The Sun.
London, England, 1859-06-25 00:00:00

PRINCE NAPOLEON'S ARMY.

(From a Special Correspondent of the Times)
HEAD-QUARTERS, PIETRA •SANTA, BORDERS
OF TUSCANY, June 18.
I have had the honour of getting over the first
day's march in the suite of Prince Napoleon
Jerome, from Lucca to this place. His Imperial
Highness left Florence on Thursday. by a railway
train, which conveyed him to Lucca in about three
days. He rested at Lucca on the evening of that
day and all yesterday, and this morning, soon after
5, he was in the saddle at the head of his staff.
The whole of the Coffiniere Division, with a fine
regiment of Hussars and a very formidable
park of artillery, preceded and followed the Im-
perial Commander-in-Chief. None of the Tuscans
were with him, with the exception of a small
body of cavalry. To-day's march took us over 18
Italian miles of ground. Our to-morrow's destina-
tion is Massa, about seven miles to the north of
this place. Prince Napoleon treads over the debris
of departed Royal greatness. Last evening he
slept at the Palace which was owce the residence of
the Bourbons of Lucca. To-morrow he will rest at
the other Ducal Palace once tenanted by a branch
of the house of Este. _ .

We know that to-morrow's journey, a short one,
Will take us .to Massa. Further than that we either
do not know or are not allowed to say that we
know. I wish it therefore to be distinctly under-
stood that anything I may say about our past or
future movements is matter entirely of private
conjecture of my own. His Imperial Highness's
Staff do not admit me to the secret deliberations of
their council. I am therefore all the more free to
speculate over the allies' further movements...
There is the 80th Regiment of the .Line, drag-
ging itself, wofully footsore and exhausted, in our
rear. These men landed at Leghorn about the
same time as the Prince, but, instead of following
him to Florence, they were marched upon Pistoia,
and sent to the Tuscan confines at. the Abetone
Pass, on the road to Modena. There they spent a
few uncomfortable weeks in the company of
the Tuscan vanguard, daily awaiting their orders
to go down into the plain and give battle
to the Modenese and Austrian troops. They—
that is, the 80th Regiment—have been suddenly
summoned down from their mountain fastnesses,
hurried over their own footsteps as far as Pistol*
and Lucca, and, however anxious for one day of
rest, they were spirite I away from their comfortable
bivouac on Lucca 's shady bastions, and bidden to
follow their leader hitherward with so little consi-
deration for their physical powers, that an officer
assured me one-half of the regiment would have to
lag.bekind as stragglers ; and. I myself saw hun-
dreds of them lying by the roadside in a very de-
pressed condition indeed. On the whole, and in
a strategical point of view, the march of Prince
Napoleon from Leghorn to Florence, and from
Florence back again to Lucca, greatly resembles the
epic expedition of that French monarch renowned
in nursery minstrelsy, who attained a certain
mountain summit, and then effected his descent
down it again. May be it would be•sheer injustice
to apply the principles of military science to the
movement of the sth Corps. Prince Napoleon had
a political mission to fulfil in Tuscany. I need not
say what it was, nor give any opinion as to the way
in which he acquitted himself of it. Enough thatas
a military commander, his career may be said to
begin to-day—that is, very nearly one month
As after
his first setting his foot on Tuscan ground. the
leader of a detached corps which was to co-operate
with the great Franco-Sardinian army, his duty was
to attack, or at least to watch, the Austrians on the
southern bank of the Po, arranging his movements
precisely as the Allies succeeded in driving the
enemy before them on the northern bank. Had
the sth Corps landed at Spersia, and thence made
its best way across the Cisa Pass, it might either
have stationed itself at the debouche of the great
Appenine valleys at Fornovo, or advanced into the
plain at Parma, and then either marched upon Pia-
cenza, if that fortress were bent on showing fight,
or else crossed the Po at any point where its ser-
vices could not fail to be of consequence in the attack
of the great square of fortresses. Had, for instance,
Prince Napoleon been at Sacca, opposite to Casal
Maggiore, on the P.O, on the day of the great battle
of Magenta, there .s no doupt but •by a bold push
across the river he could have cut off the Austrians

in their disorderly retreat to the Adda. But, as
the Prince " snugly"—as some English critic ill-
naturedly rernm.l:cil—kept his headquarters at
Florence till long utter the bloody day at Magenta,
it was natural to expect that his plan of operations
would be altered by the astounding results of that
victory, and that he would make his best way now
either across the Filigare Pass, the shortest road
from Florence to Bologna, or by the Porretta Pass
from Pistoia, where the main body of his troops
lay encamped, to the same city, whence he could
either attack Ferrara, or, even disregarding that
second-rate citadel, he might crass over the Po into
the Venetian territory.
The objections hitherto raised against any occupa-
tion of Bologna as part of the neutral Papal States
on the part of the Imperial French forces have
fallen to the ground, since by the retreat of the
Austrians the whole of the Legations have shaken
off the Papal Government and proclaimed the Dic-
tatorship of the King of Sardinia. Still, even then,
even supposing that the Papal territory, with so
much impunity violated by the Austrian garrisons,
should be held inviolable by the French armies,
which already garrison Rome, the next road which
might and should have taken the Prince from
Florence to the Lombard plain was that of the Abe-
tone Pass, from Pistoia to Modena, where, as I have
said, French and Tuscan troops already occupied
the mountain defiles, and had, indeed, already sent
their vanguard to the capital itself of the Duchy,
the city of Modena. Instead of this, again, what
does the Prince do ? He withdraws by forced
Marches the troops he had already sent to the
Abetone, and brings his main force all round by
Pescia, Lucca, and Massa, very near that very port
of Spezzia, " where the merest tryo in military
matters would have advised him to land; and now
the common rumour—mind, I do not say I heard it
at head-quarters, but the common rumour says that
we are all travelling—whither, in the name of
Alexander, Catsar, Frederick 11., and the First
Napoleon ?—why, to Piacenza !—to evacuated and
dismantled Piacenza! •

To Piacenza from here, or from Massa, there aro
two principal roads—one across the Duchy of
Modena, over the Cerretto Pass, and another across
the Duchy of Parma, across the Cisa Pass—both of
them compelling us to at least eight or ten days'
march to find ourselves about 60 and more miles in
the rear of the Franco-Sardinian allies, supposing
the latter to have achieved no further progress
between this day and the date of our arrival. IN
the meanwhile General Ulloa, who is at the orders
of the Prince, and who was to leave Florence on
Friday last (yesterday), has withdrawn his Tuscans
from the Filigare road to Bologna, and is forward-
ing them over the Abetone Pass to Modena. He
will most probably join the Prince at Modena or
Reggio, and it is, indeed, to be hoped that the
officers who name Piacenza as their ultimate desti-
nation are mistaken, and that the rendezvous is to
be Brescello or Guasta]la, on the confines between
the two Duchies of Parma and Modena, whence,
by merely crossing the Po, the sth Corps will be
in time to bear a hand in the investment of
Mantua. I need, however, hardly observe that
Prince Napoleon is not the author of his own move-
ments, but is at the beck of the French Emperor,
who has given proofs of knowing perfectly well
what he is about, and if he thinks lie can play out
his great game of Chess without the Queen or a
Rook, and is still sufficiently strong with four corps
to checkmate his adversary without the means of
the sth, he must have good reasons for sending the
latter-named corps on an indescribable errand all
about Central Italy. Prince Napoleon's double
march across Tuscany and his long sojourn in
Florence have been, strategically speaking, mere
loss of time. What good his so doing may have
done politically we cannot as yet satisfactorily make
out. The parties which were at variance at Florence
before his arrival are almost on the eve of a hostile
outbreak at his departure, and, whoever else may
have a party ready to declare for him in Tuscany,
he has certainly none disposed to act on his behalf,
for he has all the time been most fairly, openly,
and consistently proclaiming that he has no de-
signs on the throne of Tuscany, and the people,
after long hesitation, have been compelled to be-
, lieve him and take him at his own word. The
Prince, be it said, for the sake of truth, leaves
Tuscany an honoured and respected - guest. His
exhortations to the people to consider themselve as
Italians, to aspire to the union of Italy, and above
all things to lay aside all thoughts of political
arrangements for the present, and to turn all
their energies to that war on which the destinies
of their common country depend, could not be
more loudly nor more constantly spoken. No-
thing, also, can equal the good taste and breed-
ing, the good humour and forbearance, of the
French troops towards the people in that part
of Italy they are to-day leaving. Some old
grognard, it is true, may be caught muttering in
his teeth words which he hopes may not be heard
or understood against the rapacity, and' indeed
downright roguery, of innkeepers, shop and booth
keepers, retail dealers, and other highwaymen of
modern civilisation, incorrigible here as elsewhere,
and incapable of distinguishing between friends
and foes—nay, always ready to fleece an ally rather
than an enemy, as fear is with them a far stronger
motive of restraint than gratitude. The people of
the lower classes here call the French Tedeschi, in
contradistinction to the Tuscans, whom they style
Inostri, or " our people." For them every man
who speaks a foreign language is a Tedesco, an ab-
stract word barbarian. Years will pass before the
ignorant mass may be able to distinguish between
the soldiers of their oppressors and the troops of
their generous liberators.