On her part, Austria, no longer fettered by allied contingents nor by the expenses of a far distant campaign, could put forth more strength than on former campaigns, and as war came nearer home and the citizen saw himself threatened by "revolutionizing" and devastating armies, he ceased to hamper or to swindle the troops. Thus the duel took place on the grandest scale then known in the history of European armies. Apart from the secondary theatre of Italy, the area embraced in the struggle was a vast triangle extending from Dusseldorf to Basel and thence to Ratisbon, and Carnot sketched the outlines in accordance with the scale of the picture. He imagined nothing less than the union of the armies of the Rhine and the Riviera before the walls of Vienna. Its practicability cannot here be discussed, but it is worth contrasting the attitude of contemporaries and of later strategical theorists towards it. The former, with their empirical knowledge of war, merely thought it impracticable with the available means, but the latter have condemned it root and branch as "an operation on exterior lines." Jourdan and Moreau. The scheme took shape only gradually. The first advance was made partly in search of food, partly to disengage the Palatinate, which Clerfayt had conquered in 1795. "If you have reason to believe that you would find some supplies on the Lahn, hasten thither with the greater part of your forces," wrote the Directory to Jourdan (Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse, 72,000) on the 29th of March. He was to move at once, before the Austrians could concentrate, and to pass the Rhine at Dusseldorf, thereby bringing back the centre of the enemy over the river. He was, further, to take every advantage of their want of concentration to deliver blow after blow, and to do his utmost to break them up completely. A fortnight later Moreau (Army of the Rhine-and-Moselle, 78,000) was ordered to take advantage of Jourdan's move, which would draw most of the Austrian forces to the Mainz region, to enter the Breisgau and Suabia. "You will attack Austria at home, and capture her magazines. You will enter a new country, the resources of which, properly handled, should suffice for the needs of the Army of the Rhine-and-Moselle." Jourdan, therefore, was to take upon himself the destruction of the enemy, Moreau the invasion of South Germany. The first object of both was to subsist their armies beyond the Rhine, the second to defeat the armies and terrorize the populations of the empire. Under these instructions the campaign opened. Jourdan crossed at Dusseldorf and reached the Lahn, but the enemy concentrated against him very swiftly and he had to retire over the river. Still, if he had not been able to "break them up completely," he had at any rate drawn on himself the weight of the Austrian army, and enabled Moreau to cross at Strassburg without much difficulty.