It is not at all inconsistent with a possible sincerity in the ostensibly pacific foreign policy he was pursuing that, even before the decision to fight had apparently been forced upon him, two manifestoes rang out to the troops. To the Army of the Rhine he said: "You have conquered Holland, the Rhine, and Italy, and have dictated peace under the walls of terrified Vienna. Now it is not a question of defending your borders, but of overpowering hostile states." To the Army of Italy in particular he said, with reference to a too notorious instance in which during the previous year a half-brigade had shown the white feather: "Are they all dead, the brave men of Castiglione, of Rivoli, and of Neumarkt? They would rather have perished than have been untrue to their colors; and they surely would have dragged their younger comrades on to honor and to duty. Soldiers, you say your rations are not regularly distributed. What would you have done if, like Four and Twenty-two of the light infantry, like Eighteen and Thirty-two of the line, you had found yourselves in the midst of the desert, without bread, without water, with nothing to eat but the flesh of horses and mules? 'Victory will give us bread,' said they; and you--you desert your standards!" Such words, from such a man, could leave no soldier of any nation unmoved. The Frenchmen in the ranks were thrilled by them; the general who wrote them understood that peace without glory was a broken reed for an aspiring ruler. He had proffered the olive-branch, but he must, in order completely to win his people, chastise those who had spurned it. Austria, in particular, must get another lesson in humility.