Napoleon

by Emil Ludwig

  He robbed hundreds of his fellow-workers of health and youth, because he demanded too much of them when he demanded from them what he exacted from himself. His private secretary would be sent for at a late hour, and would get to bed at four in the morning; at seven, the poor man would find new tasks ready for him, and would be told that they must be finished within two hours. When Napoleon and his secretary were together all day, one dictating and the other writing from dictation, at meal times the chief would order food for two, and would share with his subordinate at a corner of the work-table, just as he would have shared with his adjutant on a boundary stone. During the Consulate he would sometimes begin a sitting with his ministers at six in the evening and keep it up till five next morning. In the three months at Schonbrunn, his official correspondence comprised four hundred and thirty-five letters occupying four hundred folio pages of print. This was only his political and administrative correspondence; in addition he wrote a great many private letters, and delivered innumerable orders by word of mouth.

  Adaptation to Circumstances

  These are the main forms of his energy. It is with their aid that he enters upon his duel with the world, availing himself of their interplay, and speaking of his genius as a talent for combination. In his plans and orders, he is fond of the phrase "at the given moment." He is not hampered by any principle; is always willing to modify his scheme to suit the weather of destiny, to adapt his combinations to the slightest modifications of the situation. This man of iron will had a most supple intelligence. While forcing all those with whom he came in contact to bend before his resolves, he himself showed a wonderful elasticity in compliance with the will of circumstances.

  " The weakness of a captain who, instead of forcing his way into port, preferred to let himself be chased on the open sea— this, and some of the trifling defects of our frigates, were the reasons why I failed to change the face of the world. Had Acre fallen, we should have made our way to Aleppo by forced marches, have enlisted Christians, Druses, and Armenians ; have speedily reached the Euphrates : thence I should have gone to India, and should have stablished new institutions everywhere."

  Whether these vaticinations were historically tenable, may remain an open question; but his belief that he could have done what he describes, bears witness to his realism. In this world of figures and magnitudes, for Napoleon everything depends upon the individual behaviour of the individual man at his post. Since the failure of any one individual may give the totality of circumstances a new trend, he is always ready to adapt the trend of his own intelligence to changing circumstances. But he does not himself attribute his successes to this, saying that they were due to his having been born at the right moment, and that under Louis XIV. he would only have become a marshal like Turenne.

  Napoleon's energy is very little disturbed by the passions, His self-confidence and his sense of dignity made self-command easy to him, and, being habituated to surprise, he was always fully master of himself. " Since I am used to great

  Genuine Anger

  events, they make no impression on me at the moment when they are reported; I feel the pain an hour later." This sometimes makes him appear more stoical than he might wish people to believe him. When Hortense's boy dies, he tells her to be composed, saying: " To live means to suffer; but the brave man is continually striving for self-mastery, and achieves it in the end."

  Nevertheless, he sometimes loses his temper. The fierceness of his passion is then proportional to his pride, the irritability of his nerves, and the impatience of his creative will—the will of one who needed a thousand hands to complete his work. The stories about his threatening an ambassador with his fist, and similar outbursts of violence, are fabulous; but there is trustworthy evidence as to the terrible moment when Berthier had infuriated the First Consul by his tactlessness. Led on by Talleyrand as Mephistopheles, Berthier, in the Tuileries, had urged upon the Consul the need of assuming the title of king. Bonaparte's anger flashed from his eyes, his lips twitched, he seized the offender by the throat, and pushed him back against the wall, shouting: " Who put you up to raising my bile in this way ? You will pay for it, if you dare to do anything of the kind again! "

  Even amid his anger, his faculty for combination is at work, and he realises that the notion cannot have originated in the good Berthier's mind. In its psychical significance the scene is unique.

  Often he is a rough, irritable soldier, who furiously lifts a badly closing window off its hinges and hurls it into the street; lashes a groom with his whip ; when dictating a letter, utters curses against the addressee, which his secretary suppresses ; even before the vicars-general speaks in an unseemly way, asking, " Which of you leads this blockhead of a bishop by the nose ? "

  One of these vicars-general, who has been absent from duty for a long time, returns, and comes to report.

  Simulated Wrath

  " Where have you been, miserable ? "

  " At home, with my people."

  " How dare you stay away so long when you know that your bishop is such a damned fool ? "

  More important are the occasions when he simulates anger to gain some political end. Occasionally he gives the show away afterwards. " You think I was in a rage ? " he says in Warsaw. " You are making a mistake. While I have been here, my wrath has never exceeded bounds." One day he is playing with his little nephew and gossiping with the court ladies, in the best of humours. The English ambassador is announced. Instantly his face changes like an actor's, his features are convulsed, he turns pale, strides towards the Englishman and storms at him for a whole hour in the presence of numerous witnesses. He is genuinely angry with England and he is genuinely annoyed at being disturbed by this visit; but the wrathful mask, the scene he makes, the angry expressions he uses, are political expedients.

  The frequency of such incidents made many people believe that Napoleon was a passionate man. Talleyrand has more insight: " He's a perfect devil. He humbugs us all, even about his passions, for he knows how to act them, though they are really there ! "

  Self-command and coldness are so dominant in him that he never takes the vengeance that might seem appropriate to his irritable sense of honour and to the extent of his power. He never punished rivals or traitors unjustly. He only banished those whom he had good reason for wishing out of the way; and it was a point of chivalry with him to leave beaten enemies, great or small, unmolested.

  Here is a scene with the Badenese envoy. The envoy asks compensation for the duke of Brunswick. The Emperor angrily refuses : not because the duke is supposed to have incited Prussia to make war against France ; but because, long before this, during the first campaign against France in 1792, he had

  Courage

  issued the famous manifesto of Coblenz, in which he had said that in Paris he would not leave one stone standing on another. " What harm had this city done to him ? " fiercely enquires the Emperor two decades later, the man who in those days had been Lieutenant Bonaparte. " This affront must be avenged ! "

  Napoleon's energy is most conspicuous in his role of conqueror. But in this case it finds a more spiritual expression than one would be led to anticipate from a soldier. " I have seldom drawn my sword; I won my battles with my eyes, not with my weapons." To gain a knowledge of his soul, it is not important to understand the new forms of his art of war; of importance is to understand the way in which his whole being vibrated before, during, and after a fight. In this, too, he is wholly original.

  Even courage, that fundamental virtue of the soldier, assumes in Napoleon a form peculiar to himself. During his youthful days, and again during the last campaigns, he displayed so much personal courage that he can venture to say, " no soldier is proof against cowardice " ; but such moments of panic fear must be utilised against the foe. What he believes himself almost alone to possess is " two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage" : courage in face of the unforeseen, the sudden courage which demands presence of mind and power of determination. But he despises the " chivalrous "
courage of the duel, which he crushingly describes as " cannibal courage."—

  " Since you have both fought at Marengo and Austerlitz you do not need to give any further proofs of your courage. Women are fickle, and so is good luck. Go back to your regiments and become comrades again."

  The commander of armies clearly recognises the line of demarcation between humaneness and coldness. The same man

  Humaneness

  who, in his study, could exclaim to Metternich : " Such a man as I does not care a snap of the fingers for the lives of a million men " ; will say on the field of battle : " If the kings of the world could contemplate such a sight as this, they would hanker less after wars and conquests." Another time he writes to Josephine : " The earth is strewn with dead and bleeding men ; this is the obverse of war; the heart is tortured at the sight of so many victims." Calculation and feeling are at cross purposes in this case, and he excuses himself for the duties imposed by his own craft: " He who cannot look upon a battle-ground dry-eyed, allows many men to be killed purposelessly." This is what he wants above all to avoid. For the great aim, Europe entrusts him with a million men : his lesser aim, the taking of this trench or that bridge, must be thriftily achieved, for " he who heedlessly allows ten men to be killed where at most two need have died, is answerable for the lives of eight men."

  Since most of his wars are fought from political necessity, arid are always conducted without hate, as soon as the fight is finished the foe ceases to exist. He writes from Schonbrunn : " I am appalled to learn that the eighteen thousand prisoners on the island of Lobau are suffering from hunger; this is inhuman and unpardonable. Have twenty thousand rations of bread sent there immediately ; a similar amount of flour for the bakehouses." But when, after the truce, soldiers are still being killed by the embittered Tyrolese, he is furious, and orders that " at least six of the larger villages are to be plundered and burned, so that the mountain folk may not soon forget the vengeance that has been exacted."

  War is for him an art, " the most noteworthy art, one which contains within itself all the other arts." Like a true artist, he declares that, in the long run, this art cannot be taught: " You fancy that because you have read Jomini you are fitted to be a leader in war ? . . . I have fought in sixty fights, and I can assure you that I have learned nothing from any of them. Csesar used the same tactics in his last battle as he had used in his first. " In

  War As An Art

  typical artist fashion, he contradicts himself in the definitions of those things in which he is a master. After the Spanish campaigns, he delivers the following lecture to one of his generals : " War is decided far more by the power of strategical calculation than by material forces." At another time he will maintain that it is the superior numbers or the moral courage of the troops which constitutes the deciding factor. Sometimes he even goes so far as to say that inspiration decides an issue: " The result of a battle hangs on a thread and is mostly the outcome of a sudden thought. One approaches the enemy according to a prearranged plan, one comes to blows, one fights for a while, the critical moment draws near, a spark of inspiration flames up—and a small reserve division does the rest ! "

  More logically, but not less as the artist, he speaks of the decisive moment which, after a couple of engagements, one can find out for oneself without any difficulty. " Such moments are not more than quarter hours. ... In every battle a moment comes when the bravest of soldiers would like to turn tail: it needs but a trifle, but a plea, to put heart into him again." This power of suggestion has won him many a victory, for soldiers constitute the only mass to which he can speak with effect. The soldier understands him, because Napoleon is simple. The Emperor even describes war as " a simple art like everything that is beautiful." By this contention he seems to uphold the idea that war is the highest of all arts. " The military profession is a freemasonry . . . and I am the grand master of its lodge."

  He draws this personal inference from the history of his own rise, which is known to every soldier. As a young general, he had learned to put up with his dependence on the civil authority; and as emperor he still commiserates his royal adversaries because their generals' activities are frustrated by civilian control. On the other hand, he knows the dangers of amateurishness, and writes to Joseph: " When the king himself

  General and King

  commands, the soldier does not feel commanded. The army applauds him as when a queen is riding by. If one is not oneself a general, one must give the generals full power of command."

  Because he is the only ruler in Europe who has risen from the ranks, from youth upwards he remains familiar with details, and always understands how things look to an officer on the fighting front. " There is nothing connected with the art of war which I cannot do with my own hand : power, siege engines, artillery." But he does not concern himself with these details unless it is necessary, and laughs at the romantic anecdote in a book where he is said, one night, to have taken over the duties of a sentry who had gone to sleep at his post: " That is a civilian's idea, the sort of thing a lawyer would think of, and was certainly not written by a soldier."

  But he is a stickler for equality in the army, and in this matter remains true to the revolution until the very end of his career. No one is promoted unless his record in the service justifies the advancement. If Napoleon makes an exception in the case of his brothers, we must remember that after he has made them kings he continues to scold them as if they were subalterns. He writes to Jerome, commenting on a report from Silesia : " Besides, your letter is too clever for my taste. . . . What a man needs in war is precision, firmness, simplicity." When Joseph plays the prince in Boulogne, and vies with Marshal Soult in the splendour of his receptions, Napoleon scolds him. " In the army, no one must put the commander in the shade. On review days, it is the general and not the prince who must give a dinner. At a review, a royal colonel is a colonel and nothing more. Discipline can tolerate no exceptions. The army is a whole. Its commander is everything. Keep to your own regiment."

  Nevertheless, a wounded commander-in-chief has become a private soldier. At Eylau, where there have been heavy losses, the Emperor forbids a famous surgeon to go out of his way in

  Napoleon as Emperor in 1815, Woodcut, after a medal

  Equality at the Front

  order to care for a wounded general: " Your business is to attend to all the wounded, and not to any one in particular." A German officer reports that after a fight Napoleon would often stand by the wounded and see that they were carefully lifted into the stretchers : " If this good fellow pulls through, there will be one victim the less."

  In all the memoirs, we read how in camp the Emperor would foregather with his men at the bivouac fire, ask whether their food was being properly cooked, and laugh at their replies. When they confided all their troubles to him, and often said "thou " to him, this was not the assumed good-fellowship of a condescending monarch, but a genuinely paternal relationship. If he calls them " my children," to them he is their " little corporal," meaning the comrade who takes the responsibility. " I have received your letter, dear comrade," he writes to a veteran grenadier who wishes to re-enter the service. " You need not speak to me of your deeds, for I know you to be the bravest grenadier in the army. It will be a pleasure to see you once more. The Minister for War will send you your orders."

  He never confides his plans to any one; but when it is a question of rewarding merit, he calls in Everyman as adviser. After a fight, he often forms a circle, speaks to the officers, the non-commissioned officers, and the rankers individually, asking who were the most valiant, rewarding then and there, allotting eagles with his own hand. " The officers pointed out, the soldiers confirmed, the Emperor approved," relates Segur as eyewitness.

  It is true that Napoleon loves war, but as a fine art, just as he loves power. It is true that he laughs incredulously at a traveller who tells him a tale of a Chinese island where there are no weapons.

  " What do you mean ? But they must have weapons !
"

  "No, Sire."

  " Pikes, anyhow; or bows and arrows ? "

  " Neither the one nor the other."

  War Is An Anachronism

  " Daggers ! "

  " Not even daggers."

  " But how the devil do they fight there ? "

  " There has never been a war on the island."

  " What, no war ? "

  It sounds to the traveller as if the very existence of such people under the sun outrages the Emperor. The thought stirs a soldier's bile !

  All the same, he looked forward to the coming of peaceful days, not with an ardent desire for them perhaps, but with the seer's vision. He showed his superiority to all the modern commanders against whom he fought, in that he, the greatest soldier of the new times, declared the primacy of the spirit over the sword. When Canova made a statue of him in which he was shown with a threatening mien, he said contemptuously : " Does the man think I achieved my conquests with blows of my fist ? " But, more than this, he himself defined a commander as something above and beyond a soldier. When First Consul, he said in the Council of State :

  " In what does the commander's superiority consist ? ' In his mental qualities: insight, calculation, decision, eloquence, knowledge of men.' But all these qualities are what make a man shine in civil life. ... If bodily vigour and courage sufficed the commander, any brave private could be a leader of armies. Everywhere, crude force now yields ground to moral qualities. The man with the bayonet bows before the man who possesses exceptional knowledge and understanding. ... I knew perfectly well what I was about when, as the head of the army, I bore the title of Member of the Institute ; and the youngest drummer understood what I meant."