The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  “They planted someone on the beach, you know. Someone who tried to get close to me. I couldn’t understand how they did it at first, because I looked up Chloë’s bylines in the South China Post.”

  Jenny’s eyebrows raised a fraction.

  “But after the penny dropped I did some more digging,” he went on. “There was a real reporter called Chloë Fleming on that paper a few years ago. She got married, left the profession and took her husband’s name. That Chloë Fleming disappeared from the internet. ‘My’ Chloë stepped into her identity.”

  “Standard procedure. Once you’d seen her stories you never doubted her, right?”

  “Right.”

  Jake emptied Beloff’s folder onto the table. There was an Etruscan alphabet in the pile, a copy of the Brontoscopic Calendar that made a prediction for each day of the year in the event of lightning. He spotted a translation of the Prophecy of Vegoia, an Etruscan prophet who warned of damnation for kings who violate their natural borders.

  If anyone extends his own possessions or diminishes those of someone else, for this crime he will be condemned by the gods. The people responsible will be affected by the worst diseases and wounds; they will perish in the heat of the summer; they will be killed off by blight. There will be civil strife. Know that these things happen, when such crimes are committed …

  Jenny drew out several sheets of typed paper tied together with silk ribbon. Beloff had written a timeline of the events he intended to focus on for his publisher, annotated in fountain pen but apparently unsent.

  The Battles of Napoleon.

  M. N. Beloff.

  1796. The campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy was Napoleon’s first sole command. An eventual triumph, yes. But was Bonaparte to cast all before him, as in later years? Not a bit of it. The Italian campaign was characterised by disorganisation and strategic blunders, the young general often saved by sheer luck. Throughout the campaign, Napoleon had to split his force into several groups (clearly he did not know which route the enemy would come from). When one of his commanders marched a division sixty miles in the wrong direction, Bonaparte was forced to call off the siege of Mantua at the cost of two hundred cannon. On another occasion Bonaparte was resting in the town of Lonato with just a thousand men when 3,000 Austrians arrived unexpectedly. He bluffed them into surrendering. But for this ruse, one of the greatest military careers in history could have ended there.

  After his first defeat at Bassano, Napoleon conceded: “Maybe my hour has arrived.”

  And after victory at Arcole, he admitted: “I needed good luck.”

  “This hardly speaks of a man able to tell the future,” said Jenny.

  Jake nodded seriously and continued reading.

  Napoleon’s errors were to be expected in an era before satellites, spy planes, the telegraph or the radio. Generals were like blind men – feeling out the terrain with their fingers, fumbling for the enemy. What is remarkable is that for the next fifteen years Napoleon acquired sight.

  1798. Like the campaign of two years previously, Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt was frequently disastrous. Nelson pulverised his fleet at the Battle of the Nile and the march on the Holy Land was devastated by plague. He tasted defeat again at the siege at Acre. Yet Egypt was a watershed. For subsequently, Napoleon lost no significant engagement until his catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1812. To all intents and purposes, he became invincible.

  24

  Jake hammered the table with his fist. “So that’s where he got hold of it. It wasn’t only the Rosetta Stone that Napoleon’s savants found in Egypt. And it’s no wonder Napoleon became an orientalist. They discovered a copy of the Disciplina Etrusca too.”

  “Who were the savants?” asked Jenny.

  “The small army of historians and scientists Napoleon bought with him to Egypt.”

  “But they couldn’t have found the Disciplina,” she said. “The Egyptian campaign was a fiasco – Beloff says so right here. Can’t you read?”

  Jake felt as if the space between them was a solid. She was miles away from him.

  “It would have taken the savants time to translate it, though,” he pressed. “Still more to realise the bloody thing worked. And right after the Egypt campaign, Napoleon’s run of victories began.”

  “Correlation is not causation. This isn’t evidential Jake, it proves nothing. You’re supposed to be a journalist. Could you defend this thesis under cross-examination in the High Court?”

  He could not. Outside, a boy was trying to throw a slip of paper into a high-up crack in the Wailing Wall. Prayers are frequently removed from the lower gaps and buried on the Mount of Olives; Jake guessed the youngster’s wish was intended to remain in situ.

  They carried on reading.

  Despite the setbacks in Egypt, Napoleon wrote to his government: “Fortune hasn’t abandoned us, not at all – she has served us during this campaign more than ever.”

  Later he recalled: “In Egypt, I was full of dreams. I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia on an elephant, the new Qur’an in my hand. My time in Egypt was the most beautiful of my life.”

  An old fear gnawed at Jake. He recalled that during the voyage to Egypt the French fleet had been scattered by weather, passing within twenty miles of Nelson’s ships of the line. An encounter would have meant automatic annihilation for the French; by sheer luck Bonaparte slipped past.

  It was as if the book wanted to be found.

  And there, writ large in Beloff’s notes, was further evidence of Napoleon’s meteorological good fortune.

  By 1799 it was clear the Egyptian campaign was a failure. The Royal Navy had Napoleon blockaded. His capture seemed inevitable. But a north-easterly breeze picked up, the perfect wind to evade Nelson’s cruisers. He escaped to Paris, thence to conquer Europe.

  Beloff’s next focus was Napoleon’s second venture into northern Italy, to fight the Austrians once again. It was this campaign that had first marked him out as a Caesar, a Charlemagne.

  1800. In conference, Bonaparte asked his private secretary Bourrienne where the key battle of the campaign was going to take place.

  “How the devil am I meant to know?” came the reply.

  “Here, you fool,” said Napoleon, pointing at the River Scrivia on his map.

  It was the exact spot where the Battle of Marengo would be fought three months later. The encounter is considered Napoleon’s first strategic masterwork.

  “We’ve struck like lightning,” Bonaparte told his brother Joseph. “Great events are about to take place.”

  “It’s like Hitler’s prophecy before he marched into Austria in 1938,” said Jake. “Do you remember it?”

  “‘I’ll appear in Vienna like a spring storm,’” Jenny recited. “‘Then you’ll see something.’”

  Jake was reminded suddenly of Mark Twain’s comment. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

  “We did a great thing by destroying Germany’s copy,” he said. “We’re a good team, you know?”

  But Jenny merely pursed her lips, returning to Beloff’s timeline, and again Jake was aware of the void between them: to encroach upon this space was to touch the negative ends of two magnets and feel the repulsive force. He leaned on his fists, staring out at the Wailing Wall with all its sadness. The boy’s note had dislodged an avalanche of other prayers; he was pawing through the mass of fallen paper, looking for his own.

  1805. The emperor faced a grand coalition of Britain, Russia and Austria and Great Britain, all bankrolled by English gold. War was coming to central Europe.

  Napoleon’s minister Daru later recalled: “In terse, imperious tones, Napoleon outlined the plan of the campaign up to Vienna. The order of the marches, their durations, the places where columns should converge, surprises, attacks in great force, diverse movements, mistakes by the enemy; everything had been foreseen.”

  “Once again, Napoleon knew what was coming,” said Jake.

  Jenny had turn
ed sallow: that same hue of bad mackerel flesh she had assumed when the veracity of lightning prophecies first hit her two years ago. Then she read of Austerlitz.

  1805. Napoleon visited the small village of Austerlitz, set amongst rolling hills in what is now the Czech Republic.

  He told his generals: “Gentlemen, examine this terrain carefully. It will be a battlefield and you will play a part. Study those heights – you will be fighting here in under two months.”

  Battle commenced as prophesied that December.

  On the morning of the battle, Napoleon announced: “Let’s finish this war with a thunderclap.”

  The Bavarian State Archives contain a sketch Napoleon drew before the clash, which illustrates how it proceeded exactly according to his prediction.

  He even forecasted the weather.

  A low mist hid Napoleon’s troops from his enemies at the start of the battle, burned off by the sun at exactly the right moment to reveal the Allies’ principal attack. Austerlitz was Napoleon’s masterpiece, a synthesis of bluff, movement and coordination. Military historians like to say that no plan survives contact with the enemy. In reality, no enemy could now survive contact with Napoleon’s plans.

  Jake recalled Full Moon Party beach, that flickering palisade.

  “Ok,” Jenny murmured. “I admit it, Jake. Napoleon could tell the future. Napoleon had the Book of Thunder too.”

  Jake’s countenance was heavy with the ageless truth. “Michael Beloff realised Napoleon’s manoeuvres would have been impossible without modern communications,” he said. “Then he became curious about the scroll in his painting and put two and two together.”

  Jenny looked at him. “You were right all along. I apologise.”

  Sometimes when you try to connect two negative ends of a magnet, Jake reflected, one spins around. Plus meets minus, opposites attract – and connect. Perhaps Jenny could be turned. He smiled at her shyly, this person both familiar to him and newly strange.

  Beneath the Wailing Wall the little boy had found his prayer, and he prepared to throw.

  “Napoleon,” Jake breathed. “Born to a family of minor landowners in an age before meritocracy – yet he turned himself into the most powerful man on earth. His siblings would include an emperor, three kings, two princesses and a queen. How? The traditional view is he achieved this with genius, ambition and belief – plus that other crucial ingredient. Luck.”

  “Didn’t Napoleon always say he wanted lucky generals?” asked Jenny.

  “He certainly did. Only …” Jake’s laugh was empty as he slapped two of the cards on the table.

  “I believe in luck. But a wise man neglects nothing which helps his destiny.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

  “Great men seldom fail in perilous enterprises. Is it because they have good luck that they become great? No, being great they have mastered luck.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

  “Napoleon did not so much make his own luck as make luck his own.”

  Jake stared out to the Dome of the Rock, an artery like a rope of steel in his neck.

  “I didn’t want to do this again,” he said at last. “I thought I’d played my part. But sometimes …”

  “Sometimes what?”

  He turned to face her. “Sometimes you can’t escape your destiny. That I have learned.”

  “What’s your destiny, Jake?”

  “Napoleon’s ambition cost three million lives,” he said, gazing at the Wailing Wall where more worshippers gathered. “And his crimes were nothing compared to those of the Third Reich. Corpse upon broken corpse, Bonaparte had a long way to go to catch up with Hitler. Jenny, it’s our duty to find out what happened to Napoleon’s copy of the Disciplina Etrusca. And if it still exists …”

  “I understand.” A new fire smouldered in Jenny’s eyes. “We must destroy it.”

  25

  A vision had come to Jake: Napoleon Bonaparte, clad in the hooded robe of the Emperor Augustus, the Pontifex Maximus of Rome, bridge between earth and the heavens. The hood in which Roman augurs foretold events that were yet to transpire. One hand aloft, consulting the clouds, ready to unleash upon Europe a blitzkrieg of movement and coordination that was not of time. A marvellous, frightening image.

  “But we come back to the same old problem,” said Jenny. “If Napoleon was a seer, why was he beaten?”

  “Let’s see what Beloff made of it,” said Jake.

  The historian’s dissection of Bonapartist devilry continued.

  1807. At the Battle of Elyau in eastern Prussia, Bonaparte was fought to a standstill by the Czar of Russia. One of the ghastliest engagements in the entire Napoleonic War, it took place amid blizzards so bad that visibility was reduced to ten yards, obliterating the sky from sight. Napoleon abandoned the artful choreography of his previous battles for a crude frontal smash. This ended in a bloody draw, costing him the strategic initiative. The next major battle, Friedland, saw no such climactic difficulties and Napoleon won a brilliant victory over the Czar.

  “Bad weather, lightning not visible, no victory,” said Jake. “Clear skies – a triumph.”

  The pages sat heavily on the desk, as if made of iron.

  1808. The Peninsular War begins. French armies got bogged down in Spain and Portugal for years, eventually beaten there by the Duke of Wellington. But Napoleon rarely took personal control in Iberia, leaving battlefield command to his generals.

  He told his brother Joseph: “This war could be finished in an instant with a clever manoeuvre. But I need to be there for that.”

  Beloff had underlined the last sentence and added: keeps it for himself.

  1809. Austria again. At the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Napoleon suffers his first major defeat in a decade. On the day of the battle the fog was so thick that visibility was reduced to the level of Elyau, with identical results.

  During this campaign, there were the first signs of ill-health in Napoleon.

  Beloff had circled ill-health and scrawled: Vegoia. Borders.

  “But what about the decision to invade Russia?” said Jenny. “Napoleon’s greatest mistake – just as it would be Hitler’s downfall more than a century later.”

  “History rhymes,” murmured Jake.

  “Hess had stolen Hitler’s copy of the Disciplina and fled to Britain by the German invasion of Russia in 1941,” said Jenny. “So he can be excused the blunder. But Napoleon would have had ample opportunity to take the auspices before crossing the border. He must have known he would fail.”

  They consulted Beloff.

  1812. As Napoleon crossed the River Niemen and entered Russia his horse shied, throwing him onto the bank.

  “It is a bad omen,” he said. “A Roman would recoil.”

  Napoleon was correct in this prediction. The Grande Armée that entered Russia numbered more than 600,000 men – only 27,000 would return. It was perhaps the greatest folly in military history.

  Bonaparte’s minister Molé later wrote: “Napoleon never discovered where the impossible begins. He only thought about increasing his own glory. Only death could stifle his ambition.”

  Instructive too are the words of the historian Charles Esdaile on the Napoleonic mind-set: “The emperor could not accept that there were limits, whether military, political, diplomatic or moral to what he could do.”

  “I understand,” said Jake. “I get it. The skies did tell Napoleon he would be defeated in Russia. But by that point he was in the grips of such megalomania he decided to go ahead and do it anyway. He could brook no limitations on his power whatsoever – not even from the heavens.”

  “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Jenny.

  Now they read how Napoleon’s foresight had deserted him overnight.

  The emperor had predicted Sweden and Turkey would side with him against Russia. On both counts he was wrong: they turned against him. Like Hitler, Napoleon was biting off more than he could chew.

  He admitted of the diplomatic coup: “It is very stupid that I did not foresee it.”
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  When the invasion began, the Czar’s armies repeatedly dodged French spearheads, escaping encirclement. The Emperor could no longer orchestrate his forces over great distances – and the Russian retreat was a trap he fell headlong into.

  Napoleon had never been trapped before.

  The Russians finally gave battle at Borodino. That morning, Napoleon declared: “Fortune is a liberal mistress. I have always said this, and now start experiencing it.”

  He unleashed another unimaginative frontal smash, far from the élan of his earlier triumphs. The resulting charnel house was the bloodiest encounter in the history of warfare until that point and would not be exceeded until the Marne a century later. The 75,000 dead is equivalent of a full jumbo jet crash-landing into a battlefield five miles square every five minutes for eight hours solid, without a single survivor. Napoleon took the field, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

  The emperor’s judgement continued to fail him. He did not foresee the Russians abandoning Moscow and burning it to the ground, depriving his troops of shelter and sustenance. The decision to retreat came too late. And when winter struck, he chose the worst possible route home.

  In December 1812, the Czar told a dinner guest: “The spell is broken.”

  26

  “I’m confused,” said Jenny. “Imagine you’re Napoleon. Out of pride or stroppiness or whatever you’ve stopped using the Disciplina. As a result, you face catastrophe. Wouldn’t you admit your mistake and begin using it again right away? Napoleon was a pragmatist, after all. ‘A wise man neglects nothing’ …”

  “I think that he did,” said Jake. “Wellington himself said Napoleon’s last campaigns gave him a greater idea of the man’s genius than anything that had gone before. But by then it was too late – France was in the position of Nazi Germany in 1945. The emperor was facing a million allied troops with barely 200,000 men. His country was mutinous, broken and bankrupted. There were barely any men left to recruit. He was engulfed.”