text:  Nor did the admirable skill of the consul Nero--who took advantage of his interior line of communication and brought a decisive superiority of force from the frontiers of Apulia to bear on the army which Hamilcar had led across the Pyrenees and the Alps to aid his brother in the south of Italy and thus decide the war in Italy--bear a less striking analogy to Napoleon's cross marches from Rivoli to the neighbourhood of Mantua in 1796 to the able movement of the Archduke Charles on the Bavarian plains to the banks of the Maine which proved the salvation of Germany in 1796 or to the gallant irruption of Napoleon first into the midst of Blucher's scattered columns on the plains of Champagne and then against the heads of Schwartzenberg's weighty columns at the bridge of Montereau in 1814 during his immortal campaign in France