Napoleon III. now announced that the acts of Austria constituted a declaration of war on France, the ally of Sardinia. At once he set about organising his army for the Italian campaign. On the 4th of May his troops were entering the valley of the Po, along which lay the open way to Lombardy. On the 10th the Emperor himself left Paris for the seat of war, to command the allied armies in person. The news of Napoleon’s coming was enough to send Gyulaï back from the threatening movement which he had already made on Turin, the capital of Sardinia. Napoleon had not yet his artillery, but the Austrian commander did not know the essential weakness and confusion of the forces that were coming to meet him. Until the battle of Magenta, when consistent and energetic measures were already too late, the Austrian movements were a strange alternation of forward marches leading to no decisive action, and of hasty and fatiguing retreats when no enemy pursued. General Gyulaï’s mind in the matter is now known. He was continually urged from Vienna, and afterwards from Verona, in Italy, where the Austrian Emperor had placed himself to direct the campaign, to push forward with his numerous, well-drilled, and well-equipped troops, and take the offensive. He himself was beset with fears that the enemy might pass him by and take Lombardy unprotected. He was not reassured when a division of his army in the north had succeeded in driving the free bands of Garibaldi to the very edge of the neutral Swiss territory. He gradually drew back to the region where the river Ticino, in its lower course, separated Lombardy from Sardinia. There he gave all his attention to concentrating his forces around the strong defensive positions which he had already prepared. But all this gave time to the French army to perfect its order and equipment, and to concentrate its own strength in line with the Sardinian troops. Such was the general situation of things on the 1st of June, when Napoleon was directing the main body of the allied troops along the great highway leading to Milan, the capital of Lombardy, only twenty miles beyond the Ticino. On that day Gyulaï again retreated with all his forces, leaving the astonished French Emperor free to enter Novara. Napoleon could not believe that the Austrians would long delay their attack. On both sides the service of scouts was so ill-organised that neither commander had any clear idea of the other’s strength and position.