Meantime the end of July had come. The Emperor Francis had decided. At the risk of defeat on the Rhine he must retain his Italian possessions and prestige. He was still the Roman emperor, inheritor of an immemorial dignity, overlord of the fairest lands in the peninsula. Wurmser, considered by Austria her greatest general, had therefore been recalled to Vienna from the west, and sent at the head of twenty-five thousand fresh troops to collect the columns of Beaulieu's army, which was scattered in the Tyrol. This done, he was to assume the chief command, and advance to the relief of Mantua. The first part of his task was successfully completed, and already, according to the direction of the Aulic Council of the empire, and in pursuance of the same hitherto universal but vicious system of cabinet campaigning which Bonaparte had just repudiated, he was moving down from the Alps in three columns with a total force of about forty-seven thousand men. There were about fifteen thousand in the garrison of Mantua. Bonaparte was much weaker, having only forty-two thousand, and of these some eight thousand were occupied in the siege of that place. Wurmser was a master of the old school, working like an automaton under the hand of his government, and commanding according to well-worn precept his well-equipped battalions, every soldier of which was a recruit so costly that destructive battles were made as infrequent as possible, because to fight many meant financial ruin. In consequence, like all the best generals of his class, he made war as far as possible a series of manoeuvers. Opposed to him was an emancipated genius with neither directors nor public council to hamper him. In the tradition of the Revolution, as in the mind of Frederick the Great, war was no game, but a bloody decision, and the quicker the conclusion was tried the better. The national conscription, under the hands of Dubois de Crancé, had secured men in unlimited numbers at the least expense; while Carnot's organization had made possible the quick handling of troops in large mass by simplifying the machinery. Bonaparte was about to show what could be done in the way of using the weapon which had been put into his hands.