The Illustrious Dead Read Free

suffering horrible casualties. Then other divisions, in sequences timed down to the minute, would pin down the opponent from unexpected angles, isolating and cutting apart individual divisions while at the same time cloaking from view a hidden force that was marching rapidly to a weak flank or an exposed rear guard. Then, at a crucial moment, Napoleon would drop these unseen divisions into the battle, backed by cavalry and artillery, overwhelming the enemy and scattering its forces to the wind.
    To the outmatched generals who faced him, Napoleon’s armies always appeared larger than they actually were, because the emperor maneuvered them for maximum striking power on the battlefield. And they were ghostly, appearing from behind a hill or over a ridge at a time when they were supposed to be miles away.
    Napoleon’s debut was a perfect illustration of his tactical brilliance as a force multiplier. In the first Italian campaign, he took a demoralized, ill-equipped collection of 100,000 soldiers and led them on a breathtaking series of victories, cutting the Piedmontese-Austrian enemy into its component parts and then chasing, catching, and defeating each segment in turn. He captured 160,000 men, 500 cannon, 39 ships, and wagon-trains worth of booty, including Michelangelos and Titians. Like many geniuses, he seemed to have no apprenticeship. General Napoleon emerged onto the world stage fully formed.
    A S HE REVOLUTIONIZED THE big-picture aspect of war, Napoleon became a master at motivating the individual soldier. “You must speak to his soul in order to electrify him,” he famously said. But his attention went deeper than oratory. He remembered hundreds and hundreds of his troops’ names, tweaked their ears and joked with them during reviews, led them brilliantly, and promoted and rewarded them on the spot for acts of bravery that would have gone unnoticed under another general.
    Stoked by a feeling of personal devotion to their leader, his soldiers did things that no other men in modern European warfare had done, things that modern Navy SEALs would struggle to equal. “The belief that they were invincible made them invincible,” remarked Karl von Funck, a German officer on Napoleon’s staff. “Just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralyzed the enemy’s sprits and efforts.” During a stretch of four days during the first Italian campaign, one division under the former cabin boy André Messéna, the son of a tanner risen to general, fought three brutal pitched battles on successive days, marched nearly sixty miles through darkness and snow, and killed or captured thousands of the enemy. Messéna’s division helped Napoleon turn a competent Austrian force of 48,000 men into a terrified mob of 13,000 in a matter of 120 hours. This was not an isolated incident: Napoleon raised the standard of individual performance in the Grande Armée to levels thought unachievable before he arrived.
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    B Y 1811 THE EMPEROR was the undisputed master of the Continent, with only the Portuguese, the Spanish rebels, and the old bugbear of England still providing outright resistance to his dominion. By that time, too, the patina of his early rhetoric had been rubbed through and now what Europe saw, by and large, was bright steel: Napoleon’s promise to free those he conquered had gone unfulfilled. He was more and more a traditional conqueror.
    By seeking further territories, Napoleon was reverting to a native form. From the days of the illustrious “Sun King,” Louis XIV, in the late seventeenth century, the French army was considered to be the vanguard of a progressive society conquering backward nations in order to bring them freedom, art, and science. For over a hundred years before the ascent of Napoleon, France had seen itself as the citadel of civilization. As expansionists and Christian visionaries would claim throughout American history, empire building was more than an economic good. It