséna with his latest orders.15

      The following morning, as the Austrian commander was about to push home his attack, the dispersing mist revealed Masséna’s divisions deploying on his flank and rear. Coming under simultaneous attack from two sides, he ordered a retreat which quickly turned into a rout. It had been little more than a skirmish, with Austrian losses in dead, wounded and prisoners around 2,700 and the French no more than a hundred, but Bonaparte accorded it the status of a full-scale battle. In his self-aggrandising report to the Directory, he claimed that the main Austrian force commanded by Beaulieu himself was involved, that it had lost up to 4,000 men and ‘several’ flags (in fact only one was captured), and blew the event up to epic proportions. His order of the day to the troops echoed this, praising them for their glorious exploit. It was the first brush-stroke of what was to be a masterpiece of mendacity.16

      Beaulieu had in fact spent the day several kilometres away, sitting badly bruised by a roadside while his escort struggled to repair the carriage that had pitched him to the ground. He had realised his mistake too late and had lost valuable time, which Bonaparte was not going to let him regain. He urged Augereau, most of whose men were still marching without boots, and many without muskets, to hasten his attack on Millesimo, and Masséna to strike further into the Austrian rear at Dego. Once Augereau had accomplished his task, he was to swing left and begin to roll up the extremity of the Sardinian line.

      Bonaparte needed to keep up the momentum so that neither of his opponents had time to regroup and strike back; if they did, he would be caught between two fires. He therefore reacted violently to any apparent hitch. After Augereau had sent the Sardinians reeling at Millesimo, one force of about 1,000 men under General Provera had ensconced themselves in an old fortress at Cosseria. Knowing them to have no more supplies or water than those they carried, Augereau meant to leave a few hundred men to pin them down and take their inevitable surrender while he went after the retreating main body of Sardinians. But Bonaparte insisted he storm Cosseria. In the ensuing assault the French suffered heavy losses from the Sardinians sniping from the battlements. Provera offered to capitulate, but Bonaparte tried to bully him into unconditional surrender, threatening to take no prisoners, and ordered Augereau to attack once more. This attack proved as futile as the first. Provera duly surrendered the next morning, having lost no more than 150 men, while Bonaparte’s impatience had cost the French at least 600 and possibly as many as 1,000 casualties. He did have the good grace to admit his mistake and express regret.17

      To Augereau’s right, Masséna attacked the citadel of Dego, where over the next two days some of the most serious fighting took place, with the citadel changing hands several times. After the final assault, which he directed himself, Bonaparte promoted a young chef de bataillon named Lannes whose dash had caught his attention.

      On 16 April Bonaparte learned that Beaulieu was retreating to Acqui on the road to Milan; his plan had worked. He ordered Masséna to move northwards against the Sardinians. Colli’s dwindling force was falling back in order to defend Turin. It fought doggedly, inflicting heavy losses on the French, but on 21 April, after a brief defence it had to abandon its base and stores at Mondovi. That evening the King of Sardinia,

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