Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  In whatever task he undertook, Lee had the ability, Douglas Southall Freeman has written, “to visualize his fundamental problem as though it had been worked out in a model and set before his eyes.” In his imagination he pictured a reconstructed South as readily as he had once envisioned the turning of the Federal flanks at Chancellorsville and Second Manassas.

  He knew that he would not live to see the new vision realized. He seemed not to regret this; such beauty and order as a man finds in this life are, he supposed, but intimations of a more ideal pattern. “My interest in Time and its concerns,” he wrote as the end drew closer, “is daily fading away and I try to keep my eyes and thoughts fixed on those eternal shores to which I am fast hastening.”

  Lorraine, August-September 1870

  LOUIS-NAPOLEON, reclining on cushions intended to soften the jolting and lurching of his carriage, left the front and hurried westward towards Verdun. The Frenchmen who watched his cavalcade pass were dismayed. The Rhine lay in the other direction. But the only concern of the ailing Emperor was to get away as rapidly as possible, while the roads were still passable, for he dreaded the prospect of falling alive into the hands of the Germans. Reports of Prussian cavalry led him to cover his escape with a heavy guard. In addition to the gendarmes of the provost-guard and his personal bodyguards, the Cent Gardes, distinguished by their sky-blue uniforms and glittering breastplates, the Emperor was escorted by detachments of Dragoons and Lancers, as well as by a battery of artillery. The heavy cavalry, however, proved cumbersome, and the Emperor, anxious to move quickly, ordered that they be replaced by swifter Chasseurs d’Afrique.

  A long line of equipages followed the Emperor’s carriage along the white road. They carried the personnel and baggage of Louis-Napoleon’s suite and retinue. In addition to his staff officers and equerries, his physician, his police agent, and his confessor, the Emperor was accompanied by more than seventy members of the imperial household. There were footmen, chefs, chamberlains, stewards, cooks, scullions, and grooms. The pomp and luxury of the imperial train reminded some observers of the days of Louis XIV. The Emperor appeared to be modeling his conduct on that of the Sun King, re-creating in the camp the splendors of the palace, and shunning in the field the hazards of the battle. This behavior, at once weak and arrogant, was the cause of much grumbling. A Bonaparte was supposed always to seek the hottest fire; yet here was the Emperor, in the act of fleeing from the battle.

  Before he departed for Verdun, Louis-Napoleon devolved upon Marshal Bazaine the command of the Army of the Rhine. Bazaine at once resolved to remove his army from the bloody amphitheater of Lorraine by means of a prudent retirement. He told the Emperor that he would as soon as practicable follow him on the western road, in order that he might unite the Army of the Rhine with the troops commanded by Marshal MacMahon at Châlons. Once joined together, the two armies could hope to resist the multitudes of Germans: and their combined force might yet succeed in preventing the enemy from reaching Paris.39

  But the juncture of the two armies never took place. After bloody fighting in the vicinity of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte, Bazaine found himself surrounded, in Lorraine, by the enemy; and he was in a short time forced to fall back on the fortifications of Metz.

  The failure of Bazaine to escape encirclement by the Germans gave rise to numerous conspiracy theories. It was said by some that he sullenly refused to co-operate with Louis-Napoleon because he had, after his return from Mexico, been coldly received at court. Others traced Bazaine’s supposed petulance to the anger he felt when, at the outbreak of the war with Prussia, he received only a corps command. Still others, with an even smaller show of probability, claimed that the Marshal had struck a bargain with the Prussians: he betrayed his country, and worked to subvert the Empire to which he owed the highest honors, in exchange for Prussian lucre, or in the hope of obtaining Prussian assistance in the establishment of a new régime in France, of which he was to be the head.

  The truth was different. It is possible, though far from probable, that Bazaine nourished in his heart a secret grievance against the Emperor. He was, however, a seasoned soldier, accustomed to disappointments, and it is not likely that he would have allowed a personal antipathy to affect his military judgment after he became generalissimo. In a struggle to the death, in the battle for a nation’s life, the petty vexations of the past, the trifling disappointments of private life, sink rapidly into nothingness. Selfishness itself is suspended in the emergency. Yet even if it were true that Bazaine still burned, after the first disasters befell the army, with an implacable yearning for retribution against the régime, he must soon have discovered, as the German armies pressed closer, that the path of vengeance coincided with the path of duty. To succeed where the Emperor failed—to win the victory that eluded a Bonaparte—would surely have been the most splendid revenge the Marshal could have wreaked on Louis-Napoleon.

  The failure of Bazaine’s generalship had its origins, not in personal malice or treacherous ambition, but in the Marshal’s acuity of vision, and in his realism and his pessimism. He had not been long in the field when he saw, with the eye of one practiced in the art of appraising the strength of an adversary, that the Germans had more men than the French; that they had a more potent artillery; that they had a superior form of martial organization; that they possessed a deeper, a revolutionary, fervor. The blows they inflicted on the French forces in August 1870 were “absolutely stupefying in their suddenness and severity.” Bazaine rapidly formed the judgment that the war could not possibly be won; and no sooner had he reached this conclusion than he fell into the same enervating fatalism which would grip the French high command seventy years later in the face of another German onslaught. In such circumstances, amid so many presages of defeat and ruin, the will tends naturally to break down. A great commander like Robert E. Lee might overcome the forces of disintegration, as well as the paralyzing inertia that co-operates with them in undermining the fighting spirit, but Bazaine, though he was a good soldier, was a mediocre general.

  While the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, shut up in Metz, succumbed to an ever deeper pessimism, the Emperor, who had been powerless to inspire in Bazaine that confidence which despair had annihilated in his own soul, reached the camp of Châlons-sur-Marne. He was by this time little more than a mock Emperor. He had relinquished his military authority to Bazaine, and his civil powers to the Empress-Regent. People spoke of him as one already dead; and in the camp soldiers insulted his name with impunity. “I seem to have abdicated,” he was heard to say. As his mind became more clouded, not only by bodily suffering but by intense mental anguish, he lost the last habits of action, and became, at length, the passive spectator of his own tragedy.

  For a brief moment, the Emperor showed some faint symptoms of a reviving spirit. Forgetting his earlier resolution to conquer or die, he toyed with the idea of returning to Paris and superintending the defense of the city. This, considered from a purely military point of view, would have been his wisest course. What remained of the French army might, in the vicinity of the capital, have operated with success against German armies hampered by long and precarious supply lines. But politically such a course was impossible. The Empress telegraphed at once to disabuse her husband of the notion that he should be welcome in his capital. The sight of his receding standards would infuriate the Parisians. His head would not be safe. He would be torn to pieces by the mob. He would “never reach the Tuileries alive,” Eugénie said.

  The Emperor relapsed into apathy, and the Empress and her councilors unfolded their own plan of campaign. If little Lulu were to have any chance of succeeding his father and ruling France, Louis-Napoleon must redeem his failures through an act of heroic gallantry. He and Marshal MacMahon must set out at once to relieve Metz and rescue Bazaine. The plan was a desperate one, for MacMahon’s force comprised only some 130,000 troops, and would be greatly outnumbered by the German armies operating in the valley of the Meuse, the backdoor through which
MacMahon hoped to enter Lorraine.

  The broken Emperor followed MacMahon’s army as it marched north towards Rheims, then east towards Mézières. Seldom has a great prince appeared a more pitiable or a more contemptible figure. Makeup had been applied to Louis-Napoleon’s face to conceal his deathly pallor, and a cruel fate dictated that this dyed and painted scion of the Bonapartes should in the last extremity of power resemble a rouged matron.40 The Emperor still dragged a princely retinue, but the splendor of his entourage seemed now to mock his dwindling authority. In provincial houses, he sat down to solitary repasts, sumptuous indeed, but cheerless. Once, while at table, he began to shake violently; and an aide-de-camp saw tears streaming down his face.

  On another night he was interrupted while dining and told that he must instantly board a train. He did so, and was taken northward in the direction of the Belgian frontier. Louis-Napoleon stepped off the train into the darkness, and found himself in a little fortified town on the banks of the Meuse.

  It was called Sedan.

  Near Metz, September 1870

  NIETZSCHE LAY IN the darkness of the freight car, nursing wounded Germans.

  He had, a short time before, taken a leave of absence from his professorship at Basel. He was a German, and he believed that it was his duty to fight for Germany. But he had not been permitted to shoulder arms; the previous year, in order to take possession of his professorial chair, he had become a Swiss citizen, and he was therefore prohibited from serving as a combatant. He volunteered instead as a medical orderly. After the German victory over Marshal MacMahon at Woerth, he was charged with the task of collecting dead and wounded soldiers. An interval of comparative tranquility followed, when he was attached to the German force besieging Marshal Bazaine at Metz. Then came the three days and nights in the freight car. The wailing “seemed as if it would never end.” The grotesqueness of those hours was heightened, for Nietzsche, by his fever-distorted vision, for he was himself succumbing to dysentery and diphtheria.

  Amid the wreckage of the car, he experienced a moment of illumination, touched with feverish delirium. While the “earth trembled under the thudding strides of Ares,” he was able, he told Richard Wagner, “to remain aloof and engaged with my theme even in the midst of the terrible direct effects of the war; indeed, I recall lying together with wounded men in the freight car in the lonely night, and although I was charged with their care, my thoughts turned to the three abysses of tragedy: their names are ‘delusion, will, woe.’”

  The revelation Nietzsche experienced in the watches of that night he elaborated in a book he published a year after the war ended. The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, is a work of prose-poetry, a series of meditations on the nausea of life and the origins of Greek tragic drama. How, Nietzsche asked, can a man live, and act, when he “sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence”? To experience life is to feel nausea; “and nausea inhibits action.” Tragic poetry, he argued, enabled the Greeks to overcome this nausea: it allowed them to live and to act, in spite of the “wound” of existence.

  The war, though it reduced him in blood and muscle, had, he believed, sweetened and spiritualized the powers of his mind. One “would never dream,” he wrote, that The Birth of Tragedy “was begun amid the thunder of the battle of Woerth.” The thunder foretold revolt. The Birth of Tragedy anticipates themes Nietzsche was to pursue during his wandering years, after he suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned the chair of philology at Basel. He traveled with a single trunk, two suits, three shirts, and numerous books, manuscripts, and medicines; he passed his days in boardinghouses and cafés in Genoa and Rapallo, in Rome and Nice, in Messina and Mentone, in Sorrento and Sils Maria. The simplicity of his exterior life concealed the voluptuous quality of his inward existence, a perpetual banquet of culture, the revelry and amusement of the symposium. He would solve the riddle of the Greeks, and use the secret to destroy the delusions of the romantics, whose credos, he believed, were the bane of his time. The antidote to romanticism lay, he said, in a recovery of the murderous life force of the Greeks, and in a revival of their “godlike selfhood,” which, he contended, derived from “Dionysian” sources.

  Nietzsche deployed his Dionysian batteries against the “cadaverous perfume” of Schopenhauer and the “decadent” fantasies of the nationalists and the socialists—against all those who did not say “yes” to life with a sufficiently affirmative zeal. He was the ablest student of the romantic phenomenon since Rousseau; yet so far from escaping from the ideas he deplored, he cast them in a new, more vehement, and perhaps more alluring form. In retrospect, Nietzsche’s avowal of Dionysian willpower appears to have been a charade, the most ironic, the most decadent— the most romantic—of his deceptions. When a sickly man, dancing naked in a rented room, dreams of hurling lances with the supple-sinewed Hellenes, he has not embraced life—he has invented a new mode of myth.

  “Zarathustra is a dancer.”

  His “will to power” was a deception within a deceit. Nietzsche glorified strength and condemned compassion, but when, in January 1889, he broke down in Turin, he wept to see a coachman flog a horse in the Piazza Charles Albert. The philosopher of power threw himself upon the mare’s neck to protect it.41 Nietzsche’s writings were conceived in sickness and ironic ambiguity; but his fellow countrymen overlooked the nuances. They construed literally his call for the “relentless destruction” of everything that is “degenerating and parasitical,” for the annihilation of morality, the segregation of the sick, and the destruction of the unbeautiful.

  Some Germans saw a resemblance between Nietzsche’s Dionysian dowry and Bismarck’s yoking together of blood and iron. Nietzsche indignantly rejected the suggestion; he was at pains to distinguish his own romantic charlatanry from that of Bismarck, whose myths he denounced as the work of an overgrown fraternity boy.42 In one of the last letters he wrote before his final breakdown, he said that the “horned-beast race” of Germans was “utterly alien” to him. “To think German, to feel German—I can do anything, but not that.”

  His provisos and qualifications went unheeded. Germany embraced him as a native prophet of coercion. “I know my fate,” he wrote near the end of his memoir, Ecce Homo. “One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

  His dæmon did not deceive him.

  Paris, August-September 1870

  THE EMPRESS!” the plumed Suisses exclaimed as they struck the floor with their staves. Eugénie appeared. Like the other great ladies of Paris, she wore only black now, and her diadem was of jet. She was in mourning for France. She greeted the American envoy, Elihu Washburne, the man who at the beginning of the decade had welcomed Lincoln to Washington, and she inquired after the latest news from the United States.

  Washburne replied that all the news was good.

  “Unfortunately,” Eugénie said, “it is not so here. It is all very bad. We have had very bad news now. We have had great reverses.”

  Washburne, who as a Congressman from Illinois nine years before helped bring Ulysses S. Grant back into the army, said that reverses were incident to all military operations. In the revolution through which his own country had passed, he observed, the Union armies had at first suffered great defeats.

  “Yes,” the Empress said, “it was at Bull Run, was it not?”

  “It was,” the American replied.

  “But,” the Empress continued, “unfortunately our people are not like yours. The French people give up so quickly and become so dissatisfied and so unreasonable, while your people have more patience and more fortitude. However I don’t despair, but keep up my courage and try to give an example. I think we can retrieve all our disasters.”

  The dissatisfactions of her people were rarely absent from Eugénie’s mind in the last days of August 1
870. She was in constant communication with the Prefect of Police, and she made liberal use of her husband’s intelligence services, among them the Cabinet Noir of the Post Office, where private letters were secretly opened and transcribed. Yet thickly encompassed as she was by guards and detectives, she lived in an atmosphere of terror. She drank coffee in the mornings to stimulate her spirits, and in the evenings she took chloral, a sedative, to soothe her nerves. The nights were the worst. It was during the night, Eugénie seems to have feared, that they would come for her.

  Minutely informed though she was concerning the discontent of Paris, the Empress knew little of what was passing at the front. Towards the end of the month communications from the army slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether. For three or four days no dispatches came. The prolonged silence “kept me in a frightful state of anguish,” Eugénie said. “I could not eat, I could not sleep; I was endlessly choked with sobs.”

  Then, on September 3, Chevreau, the Minister of the Interior, brought a telegram. The Empress was standing at the top of the private staircase that communicated between her own apartments on the first story of the Tuileries and those of the Emperor on the ground floor. There she learned that her husband had been surrounded by German armies at Sedan. The last of the imperial Bonapartes had surrendered his sword and his person to the King of Prussia, and had afterwards been carried away a prisoner to Germany.

  A terrifying wail resounded through the palace. “No,” Eugénie shrieked, “the Emperor has not surrendered! A Napoleon never surrenders! He is dead! Do you hear me? I tell you he is dead and they’re trying to hide it from me!”