No series of connected and consecutive military events has been so
closely analyzed by military students as those marking the first
Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. All expounders of the military
art who have had the good fortune to live since its principles were
so wonderfully illustrated by that campaign have delighted to use its
incidents in exposition. Every student has early learned that he could
not afford to neglect it. Even to the “general reader,” unacquainted
with the mysteries of strategy and tactics, who in the darkness of his
ignorance cherishes the error that war is fortuitous fighting loosely
directed to results by physical courage and the will of God, the
history of these brilliant operations can hardly fail, when lucidly
related, to prove interesting and charming beyond the power of fiction.
As related by the mere “historian,” with his port-fire and blood-fumes
to emotionalize the situation, it is doubtless as dull reading as
the literature of the heart generally. What, in brief, _was_ this
remarkable campaign?
In the month of March, 1796, Bonaparte, a boy of twenty-six, untried in
independent command, was intrusted with an army of some forty thousand
badly clad and inadequately supplied men, with which to invade Italy.
He was opposed by Beaulieu, with a well equipped force, Austrians and
Sardinians, of fifty thousand. The Alps and Apennines were between.
Bonaparte began active operations on the eleventh day of April, 1796.
On the seventh day of April, 1797, at Leoben, near Vienna, he received
the Austrian Emperor’s emissaries, who came to sue for peace, and the
war was at an end. During this period of one year less four days,
with forces averaging forty-six thousand opposed to forces averaging
sixty-one thousand he had in fifteen pitched battles routed one
Sardinian army and the six Austrian armies successively sent to drive
him out of Italy, only to be driven out themselves. His losses during
the campaign in killed, wounded and prisoners were about equal to the
numbers of his army at the outset. The losses that he inflicted upon
the enemy were no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand men and
vast quantities of _material_.
How were these astonishing feats of arms performed? Not by the superior
courage of his soldiers, for the Austrians then, as they are now,
were a brave and warlike people. Not by the “will of God,” whose
agency is to the military eye nowhere discernible, and whose political
predilections are still unknown. Nor were these admirable results due
to “luck,” the “favors of fortune,” the “magic” of genius. They were
brought about by the very commonplace method of knowing his business
thoroughly and applying the knowledge. There is nothing miraculous in
that. It is an open secret which Napoleon himself has explained:
“In war nothing is accomplished but by calculation. During a campaign,
whatever is not profoundly considered in all its details is without
result. Every enterprise should be systematically conducted; chance
alone can not bring success.”
I should be sorry to be understood as affirming the possibility of such
military success as Napoleon’s to the mere student of military art,
devoid of Napoleon’s genius. On the other hand, Napoleon’s genius would
have been futile without his mastery of the art. Military art is no
exception to art in general; for eminent achievement is required great
natural aptitude, _plus_ a comprehensive and minute knowledge of the
business in hand. Given these two requisites in the commander, and the
army is multiplied by two. For many generations, doubtless, the French
will boast of Montenotte, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram; but
every intelligent soldier’s view is that on all these historic fields
there was but one victor. To quote his words again:
“It was not the Roman army that conquered Gaul, but Cæsar; it was not
the Carthaginian army which, at the gates of Rome, made the Eternal
City tremble, but Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army that marched
as far as the Indus, but Alexander; it was not the Prussian army that
defended Prussia for seven years against the three most powerful states
of Europe, but Frederick.”
The contrary view—the theory of the insignificance of the individual—so
persistently urged a generation ago by Mill, and so eagerly accepted by
the young philosophers of his period, derives no support from military
history. Tolstoi, it is true, is in full, if somewhat belated,
advocacy of it, and professes to find confirmation in the events that
he relates in his military novels. And it must be confessed that, as
he relates them, they indubitably do seem to justify his view that
leaders do not truly lead. With the splendid irresponsibility of the
fictionist, he shows that the French people having incurred, somehow,
a blind, reasonless impulse to go gadding about Europe, caught up
Napoleon, as a stream bursting out of its banks might catch up a
sheep or a log, and pushed him along before them. A careful study of
the progress through Italy will, I think, show that at least he did
something toward reducing the friction incident to the movement.
Any one really believing in unimportance of the individual must be
prepared to affirm that a chance bullet finding a lodgment in the brain
of the commander of the Army of Italy at Montenotte would have made but
little difference in the conduct of the campaign and the later history
of Europe; and any one prepared to affirm this may justly boast himself
impregnable to argument, through induration of the understanding.
The history of the military operations that we have been considering
has never been better told than in a book entitled _Napoleon
Bonaparte’s First Campaign_—it should be remembered that he was then
simply General Bonaparte. The author of the book is Lieutenant Herbert
H. Sargent,[1] of the Army. Nothing could well exceed the clarity with
which the author has told his story; and nothing that I have seen
in military literature is more admirable than his professional but
untechnical comments on its successive stages. Everything is made so
clear that the benighted civilian of the anti-West Point sort, the
fearfully and wonderfully bepistoled swashbuckler of the frontier, the
gilded whiskey-soldier of the National Guard and even the self-taught
strategist of the press can comprehend it all without a special
revelation from Heaven. Those conscious of a desire, however vague and
formless, to acquire such a knowledge of military science and art as
will give them a keener interest in “war news” that is not “bluggy”
than they ever had in that which reeks with gore and “multiplies the
slain” will find in Lieutenant Sargent a guide, philosopher and friend
for whom they cannot be sufficiently thankful to the God that bestowed
him.
1895.
[1] After distinguished service as colonel of volunteers in the Cuban
and Philippine wars, this great soldier is now retired as major in
the regular army. Before retirement he published two other books,
_The Campaign of Marengo_ and _The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba_,
both characterized by all the qualities so conspicuous in his
first book—qualities that are themselves a fine result of “knowing
one’s business.”
1912.