Moreau, with his magnificent army, commenced a winter campaign on the Rhine. Between the rivers Iser and Inn there is an enormous forest, many leagues in extent, of sombre firs and pines. It is a dreary and almost uninhabited wilderness, of wild ravines, and tangled under-brush. Two great roads have been cut through the forest, and sundry woodmen's paths penetrate it at different points. In the centre there is a little hamlet, of a few miserable huts, called Hohenlinden. In this forest, on the night of the 3d of December, 1800, Moreau, with sixty thousand men, encountered the Archduke John with seventy thousand Austrian troops. The clocks upon the towers of Munich had but just tolled the hour of midnight when both armies were in motion, each hoping to surprise the other. A dismal wintry storm was howling over the tree tops, and the smothering snow, falling rapidly, obliterated all traces of a path, and rendered it almost impossible to drag through the drifts the ponderous artillery. Both parties, in the dark and tempestuous night, became entangled in the forest, and the heads of their columns in various places met. An awful scene of confusion, conflict, and carnage then ensued. Imagination can not compass the terrible sublimity of that spectacle. The dark midnight, the howlings of the wintry storm, the driving sheets of snow, the incessant roar of artillery and of musketry from one hundred and thirty thousand combatants, the lightning flashes of the guns, the crash of the falling trees as the heavy cannon-balls swept through the forest, the floundering of innumerable horsemen bewildered in the pathless snow, the shout of onset, the shriek of death, and the burst of martial music from a thousand bands--all combined to present a scene of horror and of demoniac energy, which probably even this lost world never presented before. The darkness of the black forest was so intense, and the snow fell in flakes so thick and fast and blinding, that the combatants could with difficulty see each other. They often judged of the foe only by his position, and fired at the flashes gleaming through the gloom. At times, hostile divisions became intermingled in inextricable confusion, and hand to hand, bayonet crossing bayonet, and sword clashing against sword, they fought with the ferocity of demons; for though the officers of an army may be influenced by the most elevated sentiments of dignity and of honor, the mass of the common soldiers have ever been the most miserable, worthless, and degraded of mankind. As the advancing and retreating host wavered to and fro, the wounded, by thousands, were left on hill-sides and in dark ravines, with the drifting snow, crimsoned with blood, their only blanket; there in solitude and agony to moan and freeze and die. What death-scenes the eye of God must have witnessed that night, in the solitudes of that dark, tempest-tossed, and blood-stained forest! At last the morning dawned