Of course it is impossible to summarize all the characteristics that made Napoleon a great commander in so restricted a space as an Introduction; it will be possible only to touch upon the most obvious aspects of his genius, in the hope that a fuller picture of his abilities will emerge from the perusal of the chapters that follow.
First of all, there were certain personal traits—not necessarily purely military in their application—that made him so redoubtable a leader. High on any such list of attributes must come his personal magnetism. Napoleon possessed an almost hypnotic power over those contemporaries he met face to face. It was a combination of his iron will, his irresistible charm and the feeling of his visitors of being in the presence of a master among men. Physically he was unprepossessing—of small stature, crude and even vulgar habits, brutally outspoken on almost every occasion—and yet he could have any man or woman eating out of his hand if he so desired. The fascination of his large grey eyes (which so many contemporaries remarked upon—their all-seeing, all-knowing and yet almost expressionless appearance) was irresistible. Even the war-hardened veteran General Vandamme admitted his helplessness when confronted by the Emperor: “So it is that I, who fear neither God nor Devil, am ready to tremble like a child when I approach him.”6 This hypnotic fascination undoubtedly accounts in large measure for the mastery he exerted over soldiers of all grades. He was fully aware of this power of his personality and made deliberate and systematic use of it to get his way. He was prepared to go to great lengths to enslave a man if he felt the effort worthwhile. This was seldom necessary: one penetrating stare from those grey eyes was generally all that was needed to place a man in thrall. This power never deserted him; within days of boarding the British man-of-war for his journey to St. Helena, he had completely won over both officers and crew. Only one man proved wholly unsusceptible to the ci-devant Emperor’s charm—the Governor of St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, an undistinguished soldier of unimaginative and oafish mien, who exasperated his fellow countrymen almost as much as he did his distinguished captive. There is no denying that the Emperor’s personal appeal was one of his greatest assets.
Second, we must ennumerate the almost unbelievable range and sheer power of Napoleon’s intellectual capabilities. In the words of one recent distinguished biographer, Octave Aubry, Napoleon possessed “the greatest personality of all time, superior to all other men of action by virtue of the range and clarity of his intelligence, his speed of decision, his unswerving determination, and his acute sense of reality, allied to the imagination on which great minds thrive.”7 Here was no narrow-minded professional soldier—his interests were legion. His mind was rarely at a loss for a new idea no matter what the subject, and he possessed to a very marked degree the ability of seeing every aspect of a problem without slipping into the danger of failing to “see the wood for the trees.” He studied every matter brought before him in breadth as well as depth. He could penetrate to the very heart of any matter and take into account every peripheral consideration at the same time. His grasp of detail was phenomenal, and in his prime he knew his army down to the last detail. His powers of concentration were daunting, yet he could switch from one avenue of thought to another at an instant’s notice without the least fogging of his incisive mind. He once described these mental faculties as follows: “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers and there I am—asleep.”8
Equally impressive were his powers of memory. According to the sometimes rather suspect evidence of Bourienne, Napoleon was better at remembering facts, localities and statistics than proper names, dates or words—but even if this was true it was purely a matter of degree. Two examples will illustrate his retentive mental powers. In September 1805 the Emperor and his staff came across a unit of the newly created Grande Armée that had become separated from its parent formation during the long approach-march from the Channel coast to the Rhine. Its commander had mislaid his orders and did not know where to find his division. While his staff officers busied themselves poring over maps and thumbing through countless notebooks and duplicate orders, Napoleon there and then, without reference to any book or any assistant, informed the astounded officer of the present location of his parent formation and where it would be on the next three nights, throwing in for good measure a detailed résumé of its strength and the military record of the divisional commander. At that time there were no less than seven corps d’armée, or 200,000 men, on the move; no more need be said. Again, in 1813, when his administrative departments were hard pressed to make good the loss of material suffered during the Russian Campaign, we find Napoleon writing a note to the Minister of War to the effect that he could remember seeing two cannon on the waterfront at Boulogne. In all probability it then had been all of eight years since the Emperor had last visited the port. He also appears to have had a photographic memory for statistics, and many an abashed secretary of state or senior official would be treated to a full résumé of the trade figures in, say, corn, for the past five years.
Similarly he had a knack for remembering the faces and records of individual soldiers. No doubt there was a tendency for “old sweats” to exaggerate the degree of recognition conferred upon them by the Emperor on some remote occasion in the distant past, but there is no need to query all the stories. One informant, Coignet, tells of the way the Emperor picked his face out of a crowd of soldiers after a review of the 14th of the Line in Place-St. Étienne in 1815 and promoted him to Quartermaster of the Palace and Baggage master of the Headquarters Staff in the very next breath. This was the kind of thing around which legends crystallized, but it undoubtedly served to maintain morale and inspire the rank and file to selfless exertions on behalf of le Tondu. It was another aspect of his magical appeal.
Napoleon possessed a phenomenal capacity for hard and unremitting toil. “Work is my element,” he once asserted. “I was born and made for work. I have recognized the limits of my eyesight and of my legs, but never the limits of my working power.”9 He remarked on another occasion that he worked at the table, at the opera, even in bed. An eighteen or twenty-hour working day was not extraordinary for him. He read widely and voraciously. He worked his perspiring teams of secretaries and clerks almost to death. This great capacity for unremitting toil was one great secret of his success.
The strain of such heavy toil—and of the persistent movement that inevitably accompanied every campaign—was certainly immense. Nor was Napoleon’s physique as tough as it has sometimes been represented. We know from his valets that he certainly needed his sleep. He had the happy knack of being able to “catnap” at quiet moments of the day; even amid the din of Wagram, he stretched out on his bearskin rug for a short sleep, but he was also frequently ill—suffering from both piles and bladder trouble—and the health factor is not of inconsiderable importance in considering his showing on two critical occasions when he showed himself far from his best—namely at Borodino and Waterloo. His eating habits tended to be irregular when on campaign and this affected his digestion, but he never seems to have suffered from insomnia.
When necessary, he could work for days at a time without proper rest, although the toll was felt later. On one occasion he is known to have worked for three days and nights without resting. The factor that made such sustained efforts possible was his wealth of nervous energy. But inevitably, as has been well remarked, this made him a “man of nerves” as well as a “man of nerve.” Beneath the calm and apparently unmoved surface of his face, great passions lurked. These occasionally revealed themselves in fits of tearing rage and even hystero-epileptic attacks—both of which his intimates had good reason to fear. On occasions he would thrash servants and officers with the riding whip he habitually carried; he once kicked a minister in the stomach before calmly ringing the bell for servants to come and remove the writhing unfortunate from the floor, and he once
seized poor, hardworking Berthier by the throat and hammered his head against a stone wall. Life in the Imperial entourage had its little moments! Normally, however, he retained strict control over his emotions, using them as instruments of his will.
His specific military talents were very imposing. It is not our present purpose to detail the ways he planned campaigns or conducted operations—that will be the subject of a later chapter10—but merely to analyze the qualities that lay behind them. One outstanding attribute was his sheer mastery of his profession. He once claimed that he knew how to make gunpowder, how to cast cannon and shot, how to construct carriages and limbers. This interest in the minutiae of military affairs was part of his quest for perfect thoroughness. He had his blind spots, however; he never took the trouble, for instance, to fully master the intricacies of naval warfare, and to the end of his career he failed to appreciate the influence of tides and winds on the conduct of war at sea. Similarly, it can be argued that he took too little interest in the tactical details of land fighting. At St. Helena he was adamant that a two-deep linear formation was the ideal, but he never compelled its adoption in his earlier campaigns. At Somo-Sierra (1808) he threw away the lives of a squadron of gallant Poles through a combination of pique and a lack of appreciation of what he was calling for. Quite rightly he left most tactical decisions to the men on the spot, but apart from his expressed preferment for the ordre mixte infantry formation, he paid relatively little attention to minor tactics. This should not, however, be confused with his skill at grand tactics—at which he was a past master of the greatest talent, at least on the majority of occasions.
The advice he offered Lauriston in 1804 is relevant to our survey. He enumerated three basic requirements for a successful general: concentration of force, activity and a firm resolve to perish gloriously. “They are the three principles of the military art that have disposed luck in my favor in all my operations. Death is nothing, but to live defeated is to die every day.”11 This was destined to be his own fate. However, a fourth principle might be added to the above three, as Colonel Vachée has suggested: “Surprise the enemy by strategy and secrecy, by the unexpectedness and rapidity of your operations.”12
Using his great mental powers, Napoleon was in the habit of thinking through any forthcoming military problem days, even months in advance. This concentrated thought process was no easy matter, and he once likened the effort involved in giving birth to a scheme to that of a woman bringing a child into the world. He invariably thought all around a possible problem, taking every foreseeable possibility into account and making allowance for every conceivable complication. He only genuinely improvised a solution on the spot on those rare occasions when his calculations were found to be incomplete.
Napoleon was positive that “a military leader must possess as much character as intellect—the base must equal the height.”13 He was liberally endowed with both essentials, as we have already discussed. He was also convinced that “a general’s principal talent consists in knowing the mentality of the soldier and in gaining his confidence.”14 At this, too, he was a past master. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of the French soldier to the last jot and tittle, from his “courage of an impatient sort” to his tendency to become dejected after failure. He mastered most of the psychological aspects of man-management.
Centralization of supreme authority was another sine qua non of Napoleon’s view of successful campaigning. “In war, men are nothing; one man is everything,” or again, “Better one bad general than two good ones.” The degree of centralization he achieved was fantastic. Almost every decision emanated from him alone, and his contemporaries marveled at how he could run a war and the Empire at the same time. While his armies remained of manageable proportions, this unique command method functioned extremely well; the French corps moved in a carefully coordinated pattern, the whole being directed by a single master intelligence. Later, however, the rigid desire for centralization became a snare and a delusion.
Finally we must speak of Napoleon’s genius—that utterly indefinable quality which enabled him to make the utmost use of the these great powers and gifts. “An infinite capacity for taking pains” was doubtless one facet of his daemon, but not the only one. Other characteristics incorporated in his genius were a fertile imagination (for adapting plans to particular situations), an intuitive sense (to divine the enemy’s intentions), indomitable will power (to get his way no matter what opposition he faced) and what General Camon terms “firmness of soul” (or his refusal to allow his main purpose to be diverted or blunted by the wear and tear of minor accidents and complications). Napoleon once tried to define “genius.” “Genius is sometimes only an instinct which is incapable of being perfected. In most cases the art of judging correctly is perfected only through observation (including study) and experience.”15
Behind everything else lay a boundless ambition, which provided the divine spark. “Ambition is the main driving force in man,” he once wrote. “A man expends his abilities as long as he hopes to rise; but when he has reached the highest summit he only asks for rest.”16 Where Napoleon was concerned, that ambition appears to have been insatiable. Therein lay the breeding ground of both achievement and disaster. For the rest, his unique ability was due to a combination of génie et métier, genius and professional competence, inspiration and sheer hard work.
Why, then, did he fail? Why is he known to history as simply “Napoleon” instead of “Napoleon the Great”? Once again there is no easy or simple answer. But after early 1807 there was something missing, something going wrong with this powerhouse of a man, most especially as regards his character. The wily Talleyrand was one of the first to notice the subtle change of atmosphere, and not wishing to be directly associated with the coming fall, he resigned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shortly after the seemingly crowning triumph of Tilsit.
Many of the weaknesses that contributed to Napoleon’s decline and fall were born of the very qualities that had enabled him to rise. Every quality has its perversion, and the dividing line between genius and madness is notoriously slender.17 As time passed, delusion began to cloud his powers of judgment at critical moments; he began to believe what he wanted to believe, not what the facts, objectively analyzed, would suggest to be the truth. He began to gamble for increasingly high stakes, refusing to accept that Fortune had finally turned her face away. He refused to recognize what was feasible and what was not, relying on miracles to come to his rescue. As one Minister of the Empire described this sad trend, “It is strange that though Napoleon’s common sense amounted to genius, he never could see where the possible left off.”18 In this shortcoming lay the seeds of the disaster of 1812 and the ultimate downfall at Waterloo.
Stage by stage, Napoleon’s abilities began to atrophy or produce monstrous distortions. His passion for orderliness, efficiency and centralization of power degenerated into selfish egotism and grinding tyranny. The unscrupulous treatment of the Spanish Royal Family at Bayonne, the increasing orders for punitive expeditions to spread fear through the countryside, the rapid expansion of the apparat of police terror within the Empire, even the very ballooning expansion of the Empire’s physical boundaries—these were all signs of advanced megalomania. In the image of the ancient fable, the frog was trying to blow himself up to the size of an ox. One by one many of the old ideals became neglected and then scorned; the Emperor’s ambitions became increasingly restricted to the re-creation of the Empire of Charlemagne and the private aggrandizement of the Bonaparte family. The struggle with Great Britain took on all the irrational overtones of a Corsican vendetta: countries were either for Napoleon and subservient to his will or considered to be hostile; no neutral, uncommitted position was recognized. And all the time, the Emperor’s temporal powers received vast new accretions of authority as members of the family received vassal crowns.
If Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” somewhat overstates Napoleon’s case, it n
evertheless contains an element of truth. The most obvious results of the Emperor’s insatiable lust for power were twofold: a growing resentment among the ruled (at least outside France) at the ceaseless demands for men, munitions and specie; and a common growth of national sentiment among the conquered which Napoleon, the original disseminator, tended to discount as a real force to be reckoned with. Both were portents of difficulties to come.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 4