The Age of Elegance Read Free

called up 120,000 more conscripts. No Frenchman was exempt; a bevy of young exquisites whom he encountered at a hunting party were sent to the colours next day. On May 9th, ignoring the Czar's final plea for a settlement, he set out to join his army. At Dresden, the home of the puppet King of Saxony, an emperor and seven kings waited in his ante-chamber and thirty reigning princes paid him homage. Europe, he announced, was an old prostitute who must do his pleasure; an unwieldy, medieval realm of barbarous serfs and wandering Asian tribes could not hope to resist him. Britain would inevitably fall when he had destroyed her influence at St. Petersburg. The Continent would become a single state and Paris its capital.
    Napoleon was the embodiment of the dreams of a hundred years. He was the child of nature, the personification of reason and energy, the irresistible Figaro who, always triumphing, proved the force of natural genius. This stern, plump, iron-faced little Italian, with his aquiline nose and eagle eye, his sword, sash and laurel-wreath, had shattered the pretensions of mankind's "legitimate" rulers. Strong as tempest, swift as lightning, he had only to will and strike.
    Yet, just because Napoleon shared this view of himself, he was doomed. Having risen by observing natural law, he had come to suppose himself above it. He acknowledged no morality but his own appetite and will. He cheated, lied, bullied, and exploited until in the end no one who had had dealings with him trusted him. Viewing treachery as inherent in human nature, he betrayed and was betrayed. He even denied arithmetic. Believing from repeated success that he could do anything, that the word impossible existed only in the dictionary of fools and that he alone was exempt from folly, he essayed that summer what he himself had declared the greatest of military follies: a campaign against a desert. No one was better able to assess the arithmetical imposs ibility of supporting half a mill ion men and their horse-borne transport in the Russian wastes. But with all the intensity of his passionate nature he was resolved to make the diversionist crawl, and when the Czar Alexander, sooner than do so, called on his Gods and the valour of his people, Napoleon turned his back on the Europe he had conquered and strode to destruction.
    As he did so, the little British army, whose fighting power he despised, struck in his rear. Before the end of February it had left its winter quarters in the lonely Beira mountains and begun the long southward march to Badajoz—a place which Napoleon had repeatedly declared it would never dare attack. "You must think the English mad," he had written to Marmont, "if you suppose them capable of marching there while you are at Salamanca and able to reach Lisbon before them." But the Emperor, as so often in his correspondence with his distant Marshals in Spain, overlooked the facts. For, in obedience to his own earlier orders, half Marmont's army was on the far side of Spain helping Suchet to capture Valencia, while the British, exploiting the fact, had possessed themselves of the Spanish frontier fortress that barred Marmont's road to Lisbon. With Ciudad Rodrigo in his hands, Wellington could for the moment ignore the French Army of Portugal and concentrate against Badajoz.
    Since its loss a year before by Spanish neglect and treachery, the great fortress, with its towers dominating the Guadiana and the southern road into Spain, had been the thorn in Wellington's flesh. So long as the French held it, the Bri tish could neither advance into Estremadura, nor concentrate against Marmont in the north without exposing southern Portugal to Souk's Army of Andalusia. Only with both his frontier-fortresses could Wellington take the offensive. Napoleon's arrogance in supposing him incapable of a winter campaign had already given him Ciudad Rodrigo. If he could now take Badajoz before the summer, the Peninsular War might take a new turn.
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