This is an advantage at all times: for the aggressor can generally mislead his adversary by a series of feints until the real blow can be delivered with crushing effect.

Such has been the aim of all great leaders from the time of Epaminondas and Alexander, Hannibal and Caesar, down to the age of Luxembourg, Marlborough, and Frederick the Great.

Aggressive tactics were particularly suited to the French soldiery, always eager, active, and intelligent, and now endowed with boundless enthusiasm in their cause and in their leader.
Then again he was fully aware of the inherent vice of the Austrian situation.

It was as if an unwieldy organism stretched a vulnerable limb across the huge barrier of the Alps, exposing it to the attack of a compacter body.

It only remained for Bonaparte to turn against his foes the smaller geographical features on which they too implicitly relied.