Badass
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The fifth of eleven children born to a small-town minister, young Nelson wasted no time, joining the navy as an apprentice at the age of twelve. By the time he was sixteen he had already served in patrol duty off the coast of India, crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice, and been attacked by a freaking polar bear while on a research expedition in the Arctic. My guess is that while the young cadet and his crew were in fact trying to find a mythical northern water route to India, their research actually ended up proving that it is a ridiculously bad idea to screw with a polar bear. According to the story, Nelson was in the process of trying to fight off the beast by swinging the butt of his rifle at it like some kind of half-demented Siberian mountain man when a volley of cannon fire from his ship scared it off. Of course, Nelson was young at this time—if this encounter had occurred ten years later, Horatio probably would have just slugged the beast right in the face without batting an eye.
Nelson was promoted to lieutenant at the age of sixteen, which is pretty awesome considering that during this time you had to be at least twenty to be made an officer in the British military. Obviously, Nelson was just so bitchin’ that he transcended the petty rules of mortals.
Around this time, the colonies in the Americas got their panties in a wad about stamp acts and tea parties and other such ridiculous nonsense, so the British navy was dispatched to beat a little sense into them with an unending barrage of thirty-two-pound cannonballs. Of course, Horatio would rather have cut his own face in half with a chainsaw than missed out on an opportunity to dish out some righteous ass-whompings to traitorous American scumbags. He was stationed in the Caribbean, where he captured and/or destroyed Colonial blockade runners, privateers, and smugglers. When France and Spain joined in on the fun, Nelson greeted them with an enfilade of lead death, battling French warships and personally leading amphibious raids against Spanish fortresses in Central America.
After the American Revolution, Nelson took the fight against France back to the British side of the pond. The French Revolutionary War broke out in 1793, and Captain Nelson took command of the sixty-four-gun warship Agamemnon. He helped support the invasion of Calvi, captured Corsica, and lost the sight in his right eye when a goddamned cannonball exploded in his face. Nelson wasn’t the sort of dude who needed two eyes to kick ass, as he proved in action against the Spanish at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797. When it appeared that the dirty Spaniards were escaping the battle, Nelson’s ship came flying up unsupported from the rear of the British formation, plowed into the Spanish armada, and split the enemy formation in half. Nelson, acting on his own initiative and without any orders, single-handedly divided the enemy force, and even though his vessel took a beating from a half-dozen larger and more powerful warships, his move turned the tide of the battle. Instead of escaping, the entire Spanish navy was crushed. It was so awesome that Nelson broke a piece of the ship off with his teeth and then high-fived his first mate so hard that the guy’s hand fell off.
But jamming up the works by voluntarily hurling himself into a meat grinder wasn’t even the most badass thing he did in that particular battle—at one point two giant Spanish warships, the San Nicholas and the San Jose, crashed into each other and their rigging became entangled. Nelson pulled up alongside the nearest ship and personally led a boarding party onto the deck of the San Nicholas. After fierce hand-to-hand combat, Nelson captured the Spanish captain’s sword and immediately had his men throw ropes over from the San Nicholas to the San Jose, climb on board, and continue fighting. For his daring actions in saving the battle and personally capturing two ships, Nelson was knighted by the king and promoted to the rank of admiral.
That pretty much sums up Nelson in a nutshell. He was courageous, brave, and fearless, and he always led from the front no matter how much stuff was exploding all around him. Seriously—while launching an amphibious assault on the fortress of Santa Cruz, a musket ball shattered every bone in his right arm. Nelson just went back aboard his flagship, had his arm amputated without anesthesia, and immediately returned to the battlefield. His strategy was just to go balls-out at all times, kicking it into overdrive and flying full speed toward the enemy.
Oh yeah, and he suffered from seasickness. You know you’re a bitchin’ naval commander when you can beat the holy living God out of your enemies with one eye, one arm, and stopping to hurl over the side of the deck every couple of minutes.
While all of the stuff up to this point is about as awesome as a ninja on fire riding a motorcycle, Nelson really showed the world what he was capable of when Napoleon Bonaparte started trying to flex his nuts in France. The French army landed in Egypt and was preparing to carve out an empire the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since Alexander the Great, but Nelson had different plans. He set out in 1798 with a fleet of fourteen ships and went hunting for Napoleon’s navy. After some searching, he came across a massed horde of warships and amphibious landing craft moored in Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile. The Royal Navy launched a daring, quick-strike night attack, repositioning their fleet rapidly in the face of the enemy, and Nelson completely annihilated the entire French fleet—of the seventeen ships Napoleon dispatched to Egypt, only three made it out of the bay alive.
After effectively crushing Napoleon’s lifelong dreams of an African empire in the span of a few hours, Nelson retired to Naples for a while, where he started banging Lady Emma Hamilton—a woman believed to have been pretty much the hottest babe in the British Empire. Sure, she was married to some other dude at the time (and Nelson also had a wife in the Caribbean), but neither of them really seemed to mind.
In 1801 the countries of Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia formed up into something called the League of Armed Neutrality. Nelson already hated neutrality and pretty much everything else that didn’t involve gigantic explosions and/or having wild monkey sex with beautiful aristocrats, but when the league decided that France really wasn’t all that bad after all, it was up to Nelson to sail into Copenhagen and smash all of their ships into driftwood until everyone was dead. During the battle, Nelson was given the signal to retreat, but he responded by giving his superior officer the finger, setting his phasers for disintegrate, and committing all of his ships to a full-scale attack. The League of Armed Pussies was destroyed, the city of Copenhagen was captured, and the king decided to make Nelson a Viscount of Ass-kickery.
Well, while Nelson was off pounding Swedes, Danes, Germans, Russians, and countesses, Napoleon rebuilt his navy and started getting his admirals psyched up about a possible invasion of the British Isles. Screw that. If the French were going to set foot on English soil, they were going to have to go through Admiral Horatio Nelson first.
But Nelson wasn’t the sort of geezer who was going to sit around on his dick waiting for the French to make the first move when he could be out cracking people’s skulls together, and on October 21, 1805, he tracked down Napoleon’s navy off the coast of Trafalgar, Spain. In one of the largest and greatest naval battles ever fought, Nelson’s twenty-seven ships went up against a combined armada of thirty-three Spanish and French vessels. Outnumbered and substantially outgunned (the allied fleet had roughly 250 more cannons than the British ships), Nelson resorted once again to his full-throttle tactics. Instead of approaching the enemy in an ordered line of battle, he aligned his fleet in a wedge formation, cut the enemy’s line in two, and started laying pipe to the allied fleet. The superior training, gunnery, leadership, and morale of Nelson’s men prevailed—12,000 enemy sailors and twenty-two ships were destroyed, while Nelson suffered just 449 dead and didn’t lose a single vessel. Napoleon’s ambition of taking down England—or anything else he couldn’t walk to, for that matter—was crushed in a single day. From that point on, the emperor of France couldn’t so much as wade knee-deep into a swimming pool without having a British frogman swim up and kick him in the ball sack with a flippered boot.
Sadly, it wasn’t to be that England’s greatest hero would go off drinking pints of Bass ale in a London t
avern to celebrate his greatest accomplishment. While directing the battle from the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, Lord Nelson was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper. He died shortly after receiving word that the French navy had been utterly destroyed. The British Empire, while elated that the immediate threat to her borders had been wiped off the face of the earth, went into a period of deep mourning for the loss of her greatest hero—a man who never gave less than 3,000 percent, who single-handedly established the superiority of his country’s navy for centuries to come, and who boldly gave his life to defend his homeland, dying in the moment of his greatest victory.
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Lord Nelson’s full title is the Most Noble Lord Horatio Nelson, Viscount and Baron Nelson, of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in the County of Norfolk, Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Hilborough in the Said County, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Vice Admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet, Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels in the Mediterranean, Duke of Bronte in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Knight Grand Cross of the Sicilian Order of St. Ferdinand and of Merit, Member of the Ottoman Order of the Crescent, Knight Grand Commander of the Order of St. Joachim.
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27
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
(1769–1821)
Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.
IT’S SAFE TO SAY THAT NAPOLEON BONAPARTE WASN’T EXACTLY THE MOST POPULAR KID TO EVER LIVE. Born on Corsica, a tiny Mediterranean island nobody really gives a crap about, from the time he was sent off to military school at age nine, the young outcast was bullied, ostracized, and picked on by his jackass classmates because, as we all know, children are totally evil bastards. Well, Napoleon didn’t let something as inconsequential as having no friends and being way too short to play on the basketball team get in the way of his dreams. He was determined to do something of consequence with his life, like grind all of Europe beneath his heel and train a legion of German shepherd attack dogs to ring the doorbells of his enemies and bite them in the scrotum when they opened the door. He buried himself in his studies, learned everything he possibly could about artillery, and secretly plotted his savage revenge against everyone who ever messed with him.
Bonaparte graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the French army in 1785, and thus began a long and illustrious career of aerating faces with shotgun blasts of grapeshot and crunching mighty European kings in the nuts with a tack hammer. His hard work and training paid off, as Napoleon rapidly worked his way up through the ranks, and in 1793 the twenty-four-year-old major distinguished himself by shelling the mother hell out of the city of Toulon and playing an integral part in the French effort to recapture the city from the Brits. His most famous engagement as an artillery officer, however, came two years later, when he was serving with French forces stationed in Paris.
On October 5,1795, a huge army of king-lovin’ loyalist royalist dick-biters rose and threatened to wipe out the egalitarian republican government that had been set up during the French Revolution. Even though he wasn’t even the ranking officer in the city, Napoleon rode to the rescue, seized control of the ragtag Paris militia, strategically positioned his cannons throughout the city, and shredded the royalist army with grapeshot. Despite outnumbering their Corsican foe six to one, Napoleon’s enemies were obliterated in the span of just a few hours.
This improbable yet awesome victory made the young general a national hero almost overnight. He was immediately given command of all republican forces stationed in Italy, where he whipped a demoralized and undersupplied force into shape, and led a masterful campaign across the Alps like Hannibal (the Carthaginian, not the cannibal) and into the Italian countryside. Hopelessly outnumbered and without any chance of being reinforced or resupplied, Napoleon used his genius to lay down some righteous ass-kickings on the armies of Austria, Naples, Venice, Piedmont, and the Papal States. He fought sixty-seven actions, won eighteen pitched battles, and captured 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannons, and 170 regimental flags. He resupplied his army from captured enemy depots, and his unbelievable military conquests made him pretty much the most popular guy in all of France. Meanwhile, the captain of Bonaparte’s high school football team probably plummeted into obscurity as an underemployed busboy doing bong hits in the broom closet during his lunch break.
After Italy was toast, Napoleon crossed the Mediterranean and landed a huge invasion force in Alexandria, Egypt. There he quickly went to work conquering more territory for the French Republic. In an insane battle that took place only a few miles from the pyramids, Napoleon crushed a force of more than sixty thousand Egyptians (probably by reprogramming the Great Pyramid to shoot lasers) and put an end to over seven hundred years of Mamluke dominance over the Nile. Then his men allegedly shot the Sphinx’s nose off with a cannon, which I guess is cool if you’re into defacing national landmarks.
Despite the fact that his unstoppable land armies were working like a well-oiled machine lubed up with greased pigs, Vaseline, and K-Y jelly, Napoleon eventually had to give up on his conquest of North Africa when our boy Nelson destroyed the French navy. But whatever, Napoleon didn’t go off and start hyperventilating into a paper bag—he caught the first ride out of Egypt and snuck back into France. When he landed, Napoleon marched his troops into the legislature building and seized power for himself. Then he brought the Pope in to crown him emperor of the French in 1804, but right as the Pope was lowering the crown onto his head Napoleon was like, “Whatever,” ganked the crown away from the Holy Father, and placed it on his own head. I find this hilarious for some reason.
Bonaparte’s ultimate goal was to sail into England and drop-kick the king into the Baltic Sea, but once again our buddy Nelson threw a monkey wrench in the works with his previously mentioned shenanigans off the coast of Trafalgar. So Napoleon just had to content himself with crushing all of Europe instead. He raised a massive military force, marched east, and ran into the full might of the Austrian and Russian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz in the winter of 1805. Heavily outnumbered by the combined strength of two hostile nations, Napoleon beat them so hard that their teeth came out their urethras, with thirty thousand men killed or captured in a single battle. Those who didn’t surrender on the spot foolishly attempted to flee across a large frozen pond, so Napoleon, being the master of disaster that he was, smashed the ice with his cannons and sent thousands of men to a freezing-cold watery death. The emperors of Europe’s two most powerful military nations were forced to personally submit to his will, Austria was subjugated, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, and pretty much everybody recognized the fact that Napoleon was totally rad.
Well, everybody except the Prussians. They got all pissed off and mobilized their armies in a futile attempt to stem the tide of French people sweeping across Western Europe. Nineteen days after the Prussian military mustered in, Napoleon viciously backhanded them into their place, killing forty-six thousand men in the battles of Jena and Auer-stedt and liquefying the Prussian army while losing about seven thousand of his own soldiers. He went on to cement his power in Europe, grind broken beer bottles into his enemies’ faces, capture most of the Iberian Peninsula, kidnap the Pope, annex the Papal States, and marry the superhot archduchess of Austria. Not bad for a low-born Corsican who used to get atomic wedgies in middle school.
In 1812 Napoleon decided that the Russians were really pissing him off too, so he marched 450,000 men into the motherland to teach them a lesson in having their faces wrecked. Unfortunately for l’empereur, the Russians had no intention of fighting a pitched battle and subsequently being flogged mercilessly with their own small intestines, so instead they just kept retreating deeper and deeper into Russia, burning everything they came across to prevent the French from living off the land or capturing supplies (à la Peter the Great). When Napoleon arrived in Moscow and found the entire place torched to the ground, he was like, “Well, screw it,” and turned around to head home. On the way
back, relentless guerilla attacks, rampant desertion, a bitch of a Russian winter, and a lack of supplies dealt serious losses to the French—only about a tenth of the invasion force returned to Paris.
The European allies took advantage of Napoleon’s temporary weakness, and he was defeated and exiled to the island of Elba in 1814. Just one year later, however, Napoleon busted out of his remote island prison and returned to the mainland of France. The reinstated French king, Louis XVIII, sent a regiment of troops to shoot Bonaparte, but he was such a badass that they decided to join their former commander and hop on the express train to awesometown instead. Napoleon chased the king out of Paris, reinstated himself as emperor, and immediately marched into Belgium to get his revenge.
You have to respect the fact that Napoleon’s daring escape and subsequent full-scale assault was a balls-out gambit—roughly the political equivalent of cashing in your 401(k) retirement fund, going to Vegas, and betting it all on red. Unfortunately, Lady Luck is a sadistic, kinky bitch goddess who loves to bite you in the ass and steal your wallet when you least expect it. The French ran into the Duke of Wellington’s British Army at Waterloo, and the two forces immediately started beating the hell out of each other. During the brutal fighting victory constantly hung by a single thread, but in the end Wellington’s men stood strong and Napoleon suffered his final defeat. He was exiled again, this time to St. Helena, a tiny, desolate volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic, where he wrote the definitive manual on nineteenth-century warfare and lived the life of a lonely, eccentric genius until his death in 1821 at the age of fifty-two. No matter how cool it was to live on a volcano like Sauron, with no more asses left to kick life was simply no longer worth living for this war-mongering hardass.