1898
The twelfth of May, 1796, in north Italy, at Tavazzano, on the road
from Lodi to Milan. The afternoon sun is blazing serenely over the
plains of Lombardy, treating the Alps with respect and the anthills
with indulgence, not incommoded by the basking of the swine and oxen in
the villages nor hurt by its cool reception in the churches, but
fiercely disdainful of two hordes of mischievous insects which are the
French and Austrian armies. Two days before, at Lodi, the Austrians
tried to prevent the French from crossing the river by the narrow
bridge there; but the French, commanded by a general aged 27, Napoleon
Bonaparte, who does not understand the art of war, rushed the fireswept
bridge, supported by a tremendous cannonade in which the young general
assisted with his own hands. Cannonading is his technical specialty; he
has been trained in the artillery under the old regime, and made
perfect in the military arts of shirking his duties, swindling the
paymaster over travelling expenses, and dignifying war with the noise
and smoke of cannon, as depicted in all military portraits. He is,
however, an original observer, and has perceived, for the first time
since the invention of gunpowder, that a cannon ball, if it strikes a
man, will kill him. To a thorough grasp of this remarkable discovery,
he adds a highly evolved faculty for physical geography and for the
calculation of times and distances. He has prodigious powers of work,
and a clear, realistic knowledge of human nature in public affairs,
having seen it exhaustively tested in that department during the French
Revolution. He is imaginative without illusions, and creative without
religion, loyalty, patriotism or any of the common ideals. Not that he
is incapable of these ideals: on the contrary, he has swallowed them
all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is
extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and
stage manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the
shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a would-be
author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof and punishment
as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape from dismissal from
the service so narrow that if the emigration of the nobles had not
raised the value of even the most rascally lieutenant to the famine
price of a general he would have been swept contemptuously from the
army: these trials have ground the conceit out of him, and forced him
to be self-sufficient and to understand that to such men as he is the
world will give nothing that he cannot take from it by force. In this
the world is not free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a
merciless cannonader of political rubbish, is making himself useful.
indeed, it is even now impossible to live in England without sometimes
feeling how much that country lost in not being conquered by him as
well as by Julius Caesar.
However, on this May afternoon in 1796, it is early days with him. He
is only 26, and has but recently become a general, partly by using his
wife to seduce the Directory (then governing France) partly by the
scarcity of officers caused by the emigration as aforesaid; partly by
his faculty of knowing a country, with all its roads, rivers, hills and
valleys, as he knows the palm of his hand; and largely by that new
faith of his in the efficacy of firing cannons at people. His army is,
as to discipline, in a state which has so greatly shocked some modern
writers before whom the following story has been enacted, that they,
impressed with the later glory of "L'Empereur," have altogether refused
to credit it. But Napoleon is not "L'Empereur" yet: he has only just
been dubbed "Le Petit Caporal," and is in the stage of gaining
influence over his men by displays of pluck. He is not in a position to
force his will on them, in orthodox military fashion, by the cat o'
nine tails. The French Revolution, which has escaped suppression solely
through the monarchy's habit of being at least four years in arrear
with its soldiers in the matter of pay, has substituted for that habit,
as far as possible, the habit of not paying at all, except in promises
and patriotic flatteries which are not compatible with martial law of
the Prussian type. Napoleon has therefore approached the Alps in
command of men without money, in rags, and consequently indisposed to
stand much discipline, especially from upstart generals. This
circumstance, which would have embarrassed an idealist soldier, has
been worth a thousand cannon to Napoleon. He has said to his army, "You
have patriotism and courage; but you have no money, no clothes, and
deplorably indifferent food. In Italy there are all these things, and
glory as well, to be gained by a devoted army led by a general who
regards loot as the natural right of the soldier. I am such a general.
En avant, mes enfants!" The result has entirely justified him. The army
conquers Italy as the locusts conquered Cyprus. They fight all day and
march all night, covering impossible distances and appearing in
incredible places, not because every soldier carries a field marshal's
baton in his knapsack, but because he hopes to carry at least half a
dozen silver forks there next day.
It must be understood, by the way, that the French army does not make
war on the Italians. It is there to rescue them from the tyranny of
their Austrian conquerors, and confer republican institutions on them;
so that in incidentally looting them, it merely makes free with the
property of its friends, who ought to be grateful to it, and perhaps
would be if ingratitude were not the proverbial failing of their
country. The Austrians, whom it fights, are a thoroughly respectable
regular army, well disciplined, commanded by gentlemen trained and
versed in the art of war: at the head of them Beaulieu, practising the
classic art of war under orders from Vienna, and getting horribly
beaten by Napoleon, who acts on his own responsibility in defiance of
professional precedents or orders from Paris. Even when the Austrians
win a battle, all that is necessary is to wait until their routine
obliges them to return to their quarters for afternoon tea, so to
speak, and win it back again from them: a course pursued later on with
brilliant success at Marengo. On the whole, with his foe handicapped by
Austrian statesmanship, classic generalship, and the exigencies of the
aristocratic social structure of Viennese society, Napoleon finds it
possible to be irresistible without working heroic miracles. The world,
however, likes miracles and heroes, and is quite incapable of
conceiving the action of such forces as academic militarism or Viennese
drawing-roomism. Hence it has already begun to manufacture
"L'Empereur," and thus to make it difficult for the romanticists of a
hundred years later to credit the little scene now in question at
Tavazzano as aforesaid.
The best quarters at Tavazzano are at a little inn, the first house
reached by travellers passing through the place from Milan to Lodi. It
stands in a vineyard; and its principal room, a pleasant refuge from
the summer heat, is open so widely at the back to this vineyard that it
is almost a large veranda. The bolder children, much excited by the
alarums and excursions of the past few days, and by an irruption of
French troops at six o'clock, know that the French commander has
quartered himself in this room, and are divided between a craving to
peep in at the front windows and a mortal terror of the sentinel, a
young gentleman-soldier, who, having no natural moustache, has had a
most ferocious one painted on his face with boot blacking by his
sergeant. As his heavy uniform, like all the uniforms of that day, is
designed for parade without the least reference to his health or
comfort, he perspires profusely in the sun; and his painted moustache
has run in little streaks down his chin and round his neck except where
it has dried in stiff japanned flakes, and had its sweeping outline
chipped off in grotesque little bays and headlands, making him
unspeakably ridiculous in the eye of History a hundred years later, but
monstrous and horrible to the contemporary north Italian infant, to
whom nothing would seem more natural than that he should relieve the
monotony of his guard by pitchforking a stray child up on his bayonet,
and eating it uncooked. Nevertheless one girl of bad character, in whom
an instinct of privilege with soldiers is already dawning, does peep in
at the safest window for a moment, before a glance and a clink from the
sentinel sends her flying. Most of what she sees she has seen before:
the vineyard at the back, with the old winepress and a cart among the
vines; the door close down on her right leading to the inn entry; the
landlord's best sideboard, now in full action for dinner, further back
on the same side; the fireplace on the other side, with a couch near
it, and another door, leading to the inner rooms, between it and the
vineyard; and the table in the middle with its repast of Milanese
risotto, cheese, grapes, bread, olives, and a big wickered flask of red
wine.
The landlord, Giuseppe Grandi, is also no novelty. He is a swarthy,
vivacious, shrewdly cheerful, black-curled, bullet headed, grinning
little man of 40. Naturally an excellent host, he is in quite special
spirits this evening at his good fortune in having the French commander
as his guest to protect him against the license of the troops, and
actually sports a pair of gold earrings which he would otherwise have
hidden carefully under the winepress with his little equipment of
silver plate.
Napoleon, sitting facing her on the further side of the table, and
Napoleon's hat, sword and riding whip lying on the couch, she sees for
the first time. He is working hard, partly at his meal, which he has
discovered how to dispatch, by attacking all the courses
simultaneously, in ten minutes (this practice is the beginning of his
downfall), and partly at a map which he is correcting from memory,
occasionally marking the position of the forces by taking a grapeskin
from his mouth and planting it on the map with his thumb like a wafer.
He has a supply of writing materials before him mixed up in disorder
with the dishes and cruets; and his long hair gets sometimes into the
risotto gravy and sometimes into the ink.