The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
and the general in their Jacobin days. The army which Bonaparte finally set in motion was therefore a fine engine of war. Its immediate necessities relieved, the veterans warmed to their work, and that notable promise of booty worked them to the pitch of genuine enthusiasm. The young commander, moreover, was as circumspect as a man of the first ability alone could be when about to make the venture of his life and play for the stake of a world. His generals of division were themselves men of mark—personages no less than Masséna, Augereau, Laharpe, and Sérurier. Of Masséna some account has already been given. Augereau was Bonaparte's senior by thirteen years, of humble and obscure origin, who had sought his fortunes as a fencing-master in the Bourbon service at Naples, and having later enlisted in the French forces sent to Spain in 1792, rose by his ability to be general of brigade, then division commander in the Army of Italy. He was rude in manner and plebeian in feeling, jealous of Bonaparte, but brave and capable. In the sequel he played an important part and rose to eminence, though he distrusted both the Emperor and the empire and flinched before great crises. Neither Laharpe nor Sérurier was distinguished beyond the sphere of their profession, but in that they were loyal and admirable. Laharpe was a member of the famous Swiss family banished from home for devotion to liberty. Under Luckner in Germany he had earned and kept the sobriquet of "the brave"; until he was mortally wounded in a night attack, while crossing the Po after Millesimo, he continued his brilliant career, and would have gone far had he been spared. Sérurier was a veteran of the Seven Years' War and of Portugal, already fifty-four years old. Able and trustworthy, he was loaded with favors by Napoleon and survived until 1819. It might have been very easy to exasperate such men. But what the commander-in-chief had to do was done with such smoothness and skill that even they could find no ground for carping; and though at first cold and reticent, before long they yielded to the influences which filled with excitement the very air they breathed.
At this moment, besides the National Guard, France had an army, and in some sense a navy: of both the effective fighting force numbered upward of half a million. Divided nominally into nine armies, instead of fourteen as first planned, there were in reality but seven; of these, four were of minor importance: a small, skeleton Army of the Interior, a force in the west under Hoche twice as large and with ranks better filled, a fairly strong army in the north under Macdonald, and a similar one in the Alps under Kellermann, with Berthier and Vaubois as lieutenants, which soon became a part of Bonaparte's force. These were, if possible, to preserve internal order and to watch England, while three great active organizations were to combine for the overthrow of Austria. On the Rhine were two of the active armies—one near Düsseldorf under Jourdan, another near Strasburg under Moreau. Macdonald was of Scottish Jacobite descent, a French royalist converted to republicanism by his marriage. He was now thirty-one years old. Trained in the regiment of Dillon, he alone of its officers remained true to democratic principles on the outbreak of the Revolution. He was made a colonel for his bravery at Jemmapes, and for his loyalty when Dumouriez went over to the Austrians he was promoted to be general of brigade. For his services under Pichegru in Holland he had been further rewarded by promotion, and after the peace of Campo Formio was transferred from the Rhine to Italy. He was throughout a loyal friend of Bonaparte and received the highest honors. Kellermann was a Bavarian, and when associated with Bonaparte a veteran, sixty-one years old. He had seen service in the Seven Years' War and again in Poland during 1771. An ardent republican, he had served with distinction from the beginning of the revolutionary wars: though twice charged with incapacity, he was triumphantly acquitted. He linked his fortunes to those of Bonaparte without jealousy and reaped abundant laurels. Of Berthier and the other great generals we have already spoken. Vaubois reached no distinction. At the portals of Italy was Bonaparte, with a third army, soon to be the most active of all. At the outset he had, all told, about forty-five thousand men; but the campaign which he conducted had before its close assumed such dimensions that in spite of its losses the Army of Italy contained nearly double that number of men ready for the field, besides the garrison troops and invalids. The figures on the records of the war department were invariably much greater; but an enormous percentage, sometimes as high as a third, was always in the hospitals, while often as many as twenty thousand were left behind to hold various fortresses. Bonaparte, for evident reasons, uniformly represented his effective force as smaller than it was, and stunned the ears of the Directory with ever reiterated demands for reinforcement. A dispassionate estimate would fix the number of his troops in the field at any one time during these operations as not lower than thirty-five thousand nor much higher than eighty thousand.
Another element of the utmost importance entered into the coming campaign. The old vicious system by which a vigilant democracy had jealously prescribed to its generals every step to be taken was swept away by Bonaparte, who as Robespierre's "man" had been thoroughly familiar with its workings from the other end. He was now commander-in-chief, and he insisted on the absolute unity of command as essential to the economy of time. This being granted, his equipment was complete. It will be remembered that in 1794 he had explained to his patrons how warfare in the field was like a siege: by directing all one's force to a single point a breach might be made, and the equilibrium of opposition destroyed. To this conception of concentration for attack he had, in concert with the Directory, added another, that of expansion in a given territory for sustenance. He had still a third, that war must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors. Trite and simple as these aphorisms now appear, they were all original and absolutely new, at least in the quick, fierce application of them made by Bonaparte. The traditions of chivalry, the incessant warfare of two centuries and a half, the humane conceptions of the Church, the regard for human life, the difficulty of communications, the scarcity of munitions and arms—all these and other elements had combined to make war under mediocre generals a stately ceremonial, and to diminish the number of actual battles, which took place, when they did, only after careful preparation, as an unpleasant necessity, by a sort of common agreement, and with the ceremony of a duel.
Turenne, Marlborough, and Frederick, all men of cold-blooded temperament, had been the greatest generals of their respective ages, and were successful much in proportion to their lack of sentiment and disregard of conventionalities. Their notions and their conduct displayed the same instincts as those of Bonaparte, and their minds were enlarged by a study of great campaigns like that which had fed his inchoate genius and had made possible his consummate achievement. He had much the same apparatus for warfare as they. The men of Europe had not materially changed in stature, weight, education, or morals since the closing years of the Thirty Years' War. The roads were somewhat better, the conformation of mountains, hills, and valleys was better known, and like his great predecessors, though unlike his contemporaries, Bonaparte knew the use of a map; but in the main little was changed in the conditions for moving and manœuvering troops. News traveled slowly, the semaphore telegraph was but slowly coming into use, and the fastest couriers rode from Nice to Paris or from Paris to Berlin in seven days. Firearms of every description were little improved: Prussia actually claimed that she had been forced to negotiate for peace because France controlled the production of gun-flints. The forging of cannon was finer, and the artillery arm was on the whole more efficient. In France there had been considerable change for the better in the manual and in tactics; the rest of Europe followed the old and more formal ways. Outside the republic, ceremony still held sway in court and camp; youthful energy was stifled in routine; and the generals opposed to Bonaparte were for the most part men advanced in years, wedded to tradition, and incapable of quickly adapting their ideas to meet advances and attacks based on conceptions radically different from their own. It was at times a positive misery to the new conqueror that his opponents were such inefficient fossils. Young and at the same time capable; using the natural advantages of his territory to support the bravery of his troops; with a mind which was not only accurate and decisive, but comprehensive in its observations; unhampered by control or by principle; opposed to generals who could not think of a boy of twenty-six as their equal; with the best army and the finest theater of war in Europe; finally, with a genius independently developed, and with conceptions of his profession which summarized the experience of his greatest predecessors, Bonaparte performed feats that seemed miraculous even when compared with those of Hoche, Jourdan, or Moreau, which had already so astounded the world.
Within eleven days the Austrians and Sardinians were separated, the latter having been defeated and forced to sign an armistice. After a rest of two days, a fortnight saw him victorious