Macdonald marched from Bearn in September, with forty thousand men,[26] towards Helvetia, accompanied by General Matthew Dumas, chief of the staff, a soldier who used his pen better than his sword. His first desire was that a corps of Helvetians should be formed to co-operate with the French against the Austrians; but this request the Swiss government declined; and he soon found his campaign to consist of a series of arduous marches among the mountains, where, as the season advanced and the winter drew on, his soldiers endured every misery that, toil, hunger, and cold could inflict. In the passage of the Alps, when one of his columns, composed of the 80th Regiment, with some cavalry, artillery, sappers, and guides, under Laboissiere, attempted to cross the Splugen, in the country of the Grisons, a dreadful avalanche suddenly came thundering down from the mountains to bar their march, and swept forty-two of the 10th Dragoons, with their horses, over a precipice. His other columns met with equal difficulties. A letter in the Paris papers, dated "Head-quarters, Chicavenna, 7th December, 1800," relates:-- "It was necessary to traverse the Splugen and Mount Carduiet. These mountains, even in July, present all the horrors of winter; judge what they are in December! Threatening and inaccessible rocks, seas of snow on all sides, torrents of avalanches falling with a noise equally terrible. Since our first march, two hundred men, with their horses, have been swallowed up. After unheard-of labour, we succeeded in disengaging all of them except three. There was not the least trace of a road; but by labour and constancy we opened a narrow path, bordered by precipices which the eye could not fathom nor the foot always avoid." Two-thirds of the pass, which leads towards Como had been traversed, the troops in front, with muskets slung, digging a path for their comrades in the rear, till the column, exhausted by cold and fatigue, began to retire without orders, though the dangers behind--snow, hunger, and avalanches--were the same as those in front. Macdonald galloped towards his sinking soldiers, and his presence had an immediate effect on them. They halted; he entreated and threatened; but they listened in sullen silence. Then he dismounted, seized a shovel, and proceeded to dig the snow, exclaiming-- "My comrades, I would rather perish in the abyss than stoop to turn my steps on perils such as these!" "Vive M. le General!" cried the soldiers of the 80th. Confidence was inspired anew; again the muskets were slung, the shovels resumed, and after three days of labour, danger, and toil, the passage was achieved, and the troops of Macdonald debouched from that terrible gorge, where the frozen precipices seemed to hang from heaven, and where whirlwinds of hail, tempests of snow, with death in its most frightful form, had been encountered.