With his passions, and in spite of his errors, Napoleon is, taking him
all in all, the greatest warrior of modern times. He carried into battle
a stoical courage, a profoundly calculated tenacity, a mind fertile in
sudden inspirations, which by unhopedfor resources disconcerted the
plans of the enemy. Let us beware of attributing a long series of
success to the organic power of the masses which he set in motion. The
most experienced eye could scarcely discover in them any thing but
elements of disorder. Still less let it be said that he was a successful
captain because he was a mighty monarch. Of all his campaigns, the most
memorable are,--the campaign of the Adige, where the general of
yesterday, commanding an army by no means numerous, and at first badly
appointed, placed himself at once above Turenne and on a level with
Frederick; and the campaign in France in 1814, when, reduced to a
handful of harassed troops, he combated a force of ten times their
number. The last flashes of imperial lightning still dazzled the eyes of
our enemies; and it was a fine sight to see the bounds of the old lion
tracked, hunted down, beset, presenting a lively picture of the days of
his youth, when his powers developed themselves in the fields of
carnage.
Napoleon possessed, in an eminent degree, the faculties requisite for
the profession of arms; temperate and robust, watching and sleeping at
pleasure, appearing unawares where he was least expected, he did not
disregard details to which important results are sometimes attached. The
hand which had just traced rules for the government of many millions of
men would frequently rectify an incorrect statement of the situation of
a regiment, or write down whence two hundred conscripts were to be
obtained, and from what magazine their shoes were to be taken. A patient
and easy interlocutor, he was a home questioner, and he could listen--a
rare talent in the grandees of the earth. He carried with him into
battle a cool and impassable courage; never was mind so deeply
meditative, more fertile in rapid and sudden illuminations. On becoming
emperor he ceased not to be the soldier. If his activity decreased with
the progress of age, that was owing to the decrease of his physical
powers.
In games of mingled calculation and hazard, the greater the advantages
which a man seeks to obtain, the greater risks he must run. It is
precisely this that renders the deceitful science of conquerors so
calamitous to nations. Napoleon, though naturally adventurous, was not
deficient in consistency or method; and he wasted neither his soldiers
nor his treasures where the authority of his name sufficed. What he
could obtain by negociations or by artifice, he required not by force of
arms. The sword, although drawn from the scabbard, was not stained with
blood, unless it was impossible to attain the end in view by a
manoeuvre. Always ready to fight, he chose habitually the occasion and
the ground. Out of fifty battles which he fought, he was the assailant
in at least forty.
Other generals have equalled him in the art of disposing troops on the
ground. Some have given battle as well as he did; we could mention
several who have received it better; but in the manner of directing an
offensive campaign he has surpassed all.
The wars in Spain and Russia prove nothing in disparagement of his
genius. It is not by the rules of Montecuculii and Turenne, manoeuvring
on the Renchen, that we ought to judge of such enterprises. The first
warred to secure such or such winter-quarters; the other to subdue the
world. It frequently behoved him not merely to gain a battle, but to
gain it in such a manner as to astound Europe and to produce gigantic
results. Thus political views were incessantly interfering with the
strategic genius; and to appreciate him properly we must not confine
ourselves within the limits of the art of war. This art is not composed
exclusively of technical details; it has also its philosophy. To find in
this elevated region a rival to Napoleon, we must go back to the times
when the feudal institutions had not yet broken the unity of the ancient
nations. The founders of religions alone have exercised over their
disciples an authority comparable with that which made him the absolute
master of his army. This moral power became fatal to him, because he
strove to avail himself of it even against the ascendancy of material
force, and because it led him to despise positive rules, the long
violation of which will not remain unpunished.
When pride was hurrying Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say,
"France has more need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth.
But why had he become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of
the French to the chances of an interminable war; because, in spite of
the resources of his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by
his staking the whole of his force, and by the boldness of his
movements, risked in every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of
twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that
with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action
proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both
within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of
things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were
spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of
nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible
from being armed with the principles which we had forsaken.
At times, this immense mass of passions which he was accumulating
against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled
his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him,
he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of
strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of
creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more
secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of
things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the
designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form any plans for
itself. The day on which it should have ceased to be stunned by the din
of arms, it would have called itself to account for its servile
obedience. It is better, thought he, for an absolute prince to fight
foreign armies, than to have to struggle against the energy of the
citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war; war was continued
to uphold despotism. The die was cast; France must either conquer
Europe, or Europe subdue France.
Napoleon fell: he fell, because with the men of the nineteenth century
he attempted the work of an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave
the reins to an imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age,
with which nevertheless his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he
would not pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to
succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant
enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the emperor
reached in Spain, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped
destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find
elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow-- _History of the War in the
Peninsula, from the French of General Foy._
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