He had 36,570 infantry, the young, newly promoted general pondered-for he was a man in love with numbers-3,300 cavalry, 1,700 artillerists, engineers and field police, stablemen, farriers, armourers, aides or commissionaires-41,570 officers and men, all told.

He frowned. An uninspiring infantry, though, a cavalry arm on the worst collection of spavined nags he'd ever beheld. Too few guns to suit him, since he'd come up from the Artillery. But these men had secured Marseilles in '93, had besieged, then retaken Toulon in the same year, skirmished and fought little wastrel battles in those hills against the Piedmontese and Austrians, even routed their General de Vins and secured the Riviera from Savona to Voltri the previous autumn. They'd spent a winter's penury, grumbling and pinch-gutted, their pay so far in arrears, their precious news from home so long delayed, it would be a miracle if he could wield them in battle more than once without breaking possibly the only real army of any sort he'd get.

The young general leaned out of the coach windows to study those men who lined the approaches to the parade ground, as the staff carriages rattled into camp.

Pinched they might be, surly and starving, feeling abandoned by their own country, and their leaders, the Directory of Five, in distant Paris. But they were for the most part rugged men, an army made of men of the South; Provencals, Gascons, mountaineers from Dauphin and Savoy. And some of his Corsicans, of course.

He'd come south as quick as lightning, eager for the challenge no matter how daunting, fired by the charge in his orders from Barras and the rest of the Directory, from the Army: