“Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleepTo undertake the death of all the worldSo I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.”
“Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleepTo undertake the death of all the worldSo I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.”
“Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleepTo undertake the death of all the worldSo I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.”
“Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world
So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.”
In men he could inspire the utmost self-devotion; it seems hateful to think first of the Cuirassiers, a living torrent of steel, pouring cheering to their deaths at Wagram at his command, and then of his vulgar deceit of Walewska and his petty, mercenary intrigues with other women. It leaves a foul blot on the splendour which surrounds him.
“Methought I saw a slug crawl slaveringOver the delicate petals of a flower.”
“Methought I saw a slug crawl slaveringOver the delicate petals of a flower.”
“Methought I saw a slug crawl slaveringOver the delicate petals of a flower.”
“Methought I saw a slug crawl slavering
Over the delicate petals of a flower.”
THE KING OF ROME
THE KING OF ROME
CHAPTER XIVLIKES AND DISLIKES
PERHAPS now we can see a little more clearly the man who was the centre of so much interest. To appreciate a man’s character it is not so much necessary to realize what he did, as to realize what he wanted to do, what he was fond of doing, and what he would have done had he been able; and on the other hand it is equally necessary to realize what it was he did not like doing. With Napoleon these matters do not bear a great deal of analysis.
One is astonished at first when it is borne in upon one that Napoleon was a man of tepid desires in most directions. It seems almost inconceivable that the man who was the storm centre of Europe, who was capable of rousing overwhelming emotion in others, was nearly incapable of emotion himself. Yet so it was. Napoleon had one ruling desire—for work, and he had one ruling passion—for the army. His secondary passions were small, and his dislikes were equally small. Compared in this light to any full-blooded personality, Dr. Johnson, for instance, Napoleon fades away into dismal uninterestingness. Work was what Napoleon liked best of all in this world. When other men would have broken down under the simultaneous strain of work and anxiety, he throve and grew fat. One of his most famous letters was written on this very subject to his brother Joseph at the height of the Eylau campaign.Joseph, from among the soft delights of Naples, had written complaining of the troubles which beset him while ruling his little kingdom, and Napoleon wrote back briefly and sternly, telling how he was at that moment engaged in a life and death struggle against Bennigsen; how he was encumbered with the difficulties of feeding and manœuvring two hundred thousand men in the boggy plains of Poland, where even he himself could hardly obtain the necessaries of life; how at the same time the affairs of half Europe demanded his attention, and yet for all this he did not allow himself to be worried by these numerous interests; he did all he had to do and delighted in the strain.
It can safely be said that Napoleon never took a holiday. Sometimes it has been hinted that in 1810 and 1811, after his marriage with Marie Louise, he slackened his pace and did not do as much as he might have done. This is true in part, but it is equally true that during that time he got through an amount of work which would have broken down most men. Napoleon was not made for holidays. It is hard to find, during the whole period covered by his correspondence, a single day in which he did not despatch a dozen letters, all of them bearing the hallmarks of the utmost care and thought, and nearly all of them vitally important links in a chain of important decisions. Inactivity was hateful to him. No sooner had he landed in Elba, removed entirely from the usual outlets of his energy, than he flung himself into the business of building up new interests. He laboured harder while governing his little island than did Kings of countries hundreds of times its size. Only when he was lodged in St. Helena, do we find a cessation of his frantic toil. Here circumstances were against him; his gaolers did their best in a blind fashion to prevent him from indulging in either mental or physical activity, while the climateand environments were both conducive to torpor. Yet even at St. Helena Napoleon was responsible for the production of a mass of written material of whose amount an average man might be proud if it were the results of the labour of a lifetime. Hard, unrelenting toil was to Napoleon the breath of life.
His chief relaxation was also in the nature of toil. Napoleon was passionately fond of all things military. Reviews were to him a source of unending delight. On emerging triumphant from a period of intense anxiety his first action almost invariably was to hold a review of all the troops he could muster; the very day on which he took up his residence at the Tuileries after thecoup d’étatof Brumaire, he reviewed on the Caroussel those battalions which later formed the nucleus of the Guard, while at Tilsit he contrived to arrange for two or three reviews every day. All the pageantry and pomp of war appealed irresistibly to this man to whom so little else appealed. To Napoleon a battalion marching past in column of double companies was worth all the vigour of Schiller and all the passion of Alfieri. Soldiers are a delight to most of us from our nursery days to our maturity; the sight of a long line of bayonets or the brilliance and glitter of the plumes and armour of the Household Cavalry can still make us catch our breath for an instant, but in few instances does this passion become overwhelming. When it becomes characteristic of a nation it usually portends calamity. Frederick William I. of Prussia suffered from it to an extent which has become historic, but in his case his passion for soldiers was so overwhelming that he did not risk losing any of his Potsdam Guards. Napoleon was different; he intended his army for fighting, and fight it did for twenty years, pomp and pageantry notwithstanding. Not the wildest calumniator has ever hinted that the reason why Napoleon did not send the Guard into action at Borodino was becausehe wanted to keep them to review in peace-time—though this explanation is sounder than some of those put forward. Napoleon indulged his passion whenever possible, but he kept it nevertheless strictly within bounds.
Napoleon had been a soldier from the age of twelve, so that one can easily explain his liking for military detail; he had been human from the day of his birth, but it is not so easy to find any other human traits or weaknesses. The pleasures of the table meant nothing to him; twenty minutes sufficed for dinner at the Tuileries, and he dined just as contentedly on horse-steak in Russia as he did on the elaborate dishes which delighted Marie Louise. So far as can be ascertained Napoleon was never seen drunk, or sea-sick, or dyspeptic. It would be almost with relief that we would read of his suffering from measles, had he ever done so. His freedom from ordinary weaknesses tends to throw the whole picture out of perspective. One can hardly be surprised that even so sensible a man as Thiers lost his head while telling of Napoleon’s exploits. There is only one human touch to which we can turn to gain the measure of the whole. Napoleon loved a lord.
We have already described how ardently Napoleon looked forward to his meeting with his Imperial bride, and the complacency with which he referred to her royal uncle and aunt his predecessors, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. The same characteristic is noticeable in many of his actions. Perhaps it is going to extremes to describe his origination of the Legend of Honour as a piece of snobbery, but his other arrangements for the provision of a titled nobility are strongly indicative of this curious stray littleness of mind. No one reading his letters can doubt that he preferred speaking of Monsieur le Maréchal Prince d’Essling, Duc de Rivoli, Grand Aigle de la Légion d’Honneur to speaking of plainGeneral Masséna. He delighted in seeing about him Grand Constables, Arch-Chancellors, Grand Chamberlains; it pleased him to walk midst Grand Dukes and Princesses; he preferred conversation with the not over-talented Queen of Prussia to any interview with Goethe. Characteristically, he once invited an actor to come and perform before a “Parterre of Kings.” It may perhaps be pleaded that his painstaking care in the regulation of precedence, and his minute examination of forms and ceremonies were due to his desire to have his Imperial arrangements perfect, but it may be pleaded with equal justice that he entered voluntarily into these arrangements. The Imperial dignity was not forced upon him; he lost as many adherents by his assumption of it as he gained. For all this, once Napoleon decided upon indulging his snobbery, he indulged in such a manner as to gain most profit by it. Just as his delight in military matters tended towards the improvement of his army, so his snobbery tended towards buttressing his throne. Napoleon took advantage of his own weaknesses just as he did of other people’s.
One searches in vain for other prominent characteristics. The selfishness so often attributed to him is not so much the selfishness of Napoleon as the selfishness of the Emperor. One cannot call selfish the young lieutenant who took upon himself the maintenance of a brother when his sole income was thirty pounds a year, nor the man who gave crowns and fiefs and fortunes to his friends, but the Emperor who pried jealously into the management of his subject kingdoms and took them back if he saw fit, the Emperor who refused to share his glory with his general, the Emperor who sacrificed thousands of lives in order to hold down Europe was selfish because he believed the Imperial power would suffer were he unselfish. Even the ambition withwhich he is usually credited does not appear on close examination to be very remarkable or extraordinary. Ambition is, after all, one of the commonest of human traits, and varies only in degree and not in occurrence. When Napoleon was a young man he wanted to “get on”; he “got on” partly through abundance of opportunity and partly through his extraordinary talent. If it be said that he succeeded through the force of his ambition, it can easily be countered that most of the men who have ever succeeded were ambitious. A quite plausible life of Napoleon might be written showing that he was entirely the reverse of ambitious, and that all the steps of his career towards power from the day of his receiving the command of the army of Italy to his invasion of Russia in 1812, were forced upon him. At the beginning of his career Napoleon had far less chance of gaining supreme power than had Hoche, or Pichegru, or Jourdan, or Moreau, but his rivals dropped out of the race through early deaths, sheer folly, or, perhaps in the case of Moreau, mere inertia. Napoleon is believed to have schemed to seize the reins of government as early as 1797, but half a dozen others, including even Bernadotte and Augereau, did the same. Napoleon was lucky, vigorous, and far more gifted than they, and it was into his hands that the ripened fruit dropped. From 1799 on, from the Consulate to the Consulate for life, from the Consulate for life to the Empire of the French, from the Empire of the French to the visionary Empire of the West, were steps which he could hardly have avoided taking in some form or other if he wished to retain any power at all. The attempt to enforce the Continental System undoubtedly led him further forward than was wise or than he desired. Had Bonaparte been a Washington, he might have retired after the peace of Amiens, but it is perfectly possible that even if a series of Washingtons had succeededhim, the last of them would have been beaten in a great battle some ten years later by the armies of an alliance of nations which had for some time back been oppressed and enslaved in increasing degree by the French. Undoubtedly this train of reasoning is forced and unsound in some respects, but it certainly gives a great deal of plausibility to the theory that Napoleon’s ambition was not so far-reaching and impossibly aspiring as it is sometimes carelessly said to have been. In addition, it is necessary to remember that his restless energy must occasionally have spurred him to further action while a lazier man would have remained tranquil. This is possibly an explanation of his suicidal plunge into Spanish affairs.
In like fashion the other indications of Napoleon’s character are faint and colourless. Women had no vast attraction for him; he appreciated them as a physical necessity, but that was all. Undoubtedly he ranked women in his mind along with exercise and medicine, as things without which men are liable to deteriorate. Wit and humour had very little meaning for him—as witness his distaste for Molière—and Art had even less. He ransacked Europe to fill the Louvre with masterpieces, but he himself did not enjoy them. He was careless of his ease, of his attire, of his comfort. When he fell from power, he did not seem to resent it very much. There is a story of his having attempted suicide after his abdication in 1814, but it is much to be doubted. The details seem far more in agreement with the symptoms of his mysterious illness, or of the malignant disease of which he died a few years later. He did not seem vastly depressed at Elba, or even at St. Helena. Comparable to this lack of depression is his hopefulness during the hopeless campaign of 1814. He stood to lose so much, and he lost so much, but neither the possibility nor the loss weighed upon him unbearably. Perhaps he was confident that moregreatness awaited him in the future; perhaps he simply did not care. The furious rages in which Napoleon sometimes indulged seem to have been merely good acting; he himself admitted that he never allowed his rage to mount higher than his chin.
Another human trait which was wanting in Napoleon was the capacity for hatred. With his Corsican upbringing one might have expected to find him at feud with numbers of people, but he was not. Napoleon was not a good hater. He never hated Pozzo di Borgo, for instance, half as much as Pozzo hated him. He took violent dislikes to a few individuals, but he frequently overcame these in course of time. Macdonald is a case in point. Hating must be distinguished from despising. Napoleon despised the Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbons, but he did not hate them. He waged war after war on Francis of Austria, but he never admitted any personal dislike. Hatred and affection were alike unknown to Napoleon.
There are one or two isolated examples of men for whom Napoleon professed affection, but a good deal of doubt surrounds the matter. Napoleon said he was fond of Muiron, who gave up his life for him at Arcola; he said he was fond of Duroc, the Grand Marshal of the Palace, who was killed at Bautzen, but it is significant that we do not hear much about this affection in either case until after Duroc and Muiron were both dead. More than one contemporary writer, indeed, has hinted that Duroc disliked Napoleon, although he did his duty in an exemplary manner, while so little is known about Muiron that we can be permitted to assume that the affection Napoleon expressed after Duroc and he were dead was a theatrical touch assumed for the purpose of enlisting still more sympathy at St. Helena. This is quite in accordance with what we know both ofNapoleon’s own nature and of his plan of campaign while in exile.
One more point. Napoleon habitually attributed the lowest possible motives to all human actions. His attitude was not so much cynical as uncomprehending (though some people think that cynicism is merely lack of comprehension); he simply could not understand anyone making any self-sacrifice when quite disinterested or altruistic. If anyone did, he put it down to hysteria. The brave boys who died for him in the filth and misery of twenty campaigns were so enthusiastic, Napoleon thought, merely because they were hysterical.
This idea is plainly to be discerned on reading Napoleon’s bulletins and proclamations. They are all of them apparently designed to appeal to a sentimental and hysterical public. Without doubt, they did appeal to their readers, but one cannot help feeling nowadays a sensation of distaste when looking through them. They are unbearably reminiscent of street corner oratory and of the flamboyant efforts of the sensational press—appeals to hysteria pure and simple. Moreover, it is also plain that Napoleon himself felt none of these hysterical impulses—he was merely working cold-bloodedly on the passions of a passionate people. Napoleon was entirely unfamiliar with noble instincts or with the idea of devotion. He laid claim to them himself, of course, despite his disbelief in them, but that was merely another method of capturing the favour of the populace. Washington’s loftiness of character was as much a sealed book to him as would have been (had he lived to see it) Garibaldi’s disinterested patriotism.
Even the sympathy with nationalism which his nephew later laboured so hard to attribute to him was wanting; the man who could unite seven nationalities into one state, and who tossed fragments of territory from one power to another without consultinganything beyond his own desires must of necessity have cared nothing either for national or individual sentiment.
We can sum up then by describing Napoleon as the embodiment of enormous ability, unquenchable energy, and—nothing else. He can be compared to an unguarded store of high explosive; he was bound to cause trouble wherever he settled. Once afforded an opportunity he was certain to bring about unexpected results, and, as it happened, the turmoil into which France was flung just as he reached manhood afforded a very early opportunity. Without morals or ideals to restrain or guide him, he would cause destruction wherever he went, like a runaway horse or a motor lorry out of control. He was a Frankenstein monster let loose on the world; the good he did was as haphazard as the harm.
PAULINE BORGHESE(née Bonaparte)
PAULINE BORGHESE(née Bonaparte)
CHAPTER XVWHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
OFTEN and often it has been savagely pointed out that Napoleon enjoyed greater good fortune than anyone could with reason expect. Every incident in Napoleon’s life, from his employment by Barras in 1795 to the collapse of Francis I.’s nerve in 1809, has been used to prove this, while his later misfortunes have been casually mentioned as being inevitable considering his careless taking of risks. The former criticism is undoubtedly fair, but the latter is open to serious disagreement, and has hardly received the opposition it deserves.
Napoleon’s domination of Europe from 1805 onwards depended entirely upon his military supremacy; nobody would dream of saying that he would have received the homage of the Confederation of the Rhine, the submission of Prussia and the co-operation of Austria simply because of the force of his personality, if that personality had not also been supported by the menace of four hundred battalions. Consequently Napoleon’s policy could not be questioned so long as his army was invincible, and mistakes of policy could be rapidly erased by a victory in the field. Similarly a military error was of far more importance than a political one; if the Bonapartes had never met with a defeat in battle their line would still inevitably hold the throne ofFrance, with a ring of subject countries round them. It is therefore of the first importance to inquire into the failure of the army; the other failures are merely secondary. Thus if anyone says that he has just quitted a certain building for three reasons, one of them being that he was thrown out, the other two reasons are of secondary importance.
Various dates have been assigned to the commencement of the decline of Napoleon’s military ascendancy, and the very fact that this is so proves how difficult it is to be dogmatic on the subject. Napoleon lost battles in 1807, and he won battles in 1813—and 1814 and 1815 for the matter of that. The quality of the material at his disposal certainly grew more and more inferior as time went on, but it is easy to make too much of this point, for Napoleon wasneverdefeated except by superior numbers. However, the first time he met with serious disaster was, undoubtedly, in the campaign of 1812. The catastrophe has been described times without number; what has not so often been mentioned is the nearness of Napoleon’s approach to another triumph.
A Napoleonic army never took the field without the full expectation of losing half its numbers through hardship, as distinct from the action of the enemy. This was the price it paid for its rapidity of marching and its freedom from a rigid dependence upon its base. If Napoleon led half a million men to attack Russia, he expected to lose a quarter of a million before he was in a position to gain a decisive success; he certainly lost the quarter million, and he certainly gained a success, but the losses continued and the success was not decisive. And yet on several occasions it appeared as if a new Austerlitz or a new Friedland were at hand.
The irony of the situation lies in the fact that in 1812 Napoleon took much more extensive measuresto ensure that losses due to poverty of supplies would be minimized than he did in any other campaign. He organized an elaborate Intendance, with vast trains of wagons, and he collected enormous depôts of stores wherever possible. The system broke down almost at once, partly on account of the inexperience of the commissariat staff, partly because of torrential rains which ruined the roads as soon as the army started, and partly because the army and train were so huge that they had already absorbed every available horse in Europe, so that losses (which necessarily increased with the distance marched from the depôts) could not be replaced at all. This threw additional work on the surviving horses, thereby increasing the wastage, so that the Intendance went to pieces at a rate increasing by geometrical progression. Before very long the Grand Army was once more dependent entirely on the country through which it marched, and the numbers were vast and Lithuania and White Russia were miserably poor. It was a combination of circumstances apparently almost justifying the Russian boast that God was on their side.
Yet matters were not progressing any too well for the Russians. Their field army was hopelessly divided; one portion, from the Danube, could not be expected for months, while of the other two parts one was almost in the clutches of the French, and the two together were hopelessly inferior in numbers to the forces at Napoleon’s disposal. The tide of war came surging back across Russia; the Russians were marching desperately to escape from the trap; the French were pursuing equally desperately in the hope of closing the last avenue of escape. The balance wavered, but at length turned in favour of the Czar. The roads were mere mud tracks, churned by the Russians into quagmires, and the French were delayed. Jerome Bonaparte was not as insistent on speed as he might have been, and at last, after fiercerearguard fighting, Bagration escaped from the snare laid for him. A little more—ever so little!—and Smolensk might have been another Ulm.
The two main Russian armies were now combined, and, a hundred and twenty thousand strong, with a numerous cavalry, they were able to sweep the country bare before the French advance. Had the French movements round Smolensk been successful, the Russians would have had only half these numbers, and they would probably have been panic-stricken in addition; the French advance would have been proportionately easier and less expensive. In fact, it is difficult to see how Russia could have continued the war, for Alexander’s nerve would have been shaken, the war party would have received a severe rebuff, and altogether an entirely different atmosphere would have arisen. The Russians fell slowly back towards Moscow, the French, starving and disease-ridden, toiled painfully after them. Barclay de Tolly was relieved from his command in consequence of his inaction, and Kutusoff, the disciple of the great Suvaroff, took his place. A battle was fought at Borodino. For Napoleon, it was the first victory which did not give him huge captures of prisoners and the prompt and abject submission of his enemies; for the Russians it seemed as good as a victory, for they had met the great conqueroren rase campagne, and had escaped.
Yet they should not have done. The late Lord Wolseley declares that Napoleon’s plan of attack at Borodino “could not be more perfectly conceived or better elaborated,” and he goes on to say that it was a sudden attack of illness which prevented Napoleon from controlling the battle when it reached its height, and from sending adequate supports to Ney at the crucial moment. This is the first mention we find of the mysterious illness on which a large number of writers lay so much stress; in the next campaign weshall find a much more important example. But whether Napoleon was ill or not, a little better luck for Ney or Davout would certainly have brought about important results. The destruction of Kutusoff’s army would have had a great effect on the rest of the campaign, even if it had not appalled Alexander into making peace.
The next mistake of the Emperor’s was in staying too long at Moscow; during the five weeks he spent there his own army became demoralized, the Russians had time to rally and to bring up the Army of the Danube, and winter closed down on the countryside. When at last Napoleon decided to retreat Kutusoff was able at Malo-Jaroslavetz to bar the way to Kaluga, and to force him to go back through the pillaged districts through which he had come; this could mean nothing less than the destruction of his army, and, as everyone knows, the Grand Army was destroyed. It is needless here to tell once more the tale of the Beresina and Krasnoi; the interest of “what might have been” ceases with the battle of Malo-Jaroslavetz.
The points to be remembered are that during the fighting round Smolensk Napoleon was within a hairbreadth of an overwhelming victory; at Borodino he might have gained a satisfactory victory; a prompt retreat from Moscow would at least have minimized disaster; a success at Malo-Jaroslavetz would have saved part of the army, while the check which was actually experienced here was due to the accumulated effects of the earlier bad luck. In a military sense the campaign of 1812 was not merely justifiable but it was very nearly justified. A little—a very little more thrown into the scale would have saved his Empire for Napoleon and set him on a higher throne than ever before.
The campaign of 1813 was in this sense even more striking. It was waged with untrained,immature forces, for the most part against overwhelming odds, but during the course of the fighting Napoleon was not once, but many times, within an ace of successes more splendid than Austerlitz. The actions of the Allies seemed to portend failure for them from the start. Although Prussia joined Russia as soon as the extent of the French disaster became known; although there was nothing to bar their way except a few thousand starving survivors of the Grand Army; although all Germany was in a ferment, and the French domination of the Rhenish Confederation was tottering, the Russians advanced with pitiful caution and delay. Napoleon had returned to Paris, had raised, organized, equipped and set in motion a new army of a quarter of a million men by the time the Russians reached the Elbe. Almost before the Russian commander-in-chief, Wittgenstein, knew what was happening, Napoleon had rushed back at the head of his new army, had won the battle of Lützen, had reconquered Saxony, and had flung the Allied army back across the Oder.
At Bautzen they stood once more to fight. Napoleon drew up the most gigantic battle plan ever conceived up to that time; with half his force he assailed the Allied centre, while Ney with sixty thousand men marched against the right. The struggle lasted for twelve bitter hours. Somehow Napoleon held his own command together and kept the Allies pinned to their position, while Ney was slowly wheeling his immense force round for the decisive movement. But the stars in their courses fought against the Emperor. Ney failed lamentably. He lost sight of the main object of his march, and he showed his hand and then wasted his strength in a fierce attack on Blücher at Preistitz. Blücher struggled gamely; more and more of Ney’s forces were drawn into the fight; the turning movementwas delayed, and the Allies, warned in time, writhed out of the trap. Fifty thousand prisoners and two hundred guns might have been captured; as it was, Napoleon was left to deplore a massacre—for nothing! Alluding to Soult’s capture of Badajoz in 1811, Napoleon had said, “Soult gained me a town and lost me a kingdom.” He might well have said of Ney’s attack on Preistitz that Ney gained him a village and lost him an Empire. It is inconceivable that the war could have been prolonged if Ney had obeyed orders at Bautzen; the allied army comprised all the troops that Russia and Prussia could at that time put into the field; its destruction would have meant the reconquest of Prussia and of Poland, the intimidation of Austria, and the regaining of Napoleon’s European ascendancy.
After Bautzen Napoleon concluded an armistice with his enemies. He still hoped for an advantageous peace, and even if he failed to obtain this he expected that the delay would enable him to rest the weary boys who filled the ranks, to drill his wretched cavalry into some semblance of order, and to clear his rear of the bandits and partisans who were swarming everywhere. Moreover, for the last eighteen months he had been working at a pace which would have killed most men, and he himself was undoubtedly feeling the strain. The armistice would give him a little rest. But it meant disaster, nevertheless. From all over Russia new recruits were plodding across the unending plains to fill the gaps in the ranks of the field army; Prussia was calling out her whole male population, and Bernadotte’s Swedes were gradually moving up into line. Worse than all, Austria turned against him. The delay enabled Francis to bring his army up to war strength on the receipt of lavish English subsidies, and, even while he still hesitated to attack his son-in-law, the news arrived that Wellington had routedJoseph Bonaparte at Vittoria, had cleared Spain of the French, and was about to attack the sacred soil of France herself. The news was decisive, and the demands of the Allies promptly increased inordinately. When, in August, the armistice came to an end, Napoleon found himself assailed by forces of twice his strength.
Yet he did not despair; he thrust fiercely into Silesia, and then, finding the Austrians moving against Dresden, he wheeled about, marched a hundred and twenty miles in four days, and gained at Dresden the most surprising of all his victories. With a hundred thousand men he flung back a hundred and sixty thousand Russians and Austrians in utter disorder; Vandamme had cut off their retreat, and once again it seemed as if Ulm and Austerlitz were to be repeated. And then once more occurred a startling change of fortune. Napoleon might have taken a hundred thousand prisoners; the Emperors of Austria and of Russia might have fallen into his power; Austria would have been ruined, and Napoleon could have dictated peace on his own terms. But Napoleon handed over the pursuit to Murat and St. Cyr, and returned to Dresden. In consequence, the retreating Austrians were not pressed, Vandamme was overwhelmed, and the action at Kulm gave the Allies twenty thousand prisoners instead of placing the whole Allied army in the hands of the French.
No one knows why Napoleon returned to Dresden when victory was in his grasp. The advocates of the illness theory certainly have a strong case here; but perhaps it was news of the disasters in Silesia which recalled him; perhaps he was merely too tired to continue; perhaps he only had a bad cold as the result of sitting his horse all day in the pelting rain which fell all day during the battle of Dresden. However it was, Napoleon’smastership of Europe was lost irreparably when he came to his decision to leave his army.
For two months disaster now followed disaster. Macdonald had already been routed on the Katzbach; Oudinot was beaten at Gross Beeren, Ney was beaten at Dennewitz, St. Cyr surrendered at Dresden, and Napoleon himself tasted the bitter cup of defeat at Leipzig. The astonishing feature of the autumn campaign of 1813 was not that Napoleon was defeated, but that he ever escaped from Germany at all. But he did, blotting out on his path the Bavarian army which opposed him at Hanau.
Once again the Allies advanced too slowly, and once again Napoleon was able to organize a fresh army to defend France. Soult had grappled with Wellington in the south, and was stubbornly contesting every inch of French soil in his desperate campaign of Toulouse. Napoleon prepared to make one more effort for success in the north. Russia, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, the Confederation of the Rhine, Holland and even Belgium had sent every man available against him. Four hundred thousand men were about to pass the Rhine while Napoleon had not a quarter of this force with which to oppose them. However, the prospect was not as hopeless as it would appear. The Allies were bitterly jealous of each other, and Napoleon had good grounds for hoping to divide them even now. Besides, they were all of them intent upon gaining possession of whatever territory they wished to claim at the conclusion of peace, and an army guided solely by political motives is at the mercy of another which is directed only in accordance with the dictates of military strategy.
This early became obvious. Austria had bought the alliance of the smaller German states only by means of extensive guarantees of their possessions; in consequence she determined to find compensation for her losses by acquisitions in Italy. But Italywas stoutly defended by the Viceroy Eugène; she could make no progress there, and in consequence she did not yet desire Napoleon’s fall. Schwartzenberg, the Austrian general, was therefore held back by Metternich’s secret orders until Venetia and Lombardy should be in Austrian hands. Metternich was quite capable of leaving the Russians and Prussians in the lurch while he played his own tortuous game; however, the situation was saved by Murat’s betrayal of Napoleon. With Murat on his side, and the Neapolitan army moving forward against Eugène, Metternich was sure of Italy, and Schwartzenberg was allowed to proceed into France. Once more the weakness and treachery of a subordinate had prevented Napoleon from gaining a decisive success.
The prospect grew gloomier and gloomier for the French. Napoleon was beaten at Brienne and at La Rothière; immediate and utter ruin seemed inevitable. Suddenly everything was changed. Napoleon fell upon the dispersed army of the Allies. At Champ-Aubert, Vauchamp, Château-Thierry and Mormant the Allies were beaten and hurled back. More than this, the Prussians under Blücher, thirty thousand strong, hard pressed by Napoleon, came reeling back towards Soissons and the Marne—and Soissons was held by a French garrison. With an unfordable river before him; the only bridge held by the enemy; a panic-stricken army under his command, and Napoleon and his unbeaten Frenchmen, flushed with victory, at his heels, Blücher seemed doomed to destruction. The officer in command at Soissons bore the ominous name of Moreau; he was intimidated into surrender when one more day’s defence would have had incalculable results. Blücher escaped across the Marne not a minute too soon.
This was Napoleon’s last chance before hisabdication. His armies were weakened even by their victories; the Allied forces seemed inexhaustible. All Napoleon’s efforts were unavailing; his final threat at Schwartzenberg’s communications was disregarded, and the Allies reached Paris. Marmont’s surrender here has often been brought forward as one more instance of treachery in high places, but it was not treachery, it was only timidity and fear of responsibility. One cannot imagine Blücher surrendering under similar circumstances. Be that as it may, Paris fell, and Napoleon abdicated.
After the abdication came the descent from Elba; after the descent from Elba came the Hundred Days; and at the end of the Hundred Days came the Waterloo campaign. It was during the Waterloo campaign that there occurred, not one but half a dozen chances for Napoleon to win the decisive victory for which he had been striving ever since 1812, but all these half-dozen chances were spoilt by unexpected happenings and by sheer hard luck.
Many critics have inveighed against Napoleon’s decision to take the initiative into his own hands and to carry the war into the enemy’s camp by his invasion of Belgium, but there is hardly one who can find any fault with the plan of invasion once it had been decided upon. The chief fault-finder, indeed, is Wellington, who, to his dying day, maintained that the movement should have been commenced through Mons, against the English right, and not through Charleroi, against their left. However, Wellington’s opinion on this matter does not carry as much weight as it might, because the Iron Duke was guilty of several serious mistakes during the campaign, and was only too anxious to draw any red herring that offered across their trail, especially as these mistakes were nearly all committed while he was under the impression that Napoleon’s ultimate objective was his right and not his centre.The whole weight of later opinion is in favour of Napoleon’s plan.
Napoleon decided, then, to invade Belgium via Charleroi, to interpose between the Prussian and the Anglo-Allied armies and defeat them in detail. The fact that he had only 130,000 men against 120,000 Prussians and 100,000 English and Allies does not seem to have caused him any grave apprehension. The greatest handicap under which he suffered was the absence of Berthier and Davout; both staff work and the higher commands suffered because of this, for Soult had no aptitude for the task of Chief of Staff, and Ney and Grouchy had no skill either in higher strategy or in the handling of large numbers of men. Nevertheless, the initial movements, without the interference of the enemy, were carried out with brilliant success; the 130,000 men available were assembled on the Sambre without either Blücher or Wellington having any suspicion as to the storm that was gathering. Next day the advance across the Sambre was ordered, and the storm burst.
The two vitally important factors for success were extreme simplicity of movement and the utmost secrecy of design. But these were rendered impossible at the very moment of the opening of the campaign. First, a general of division, as soon as he was over the river, deserted to the Prussians and disclosed the very considerable information of which he was possessed, and secondly the officer bearing orders to Vandamme to advance met with an accident and broke his leg. This held up both Vandamme’s corps and the one behind it, Lobau’s, and delayed the advance after the movement had become known for six valuable hours. All chance of surprising the Prussians in their cantonments was now lost, but for all that the plan of campaign was so perfect that on the next day the English and Prussians could onlybring slightly superior numbers to bear on the French force. At Ligny the Prussians were beaten; at Quatre Bras the English were held back. Ney’s and d’Erlon’s mistakes on this day have already been described. Had Ney acted with all possible diligence, or had d’Erlon used his wits, either a completely crushing victory over the Prussians or a nearly equally satisfactory success over the English could have been obtained. Even both were possible. But Napoleon’s chance was spoiled owing to the inefficiency of his subordinates. Soult, Ney and d’Erlon were all equally to blame.
The next point is more mysterious. After Ligny was fought and won, it was clearly to Napoleon’s advantage to follow up his success without a moment’s delay. No other general had ever been so remorseless in hunting down a beaten enemy, and in wringing every possible advantage from his victory. But at Digny Napoleon paused. No order for an advance was issued. For twelve hours paralysis descended upon the Imperial army. The Prussians struggled out of harm’s way, and crawled painfully by by-roads to Wavre to keep in touch with the English. The cavalry reconnaissances which were sent out later the next morning to find the Prussian army did their work badly, and left Napoleon convinced that they had fallen back on Liège and not on Wavre. It was the delay, however, and not the faulty scouting, which proved most disastrous. Like Napoleon’s return to Dresden in 1813, it has never been explained. Some historians say that he was struck down by an attack of the same nameless illness which had overcome him at Borodino, at Moscow, at Dresden and at Leipzig. In this case it is the only possible explanation. For four or five hours Napoleon must have suffered from a complete lapse of his faculties. Those four or five hours were sufficient to ruin the Empire. Napoleon was leftcompletely in the dark as to the moral, strength and position of the Prussians, and consequently he detached Grouchy with ambiguous orders in pursuit, gave him a force too small for decisive operations and yet much too large for mere observation, and sent him by a route which precluded him either from assisting the main body or from interfering seriously with the operations of the Prussians. Grouchy might possibly have done both if only he had possessed vast insight, vast skill and vast determination, but he did not; he was merely ordinary. So Wellington turned to bay at Waterloo; the Prussians assailed Napoleon’s flank, and the day ended in despair and disaster.
Thus, on looking back through the years of defeat, 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815, we find that there were a great number of occasions when Napoleon might have gained a success which would have counter-balanced the previous reverses. At Smolensk he might have gained another Friedland; at Borodino he might still have snatched some slight triumph out of the Moscow campaign. At Bautzen he came within an ace of destroying the Russian and Prussian armies, at Dresden he nearly captured the whole Austrian army and the two most powerful autocrats of Europe. The surrender of Soissons just saved the Prussians in 1814. In 1815 he might have shattered either or both of the armies opposed to him. It is not too much to say that with the good luck which had attended him during his earlier campaigns not only might he not have been forced to abdicate in 1814, but he might have enjoyed his continental ascendancy for a very considerable additional length of time.
Beside these undoubted possibilities there are others not as firmly based. Marbot tells a story that on the eve of Leipzig, while at the head of his Chasseurs, he saw a party of horsemen moving aboutin the darkness a short distance ahead. For various reasons he refrained from attacking—to discover later that the hostile force had consisted of the King of Prussia, the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and their staffs. A resolute charge by Marbot would have brought back as prisoners all the brains and authority of the opposing army. The Spanish victory at Pavia, when Francis the First lost “everything except honour,” would have been a poor success in comparison. We have, however, only Marbot’s word for this incident, and Marbot is distinctly untrustworthy. Edward III.’s army was not the only one which used the long bow.
It is more to the purpose to consider Dupont’s surrender at Baylen. When Dupont was sent out from Madrid to conquer Andalusia, there was only one Spanish field army in being, and that was the one he was to attack. As it happened, his nerve failed him, he frittered away weeks of valuable time, and finally he was hemmed in and forced to surrender rather feebly. The news of the disaster spread like wildfire over the Peninsula. Moncey was repulsed from Valencia; Catalonia broke into insurrection and hemmed Duhesme into Barcelona. Galicia and Aragon began to arm. The Peninsular War was soon fully developed; it was to absorb the energies of an army of three hundred thousand men for five years; it was to shed the blood of half a million Frenchmen; it was to encourage first Austria, then Russia, to rebel against the Napoleonic domination, and it was only to end when the British flag waved over Bordeaux and Toulouse. Had Lannes or some other really capable officer been in command of Dupont’s twenty thousand men, the Army of Andalusia might have been thoroughly beaten and the Peninsula overawed, for Baylen was the battle which destroyed the French army’s reputation for invincibility. Had not the Spaniards been victoriousthere, there would not have been an opportunity for the simultaneous call to arms which set all Spain in an inextinguishable blaze; isolated outbreaks might naturally have occurred, but the long respite given to the Spaniards during the summer of 1808, while Madrid was evacuated, would not have taken place to give the Peninsula its opportunity for arming and organizing. Baylen is as great a turning-point in Napoleonic history as even Bautzen or Leipzig—and but for Dupont history might have turned in another direction.
Instances such as this might be multiplied indefinitely, from Marmont at El Bodin (where he hesitated when half the British army was in his power) to Jourdan in his retreat to Vittoria; from Jerome’s mismanagement of Westphalia to Ney at Dennewitz; but it is useless to continue. It is obvious that Napoleon’s military set-backs were due very largely, not to his own failings, but to the incapacity of his subordinates. Napoleon made mistakes, enormous ones, sometimes (a few will be considered in the next chapter), but none of them as utterly fatal as those of the other generals. And yet these other generals were quite good generals as far as generals go—they were far and away superior to Schwartzenberg and Wittgenstein, for instance. Only Wellington and perhaps Blücher can be compared to them. The only moral to be drawn is that nothing human and fallible could sustain the vast Empire any longer; the dead weight of the whole was such that the least flaw in any of the pillars meant the progressive collapse of the entire fabric.
This conclusion enables us to approach a definite decision as to “what might have been.” It is unnecessary to argue as to whether the English Cabinet would have survived a defeat at Waterloo, or whether Francis would have made peace if he had been captured at Dresden. The result eventuallywould have been the same. There was only one Napoleon, and the Empire was too big for him to govern. Sooner or later something would go wrong, and the disturbance would increase in geometrical progression, and with a violence directly proportionate to the length of time during which the repressive force had been in action. It was inevitable that the Empire should fall, although as it happened the fall was accelerated by a series of unfortunate incidents. Victor Hugo meant the same thing when he said “God was bored with Napoleon”; and Napoleon himself had occasional glimpses of the same inevitable result—as witness the occasion when he said, “After me, my son will be lucky if he has a few thousand francs a year.”
Thus, if Napoleon by good fortune had reestablished his Empire in 1813, and taken advantage (just as he did in 1810) of peace in the east to reconquer Spain in the south, even then he would not long have retained his throne. The persistent enmity of England would have continued to injure him, and to seek out some weak spot for the decisive blow. Even if Ferdinand had been sent back to Spain, and French prestige survived such a reverse, there would have still remained various avenues of attack. England was suffering severely, but France was suffering more. Perhaps the patience of the French would have become exhausted, and some trivial revolt in Paris would have driven Napoleon into exile. A very similar thing happened in 1830, and the house of Orleans was always anxiously awaiting some such chance. There could hardly have arisen a Napoleonic Legend in that event. To the French mind Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little would have been the same person, instead of uncle and nephew.
However it was, Napoleon was not destined to live long, and even if his Empire had survived him,at his death one can hardly imagine Europe remaining under the thumb of any Council of Regency he might appoint, with Joseph and Jerome and the Murats all scheming and conspiring to grasp the main power. Poor silly Marie Louise could never have kept order; some Monk would have arisen to restore the Bourbons, and Napoleon II. would have received the same treatment as did Richard Cromwell. The legend of l’Aiglon would then have been very different. A Bonaparte restoration in France might be as feasible as ever was a Protectorate restoration in England. Not all Louis Napoleon’s wiles could have built up a reactionary party; not all the glamour of Austerlitz and Jena could have masked the discredit of a new dynasty being cast out by its own people instead of by a league of indignant autocrats; even Sedan was not the death-blow to Bonapartism. As it is, there will be a Third Empire in France as soon as there arises a Napoleon the Fourth.