The Man of Destiny | Page 4

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