quotes Alexander’s words: “I shall learn from his own teachings, which
are those of a master. Our climate will make war for us. The French are
not inured to it as we are. Miracles only happen when the Emperor is
present, and he cannot be everywhere.” Napoleon is greatly moved by these
words; he tramps restlessly up and down the room; the conversation lasts
for hours. Since he cannot refute Caulaincourt’s arguments, he makes
vague answers behind which his titanic wishes loom.
“A well-fought battle will put an end to the fine resolves of your friend
Alexander.... He is false, ambitious, and weak; he has the character
of a Greek. Believe me, it is he, not I, who wants this war, for he
cherishes a hidden design.... He is out of humour because I did not take
his sister.” When Caulaincourt gives proofs to the contrary, Napoleon
says: “I have forgotten the details.”—Forgotten! This is a new word in
the Emperor’s mouth. He knows his position to be weak; himself a man of
facts, he now brushes away those which he finds inconvenient.
He sends a more resolute envoy to the tsar. When a proposal comes from
St. Petersburg that Warsaw shall be exchanged for Oldenburg, the Emperor
says threateningly to the Russian ambassador, raising his voice so that
every one in the room may hear: “Not one Polish village!”
But these political incidents and discussions are merely the forms of
destiny. Schemes flash like lightning through his brain; his soul is
devoured by wishes: and he will rather reveal these things to a dangerous
enemy like Fouché than to a shrewd adherent like Caulaincourt. He cannot
rid himself of the ex-Jacobin and ex-cleric. Last year, he had cashiered
the Minister of Police, for Fouché was obviously intriguing with England.
But Napoleon was as lenient as he had been at the time of the conspiracy
which had brought him back hot foot from Astorga. Instead of banishing
the man, the Emperor had appointed him senator—at the same time writing
to him words which give a glimpse into the inferno of these struggles
between the monarch and the spy: “Although I do not doubt your devotion,
I find it necessary to have you watched all the time. This is a fatiguing
necessity, and I should not be called upon to do anything of the kind.”
But though he dismisses Fouché from his ministerial post, and has the
watcher watched, Napoleon cannot get on without him, and talks to him
about the most private matters.
“Since my marriage, people fancy that the lion is asleep. They will soon
learn whether I am asleep. I need eight hundred thousand men, and have
them; I shall tow all Europe in my wake. Europe is nothing more than
an old woman, and with my eight hundred thousand men I can make her do
whatever I please.... Did not you yourself say to me: ‘You let your
genius have its way, because it does not know the word impossible.’ How
can I help it if a great power drives me on to become dictator of the
world? You and the others, who criticise me to-day and would like me to
become a good-natured ruler—have not you all been accessories? I have not
yet fulfilled my mission, and I mean to end what I have begun. _We need
a European legal code, a European court of appeal, a unified coinage, a
common system of weights and measures. The same law must run throughout
Europe. I shall fuse all the nations into one._... This, my lord duke,
is the only solution that pleases me....” Having said this, he suddenly
sends Fouché from the room.
Here we have it plainly disclosed, Napoleon’s vision of the United
States of Europe. The plan is recorded by one who, in his memoirs,
would fain have discredited the Emperor—this plan with its extremely
rational deductions and its daimonic inspiration. Europe is no longer
a “mole-hill” as it was in the days of Milan and Rivoli, when he was
nothing more than General Bonaparte, and when to the young man of
genius all possible adversaries seemed too petty. Fifteen years later,
Europe has become a plastic material; and Bonaparte is the emperor,
the legislator, the great orderer, the enemy of the anarchy out of
which he sprang, the modeller who would mould the clay into a splendid
whole. Throughout the intervening years he has been marching along a
predestined path; now he displays before us, in this statement of his
aims, the productive consequences towards which he has been moving along
that road of force through ever new hecatombs of slaughter. Behind him
lie Charlemagne’s visions of a united Europe; in front of him glide new
forms; and Cæsar, half way towards the realisation of his dream, is well
aware that the spirit will ultimately overpower the sword. He has himself
said this; and what he is now striving to establish by force with the aid
of eight hundred thousand men, will some day come into existence as a
voluntary amalgamation based upon reason and necessity. All the nations
will fuse into one.
This, my lord duke, is the only solution that pleases me.
III
While Napoleon is pouring his thoughts into Fouché’s ears, Alexander is
pouring gold into Talleyrand’s pockets, and no doubt Talleyrand is going
shares with Fouché. The bank could have informed Napoleon to whom Count
Nesselrode, the new secretary to the Russian embassy, was paying out such
large sums of money. From month to month Talleyrand lets Russia know
how the French preparations for war are advancing, and when they will
be completed. The limping Mephistopheles must have smiled to himself,
sometimes, when Russia paid him for his information with licenses for the
import of English goods into Russian harbours—documents which he could
sell for hard cash in Paris!
Is the tsar richer than the Emperor? Russia is still allied to France,
but the Russian market has been closed to French goods, and the famous
1811 vintage has one purchaser the less. Since England and Spain have
long ceased to be customers, French industry is in a bad way. But when
the Minister for Finance urges peace because tranquillity is essential to
the restoration of French finances, the Emperor cuts him short by saying:
“Not at all! It is true that our finances are disordered, but that is why
we need war!”
This argument was valid in the past, when the general had sent from
Italy the money which the indebted Directory needed, and when, as Consul
and Emperor he had made money by his wars. The French State, suffering
more than any other from the effects of the blockade it had itself
established, showed a deficit for the first time, though the deficit
amounted to hardly more than fifty millions. Yet, even now, the Emperor
refused to sanction any kind of State loan; “that would be immoral,
for it would lay a burden upon later generations.” Nevertheless, he
introduced indirect taxes and monopolies; nor did he act unwisely in
doing so, since he expected to acquire fresh markets, and thereby more
stable finances, from the Russian war. But victory was essential!
He enthusiastically lays his plans before the Chambers of Commerce.
“England has harmed herself far more by her blockade than she has harmed
any other country; she has taught us how to dispense with her products.
In a couple of years’ time, Europe will have adapted herself to the new
ways of feeding her populations. Soon, we shall have more than enough
beet sugar and shall be able to do without cane sugar.... Every year
I draw only nine hundred millions revenue from my own country; three
hundred millions I put away, and store in the cellars of the Tuileries.
The Bank of France is full of silver; the Bank of England has none.
Since the peace of Tilsit, I have received more than a milliard francs
in indemnities. Austria is bankrupt. England and Russia will soon follow
suit. I alone have money!”
All the same, no one has much faith in his fine words. The more the
Emperor’s plans for world conquest force the pace of recruiting, the
more keenly does he keep watch upon the internal tranquillity of France.
As the ruthlessness of his dictatorship increases, the mood of the
citizens of France becomes gloomier and gloomier. Any criticism, even
in the remotest corner of the realm, is immediately pounced upon and
prosecuted. There are more than three thousand persons locked up in
gaol without trial, because this one “hates the Emperor,” or this other
has certain “religious outlooks,” or another has written, “in private
letters, unfriendly expressions in regard to the government.” A new
press bureau, with the absurd name of “Bureau of Public Opinion,” is
established to manufacture political trends. When a Dutch newspaper
publishes the statement that it is within the competence of the pope to
excommunicate kings, not only is the journal suppressed, but the author
of the offending article is arrested. In a certain book, an appreciation
of the English constitution has to be deleted; another work has to be
rechristened “Campaigns of Napoleon the Great,” whereas the author’s
original title had been “History of Bonaparte.”
While oppression of thought is rampant, it is not inconsonant with the
imperialistic spirit to find that such men as Monge and Laplace, Guérin
and Gérard, are willing to accept baronial honours. And when the French
version of _The Robbers_ is prohibited in Hamburg, the last of the
republicans recall with ironical bitterness the day twenty years earlier
when the revolution had conferred the right of French citizenship upon
its German author.
What cares the Emperor for the mood of these ideologues? Under the spell
of the evolution of his own powers, his eyes fixed upon the goal of his
life’s aspiration, he misjudges now, as earlier in his struggle with
the pope, the moral impression he is making upon his contemporaries.
Yet in the past he had never failed to take this into account; at each
step, he had questioned public opinion. Now, he allows the newfangled
Bureau to manipulate public opinion: “What do I care for the opinion of
the drawing-rooms and the babblers! I recognise only one opinion, that
of the peasants!” Certain it is that the peasants are his most faithful
supporters, mainly because he rescued their lands from the dangers
threatened by the revolution. Now that the Spanish war has swallowed up
larger and larger armies, the peasants have to pay eight thousand francs
for a substitute, simply to save the few remaining sons to carry on the
work of agriculture on the lands of their fathers. Many thousands of
these young men are trying to evade service; and those who in the early
days of the war would have joyfully rallied to the colours, have now
to be rounded up by mobile columns or forced into the ranks by threats
against their families and the communes to which they belong.
Why should the Emperor be surprised at such a change of mood? Had not
General Bonaparte set out to carry the ideas of the revolution to the
peoples groaning under the yoke of emperors and kings? Did not the
First Consul go forth to repel in his one campaign, did not the Emperor
likewise go forth to repel in his three wars, the ever-renewed onslaughts
of the allied monarchs? That by wars thus forced upon him he won more
than freedom for the land of his adoption, that by the battles of
Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram he obtained new provinces from the enemy,
was the outcome of his genius, and encouraged the people’s army to fresh
deeds of valour. Even the rivalry with England was comprehensible to the
French people; had it not been ever thus in the days of their fathers
and grandfathers before them? But what could the peasant of Provence
make of these purely political struggles in Spain and in Russia? The
Emperor could not explain to him the plan for setting up a United States
of Europe. Men had disappeared in the rivers of Andalusia, the names of
which fell haltingly from a Frenchman’s lips. The peasant needed the
support of his son’s young arm, now that the years were creeping onward.
So it was that he purchased his son’s freedom from military service, and
growled as he paid.
What had the German peasants to say when, addressed as “contingents,”
they answered the call of their kings and accompanied the foreign Emperor
into distant lands? Thousands of peasants from the valley of the Main
were dispatched to Spain; Jerome sent thirty thousand Westphalians to the
Oder; Saxons guarded the Vistula; Württembergers and Bavarians flowed
in a steady stream eastward, for “if the princes of the Confederation
of the Rhine” (thus writes the Emperor to one of these same princes)
“give me the least cause to doubt their willingness to undertake a joint
defence, then, I tell them frankly, they are lost. I prefer open enemies
to untrustworthy friends.” Such is the crack of the master’s whip. He
deals more politely with the Habsburg. All being well, Austria may even
be rewarded for her aid by receiving Silesia.
Germany, composed as she is of many small and disintegrated fragments,
serves Napoleon admirably in his jig-saw game with the nations. The three
southern States have had their inhabitants and their lands bartered and
exchanged at will; and, since Eugene has lost his throne to the Emperor’s
son (the baby was made “King of Rome”) he is immediately installed as
ruler in the hastily concocted “grand duchy of Frankfort.”
What of Prussia? Why should Prussia continue to exist? Had he not, in
Tilsit days, merely preserved this kingdom to please the tsar? But
he is about to destroy the tsar! By notices and decrees, the Emperor
announces that now, just before the war with Russia begins, Prussia is
to be parcelled up. Does he not know that for the last year Prussia
has been the ally of Russia, and that in a secret treaty the tsar has
promised Frederick William his assistance? The Emperor hears much of
defiant songs, of volunteer corps, of discontent in the universities, of
the Tugendbund. Beware! Remember Spain! Do not trust to the proverbial
“tolerance and coldness of these north Germans”! Surely it would be wiser
to utilise the Prussian army before destroying it....
The great-hearted Scharnhorst assures Frederick William that now is the
time to strike. But Metternich, in Vienna, tricks the Prussian general
when he proposes an alliance, and advises him to seek alliance with
Russia rather than with the Habsburg emperor. For only if the man with
whom he exchanges these words of false friendship, becomes an opponent,
only if Prussia enters the war as Austria’s enemy, can Austria hope to
enclose Silesia once more within her borders. At the same time Hardenberg
bends before the Vienna wind, to-day as always. The king, who will take
no risks, and who considers Napoleon absolutely unconquerable, at last
makes up his mind to enter into alliance with the Emperor; his resolution
comes too late to secure favourable terms. Silesia and Poland are already
alive with troops, and Prussia is surrounded. In such circumstances it is
natural that she should be treated as a vassal, should have to tolerate
the passage of armies, should have to put up with requisitionings, should
have to look on patiently while her eastern fortresses are manned by
French soldiers and her auxiliary corps commanded by foreign marshals.
Metternich writes to his master in gleeful mood: “Prussia need no longer
be reckoned among the powers.”
And yet! And yet! Although Europe, from Capua to Tilsit, at the outset
of 1812, is rallying to Napoleon’s standard, although his arm reaches
from Finisterre to Bukovina, he feels how uncertain is the outcome of his
campaign, and, as Count Ségur tells us, starts up from the conning of his
interminable lists and calculations to exclaim in terror: “I am not ready
to undertake a war in such far-off lands! I need three years more!”
But the machine rolls on; no master hand can stay it. An inner impulse
urges him forward; the whole history of his rise to power impels him;
all the shades of vanished years drive him on. He, who has built so many
harbours wherein to seek refuge in times of storm and stress, is in the
end tossed out upon the open sea, more roughly, more speedily than he
had wished, and, with the wild determination of the adventurer, he now
recklessly seizes the steering-wheel which for so long he has manipulated
with statesmanlike care. “Do you not see,” he exclaims to his brother,
“that I can only keep my seat upon this throne by means of the fame
which brought me to it? That a private individual such as I, who has
merely risen to become a ruler, dare not call a halt? That such a one is
constrained to mount higher and ever higher, and is doomed to perish the
moment he stops climbing?”
His soul is a-flicker with excitement, so that at one moment he is eager
for the final struggle, and at the next dreads it. His letter to the
tsar, with which, as heretofore, he begins the campaign, still preserves
a friendly tone. At the same time he says to a Russian colonel who is
on spy duty in Paris: “Since the tsar is young and I have yet many
years to live, I had thought to preserve the peace of Europe by means
of our good feelings towards one another. My feelings have not changed.
Tell him this; and say, in addition, that if the fates decree that the
two greatest powers of the world are to come to blows over girlish
peccadilloes, I shall enter the lists as a gallant knight, without hatred
and without enmity. I suggest to him the possibility of our meeting for
breakfast together between our respective outposts.... I still hope
that we shall not spill the blood of hundreds of thousands of brave men,
simply because we cannot agree as to the colour of a ribbon!”
How his own unrest vibrates through these brilliant subterfuges, which
he specially adapts to cajole Alexander’s feminine disposition! A grey
gauntlet of steel is hurled from one world power to the other; the great
fight between birth and genius is now to take place in all its grandeur.
And he who, after two decades of dreaming, sees his dream descending out
of the clouds earthwards, talks as if nothing more were at stake than a
girl’s quarrel or the colour of a piece of ribbon—when in reality the
fate of the world hangs in the balance!
IV
What is passing in Alexander’s mind? Estranged from the Russian nobility,
railed at by his mother, cheated out of his hopes of setting up the
cross once more on St. Sophia, deeply concerned about Poland (which
his adversary threatens to liberate)—there are reasons enough, both
in political and court life, why he should no longer regard Napoleon
as his friend. After Tilsit, Metternich had said that it would take
five years for the tsar’s feelings to swing to the opposite pole.
That period had now elapsed, and although the tsar’s was one of those
nervous temperaments in which moods decide actions, on his side, too,
the struggle could assume allegorical greatness. But he lacked a grand
aim and a lofty thought. He was not even fighting to win warlike renown
against the master craftsman in the art of war. The impulses that drove
him to the fight were merely the outcome of a confused mysticism, in
whose waters he had drowned his old veneration for the magician of Tilsit.
Politically, he makes two successful moves in the game, one of these
being intimately adapted to the peculiarities of human character, and
therefore weighty with consequence. To cope with Napoleon, he needs
tranquillity on his southern and his northern borders. He finds means
to keep the sultan neutral; but in the case of Sweden he manages even
better, for he is able to secure an alliance. He and Bernadotte meet on
the frontier; and here, for the second time, the tsar of all the Russias
succumbs to the charm of a French revolutionary. Sweden is in danger of
English vengeance. Norway belongs to the Francophil Danes. The community
of interests between Sweden and Russia secures expression when Russia, in
return for a promise of help in the coming war, guarantees that Sweden
shall have Norway.
But this prospect of territorial enlargement is not the thing that spurs
Bernadotte to action. He, who is king in Napoleon’s despite, cares no
more about his new subjects than those who had become kings by Napoleon’s
favour cared about theirs. But the tsar, too, has an imagination. Looking
forward to the winning of this game, he sees in broad outline what
lies beyond. He sees, not only the Emperor’s defeat, but the Emperor’s
destruction; and while Napoleon, at the head of the greatest army known
to history, is slowly advancing to swallow up the tsar, Alexander is
promising Bernadotte, the friend of Bonaparte’s youth, no less a prize
than the throne of France.
To such heights, this summer, do the opposing eagles soar.
In Dresden, the Emperor treats all the princes to the spectacle of a
review, just as he had done four years earlier in Erfurt. The only
sovereign from among that company who is absent, is the one he is now to
fight. But Alexander’s place has been taken by the Habsburg ruler. Only
once before have Napoleon and Francis met, on the day after Austerlitz.
Twice, since then, has the victorious Emperor of the French occupied the
Austrian’s abandoned capital. When peace had been made between them, and
the victor had wedded the daughter of the vanquished, the girl had been
sent alone from Vienna to distant Paris.
Now Marie Louise sits between husband and father at the sparkling board,
and to outward seeming all is well. The father-in-law is pledged in
alliance, and the Emperor has appointed his wife regent of France. But
vainly has he forbidden her to be so foolish as to attempt the outshining
of her step-mother on these festal occasions. The empress from Paris
sheds tears at the prohibition, while the empress from Vienna weeps
because her pearls are smaller than those worn by Marie Louise. The old
jealousies between the principalities and powers now find vent in family
quarrels which the courtiers try to gloss over. When a health is drunk to
the boy who should be a tie between all four of them, both the men and
both the women drown their thoughts in their champagne, though each knows
perfectly well what the others are thinking.
The December meeting in the windmill near Austerlitz, and the May meeting
in the palace of the Saxon kings! Son-in-law and father-in-law will never
set eyes on one another again.
Meanwhile, half a million men are being ranged between Königsberg and
Lemberg. The master of these legions journeys to Posen, and announces
the “Second Polish War,” for his ostensible aim is merely to wrest
Poland from the tsar—most of the old kingdom, at any rate, as far as
Smolensk. “There or in Minsk,” he tells a confidant, “the campaign will
end. I shall winter in Vilna, organise Lithuania, and live at Russia’s
expense. If, then, peace cannot be secured, I shall, next year, advance
into the centre of the enemy’s land, and stay there until the tsar
becomes pliable.” The whole disposition of Napoleon’s troops is made in
accordance with this scheme. At Russia’s expense? What supplies can he
get from Russia? Has he accurate information regarding the resources of
this foreign land?
In Gumbinnen, he sends for a Prussian president. Speaking of the stores
of grain he has collected in the German ports, and proposes to have sent
to Kovno, he says:
“I presume there are plenty of mills in Kovno?”
“No, Sire; very few mills are to be found there.”
The Emperor looks at Berthier “dubiously.” This glance of the supreme
war lord at his chief of general staff is a fore-shadowing of the
disillusionments he is to experience in the unknown land beyond the
Memel. It is not the mere lack of mills which disturbs him, but the
fact that he is taken by surprise. For a whole year, the Emperor has
been preparing the great campaign. Troops, parks of ammunition, reserve
corps, fourteen hundred pieces of ordnance, siege trains, bridge-building
materials, pontoons, have been assembled from seven realms, counting
the Confederation of the Rhine as one. Eight Baltic fortresses are used
as storehouses, to which hundreds of ships and thousands of wagons
bring wheat and rice. Some of the wagons are drawn by oxen which are
destined for the slaughter house at the end of their journey—a symbol of
compulsory military service, in which a man serves only that he may die.
Now Napoleon learns that he is about to enter a country without mills.
He can build them, no doubt; but at what cost in time and men! Are other
surprises awaiting him across the Russian border? It will be impossible
to carry fodder for one hundred and fifty thousand horses. That is why
he has waited till June, when the grass will be green. But what if the
steppe should disappoint him here?
And what if his men’s spirit should disappoint him?