country. We may picture to ourselves the fierce blows that, in such a
case, Frederick the Great would have rained on his assailants as he
wheeled round on their rear and turned their turning movements. With
Frederick matched against Napoleon, the Lech and the Danube would have
witnessed a very cyclone of war.

But Mack was not Frederick: and he had to do with a foe who speedily
made good an error. On October 13th, when Mack seemed about to cut off
the French from the Main, he received news through Napoleon's spies
that the English had effected a landing at Boulogne, and a revolution
had broken out in France. The tidings found easy entrance into a brain
that had a strange bias towards pleasing falsities and rejected
disagreeable facts. At once he leaped to the conclusion that the moves
of Soult, Murat, Lannes, Marmont, and Ney round his rear were merely
desperate efforts to cut back a way to Alsace. He therefore held fast
to his lines, made only feeble efforts to clear the northern road, and
despatched reinforcements to Memmingen. The next day brought other
news; that Memmingen had been invested by Soult; that Ney by a
brilliant dash across the Danube at Elchingen had routed an Austrian
division there, and was threatening Ulm from the north-east; and that
the other French columns were advancing from the south-east. Yet Mack,
still viewing these facts in the twilight of his own fancies, pictured
them as the efforts of despair, not as the drawing in of the hunter's
toils.

He was now almost alone in his reading of events. The Archduke
Ferdinand, though nominally in supreme command, had hitherto deferred
to Mack's age and experience, as the Emperor Francis enjoined. But he
now urged the need of instantly marching away to the north with all
available forces. Still Mack clung to his notion that it was the