William Milligan Sloane

“ A quick burst of Spanish anger, a sharp stab of the Spanish poniard—the frequency of such incidents began to create a panic among the French boy-soldiers. The seizure and sack of a city had for years been a traditional amusement of the grand army, connected in Italy and Germany with little or no loss of life, and enhanced by the acquisition of enormous booty. The young conscripts, who had heard the oft-told tale from their fathers' lips, found to their bitter disappointment that in Spain a sack meant much bloodshed and little, if any, booty. ”

“ The Emperor's infatuation with the plausible scheme of destroying England's commerce by paper blockades and by embargoes on British goods had not been diminished either by his inconclusive struggle in Spain or by his victory over Austria. It was in vain that he had changed his naval policy from one of fleet-fighting to one of commerce-destroying; that he had seized and was continuing to seize neutral vessels laden with British wares; that he had expanded his political system by conquest until he was nominally master of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Baltic harbors. ”

“ If the Russian army in its own territory shriveled as it did before the summer heat by sickness and desertion, it may be imagined how that of the French dwindled. Their terrible sufferings could be ended only by a battle. Heat, dust, and drought wrought havoc in their columns; the pitiless northern sun left men and animals with little resisting power; the flying inhabitants devastated their fields, the horses and oxen gorged themselves on the half-rotten thatch of the abandoned huts, and died by the wayside; the gasping soldiery had no food but flesh. ”

“ She withheld a similar coöperation from Sweden and Russia until it was too late, her enterprise being chiefly concerned to open new channels for her commerce in Egypt and in South America.
How was this leviathan, which was drawing the wealth of all Europe to its stores, and eluding or repelling all attack on its chosen element—how was this tyrant of the ocean to be slain? Clearly the Americans must be so harassed and annoyed that in the end the public spirit of the United States would be aroused to resent English control, and bid defiance to Great Britain's assumption of maritime supremacy. ”

“ In the event of success, the invasion of Turkey, the seizure of Egypt, and the gratification of Alexander would be easy. More remotely, the deadly blow at England could be struck in Asia. What a conception! What a debauch of the imagination!
But there was one specter which, though laid for intervals, would not entirely down, and returned with stolid persistency: the existence of the Western empire hung on the thread of a single life; the very crowns of France and Italy had no heir. ”

“ The appointment of Bennigsen as commander-in-chief, and the results of Pultusk, awakened great enthusiasm among his hungry soldiers, who were now clamorous for a decisive battle. He had ninety thousand men,—at least on paper,—and was not disposed to leave the French in peace to recruit their numbers and physical strength in comfortable winter quarters. Unlike the Prussian officers, he had learned the lessons of recent campaigns, and had the strength of his character been equal to the cleverness of his strategy, he would have been a fair match for Napoleon. ”

“ Madrid itself was dangerous enough, but Madrid was not Spain, as Paris is France, and the fine local enthusiasm of uncorrupted Spanish blood in every district was awakened into vigorous activity by the news of how faithless had been the French treatment, not only of the royal house, but of the citizens—men and women who were themselves true Spaniards, brothers and sisters of every other Spaniard. ”

“ It is not easy to estimate Napoleon's responsibility for what had happened and was about to happen. He was persistently domineering, contemptuous of national feeling and dynastic politics, over-confident in the unswerving devotion of France, inflexible in his policy of territorial aggrandizement, ruthless in applying his peculiar conceptions of finance and political economy, and pitiless in his own self-seeking. On the other hand, Alexander, having received Prussia's autonomy as his part, had proved an untrustworthy ally from the outset. ”

“ The French interests in Spain were left in a most deplorable condition. The populace of Madrid had received the hero of the age with coldness, and shut themselves up in their houses to avoid forming a crowd or creating any enthusiasm in the streets. They would not even come out to see the gorgeous military parade which was arranged for their benefit. The gentry and nobility had been alike distant and cold. It was clear that Spain could neither be wheedled, cajoled, nor threatened into even passive acquiescence in the new conquest. ”

“ In a less public way he had it thoroughly understood throughout Europe that he would take no steps toward peace with Russia; that he would not yield an inch with reference to the grand duchy of Warsaw, or regarding the annexed lands of Italy, Holland, and the Hanseatic League. It was as if the whole world must see that ordinary human concessions could not be expected from one who had been conquered only by act of Providence, and was, now as ever, invincible so far as men were concerned. ”

“ This was the dynastic side; the national side was also to be used for the same end. "The liberties of Europe have taken refuge under your banner," ran Charles's proclamation to the army; "your victories will break their bonds, and your German brethren still in the enemy's ranks await their redemption." To the German world he said, "Austria fights not only for her own autonomy, but takes the sword for the independence and national honor of Germany." ”

“ Hark you, M. Tolstoi; it is not the Emperor of the French, but an old general of division that is now talking to another. May I be thought the vilest of men if I do not scrupulously (p. 113) fulfil the contract I made at Tilsit, and if I do not evacuate both Prussia and the duchy of Warsaw as soon as you have withdrawn your troops from Moldavia and Wallachia! I am neither a fool nor a child, not to know what I stipulate, and what I stipulate I always fulfil. ”

“ They were indolent by nature, had been fettered both by tradition and by worn-out institutions, and had long groaned in the chains of corrupt administration. With the removal of the Bourbons all these paraphernalia were swept away. The brothers Napoleon believed, and no doubt honestly, that pure and capable administration under a modern system would soon produce order, industry, prosperity, and peace, and that a grateful nation would before long acclaim its preservers, and enroll itself as a devoted ally against the "perfidious and tyrannical" supremacy of Great Britain. ”

“ If there be a time when the turn of Napoleon's fortunes is evident, it is the spring of 1808. Between the determination to complete his system of commercial warfare in western Europe and the contempt which he entertained for the Spanish throne, he appears to have fallen into a deadly snare—the failure to appreciate how strong and lively was the popular passion for nationality in Spain, a feeling so long eclipsed by the failures of Spanish government, the licentiousness of the Spanish court, and the turbulence of personal ambitions indifferent to the public welfare. ”

“ To this day many men of ancient and honorable name in France have not ceased to bemoan the destruction of primogeniture by the Revolution and the Code Napoléon. They are proud to transmit their title untarnished to their descendants, are ready to make serious sacrifices in its behalf, to exercise the rigid self-denials of family control for its sake, and to engrave the motto of "noblesse oblige" on their hearts in order to sustain it ”

“ England would of course rush to the assistance of Sweden, the only land now left in Europe that had never fallen into the orbit of the French system. At that moment Spain and Portugal, abandoned to their fate, must drop into French hands. If England should still prove resolute, then an expedition to Egypt would sail from Corfu, while simultaneously the united armies of Russia, France, and Austria would march to the conquest of Turkey and the seizure of India. ”

“ By this disaster the demonstration against Sweden promised to the Czar was made impossible. This accumulation of misfortunes—defeat before Valencia, defeat before Saragossa, disaster and surrender at Baylen, disaster and disgrace at Vimeiro, retreat from Madrid, desertion of the Duero as a line of defense, exchange of the offensive for a weak defensive, and loss of the whole Iberian peninsula except the strip behind the Ebro—all this was shameful and hard to bear. ”

“ Since the first awakening of his ambition, Napoleon had dreamed of supremacy in the Mediterranean, and every successive treaty made with Northern powers had looked to some strengthening of French influence on that sea. Now at last he had Corfu, and the English, straitened for troops, were withdrawing the forces which occupied Sicily to send them into Portugal. The squadrons from Brest, Lorient, and Rochefort were at once ordered to unite in the Mediterranean. This was the moment to seize Sicily, and with that island added to Corfu, France would control the best road into Egypt. ”

“ Denmark, friendly, but independent in her quasi-autonomy; the United States, chafing under the restrictions of her commerce; Turkey, sick to death, but then as now pivotal in all European politics—the relation of all these powers to the coming conflict was still a question, and during a year much might be done in a diplomatic way to determine it. The whole civilized world was to be in array, although the life-and-death struggle was to be between two insatiate despotisms, one Western and modern, the other Oriental and theocratic. Napoleon grasped the tendency of his own career but dimly. ”

“ General Bonaparte was himself at once. No movement is considered more difficult than that by which an army marching in columns wheels when attacked on its flank, so as in turn to outflank the assailants. In a flash, and apparently without a thought, the Emperor issued minute orders for this intricate manœuver, and his generals accomplished it with a masterly dexterity. Napoleon then galloped forward toward Lützen to carry the guard behind the center as a reserve, and Ney dashed into the thickest of the fight to take command of his boy conscripts, who were beginning to yield. ”

“ In the face of national feeling, before the march of national regeneration, a single man, world-conqueror though he may have been during a period of national disorganization, is an object of microscopic size. The French emperor did not know the strength of Russian feeling, the great revolutionist was ignorant of the Europe he had unconsciously regenerated. If he blundered as a strategist in not confessing defeat at Smolensk, he behaved like a tyro in statesmanship when he courted an overthrow at Moscow. ”

“ Napoleon's scorn burst its bounds. "Louis," he wrote in a letter carefully excluded from the authorized edition of his correspondence, "you do not want to reign long; your actions reveal your true feelings better than your personal letters. Listen to one who has known those feelings longer than even you yourself. Retrace your steps, be French at heart, or your people will drive you out, and you will leave Holland, the object of pity and ridicule on the part of the Dutch. Men govern states by the exercise of reason and the use of a policy, and not by the impulses of an acid and vitiated lymph." ”