The merest layman can not only see the colossal proportions of this plan, but he must recognize as well the symmetry of its parts. It is a matter of opinion whether Napoleon devised it in the few days between the receipt of news that Villeneuve had failed him and the departure for Germany, or whether its combination was the result of a long-studied and carefully concealed design. Either hypothesis borders on the miraculous, and yet, paradoxical as it may appear, it requires less strain on one's reason to believe that both are in a measure correct; the test imposed on the navy having failed, the alternative which was long foreseen and always preferred became imperative. So rapid was the wonderful march that scouts could scarcely outrun it with reports, and the newspapers were either without information or dared not print what they knew. It was a force of about two hundred thousand men which crossed the Rhine, and, passing through Hesse, Baden, and Würtemberg to crush the utterly disproportionate and feeble Austrian army, reached the Danube valley near Ulm early in October. It was the third of September before Francis declared war; on the twenty-first, his forces, sixty thousand strong, were on the Iller in sight of Ulm. It was not so much Bavaria that he had in mind; it was Italy for which he was concerned. Austria's weight in the balance now depended upon her keeping the Venetian lands, and her generals made no haste in an advance which would not only put the Alps between her own two armies, but separate her van from her approaching auxiliaries. The agreement with Russia was that her army, now on the borders of Galicia, and eighty thousand strong, should enter Austria in three divisions, the first of which should reach the Inn on October sixteenth. The Archduke Charles was to command the main force in Italy; the youthful Archduke Ferdinand, under the direction of Mack as quartermaster-general, that in Germany. Napoleon had made the acquaintance of this officer six years before while he was a prisoner of war at Paris, and considered him entirely mediocre--"likely to get a lesson if ever opposed to a first-rate French general." Now that the two were matched the Emperor must have laughed in his sleeve, for he played with his adversary in a spirit of confident and amused assurance.