yet in the depths of her soul she shudders at the foreboding that she is
to become the play of elemental forces. For, if this man who covets all
or nothing and cannot rest until he has all, this man who has never given
himself up to any one person or any one thing because it has been his
unceasing wish to gain every one and everything, if Napoleon now gives
himself for the first and only time in his life, he will stake his whole
being, and will fetter it to the personality of the woman whom he clasps
in his arms.
“I am waiting for you; I am wholly filled with you; your picture and
the intoxicating evening leave my senses no peace. Sweet, incomparable
Josephine, what have you done to my heart? Are you angry with me? Do you
look sad? Are you ill at ease?... But I find calm when I give myself up
to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames
which burn me. How plain it was to me last night that your picture can
never replace the real you. At noon you will start; in three hours I
shall see you; till then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses! But you must
not give me kisses, for they burn my blood!”
He does not tell her his plans, and yet he tells her something more.
“These Directors fancy that I need their protection. They will consider
themselves happy, some day, to secure mine. I shall make my way with the
sword.”—“What do you think,” writes Josephine, “of this faith in success?
Can such self-confidence be based on anything else than immeasurable
conceit? A brigadier general is to protect the heads of the government!
I don’t know what to make of it; and yet, often enough, this ludicrous
self-assurance makes me believe that anything is possible which the
strange man wants to achieve.”
We feel as if we were standing in front of the iron door which guards
a glowing human heart, and looking through the key-hole into the fiery
furnace of a soul.
But this woman, whom he possesses, why does he take her to wife? That
he may possess her for himself alone? His egotism is against it, and,
besides, he would be deluding himself. To gain advantages? In respect
of money, and in respect of influence with the powerful, she can offer
him nothing that he does not already enjoy. Of course she might prove
useful to him; he is certainly flattered that she is of noble birth; and
beyond doubt he has taken into consideration the fact that if she, who
had a place in the days of the old regime, becomes his wife, this will
put an end to the whispers that he is “only a Corsican.” Yet it is as
a Corsican, with the family feeling of an Italian (a feeling that has
come down to him through the generations, and masters even him), that he
desires marriage with a woman of birth. Finally, is it not obvious that
this man who is so utterly self-centred must passionately long for a
perpetuation of his own ego?
The one thing in the world which Napoleon cannot make without another’s
aid is an heir, and this heir must be made out of good materials. He
is no man of the people. He has come into being amid the struggles of
old families, and beneath a coat-of-arms bearing two stars which he now
wishes to fuse into one. If he has helped to break down the prejudices
against the masses, he has been moved along this course by delight in
the elemental energy of action, and never by humanist feelings. Why
should he wish to mix his blood with that of the people? When he marries
the woman who long ere this has granted him all, he does so because, in
both branches of her ancestry, she is the offspring of a long line of
noble forebears. It is her birth, in addition to her charms, which makes
her a welcome figure in a drawing-room, despite her reputation and her
position. Since the Thirteenth Vendémiaire, Barras, the most powerful of
the Directors, has regarded Buonaparte as his main prop—and he wishes
to bind the general to his service by handing over Josephine. In this
realm of erotic freedoms, a man who should wish, of a sudden, to insist
on points of honour would simply make himself ridiculous. There are no
knights and ladies now, but only citizens and citizenesses, who pair and
separate as they please.
Barras has long since decided that Napoleon shall command the Army of
Italy; and when Josephine, womanlike, is unable to make up her mind,
Barras gives her a definite pledge to this effect. There are good
reasons, too, why he should send the dangerous man to the most difficult
front. Napoleon’s great plan, the one which has procured him his
position on the general staff, is now sent to Nice, and comes back with
annotations by the commander-in-chief there. The man who has drafted the
plan, says that worthy, must have been a lunatic. He had better come and
try his own hand at the job. That is exactly what the Directory has been
angling for. The writer of the criticism is recalled, and the “lunatic”
is sent to take his place.
The position is assured; the prudent Josephine hesitates no longer. A
legal friend has to certify that no birth certificate is now obtainable
from the blockaded island in the West Indies, and that the authorities
must therefore take the lady’s word for the statement that she is
twenty-eight. Since this knocks five years off her age, the bridegroom is
gallant enough to add a year to his own. Thus the marriage begins with
a twofold falsification of dates. A marriage settlement arranging for
the division of property is signed, although the vicomtesse owns nothing
but debts, and the warrior declares that his only possessions are his
clothes, his uniform.
In the wedding ring, the words “To Destiny!” are engraved.
Two days later, he leaves Paris. Eleven crazy love letters are sent to
her from eleven halting places. In Nice he joins his army, and takes over
a command which will lead him beyond the frontiers of Europe.
It is the season of the equinoctial gales. From a turret he looks across
at the enemy coast, and thinks: “This is the place I have always coveted
as a starting-point. Behind me lies Paris; and her bedchamber, hung with
mirrors. That is happiness. It is mine. Over there, across the mountains,
in that hostile land, is fame. The goal of my desire.”
As he turns away, he catches sight of a familiar line of mountains
shimmering in the distant blue. No longer does this hold his attention.
It is his lost homeland. The island.
BOOK TWO
THE TORRENT
So divine an illumination is always linked with youth and
productivity; and, in very truth, Napoleon was one of the most
productive men that ever lived.—GOETHE.
I
The towering peaks form a white, serrated ridge that thrusts upward
into the blue of morning. Gleaming with perpetual snows, dangerous as
the adventure he has undertaken, the Alps look down threateningly upon
the bay, and mock the teeming crowds of men. Invincibly does nature,
in symbolic fashion, here call a halt to the commander; here she has
interposed a barrier between the land of his fathers and his new
fatherland.
But he, who never trusts in force alone, who always outbids force with
prudence, has to good purpose been pondering the old problem. Hannibal
crossed the Alps; he, Napoleon, will go round them. If we come to grips
with the enemy at the weakest point, where the Apennines press close to
the Alps and a slight depression facilitates an entry, we need not wait
for the summer. The earlier in the year, the firmer the snows, and the
less danger from avalanches. Forward, into the land of my fathers!
Delay will be fatal. Not that the enemy is a danger to him. His foes
are asleep in winter quarters: the Austrians in the east of Lombardy;
the Sardinians in the west of the Lombard plain; and the numerous petty
republics and duchies, the fragments of Italy, are not expecting an
attack until the thaw has come. But the French soldiers are hungry.
Paris, on the verge of ruin, through depreciation of the currency, can
send them nothing but almost valueless assignats; and all of these
disappear into the greedy maw of the army contractors. “France would
tremble,” said one of the generals in his letters home just before
Bonaparte’s arrival, “could every one know how many are dying here of
famine and disease.” What will the new commander do if he brings neither
money nor bread with him?
“Soldiers, you are half starved and half naked. The Government owes
you much, but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage, do
you honour, but give you no glory, no advantage. I will lead you into
the most fertile plains of the world. There you will find flourishing
cities, teeming provinces. There you will reap honour, glory, and wealth.
Soldiers of the Army of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and
firmness?”
A faint cheer from the ranks answered the new commander when, at the
first parade, he addressed his men in the foregoing words. But when they
were all back in camp, one said to another: “General doesn’t look very
weatherproof, with his yellow hide. Fine talk, that, about the fertile
plains. He’d better let us have some boots first, so that we can march
there!” The people of Israel must have grumbled in much the same fashion
when Moses spoke of the Promised Land. The new commander encounters
nothing but opposition.
Who knows him among the soldiers of this army, which has now been
encamped for three years on the crests of the hills? Those of them who
remain, that is to say: for a fourth of the men are in hospital; and an
equal number have been killed, or taken prisoner, or have deserted! The
officers? Will not they, like those captains in Auxonne seven years ago,
be inclined to encounter this wonderful young man’s orders with passive
resistance rather than ready obedience? Look at him as he sits there
writing and calculating; his powdered hair is cut in a fringe over his
forehead, but lengthens towards the back of the head to hang down over
his shoulders; his coat is simple and scantily embroidered; he walks up
and down and issues dictatorial orders, this foreigner whose French is
still faulty. Not an officer in his staff is well-disposed towards him,
except the three or four faithful followers whom he has brought with him.
One of these latter tells us: “They looked upon him as a mathematician or
a visionary.”
What if he be both at once, and for this very reason a man of genius?
At first, he seems to be nothing but a calculator. Consider one of his
early letters to the Directors—for he promptly opens an epistolary
campaign, carried on side by side with a campaign of cavalry and by
guns, waged with the same ardour and the same success. “You are asking
me to perform miracles, and I cannot do that.... Only with prudence
and foresight can we achieve great ends. It is but a step from victory
to defeat. In affairs of magnitude I have learned that, in the last
resort, everything invariably turns upon a trifle.” But to Carnot, the
great army organiser, to whom he can say much that is unsuitable for his
official dispatches, he writes, gnashing his teeth: “Would you believe
it, that I have not a single engineer officer here, not one who has ever
taken part in a siege!... You can hardly conceive how furious I am that
I have no artillery!” His actual resources totalled 24 mountain guns,
4,000 underfed horses, frs. 300,000 in silver, and enough food to supply
his 30,000 men for a month on half rations. With these vestiges of an
equipment, he is to conquer Italy!
Nevertheless, having undertaken the venture, he makes the best of the
materials at his disposal. Getting to work like a hurricane upon this
crowd of pitiful men who have run to seed, upon corps some of which have
already begun to sing the royal anthem again, with indefatigable energy
he succeeds in transforming them into a republican army.
Here are some of his doings on the third day after his arrival. Sending
a hundred and ten workmen to make a road. Suppression of a mutiny in a
brigade. Quartering of two artillery divisions. Orders to two generals in
case of horse stealing. Answer to the requests of two others concerning
their commands. Order to a general in Toulon to bring his men to Nice.
Order to another general to call up the National Guard of Antibes. Order
to a general to find the most efficient officers in the mutinous brigade.
Address to the general staff. Review of troops, with orders of the
day.—During the first twenty days, one hundred and twenty-three written
orders relate solely to the provisioning of the troops; among them are
numerous complaints concerning peculation, short weight, and inferior
goods; and these orders are issued on the march, from twelve different
headquarters, in the interludes between six skirmishes.
For hardly has he passed through the narrow defiles than, in accordance
with his new principle, he has massed his forces to attack first one
and then the other of the allied foes, and in two battles he defeats
and separates them. In truth, these were mere advance-guard skirmishes,
as becomes the nature of the French, and the previous training of these
troops, which as yet know nothing of a great movement in open lines. At
this stage of his campaign, speed and boldness are more important than
elaborate strategy.
When he is on one of these breathless rides, in the deep mountain
valleys, through the passes, amid the thunder of his own and the enemy
cannon, suddenly the glass covering Josephine’s miniature (which he
carries in the inner pocket of his tunic, and has kissed hundreds of
times) shivers into fragments. Growing paler than ever, he reins in his
charger, and says to Bourrienne: “The glass is broken. My wife is ill or
unfaithful. Forward!”
Everything depends upon the fulfilment of his first old pledge. He knows
that if, this once, he is able to do what he has promised, the army
will believe him; and if it believes him, it will soon believe in him.
In actual fact, a fortnight after his prophecy had been uttered, the
army, which had won its first victories on entering the downward grades,
found itself on the last elevation. The soldiers raised a hearty cheer.
After the weary days in the narrow valleys, they at length caught sight
of the plains of Piedmont lying at their feet, stretching out into the
immeasurable distance, blossoming in the spring weather, offering all
that they had gone short of for so long. The Po and other rivers were
flowing towards the horizon, and at length the world of snows lay
behind. “As if by a magician’s spell, they had been enabled to cross the
gigantic barrier, which had seemed to them like the frontier of another
world.”
“All this is yours!” Their commander has forced one of the two opponents,
the king of Sardinia, to make truce, thus compelling the surrender of
everything that grows on Sardinian territory. This first truce of his
campaigns was secured by Bonaparte through cunning and bluff, for he
threatened the enemy with the use of overwhelming forces, which he did
not possess, and, indeed, could not have used, pressed as he was on both
sides. The soldiers are amazed; their general is a man of his word!
Literally, in a fortnight, he has fulfilled his promise.
Henceforward, the men under his command put their trust in Bonaparte. It
is as Bonaparte that he begins to sign himself from the outset of the
campaign. Since Italy is the enemy, he will have nothing more to do with
an Italian name.
Ere long, he will change his name again.
II
Why was he victorious? How can we explain that during the next few weeks
he was able to deliver blow after blow? What is the solution of this
riddle?
First of all, he owes his success to youth and health. A body that can
endure interminable riding without fatigue; the power to sleep at any
moment, and to wake whenever he pleases; a stomach which can digest
anything, and makes no complaint at being put on short commons; eyes that
see and arrange everything.
But it is to the revolution that he is indebted for the fact that at the
age of twenty-seven, when his splendid powers are in their first vigour,
he has risen to a leading place, and can wield unrestricted dictatorship.
Only, thanks to the new ideas of equality, in a world which prizes a man
for what he does and not for his birth, can any one become a leader in
the prime of youth and after so rough an apprenticeship.
Look at the men who are in the field against him. Archduke Charles, with
his delicately shaped and decadent Habsburg nose, how can he, with his
education, vie with the Corsican in indifference to hardships, rival
Bonaparte in knowledge of men? How can Beaulieu, the Austrian commander,
cope with the French general? The former is seventy-two; the latter,
twenty-seven. General Colli suffers from gout, and has to be carried
throughout the campaign. Alvintzy is in the middle sixties. The king
of Sardinia is an old man. What can the excellent General Wurmser, who
is deaf, and a slow, elderly gentleman, cautious in his movements, do
against a commander who thinks nothing of changing his headquarters
every day, who surrounds himself with young men, and who takes “Time is
everything,” for his motto?
The oldest man in Napoleon’s circle is the faithful Berthier, now
forty-two, whom the new commander has taken over from his predecessor
because Berthier has a good knowledge of the country. For two decades he
is to be Bonaparte’s slavishly devoted chief of general staff. Next to
be mentioned comes Masséna, a man of ardent temperament, who had been a
cabin boy and a vagrant, and had served fourteen years under the Bourbons
without rising to the rank of sergeant major; now, within a few weeks,
he was to become a general. Augereau, too, a deserter from three armies,
boaster, adventurer, and great thief. Such were the men drawn from the
dregs of society out of whom their commander, the youngest of them all,
was soon to make heroes and generalissimos, and subsequently princes and
dukes.
In every dispatch, he recommends for promotion those, and only those, who
have displayed courage. Thus, after three battles, a grenadier rises to
the rank of colonel, and will climb yet higher. On the other hand, many
of the generals whom he has taken over with his command are dismissed
with blunt censure: “Good enough for office work, knows nothing of war.”
His subordinates do not necessarily incur his displeasure because they
are beaten: “The fortune of war, dear Masséna, changes from day to day.
To-morrow, or later, we shall win back what you have just lost.” But a
division which has done badly is paraded to hear a rating. He says that
he will have a mocking inscription worked upon its colours. Then the
soldiers cry to him from the ranks: “To-morrow we will lead the van.”
Next day, he has a thousand more enthusiasts among the troops. When they
are victorious, in the orders of the day he calls them comrades and
friends. Thus does he lead the sons of the people.
For it is a people’s army that he is leading; that is the second great
factor of his success. This, too, he owes to the revolution. Indeed,
the people’s army is an expression of the revolution. The soldiers on
the Austrian side must be used thriftily, for they cost a great deal,
and it is not easy to replace them. They are drawn from a larger number
of nationalities than the German emperor himself rules. Six different
languages are spoken in the army, and there is no community of thought
to hold it together. But the French are fighting as a united nation of
thirty millions, and their army will be capable of perpetual regeneration
for twenty years to come.
What is the French army fighting for? The new freedom of the republic,
and to spread throughout the world the few and simple ideas which animate
it! The French are fighting for the world revolution, and nothing short
of that. But the army is not in pursuit of purely ideal aims. It has to
defend liberty against the environing forces of legitimate monarchy,
against the legitimists who are more concerned with self-defence than
with the cause of the fallen Bourbons. The French cannot achieve their
end by simply defending their own frontiers. They are surrounded by kings
and emperors who wish to keep their peoples from any attempt to imitate
the French revolution, and are therefore trying to destroy the very focus
of the new ideas. Thus France is forced to assume the offensive as a
means of self-defence. Those who in such a fashion become conquerors in
spite of themselves, are surely entitled to declare that their conquests
are achieved in the name of liberty.
This brings us to the third factor of Napoleon’s success. While the
commander is engaged in the attempt to conquer Lombardy, and then Italy,
for France, he issues a series of manifestoes to tell the inhabitants
of the territories he is invading that he comes to free them from the
Habsburgs and the Sardinians, from dukes and patrician senates. Will not
all who have been discontented with the old order be roused to action
by the torrential force of such appeals? Have not the oppressed masses
long had it in mind to rid themselves of their rulers? Have not the ideas
of the revolution crossed the frontiers years ago, rousing, in many of
the towns, students and burghers to revolt? Here in Italy were young
people who longed for freedom; leaders who had been vainly clamouring
for “Italia unità.” The revolt, though still in chains, was rattling its
chains outside the kings’ palace doors. The malcontents were ready to
welcome the invading army, and to believe in its mission.
The commander, a man of Italian blood, bearing an Italian name, and
speaking Italian as his mother tongue, was not for them a French warrior.
He was the herald of liberty and equality, and the two great words headed
all his letters. How terrible would be the disillusionment, should the
invader prove, after all, a foreign oppressor! The commander is well
aware how much turns upon this. Will he be able to keep his famished army
within bounds? Can he make his soldiers behave as well as if they were
fresh from a well-provisioned garrison town?
“Looting is on the wane,” he writes home. “The thirst of an army which
lacked everything has been quenched. There is an excuse for the poor
devils. They have spent three years in the marches of the Alps, and now
I have led them into the Promised Land! A famished soldier perpetrates
excesses which make one ashamed of being a man.... I intend to restore
order, for I will not remain in command of a robber band.... To-morrow I
am going to have several privates and a corporal shot, for having looted
the plate from a church. Discipline will be re-established within a day
or two. Italy has been amazed at the valour of our soldiers, and shall be
amazed at their good behaviour. There have been terrible moments; things
have happened which have made me shudder. Thank God, the retreating enemy
behaved even worse!”
He puts his men on their honour. “Swear to me”—thus runs one of his early
manifestoes—“to spare the peoples you are liberating; otherwise you will
be the scourges of the people! Your victories, your courage, the blood
of our fallen brothers, will be lost; honour and glory, too! I and my
generals would blush at leading an undisciplined army!” Hard to carry
out, despite his adjurations. Throughout the campaign, he is hampered by
this problem of looting. Again and again he issues orders to his generals
telling them they are to shoot any one who fails to hand over his plunder
within twenty-four hours, even if the stolen goods be horses and mules.
There are revolts and counter-attacks. Priests and nobles, agents of
the princes, incite a town to resist. He is pitiless in his shootings,
ruthless in his reprisals, whenever, in the conquered territory, any one
raises a hand against the new master. But this becomes increasingly rare,
for in the towns he is skilful in enlisting the civic sense on the side
of a new order which assumes imposing lineaments. He understands (and
this is an additional factor of success) the Italian temperament; knows
how to appeal to the sense of historic veneration: “Peoples of Italy,
the army of France comes to break your chains. It is a friend to all the
peoples. Have confidence! Your property, your customs, your religion,
shall be respected.” He goes on to speak to them of Athens, Sparta,
classical Rome.