Strategic Operations in Mountains.
A mountainous country presents itself, in the combinations of war, under four different aspects. It may be the whole theater of the war, or it may be but a zone; it may be mountainous throughout its whole extent, or there may be a line of mountains, upon emerging from which the army may debouch into large and rich plains.
If Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Noric provinces, some parts of Turkey and Hungary, Catalonia and Portugal, be excepted, in the European countries the mountains are in single ranges. In these cases there is but a difficult defile to cross,—a temporary obstacle, which, once overcome, is an advantage rather than an objection. In fact, the range once crossed and the war carried into the plains, the chain of mountains may be regarded as an eventual base, upon which the army may fall back and find a temporary refuge. The only essential precaution to be observed is, not to allow the enemy to anticipate the army on this line of retreat. The part of the Alps between France and Italy, and the Pyrenees, (which are not so high, though equally broad,) are of this nature. The mountains of Bohemia and of the Black Forest, and the Vosges, belong to this class. In Catalonia the mountains cover the whole country as far as the Ebro: if the war were limited to this province, the combinations would not be the same as if there were but a line of mountains. Hungary in this respect differs little from Lombardy and Castile; for if the Crapacks in the eastern and northern part are as marked a feature as the Pyrenees, they are still but a temporary obstacle, and an army overcoming it, whether debouching in the basin of the Waag, of the Neytra, or of the Theiss, or in the fields of Mongatsch, would have the vast plains between the Danube and the Theiss for a field of operations. The only difference