H. G. Wells in his _Outline of History_ seldom seems just an Englishman.
He fights his battles and makes most of his judgments alone and
generally in defiance of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not
bold enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. The sight of the
terrible little Corsican peeping over the edge of the thirty-eighth
chapter sends Wells scurrying from his solitude into the center of a
British square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad his nurse
told him that if he did not eat his mush or go to bed, or perform some
other necessary function in the daily life of a child, Old Bony would
get him. And Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by
pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated and remarks that it
was pretty lucky for him that he lost Trafalgar and never got to
England, where troops would have made short work of him.
Nelson, Wells holds, was just as great a figure in his own specialty as
Napoleon in his, but if so it seems a pity that he did not rise to
Wellsian heights of strategy and lose Trafalgar so that Napoleon might
land and be defeated by British pluck and skill. Then, indeed, might
Waterloo have been won upon the cricket fields of Eton.
Not only does Wells insist on regarding Napoleon through national lenses
but through moral ones also. Speaking of his accession as First Consul,
Wells writes: "Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man
before. Here was a position in which a man might well bow himself in
fear of himself, and search his heart and serve God and man to the
utmost."
That, of course, was not Napoleon's intent. His performance must be
judged by his purpose, and it seems to us that Wells doesn't half
appreciate how brilliant was the stunt which Napoleon achieved. "He
tried to do the impossible and did it." Man was no better for him and
neither was God, but he remains still the great bogy man of Europe, a
bogy great enough to have frightened Mr. Wells and marked him. Here was
a man who took life and made it theatrical. It was an achievement in
popular aesthetics, if nothing else, but Wells doesn't care about
aesthetics. Perhaps even a moral might be extracted from the life of
Napoleon. He proved the magic quality of personality and the inspiration
of gesture. Some day the same methods may be used to better advantage.
The institution of the Legion of Honor Wells calls "A scheme for
decorating Frenchmen with bits of ribbon which was admirably calculated
to divert ambitious men from subversive proceedings." But these same
bits of ribbon and the red and green ones of the Croix de Guerre and the
yellow and green of the Medaille Militaire were later to save France
from the onrush of the Germans. Without decorations, without phrases and
without the brilliant and effective theatrical oratory of French
officers, from marshals to sub-lieutenants, France would have lost the
great war. Everybody who saw the French army in action realized that its
morale was maintained during the worst days by colored ribbons and
florid speeches. Even the stern and taciturn Pershing learned the
lesson, and before he had been in France three months he was about
making speeches to wounded men in which he told them that he wished that
he, too, were lying in hospital with all their glory. Personally, it
never seemed to me that Pershing actually convinced any wounded doughboy
of his enthusiasm for such a change, but he did not use the gesture with
much skill. He lacked the Napoleonic tradition.
Another American officer, a younger one, said, "If I ever have anything
to do with West Point I'm going to copy these Frenchmen. They do it
naturally, but we've got to learn. I'm going to introduce a course in
practical theatricalism. Now, if I were a general, as soon as I heard of
some little trench raid in which Private Smith distinguished himself I'd
send a staff officer down on the sly to find out what Smith looked like.
Then I'd inspect that particular organization and when I got to Smith my
aide would nudge me and I'd turn, as if instinctively, and say, 'Isn't
that Private Smith who distinguished himself on the evening of January
18 at 8 o'clock? I want to shake your hand, Smith.' Why, man, the French
army has been living and breathing on stuff like that for the last two
years."
It is an easy matter to satirize the heroic and theatrical gesture. The
French themselves did it. Once in the Chamber of Deputies, late in the
war, a Radical member, who didn't care much for the war, anyway, and
still less for the Cabinet, arose and said: "This morning as I was
walking in the streets of Paris a little before dawn I saw three camions
headed for the front, and I stopped the first driver and said, 'Ah, I am
overjoyed to see that at last the ministry is awake to the needs of our
brave poilus and is sending supplies to the front. What is it that you
carry--ammunition, clothing, food?' But the driver shook his head and
said, 'No; Croix de Guerre.'"
But the satire does not cut too deeply, for Croix de Guerre played just
as important a part in winning the war as food or ammunition or
clothing. I heard a French colonel once cry to a crowd of prisoners
returned from Germany, broken and ill: "Now, let us hear you shout that
which it has been so long forbidden to you to say, 'Vive la France!'"
And as he spoke his arm shot up into the air and his voice rang like a
trumpet call, and everybody within sound of the man straightened up and
thrilled as if he had just heard of a great victory. It was fine art for
all the fact that it was probably also sincere.
No, when Napoleon had himself crowned in Notre Dame it was not, as Wells
says, "Just a ridiculous scene." Napoleon realized that a play can be
staged in a cathedral or upon a battlefield just as well as in a
theater, and that man, who may come in time to be the superman of whom
Wells dreams is still a little boy sitting in the gallery, ready to
applaud and to shout for any dressed-up person who knows how to walk to
the center of the stage and hold it.