On the other side, Carnot, of course, foresaw this possibility. He
warned the generals not to allow the enemy to "use his forces sometimes
against one, sometimes against the other, as he did in the last
campaign," and ordered them to go forward respectively into Franconia
and into the country of the upper Neckar, with a view to seeking out and
defeating the enemy's army. But the plan of operations soon grew bolder.
Jourdan was informed on the 21st of July that if he reached the Regnitz
without meeting the enemy, or if his arrival there forced the latter to
retire rapidly to the Danube, he was not to hesitate to advance to
Ratisbon and even to Passau if the disorganization of the enemy admitted
it, but in these contingencies he was to detach a force into Bohemia to
levy contributions. "We presume that the enemy is too weak to offer a
successful resistance and will have united his forces on the Danube; we
hope that our two armies will act in unison to rout him completely. Each
is, in any case, strong enough to attack by itself, and nothing is so
pernicious as slowness in war." Evidently the fear that the two Austrian
armies would unite against one of their assailants had now given place
to something like disdain.
Neresheim.
This was due in all probability to the rapidity with which Moreau was
driving the archduke before him. After a brief stand on the Neckar at
Cannstadt, the Austrians, only 25,000 strong, fell back to the Rauhe
Alb, where they halted again, to cover their magazines at Ulm and
Gunzburg, towards the end of July. Wartensleben was similarly falling
back before Jourdan, though the latter, starting considerably later than
Moreau, had not advanced so far. The details of the successive positions
occupied by Wartensleben need not be stated; all that concerns the
general development of the campaign is the fact that the hitherto
independent leader of the "Lower Rhine Army" resented the loss of his
freedom of action, and besides lamentations opposed a dull passive
resistance to all but the most formal orders of the prince. Many weeks
passed before this was overcome sufficiently for his leader even to
arrange for the contemplated combination, and in these weeks the
archduke was being driven back day by day, and the German principalities
were falling away one by one as the French advanced and preached the
revolutionary formula. In such circumstances as these--the general
facts, if not the causes, were patent enough--it was natural that the
confident Paris strategists should think chiefly of the profits of their
enterprise and ignore the fears of the generals at the front. But the
latter were justified in one important respect; their operating armies
had seriously diminished in numbers, Jourdan disposing of not more than
45,000 and Moreau of about 50,000. The archduke had now, owing to the
arrival of a few detachments from the Black Forest and elsewhere, about
34,000 men, Wartensleben almost exactly the same, and the former, for
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