29. The plan of the Aulic Council was, in the north to force the passage of the Moselle, carry the war into Flanders, and rescue that flourishing province from the grasp of the Republicans. For this purpose they had brought the greater mass of their forces to the Lower Rhine. On the Upper, they pro

dispensable to the public safety; and the Aulic Council repaid his achievements by the appointment of the Archduke Charles to the command of the armies on the Rhine- -a step which, however ill deserved by his gallant predecessor, was soon justified by the great military abilities of the young prince. 28. The forces of the contending par-posed to lay siege to Landau, and, havties on the Rhine were nearly equal; but the Imperialists had a great superiority in the number and quality of their cavalry. On the Upper Rhine, Moreau commanded seventy thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry; while Wurmser, who was opposed to him, had sixty-two thousand foot and twenty-two thousand horse; but before this campaign was far advanced, thirty thousand men were detached from this army to reinforce the broken troops of Beaulieu in Italy. On the Lower Rhine, the Archduke was at the head of seventy-one thousand infantry and twenty-one thousand cavalry; while the army of the Sambre and Meuse, under Jourdan, numbered sixty-eight thousand of the former arm, and eleven thousand of the latter. The disproportion between the numerical strength on the opposite sides, therefore, was not considerable; but the superiority of the Germans in the number and quality of their horse gave them a great advantage in an open country, both in profiting by success and arresting disaster. This advantage, however, was more than compensated to the French by their possession of the fortresses on the Rhine, the true base of offensive operations in Germany. They held the fortresses of Luxemburg, Thionville, Metz, and Saarelouis which rendered the centre of their position almost unassailable; their right was covered by Huningen, New Brisach, and the fortresses of Alsace, and their left by Maestricht, Juliers, and the iron barrier of the Netherlands; while the Austrians had no fortified point whatever to support either of their wings. This want, in a war of invasion, is of incalculable importance; and the event soon proved that the fortresses of the Rhine are not less valuable as a base for offensive, than as a barrier to support defensive operations.

ing driven the Republicans over the mountains on the west of the valley of the Rhine, blockade Strassburg. But for some reason, which has never been divulged, they remained in a state of inactivity until the end of May; while Beaulieu, with fifty thousand men, was striving in vain to resist the torrent of Napoleon's conquests in Lombardy. The consequences of this delay proved fatal to the whole campaign. Hardly was the armistice denounced in the end of May, when an order arrived to Wurmser to detach twenty-five thousand of his best troops by the Tyrolese Alps into Italy--a deduction which, by necessarily reducing the Imperialists on the Upper Rhine to the defensive, rendered it hardly possible for the Archduke to push forward the other army towards the Moselle. There still remained, however, one hundred and fifty thousand Imperialists on the frontiers of Germany, including above forty thousand superb cavalry-a force which, if earlier brought into action, and placed under one leader, might have changed the fate of the war. The French inferiority in horse was compensated by a superiority of twenty thousand footsoldiers. The Austrians had the immense advantage of possessing two fortified places, Mayence and Mannheim, on the Rhine, which gave them the means of debouching with equal facility on either side of that stream; while the Republicans only held a tête-de-pont at Düsseldorf, so far removed to the north as to be of little service in commencing operations. The events of this strug gle demonstrate, in the most striking manner, the great importance of early success in war, and by what a necessary chain of consequences an inconsiderable advantage at first often determines the fate of a campaign. A single victory gained by the Austrians on the

Saare or the Moselle would have com- | formity with this design, KLEBER,* on pelled the French armies to break up, the 30th May, crossed the Rhine at Düsin order to garrison the frontier towns; seldorf, and, with twenty-five thousand and the Directory, to defend its own men, began to press the Austrians on territories, would have been obliged to the Sieg, where the Archduke had only arrest the career of Napoleon in the twenty thousand-the great bulk of his Italian plains; while, by taking the ini- army, sixty thousand strong, being on tiative, and carrying the war into Ger- the left bank, in front of Mayence. many, they were enabled to leave their fortresses defenceless, and swell, by the garrisons of these, the invading force, which soon proved so perilous to the Austrian monarchy.

30. The plan of the Republicans was to move forward the army of the Sambre and Meuse by Düsseldorf, to the right bank of the Rhine, in order to threaten the communication of the Archduke with Germany, induce him to recross it, and facilitate the passage of the upper part of the stream by Moreau. In con

31. The Republicans succeeded in defeating the advanced posts of the Imperialists, crossed the Sieg, turned the position of Ukerath, and drove them back to Altenkirchen. There the Austrians stood firm, and a severe action took place. General NEY, with a body of light troops, turned their left, and threatened their communications; while Kleber, having advanced through the hills of Weyersbusch, assailed their front; and SOULT+ menaced their reserve at Kropach. The result of these sideration, and elevated him to the rank of adjutant-major, in which capacity he acted for some time under General Custine. When that officer was brought to trial, he had the courage to do what in those days required stronger nerves than to face a battery of cannon-to give evidence in his favour. The known vehemence of his Republican principles preserved him from the destruction which otherwise would have awaited him for that courageous act; and he was soon after sent as general of brigade to La Vendée, where his talents and intrepidity were experienced with fatal effect by the Royalist forces. His able conduct mainly contributed to the vic. tories of Chollet, Mans, and Savenay, which

* Jean Baptiste Kleber was born at Strassburg in 1754. His father was a domestic in the service of Cardinal Rohan, who became so notorious in connection with the affair of the diamond necklace; and he was at first destined for the profession of an architect, for which he evinced a considerable turn. One day at Paris, when pursuing his studies, he saw two foreigners insulted by some young men in a coffee-house; he took their part, and extricated them from the attack: in return, they offered to take him with them to Munich, to which city they belonged, and place him in the Military Academy there. The offer was too tempting to be resisted; the study of architecture was exchanged for the career of arms; and such was the pro-proved so fatal to the Vendean cause. gress made by the young student in his mili-having made a triumphant entry into Nantes, tary studies, that General Kaunitz, son of the and in effect finished the war, he was removed celebrated minister of the same name, invited from his command, in consequence of the unhim to Vienna, and soon after gave him a disguised manner in which he expressed his commission as sub-lieutenant in his regi- abhorrence of the sanguinary cruelties with ment. He remained in the Austrian service which the Committee of Public Salvation defrom 1776 to 1785, and made his first essay in solated the country after the contest was over. arms against the Turks; but, disgusted at His unrestrained freedom of speech long prelength with a service in which promotion was vented Kleber's promotion, as it does in every awarded only to birth, he resigned his com- age that of really great men. Every governmission, returned to France, resumed his ment, monarchical, aristocratic, or republiprofession of an architect, and obtained the can, seeks for pliant talent, not lofty intelsituation of inspector of public edifices at Bélect. The disasters of the Republic, however, fort, which he held for six years.

After

at length rendered his employment indisThe Revolution, however, called him to pensable, and he received a command as genvery different destinies. In a revolt at Béfort, eral of division, in which capacity he bore in 1791, he espoused the cause of the popu- a part in the battle of Fleurus, and in all the lace, whom he headed, and defeated the regi- subsequent operations of the army of the ment of Royal-Louis, which strove to sup- Sambre and Meuse in 1795, down to the crosspress the tumult. This incident determined ing of the Rhine by Jourdan in spring 1796. his future career: retreat was impossible; he-Biog. Univ. xxii. 460, 462 (KLEBER). had now no chance of safety but in advancing with the Revolution. In 1792 he entered as a private into a regiment of volunteers of the Upper Rhine, in which his lofty stature, martial air, fearless demeanour, and previous acquaintance with war, soon gained him con

Jean de Dieu Soult, afterwards Marshal of France and Duke of Dalmatia, was born at St Amans, in the department of Tarn, on the 29th March 1769, just a month before his great rival Wellington, and in the same year with Lannes, Ney, and so many others of the

had commenced offensive operations. | ministering the affairs of some emiThis great general, born in 1763, at grants, who, but for his probity, would Morlaix, in Brittany, was the son of a have lost their all. This tragic event respectable advocate in that town, and confirmed his son in the repugnance had been originally bred to the bar. which he already felt for the atrocities While yet engaged in that profession of the Jacobins, and determined him to he was appointed Prévot-de-droit at devote himself exclusively to the career Rennes, in which situation his solid of arms. He commanded the right wing talents, great acquirements, and cour- of Pichegru's army in the winter camteous manners, gave him an entire as-paign of 1794, which procured for the cendant over the students of law in Republicans the possession of Holland. that provincial capital, who styled him When that general was transferred from in 1787, on occasion of its contest with the scene of his Batavian triumphs to the the crown, "General of the Parliament." command of the army of the Rhine and Tempering at the same time prudence Moselle, Moreau received the command with firmness, he succeeded in calming in chief of the army of Holland; and, the effervescence of the young men, by the wisdom and justice of his adand subduing a revolt which otherwise ministration, attracted universal esteern might have been attended with serious-the more so, as it exhibited such a consequences. When the Revolution broke out, he organised a company of artillery volunteers, of which he was elected captain. Weary of pacific service, and finding the legal profession wholly destroyed by the public convulsions, he solicited a situation in 1792, in the gendarmerie or mounted police. Happily his application was unsuccessful; and, having soon after enlisted in a regiment of the line, he made his début in war under Dumourier, in the campaign of Flanders in 1793. His intelligence and sagacity speedily occasioned his promotion: he was raised by the suffrages of the soldiers to the rank of colonel; before the end of the campaign he was a brigadier-general: and in the following year, on the recommendation of Pichegru, he was appointed general of division, and intrusted with an important command in the maritime districts of Flanders. There, after various lesser successes, he succeeded in planting the Republican standards on the important fort of Ecluse on the Scheldt.

34. At the moment that Moreau was rendering these important services to France, the Jacobins of Brest sent his father to the scaffold. That respectable old man, who, by his beneficence to the unfortunate in Morlaix, where he resided, had gained the surname of the "Father of the Poor," had excited the jealousy of the Revolutionists in his province, by his humanity in ad

contrast to the universal rapacity and shameless extortions of the commissioners of the Convention. After the dismissal of Pichegru from the command of the army in Alsace, in the winter of 1795, he was appointed his successor; and two traits of his conduct in that campaign, overlooked in the whirl of its important events, deserve to be recorded, as marking at once the probity and generosity of his character. When compelled to retreat by the admirable skill of the Archduke Charles from the heart of Bavaria to the Upper Rhine, he preferred forcing his way sword in hand through the defiles of the Black Forest, occupied by the enemy, to violating the neutrality of the Swiss territory near the lake of Constance, which would have given him the means of a bloodless retreat. And when his rival, Napoleon, was hard pressed by the Austrians under Alvinzi in Italy, he detached a corps across the Tyrolese Alps to reinforce him, sufficient again to chain victory to the standards of the Army of Italy. "O Moreau !" said Carnot, on hearing of this- "O my dear Fabius, how great you were in that circumstance! how superior to the wretched rivalries of generals, which so often cause the bestlaid enterprises to miscarry !”

35. Moreau was the most consummate general who appeared in the French armies in that age of glory. Without the eagle glance or vehe