CHAPTER V.

NAPOLEON (_continued_).

The return of Pitt to power, at the call of the nation; the aggressive foreign policy of the first Consul, and the atrocious execution of the Duc D’Enghien--a crime that may be palliated but not excused--soon led to a new Coalition against France. Prussia, indeed, gorged with spoil after the peace of Basle, stood apart, as she had done in 1799, as if secretly ashamed of an ignoble part; but Russia and Austria joined hands with England. Other petty States took the same side, and by the summer of 1805 the Allies had come to a general agreement to take the offensive. Before this time Napoleon had become Emperor, with the universal acclaim of the French people, and the crowned soldier, who had raised France from the depths of disaster to the head of Europe, and whose strong hand had put anarchy down, now wielded the resources of a mighty State, and made the revolutionary forces which he used and hated the ministers of immense despotic power. The military strength of France, though it was enlarged afterwards, was now really at its extreme height, and Napoleon’s army of this period was by far the finest he ever commanded. I must glance at the characteristics of this magnificent force, justly known by the name of the Grand Army, and infinitely the most formidable organization for war which hitherto had been arrayed in Europe. Apart from small Italian and German contingents, the Grand Army at this time was composed of Frenchmen, for the most part troops in the flower of life, but with a large admixture of veteran soldiers; and this vast body was inflamed with a strong spirit of enthusiasm, of patriotism of its own kind, of thirst for glory, and of intense confidence in an unrivalled leader. Its physical and moral force was, therefore, enormous; and as five-sixths of it had for many months been assembled in the great Camp of Boulogne--the general name of many leaguers--and the troops had been inured to the hard training of war, its military condition had attained perfection. It probably numbered at this time about 200,000 men in the first line, with reserves, perhaps, 200,000 more; and, regiment for regiment, I certainly think it formed a more efficient instrument of war than the huge national armies of recent days, composed far too largely of young conscripts, and never yet subjected to the strain of ill-fortune.

The general organization of this great force was perfectly adapted, in Napoleon’s hands, to the conditions of war in the first years of this century. Brigades and divisions had now been formed into corps, each under the command of able chiefs, too accustomed, indeed, to look up to Napoleon, and not given sufficient freedom of action, but all skilful and experienced soldiers; and the army had more cohesiveness and real power than ever had been the case formerly. Napoleon, however, apart from these masses, each an independent army in itself, had large cavalry and artillery reserves; and he usually kept them under his immediate control, to wield “his club of Hercules” for decisive strokes. The Grand Army, too, like that of Louis XIV., had its _corps d’élite_--the Imperial Guard--the tenth legion of the modern Cæsar, and this superb force on many a hard-fought day turned by its mighty preponderance the scales of fortune. As for the tactics of the army, they had been perfected in the experience of a long series of wars; columns of infantry, not as yet too dense, and preceded by skirmishers, were formed for attack; but they were always supported by cavalry and guns; and Napoleon invariably took special care that the three arms should act in concert. These arrangements had given great flexibility and yet strength to the improved formations; and it was clearly apparent that the new methods were superior to those of the Seven Years’ War. As for the mechanism of the army, if I may use the word, the whole system of assuring supplies, of establishing magazines and depôts, and of procuring continual relays of troops, which German science has brought to perfection, had been largely matured by Napoleon; and though he always “made war sustain war,” that is, he usually trusted to resources on the spot in order to enable his troops to move freely, he was most attentive to the wants of his soldiers, and provided for them with great administrative skill. Yet, formidable as it was, the Grand Army had marked defects which require notice. It had never lost the habits of the Revolutionary Wars; Napoleon’s system, indeed, promoted rapine; it retained some of the instincts of the savage hordes let loose in 1793–94; it was crowded with ignorant and bad officers, the survivors of the huge conventional levies; and the arrangements of the staff were far from good. It still bore the marks of a revolutionary age; and in all these respects it was very inferior to the great army formed by Roon and Moltke.

The Allies had set their armies in motion by the first week of September 1805. They had nearly half a million of men on foot; but, partly owing to divided counsels, and partly to the disastrous mistake of subordinating military to political ends, this gigantic force was injudiciously arranged on the theatre. Four separate attacks had been designed; the first by a small English and Swedish force from Hanover and the North German seaboard; the second by an Austrian and a great Russian army, to be assembled upon the banks of the Danube and ultimately to invade Alsace; the third on northern Italy from the Adige and the Tyrol, conducted by the Archdukes Charles and John; and the fourth by an English and Russian contingent disembarked from a fleet on the coast of Naples. But the first and last attacks were mere weak diversions, which could not alarm a true strategist; as regards the second, the Russian army, still in Galicia and Poland, was at an immense distance from the Austrians upon the Upper Danube; and as for the third, the ambition of the House of Hapsburg, eager to regain its Italian possessions, had repeated the mistake of 1800, its chiefs having placed far too great a force on secondary points, without sufficient regard for those which were of supreme importance, the space between the Middle Rhine and the Danube. Napoleon seized the situation with the eye of genius; and the plan of his operations was at once formed. Neglecting Northern Germany and Southern Italy, and employing only an inferior force to hold the Austrian Princes in check--they were in command of 100,000 men--he resolved to fall on the Austrian army on the Danube, which, not more than 85,000 strong, was thrown forward on the country round Ulm, to surround and destroy it, under its chief Mack, as Mélas had been destroyed five years before, and thus to cut it off completely from the distant Russian army, which could not be on the spot at the time.

I can only glance at the operations that followed, less dazzling than those which led to Marengo, but in principle and method essentially the same, and a notable instance of the great maxim in war, set at nought in 1793 to 1799, but always observed by real commanders, that you should find and strike at the decisive point, and assail an enemy where he is most vulnerable. The Grand Army marched across France from the camp of Boulogne with a celerity which confounded its foes; two corps, under Bernadotte and Marmont, created of late Imperial Marshals, advanced from Hanover and the flats of Holland; a corp of Bavarians joined the French; and the collected masses, nearly 200,000 strong, were drawn together to the Rhine and the Main, ready to attain the Danube, in the last days of September. These movements led to the great surrender of Ulm, a most remarkable event in the wars of this century. Masking the general movement by sending detachments of cavalry into and along the Black Forest--the stratagem again of the column of Mont Cenis--and spreading his masses over the Franconian plains, the Emperor moved the converging arrays from the great arc of Strasburg, Mayence, and Würtzburg; and by the second week of October they were upon the Danube already interposed between Ulm and Vienna. The net was now rapidly drawn round Mack, who, stricken with terror, remained almost motionless, changing front about Ulm, and doing scarcely anything to strike at the enemy gathering in on all sides. Some mistakes were made in completing the toils, almost inevitable in manœuvres of the kind, which a capable chief might have turned to account; but these were rectified within a few hours; three bodies of Austrians made their escape; but Mack simply waited on events, unlike Mélas, made no attempt to break through, and capitulated with the mass of his army on the 19th of October. The greater part of the forces which had got off were intercepted and made prisoners; and thus a whole army was literally swept from the theatre by a march without striking one effective blow. Europe never witnessed a scene of the kind again until Metz fell through the treason of Bazaine.

[Illustration:

Sketch Map of CENTRAL EUROPE]

Napoleon, in his rapid advance on Ulm, had spread his army over a vast circumference because no possible foes were at hand; he had made the best use of the good roads which now generally traversed France and Germany; and he had thus turned to the greatest advantage one of the new existing conditions of war. The front of the Allied attack had been broken; and the paralysis, so to speak, of the head, had caused the collapse of the inferior members. The eccentric operations in the North of Germany and in Southern Italy came to nothing; the Archduke Charles and the Archduke John--the first had been defeated at Caldiero, a revenge for the failure of 1796--were compelled to fall back from the Adige and the Tyrol; and the way from Ulm to Vienna lay open. The Emperor, giving effect, in another age, to the great conception of Villars in 1703, marched with the Grand Army down the valley of the Danube, protecting his wings from possible attacks; the Isar, the Inn, the Traun, and the Ens, lines capable of defence, were passed and mastered; and, by the middle of November, the triumphant conqueror had entered the capital of the German Cæsars. By this time the advanced corps of the Russian army, which had marched from Galicia and had attained the Inn, had rallied the fragments of Mack’s forces; its chief, Kutusof, a name to become famous, had fallen back, and left Vienna to its fate; and he had come into line with his colleague, Buxhöwden, who had been marching from the Polish frontier, and had made his way into the plains of Moravia. Napoleon broke up from Vienna to pursue his foes, though, notwithstanding his wonderful success, his position was already not free from danger. In the march on Ulm, Bernadotte had crossed a Prussian district; this had incensed the King and even the nation, for some time chafing at its neutral attitude, and Prussia had begun to prepare for war, and to assemble troops on the Elbe and the Oder. The Grand Army, too, had suffered heavy losses in its forced marches into the heart of Austria; the system of living upon conquered provinces had not sufficed for enormous bodies of men; and thousands of stragglers, marauders, deserters, swarmed along the tracts from the Rhine to the Danube. The Archdukes, too, in retreat from the south, were straining every nerve to attain Moravia; and should Prussia march an army through the Bohemian passes, and throw her sword into the scale of the Allies, the French, isolated, would, with winter at hand, and far from their base, be soon compelled to confront an immense superiority of force.

Napoleon, however, always confident--the modern Cæsar had faith in his fortunes--did not hesitate to march into Moravia; and he was at Brünn by the third week of November, with a considerable part of the Grand Army. At this moment Kutusof and Buxhöwden were near Olmütz about 80,000 strong; some Austrian contingents had united with them; Prussia had actually promised to attack Napoleon; the Archdukes were but a few marches off; and had the Allies only waited a fortnight, they could have assembled nearly 200,000 men to fight a great battle with the French Emperor, who could not have assembled 100,000. But folly and presumption were in the Russian camp, and the young Czar, Alexander, was persuaded to take the offensive, and to advance from Olmütz before the available supports of the Allies were near. A theorist contributed to this fatal resolve, and his pedantry led to a tremendous disaster. Napoleon at this time was in position not far from Brünn, on the banks of the Goldbach, in front of the little town of Austerlitz; and though he had really about 70,000 men in hand, two of his corps were at some distance. Weyrother, an Austrian general officer, proposed a grand plan, to descend from Olmütz, to turn the right wing of the French on the Goldbach, and to cut Napoleon off from retreat on Vienna, by a formidable attack in the oblique order. The Allied army, perhaps 80,000 men, was close to the Goldbach on the 1st of December, its columns arranged for the offensive movement ostentatiously talked of and soon made apparent; and Weyrother announced a great coming victory. Napoleon, who had drawn in his two corps, beheld with delight this reckless strategy--a flank march along a wide front, under the beard of the chief of Arcola and Rivoli; that “army is mine,” he proudly said, and he made the prediction known in an address to his soldiers. Anticipating what would happen--in part at least--he had assumed a timid defensive attitude, in order to lure his enemies on--another instance of his wonderful powers of stratagem.

The sun of Austerlitz rose on the 2nd, to illuminate one of the great scenes of history. The nature of the ground forbade the manœuvre contemplated by the Allied leaders. Towards their left, in the space in which they proposed to outflank and defeat the French right, spread a region of marsh, around the Goldbach, of wide lakes, and of intricate country, with the hamlets of Sokolnitz and Telnitz hard by; and it formed at once a difficult position to force, and a line favourable in the extreme for defence. Their centre filled the plain round the hill of Pratzen, and was, therefore, dangerously exposed to attack, should it be weakened by a detachment to the left; and their right was almost wholly “in the air,” and liable to be turned and destroyed by the low hill of Santon. Napoleon had seized the characteristics of the scene with the insight of the great chief of Ramillies, and his dispositions were made to turn to the best advantage the local peculiarities which he saw before him. He had already secured a second line of retreat, was not bound to his base on Vienna, and was perfectly free to act as he pleased; and his arrangements were the piece of a master of tactics. He placed Davoust, one of the best of the marshals, with only a few thousand men on his right--reinforcements, however, were ready for them--for he wished to draw the enemy on to his ruin, and the position he knew was easy of defence; but Soult, afterwards Duke of Dalmatia, Bernadotte and his corps, with the Imperial Guard, were massed together in formidable strength, to carry the plain and heights of Pratzen; and Lannes, with the left and a reserve, held the hill of Santon and the lowlands around, with every advantage for an effort against the Allied right. The battle-field, therefore, was made, so to speak, a theatre by the antagonist chiefs, to assure defeat and victory alike; and Kutusof, it is said, foretold the issue with an assurance equal to that of Napoleon.

These operations led to the great fight of Austerlitz, the masterpiece of war, I think, of this century. By the early dawn, four big Austrian and Russian masses were in motion to turn Napoleon’s right, advancing slowly in the oblique order; but they toiled painfully through the difficult ground; and they were kept at bay by the little force of Davoust, which, holding Sokolnitz and Telnitz, defied their efforts. Ere long a tremendous onslaught of war burst suddenly upon the Allied centre, thinned by the divisions sent to the left; Napoleon, who, like a crouching tiger, had reserved his strength until it was time to spring, launched Soult and Bernadotte against Pratzen, and the enemy’s centre was cut through spite of heroic efforts. Meanwhile Lannes had assailed the enemy’s right; here, too, a noble resistance was made; but science and skill, force being nearly equal, must always prevail over the sternest courage; and victory soon declared for the French. Early in the afternoon the Allied centre and right, half ruined, were a dissolving mass; and though the left had forced Davoust back some distance, it was isolated and entangled in an intricate region. It was beginning to retreat, its cumbrous masses demoralised and showing signs of panic, when Napoleon turned against it with that determined energy which he nearly always displayed in a successful battle. His victorious centre was brought to bear in irresistible power on the flying enemy; a horrible scene of carnage followed; the Austrians and Russians were slain or captured in thousands without an attempt at resistance; and multitudes perished in the lakes near the Goldbach, the French artillery shattering their frozen surface. The stricken army was well-nigh destroyed; it lost all its guns; and nearly half its numbers, and its fragments were scattered in every direction. The coalition succumbed under this mighty stroke; Prussia said “Hail” to the conqueror, and licked his hand; Alexander was too glad to escape beyond the Niemen, with the remains of his army; and Austria, her constancy at last broken, was compelled to accept the Peace of Pressburg, which deprived her of all she had retained in Italy, and contracted the limits of her shrunken empire. In the general dismay of Continental Europe, England alone had consolation and hope; she had lost Nelson, but that greatest of seamen had annihilated the fleets of France and Spain on the ever memorable day of Trafalgar.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the first part of this campaign; for the operations that led to the surrender of Mack were, I have said, akin to those that hemmed in Mélas. The Allies were in a false position on the theatre of war, as the Austrians were in 1800; Napoleon enveloped one of their armies, as before Marengo he had closed round the Austrians. The movements of 1805 were less fascinating, I have remarked, than those of 1800; and the great superiority of Napoleon over Mack in numbers make them less astonishing and strike the mind less; but they were conducted upon a grander scale, were more scientific, and were better prepared. The march on Vienna was a fine operation; but it will always remain questionable if the Emperor ought to have hazarded the advance into Moravia; assuredly had the Allies fallen back and waited, he would have been exposed to the gravest perils.

The grand incident of the contest is, however, Austerlitz, a battle that should be studied by every thinker on war. It is a poor account of this mighty conflict to say that it represents the system of Frederick at odds with that of Napoleon, and exploded by it; the result depends on much deeper causes than tactical orders on a field of battle. No doubt the Allies tried to attack in Frederick’s fashion; no doubt the French attacked in columns with skirmishers; no doubt the hostile armies may be compared “to a long bar of iron, inferior in strength and suppleness to a chain of many links,” to use the metaphor of an accomplished writer. But Austerlitz was not an affair of mere methods of offence; it was the triumph of marvellous genius in war over pedantry and ignorance of the higher parts of tactics. The Allies placed themselves on the ground as badly as possible; they made a long flank march under the guns of an enemy; their turning movement inevitably failed in the region in which the attempt was made; and had Daun been before them they would have been defeated, though Daun could no more have achieved Austerlitz than he could have written _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. On the other hand, Napoleon occupied the ground with perfect judgment, made every feature in it conform to his ends; placed his army upon it in the exact positions in which its attack would be most decisive, and made the very most of the false moves of his enemies. The result was complete; only two-thirds of an army rather weaker than its foe in numbers, and much weaker in guns, simply shattered to atoms a more powerful force, with a loss comparatively very small; and this, though the Austrians and Russians fought extremely well. In all this we see what Napoleon has called the “divine side of war,” not its mere evolutions; the difference, he has said, is that between a “book of the _Iliad_ and a page of a grammar.” Yet masterpiece as this great battle was, I do not think it surpasses Ramillies in the dispositions that were made before it, and in the manner in which the enemy was reached and conquered. We see the same insight in both instances; the same thorough perception of the nature of the ground, and the means of taking the best advantage of it; the same perfect appreciation of the faults of the enemy, the same admirable distribution of the victorious armies. In one respect, however, Marlborough perhaps was inferior to Napoleon in execution; he did not strike down Villeroy with the tremendous force with which the Emperor crushed the Allies, and did not show the same wonderful power in victory. Yet I hesitate here, for we must remember Blenheim, and the absolute destruction of Tallard’s army; and in comparing the two battles, we must bear in mind that the three arms in Napoleon’s day had acquired a “mobility” and a power in the field unknown in the first part of the eighteenth century, and were, therefore, far more effective against a defeated army.

I cannot notice the Confederation of the Rhine, the creation of vassal kingdoms beyond France, as appendages to the House of Bonaparte, and the enormous extension of the French Empire from the Zuider Zee to the extreme verge of Italy. The dream of setting up again the throne of Charlemagne in the generation of the French Revolution, and of holding down martial States by sheer force of arms, is characteristic of the extravagance sometimes seen in Napoleon; and it indicates also that profound scorn of anything resembling popular rights and movements which is a marked feature of his wonderful nature. War broke out soon again on the Continent, and Prussia, unaided, challenged the French Empire. That Power had been willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike; she had feigned submission after the rout of Austerlitz, but she remained angry and vexed at heart, and the domineering conduct of the Imperial conqueror goaded her at last to proclaim hostilities. The Court and even the nation rushed to arms; the misgivings expressed by veterans of the Seven Years’ War, who had followed events from 1794 to 1805, were disregarded with false confidence; and two armies, about 150,000 strong, led by Prince Hohenlohe and the Duke of Brunswick, marched from the Elbe and the Oder to the Thuringian Forest.

The operations of the campaign of 1806 are, perhaps, less marked by Napoleon’s genius than that of more than one previous contest; but they achieved success that even now seems marvellous, and they conspicuously illustrate one of his peculiar gifts, power in annihilating a defeated enemy. The Grand Army, about 180,000 strong, was on the Main, not having returned to France when the Prussian chiefs had assumed the offensive, and the Emperor joined it in the first week of October. At this moment Hohenlohe and Brunswick were contemplating an advance to the Rhine. Bold strategy, they boasted, was all that was needed to overcome the Corsican upstart, and the Grand Army was spread from Würtzburg to Bamberg capable of being easily moved on their flank. Napoleon determined to gain this advantage, and, forming his army into three great masses, he began to traverse the defiles that lead from the southern verge of the forest towards the Saale and the Elster. The movement, executed with his wonted promptitude, brought the Grand Army into the plains between the two rivers on the 10th of October, threatening the communications of the enemy with the Elbe; and Hohenlohe and Brunswick, passing from boasting to terror, fell back towards Weimar and Jena, to approach the Elbe. Napoleon, who, at the beginning of the campaign, expressed unfeigned respect for the famous army of Frederick, would not at first believe that generals of a great school would make such a hasty retrograde movement; and he drew part of his forces together, expecting to fight a great battle near Gera and Auma, points in the valleys of the Saale and the Elster. This miscalculation cost him the loss of some time, for his enemy had no intention to stand, and, meanwhile, the retreating armies had fallen back a considerable way towards the Elbe, the main body under Brunswick making for the line of the Unstrutt, a feeder of the Saale, and the defile of Kosen, a smaller force, led by Hohenlohe, halting near Jena in order to call in outlying detachments, and then to follow Brunswick to the Elbe. Napoleon began to pursue when he had ascertained his mistake; he was greatly elated by the results of partial engagements with small hostile bodies, in which the superiority of the French tactics was manifest, and he wished to compel the Prussians to accept battle. But his information was still imperfect; he would not credit so rapid a flight; he believed that by far the greatest part of the enemy’s army was concentrating near and around Jena; and his plan was to overwhelm it in front, and to cut off its retreat. With this object in view, he directed Davoust and Bernadotte to seize the defile of Kosen, crossing the Saale at the points of Naumburg and Dornburg; and with the main part of the Grand Army spread out in many columns he drew near the river and advanced on Jena.

These operations led to Jena and Auerstadt, fought on the 14th of October 1806. By the night of the 13th Napoleon had seized, had occupied by an advanced guard, and had crowned with guns brought up with infinite toil--the Emperor followed the train in person--the Landgrafenberg heights, since known by his name, which commanded the approaches to the plains beyond; and from this point he saw the army of Hohenlohe, the bivouacs marked by miles of fires, extending along the region between Jena and Weimar. He made his dispositions for a great battle, still fixed in the belief that Hohenlohe’s army was the principal part of the hostile forces; and as he knew that, in any event, he would be in preponderating strength on the field, he prepared to attack Hohenlohe in front, and to turn both his flanks, and he directed Davoust to advance even beyond Kosen, to defeat, if he could, the army of Brunswick, and to close on the rear of the two Prussian armies. The battle of Jena began in the early morning; the first movement of Napoleon was to debouche from the Landgrafenberg into the plains beyond, and this was accomplished with little difficulty, Hohenlohe having altogether failed to perceive the importance of this position. When the French army had fully taken its ground, Napoleon had 100,000 men against 60,000, and the issue of the battle could not be doubtful. Ney, indeed, the ill-fated “bravest of the brave,” the warrior of Elchingen and of the Moskwa, engaged his troops prematurely, and met a severe repulse; and the Prussians displayed the stern devotion, and even the precision and skill in manœuvre characteristic of them in the Seven Years’ War. But Hohenlohe’s force, weaker as it was, was divided; the attack of Lannes, the Guard and Murat in front--the chief of the Imperial cavalry is well known to fame--that of Soult and Augereau, another marshal, on either flank, became impossible to resist; and though the Prussians “fought like tigers,” an eye-witness has said, and Napoleon[11] sincerely praised them in his account of the battle, Hohenlohe’s army was before long routed.

Meanwhile a battle of a very different kind had raged at Auerstadt, a few miles off, on the line of the retreat of the defeated Prussians. Davoust had issued, as he had been ordered, from the defile of Kosen; but as he advanced he became aware of the great strength of the army of Brunswick, and he entreated Bernadotte to come to his aid. That chief, however, insisted on remaining at Dornburg, relying on the letter of Napoleon’s despatches; and it is doubtful whether this unwise resolve is to be attributed to the servile obedience characteristic of the Imperial marshals, or to miserable jealousy and dislike of a colleague. Davoust was now left with about 27,000 men to confront Brunswick, who must have had 70,000 had his force been well in hand; and the Marshal directed one of the finest battles of the whole period of the wars of Napoleon. He tenaciously kept Brunswick at bay for hours, but he must have been overwhelmed had Brunswick displayed the energy of the Austrian chief at Marengo; and in that event the two Prussian armies would have successfully effected their retreat to the Elbe. Brunswick, however, and most of the Prussian leaders, fell, and in a fatal hour the wretched advice was given to retire, and seek the support of Hohenlohe’s army, known to be making a stand at Jena. Within two or three hours the wrecks of that perishing force became entangled with the troops of Auerstadt; the contagion of demoralisation and panic spread, and the two armies broke up in headlong flight, ravaged and never let to rest by the French cavalry. Once more Napoleon gave proof of his skill in pursuit, and on this occasion with extraordinary results. The Prussian army had no reserves; the beaten force was completely scattered, and made for the course of the Lower Elbe, and the French Emperor, seizing the chord of the arc, forced it, in masses of shattered fragments, northwards, and cut off five-sixths of it from all possible retreat. Within a few days the conqueror had entered Berlin; some 20,000 fugitives were the sole relics of a fine army of 150,000 men; these were driven into the wastes of the Lower Vistula, and the military power of Prussia was destroyed. Terrible scenes of weakness and despair followed; great fortresses opened their gates to hussars, and the monarchy of the chief of Leuthen toppled down in ruin. One of the last divisions that surrendered was that of Blücher, a rude soldier brought up in the school of Frederick, and destined to win a name in history.

The campaign of Jena, it has been remarked, bears a singular resemblance to that of 1870, in which, however, victory passed from Gaul to Teuton. In both instances there was the same arrogance and precipitate haste on the defeated side; in both the same hesitation followed by panic; in both the same superiority of force, generalship, of all, in short, that secures success in war on the side of the triumphant conquerors; in both the same utter collapse of a great military State. Prussia, however, unlike France, made no national effort to struggle out from under the heel of the victor. There was no siege of Berlin like that of Paris; no Prussian Chanzy made his powers manifest; no Prussian Gambetta refused to despair of his country, or organized a resistance, misdirected no doubt, but not the less heroic and even formidable. In this campaign, I have said, the strategic gifts of the Emperor are not so strikingly seen as in others which I have tried to sketch. The plan of debouching into the valleys of the Saale and the Elster from the edge of the forest, though certainly the best, would have probably occurred to a general of the second rank; and, as a matter of fact, it occurred to Jomini, then a young officer in the Imperial Service. In the operations, moreover, that led to Jena, Napoleon made more than one real mistake; he lost time in preparing to fight near Gera and Auma. He was convinced that he was dealing with the main Prussian army at Jena. He ordered Davoust to advance beyond the pass of Kosen, and to close on the enemy, upon the false assumption that the force of Brunswick was not very great; and owing to these misconceptions, he so placed his army on the scene of the two battles that Davoust escaped a complete defeat by a chance only--a result that would have caused the failure of the campaign. Most probably Bernadotte was to blame for not joining his brother Marshal, and averting a blow that might have been disastrous; but Napoleon’s orders to go to Dornburg seem clear, and, in any case, as General-in-Chief, he is mainly accountable for a decided error. Yet the true student of war will not think the less of the Emperor for mistakes such as these. The greatest commanders must make mistakes, for they must act at once on imperfect knowledge; and the aphorism of Turenne is the simple truth, “He is the best general whose mistakes are the fewest.”[12] For the rest, in the campaign of 1806, Napoleon’s general conceptions were, as always, masterly. It is not surprising that he could not believe in the precipitate flight of a most renowned army; and his arrangements in the actual contest at Jena were those of a captain of the highest order; though he was so superior in force, they have little interest. What is to be chiefly dwelt on in this campaign is its illustration of the wonderful powers of Napoleon in destroying a retreating enemy. Many a chief would have followed the Prussians to the Elbe; the Emperor completely cut off their retreat, forced them into nooks and corners where they could not escape, and compelled the great body of them to lay down their arms. Napier was, perhaps, thinking of this great achievement when he compares Napoleon’s battle to the “wave that effaces the landscape.”

Napoleon, after the subjugation of Prussia, came into conflict with a more distant enemy. Alexander, the future head of the Holy Alliance, half French in ideas, but at heart a despot, had undertaken again to defend Old Europe; and notwithstanding the experience of Austerlitz, had solemnly vowed to avenge Prussia. His armies, however, moving slowly through the immense spaces of the Russian Empire, were unable to avert the ruin of Jena, or to prevent the fall of the Prussian Monarchy; it was November before they reached the Niemen, and they had not approached the Vistula for some time afterwards. The conqueror, who, in the intoxication of success, had launched against England the well-known Decree which declared her excluded from commerce with Europe, and established the famous Continental system, resolved to march against the new foe, and to strike down the Russians in the wilds of Poland. He made preparations, in Berlin, for a great winter campaign; and, looking behind and before, he left nothing undone to gain opinion in France, to make his military power irresistible on the theatre of war, and to secure a fresh base for an offensive movement. His arrangements were far-sighted and masterly; for there is no wilder mistake than to suppose that Napoleon, though his imagination at times overcame his judgment, was not always the most profound and capable, as well as the boldest, of strategists. Magnificent public works enchanted Paris; rewards were lavished upon the Grand Army; and France, ever liable to be carried away by “glory,” was, so to speak, entranced in dreams of Imperial grandeur. Meanwhile thousands of levies were called to join the eagles; the fatal system of anticipating the conscription began; vast bodies of troops were sent from the Confederation of the Rhine, from Italy, from Holland, and even from Spain; and these were stationed at intervals along the space extending from the Rhine to the Elbe and the Oder. Nor did the Emperor omit precautions to provide for these immense masses; the granaries of Germany were made to furnish supplies; the French cavalry were remounted in regiments from the establishments of the troopers of Seidlitz; and enormous magazines were prepared to support the hosts of Western Europe, in their march to the East. Napoleon, too, cast a scrutinizing eye on possible enemies and possible allies; he arrayed an army in Italy to observe Austria; and he tried to cajole the Sultan into attacking the Czar.

Towards the close of November, the Grand Army, extending from the Meuse and the Rhine to beyond the Oder, had reached the great strength of 300,000 men; and Napoleon expected a speedy triumph. Yet that vast host was already different from the soldiers of Austerlitz and of Boulogne, it was a “_colluvies gentium_,” in the historian’s words; it was crowded with young levies and half false auxiliaries; and the wand of the magician, so to speak, had changed in his hands. As yet, however, these elements of decline were not perceptible to any large extent; the warriors of Jena formed the first line; and the front of the Grand Army was moved to the Vistula, strong detachments being made to protect its flanks, and to subdue the fortresses Prussia still held in Silesia. Napoleon had reached Posen by the end of November; his troops had soon covered the plains of Poland; and when he attained the scenes of the famous Partition, the Poles greeted him as the coming liberator of their race. The Emperor, however, true to a nature to which popular stirrings were simply abhorrent, put off his suppliants with fair speeches; he enrolled the Poles in his ranks by thousands; but he never sought to make them an independent people. Irresistible in strength, as he believed himself to be, he had no wish to exasperate Austria, one of the partners in the destruction of Poland; and hard statecraft concurred with instinct in causing him to adopt a purely selfish policy. As yet, however, all went well; the Grand Army, probably 130,000 strong, held the line of the Vistula, and filled the tract between Thorn and Warsaw by the second week of December; the remains of the Prussian forces, and two Russian armies which had approached the river fell back at all points; and the formidable barrier of the great stream of Poland, held on both banks, was completely mastered.

The position of the enemy on the theatre of war now invited one of Napoleon’s strokes. The hostile armies were widely apart, and disseminated upon a vast semi-circle; Lestocq, with the relics of Jena, about 20,000 strong, holding a line from Soldau to the Lower Vistula; Beningsen, a Russian chief, with perhaps 50,000 men, being in the angle where the Narew and the Wkra meet before they merge in the Vistula’s waters; Buxhöwden, with probably 40,000, being far in the rear around Ostrolenka, in the country about the Upper Narew. The Grand Army, between Thorn and Warsaw, was in possession, therefore, of all the shorter lines on the field of manœuvre against its foes; and Bernadotte and Ney, on the left, were directed to attack and overwhelm Lestocq, while the corps of Augereau, of Lannes, of Davoust, and the Guard, with Soult in the rear, were to fall on Beningsen, to cut him off from Buxhöwden, and to drive the two armies into the deserts between the Bug and the Narew. The project was worthy of its renowned author; and the Grand Army began the movement from the Vistula in the last days of December. Napoleon, however, for the first time, found the forces of Nature and the state of the theatre arrayed against his rapid offensive strategy; and his conception was not even nearly realised. The region traversed was one of morasses and woods; there were scarcely any supplies to be found on the spot; the French soldiery, living on magazines from the rear, and sinking in expanses of swamp, were hardly able to march; and the cavalry could not ascertain the movements of the enemy behind whole leagues of forest. Comparative failure was the result; the allied armies effected their retreat; Lestocq eluded Ney and Bernadotte; Beningsen, who had encountered Lannes at Pultusk, and Davoust at Golymin, without a defeat--the corps of the Marshals had been misdirected, for it was impossible to reconnoitre the country--contrived to join Buxhöwden, though with great loss; and the converging armies found rest for some days on the vast and lonely plains of Eastern Poland. Napoleon, baffled, returned to the Vistula and placed the Grand Army in winter quarters extending from Warsaw almost to the coast; and his forces were spread on an immense line, for it was difficult in the extreme to find supplies, and there was no apprehension of possible danger.

Beningsen, however--he had been placed in supreme command--elated at what he deemed success, resolved to assume a bold offensive; he defiled between the long screen of forest and lakes, which divides the Narew from the Passarge; and he all but reached the corps of Bernadotte and Ney, a nearly isolated wing of the hostile army. Napoleon prepared a decisive counter-stroke; he ordered Bernadotte and Ney to fall back, with the view of luring the enemy on; and he directed the other corps of the Grand Army to close on the rear of the Russian chief, when fully committed to the forward movement. It was a design worthy of the chief of Austerlitz; but Beningsen found it out through an intercepted despatch, and he instantly fell back from the Passarge to the Alle, in the hope of escaping his terrible enemy. Napoleon pursued with his accustomed energy; the vast plains, hardened by the frosts of the North, enabled his troops to move more rapidly; and he came up with his adversary, in position, round Eylau, where Beningsen, urged by his army, had consented to stand. The battle was fought on the 8th of February 1807; it was one of the most sanguinary of the wars of that age, and in the result it was a mere Pyrrhic victory. Each army was about 80,000 strong; but the Russians had many more guns; and this told heavily on the lines of the French, for Napoleon delayed his attack for some hours in order to allow his supports to come up. It is unnecessary to retrace the scenes of a conflict unmarked by peculiar tactical skill and notable chiefly for the stubborn constancy shown by the Muscovite soldier on many a field. The centre of the French, attacked in a tempest of snow, was shattered, and well nigh pierced through: a charge of Murat, and all his horsemen failed against the tenacious Russian infantry; the arrival on the scene of Davoust and Lestocq made the issue at several moments doubtful; but the scale was ultimately turned by Ney, who had hastened to the spot, by a forced march. The Russians, scarcely defeated, only just fell back; and Napoleon had suffered too much to move.

The carnage of Eylau on both sides was terrible; the corps of Augereau was nearly destroyed; and the Russians, packed in dense masses, had suffered frightfully from the continuous fire of the French artillery. But of the two conflicting hosts, the Grand Army was certainly the one most exposed to peril; the Russians were almost on their own ground; it was far from its base, with Germany in its rear, and its position for a time became extremely critical. Napoleon’s triumphs, in fact, had been so unbroken, that he was deemed vanquished even in a drawn battle; a thrill of alarm and anxiety ran through France, and the humbled Continent was stirred to its depths. Had Beningsen possessed the gifts of Frederick, he would, at this juncture, have resumed the offensive; in that event, Napoleon must have retreated to the Vistula, at least, perhaps to the Oder; Austria, in all probability, would have taken the field; and the great Teutonic rising of 1813 might have been witnessed in 1807. But the Russian chief, though a capable man, was not a commander of the foremost rank; he had suffered immense loss, and he retired behind the Alle in order to place his army in winter quarters, confessing defeat by this retrograde movement. Indomitable constancy, we shall see hereafter, was not one of Napoleon’s distinctive qualities, but he perfectly knew what a prodigious effect an imposing attitude has on mankind, and would necessarily have in the present state of Europe; and his conduct was that of a consummate warrior. In order to convince a doubting world that Eylau had been a French victory, he moved his army forward a little distance, and instead of falling back on the line of the Vistula, he ostentatiously placed every corps at hand in cantonments behind the course of the Passarge, braving a northern winter on the very verge of Russia. Meanwhile, he applied himself, with that amazing energy, that mastery of detail, that administrative power, for which he has perhaps had no equal, to reinforce and secure the Grand Army; to establish it firmly in its present position; and to make his military ascendency supreme. Two fresh levies of conscripts were made; his vassal kings, and still submissive Allies, were compelled to furnish more contingents to the theatre of war, and to comply with enormous demands for supplies; the forces required to hold Austria in check and to keep Prussia down were largely increased; Masséna was summoned with his corps from Italy to strengthen the front of the Grand Army; and Mortier, Duke of Treviso, another marshal, was sent with a considerable detachment to the Pomeranian seaboard, in order to guard against a descent from Stralsund on the communications and flank of the Imperial hosts expected to be made by a British force. Concurrently, a corps under Marshal Lefebvre was moved to undertake the siege of Danzig, a place of capital importance still held by Prussia; the sieges of the Silesian strongholds were pressed, and an alliance at last was made with the Sultan, who even proclaimed war against the Russian Empire. Months were spent in making their last preparations, at Osterode, near the banks of the Passarge; and Napoleon’s correspondence alone can give the student of war an adequate notion of the prodigious ability of their great author.

The Emperor’s exertions were completely successful; the Nemesis of conquest had not yet drawn near; and by the spring of 1807 his military power was established on broader foundations than ever; and he was ready to take the field with most imposing forces. By this time Eylau was a mere recollection; the Continent had relapsed into bondage; and the Imperial armies, filled with bad elements as they were, reached the enormous number of half a million of men, spread from Champagne to the limits of Eastern Prussia. Meanwhile, no attack had been made from Stralsund; Danzig had fallen with the Silesian fortresses; the Porte had compelled Duckworth to leave the Dardanelles; the Turk was in arms against the Czar; and the cause of old Europe seemed once more desperate. With both his flanks covered, and his base secure, Napoleon had 160,000 men in perfect order upon the Passarge, ready to take the offensive at the first moment when the growth of vegetation would supply the means of subsistence to his thousands of horses. Yet such is the waste and strain of war that, even at this time, 60,000 men were missing from the rolls of the Grand Army, and spread along its rear, living on plunder and straggling; and this, notwithstanding the astonishing efforts of Napoleon throughout the whole winter. In fact, railways being as yet unknown, the means of transport were still imperfect, and the admirable arrangements by which the German armies of the present day are moved and supplied were impossible, especially along an enormous line.

The success of the Czar in reinforcing his armies had been trifling compared with that of Napoleon; and England, as we have seen, had made no diversion. The Russian Guards were despatched from St. Petersburg, and troops were in march from other parts of the Empire; but Beningsen, in the last days of May, had scarcely more than 120,000 men to oppose to the Grand Army of 160,000; and this though the Russians were close to their frontier, and the Emperor was hundreds of miles from the Rhine. In these circumstances, the Russian chief ought to have stood cautiously on the defensive; but he endeavoured to repeat the attempt of the winter; and breaking up from his camps on the 5th of June, he fell on Ney, somewhat widely detached, and on the extreme left of the Grand Army. Ney, however, a tactician of real skill, held the enemy in check, and slowly fell back; Napoleon tried a counter-attack once more; and he marched against Beningsen, from the Passarge, in the hope of gathering on his flank and rear. The Russian contrived to effect his escape; a great entrenched camp which, after the fashion of Daun, he had fortified, arrested the onset of the French; and he reached the Alle and began to retreat along the right or eastern bank of the river, in the hope, apparently, of reaching Königsberg, where immense supplies had been stored for his army. The Emperor followed along the western bank, his object, too, being to attain Königsberg; and his foremost corps came abreast of the Russians, the rest of the Grand Army being somewhat divided, and a considerable part being in the rear. This state of affairs encouraged Beningsen, in an evil hour, to try to attack his enemy. On the 14th of June 1807, he began to cross to the left bank of the Alle, at daybreak, with more than half his army; and by mid-day he had assailed the corps of Lannes, for the moment isolated and in advance. The French marshal, however, made a determined stand; in a short time Mortier, the Guard, the chief part of the cavalry, and Napoleon, had arrived on the scene, and the corps of Bernadotte and Ney soon made their appearance.

Napoleon seized the position of affairs at a glance, and made everything ready to destroy an enemy who had recklessly offered battle with a great stream in his rear. With complete mastery of the grander part of tactics, he commanded Lannes and Mortier to fall back, in order to draw Beningsen some distance forward; and Ney and Victor, another marshal, in temporary command of Bernadotte’s troops, were directed to seize the bridges thrown across the river not far from the little town of Friedland by Beningsen, and to cut off his retreat. This admirable stroke completely succeeded; and apart from the fact that Napoleon’s forces were by this time greatly superior in numbers, the defeat of the Russians had been rendered certain. Beningsen fell imprudently into the snare; Lannes and Mortier seemed to yield to the Russian masses; and when these had advanced too far to escape, Ney, covering his attack with a tremendous fire, and his colleague made the decisive movement. The bridges were taken and destroyed after a stout resistance; and the Russians were forced back against a deep river, hemmed in, captured, and drowned in multitudes. A fragment only of the army got across the Alle; and Beningsen fled to the line of the Niemen, followed by his indefatigable and pitiless foe. The Grand Army halted on the Muscovite frontier; the Czar had no choice but to seek an armistice; and the French eagles which had flown from the Channel, overshadowing Germany in their ravening flight, closed their Imperial wings on the edge of Old Europe. Troops of Tartars and Kalmucks armed with bows and arrows, and scattered along the banks of the Niemen, in the vain hope of arresting Fate, attested the exhaustion of the Russian Empire.

The twofold campaign of Eylau and Friedland does not exhibit in its highest aspects Napoleon’s marvellous genius in the field. His project of attacking the Allied armies on the Wkra and Narew, at the close of 1806, undoubtedly was worthy of a great strategist; and his plan of falling back to draw Beningsen, and of doubling on him when he marched from the Passarge, reveals once more his pre-eminent gift of stratagem. The stroke delivered at Friedland, decisive and splendid, was that, too, of a master of tactics in their highest sense; the vulnerable side of the enemy was at once detected; and his position on the battle-field was made to cause his ruin. Still, the strategy of the Emperor in this contest comparatively failed in more than one instance; the extension of his cantonments--this was due, I repeat to the extreme difficulty of supporting his army--exposed him to attacks of a formidable kind; and he barely escaped defeat at Eylau. The most conspicuous proof this campaign affords of his military capacity is his steadfast attitude amidst a host of enemies, when beyond the Vistula, and his administrative triumph in restoring his army; these are examples of powers of different kinds, but alike indicate supreme ability. The chief lesson of this campaign, however, is that even Napoleon’s wonderful gifts could not overcome impassable obstacles; his grand offensive strategy hardly succeeded, because the conditions forbade success; his brilliant manœuvres missed their mark, because his troops could not live in Poland as they had lived in the fertile plains of Italy, and could not move rapidly in wastes of swamp; the Phaeton of war found himself opposed by the forces of Nature and well nigh succumbed.

The end, nevertheless, was as yet distant; and Fortune raised her favourite to a still more dazzling eminence. Napoleon had felt, during recent events, that prodigious as his military power was, he was isolated in a hostile or unfaithful Europe, and he resolved to turn to account his recent victory by endeavouring to make his humbled adversary a permanent ally of the French Empire. To attain this end he had two great advantages, the ascendency of astonishing success, and a power of subjugating men which seemed like magic; and Alexander, indeed, wounded to the quick by the conduct of England in the affair of Stralsund, was ready to yield to England’s deadly enemy. In the presence of their armies on either bank, the two Sovereigns met on a raft on the Niemen; the town of Tilsit was chosen as the seat of the conferences which immediately followed; and the fascinations of Napoleon had soon won over the young Czar to alliance, and even to friendship. All that passed in these interviews is still unknown, but the Revolutionary Monarch and the half Oriental despot agreed to re-model the map of Europe, and formed plans of the most far-reaching ambition. Each declared England the common enemy; and Alexander consented, at Napoleon’s instance, to adopt the Imperial Continental system, to close the ports of Russia to British commerce, to summon England to make peace at once, and, should she refuse, to array against her the navies of every state in Europe, invited or compelled to obey the mandate. Meanwhile, Sweden was to be despoiled of Finland; the never-changing ambition of the Czars was to be gratified by great Turkish provinces; Constantinople was talked of as a prey; and a Russian advance to the Indus, it is believed, was discussed. In return for these immense concessions to a defeated enemy, Napoleon obtained the recognition of the French Empire, and of the order of things he had set up in Europe; the Czar pledged himself to make common cause with his ally in his contest with England; and Alexander perhaps agreed to the conquest of Spain. To complete the new arrangement of the European world, in the interest of the Lords of the West and the East, Prussia was to lose nearly half her territory, and to be reduced to a second-rate power. Napoleon announced that he would have gone farther but for his regard for his Imperial friend. Saxony was to be made a counterpoise to her old rival in Germany, as a mere French dependency; and the craving of the Poles for national life was to be appeased by the mock creation of a Grand Duchy of Warsaw for the House of Saxony.

I cannot dwell on the policy of Tilsit, unequivocally condemned by all writers. It was a conspicuous instance of the extravagance sometimes shown by Napoleon, even in war, but often in the less familiar sphere of politics. It was a mistake to challenge England, the ruler of the seas, and the treasurer of Europe, to prolong a contest in which, after Trafalgar, she could not be invaded; and the Continental system was a chimera of force more injurious to French than to British interests. It was a mistake to reverse the policy of France for centuries, to abandon Sweden, and to betray the Turks, especially when these had become her allies; and it was idle to suppose that the fiat of a Czar would add to the stability of the French Empire. It was a mistake, too, of the worst kind to trample on the State and the people of Frederick; and it was an insult to the Poles to put the nation off with the phantom of a Grand Duchy of Warsaw. But the greatest mistake of all was to give a free rein to the ambitious impulses of two despots; to place the Partition of Europe at the will of two men essentially opposed in nature and interests; to suppose that the rulers of France and Russia could ever join in a lasting alliance. General war, the shifting of the boundaries of States, the destruction for a time of the European system, and implacable international passions and hate, were the inevitable results of this scheme of rapine; and beside that it had no element of strength and endurance, it was certain to lead to a rupture between its authors. In this unnatural arrangement we see no trace of the genius of Richelieu, of Cavour, of Bismarck; it was a mere ephemeral product of force, in opposition to the nature of things, and simply impossible to become permanent. This, however, was not perceived by the conqueror, covered with the adulation of France and the Continent; and Napoleon at this moment might, indeed, imagine that his power was beyond the perils of Fortune.

A word on the state of Napoleon’s Empire, at this time at the height of its greatness, though its borders were to be still extended. France had long ago reached what the national instinct had pointed to as her natural limits; she was bounded by the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees; but girdled all round by dependent States, and supreme in Italy and in fully half of Germany, she was really the mistress of Continental Europe. Nor was this immense dominion the mere spoil of conquest; the vigorous and able rule of Napoleon had done wonders for old France, and had conferred the greatest benefits on her new possessions; and the institutions he founded still flourish far beyond the Rhine, and even along the Danube. The prosperity of the Empire was growing and splendid; the continuance of order and the collapse of anarchy had given free play to the energetic interests which the Revolution had called into being; nay, the tributary States had, to a great extent, been renovated by the hand of Napoleon. The creative genius of the Emperor, too, had accomplished marvels in administration and finance, and had completed fine monuments of material grandeur; magnificent roads overcame the Alps, and connected the Atlantic with the Mediterranean shores; and Paris, rich with treasures of art from all lands, and crowded with new and imposing structures, put on the aspect of Imperial Rome, and gathered into her lap the fairest spoils of conquest. Military power, besides, invincible as yet, and the glory of years of triumphs in war, protected this fabric of far-spread dominion; the ruling race still prevailed in the Grand Army; its commanders, lavishly rewarded, were docile instruments of a chief still in the flower of his age; and the flaws and defects in it were not yet conspicuous. Nevertheless, even now, one or two deep thinkers, amidst the terror and submission of three-fourths of Europe, had declared that the Empire could not be lasting. With its vassal Bonapartes, its enormous extent, its sway over subdued but mighty races, its mediæval pomp, its _parvenu noblesse_, its violence, and its despotism of the sword, it was an anachronism in the nineteenth century; its grandeur and even its beneficence could not hide its oppression; it was established among a people prone to change, and demoralized by Revolutionary passions; and, in antagonism to all moral and social forces, it depended on a single life and a conqueror’s genius. Greater as it was, too, than the monarchy of Louis XIV., it was shut out from the sea by England, a source of weakness and peril to a maritime State; and it had no foundations in the organic structure, the history, or the traditions of the French people. Most ominous of all, the Empire seemed to destroy intellect and public worth in France: it was barren of great men of letters, and of great citizens; it produced only soldiers and a servile herd of functionaries.

I pass over the immediate results of Tilsit, the oppression of every small neutral Power, Copenhagen, the invasion of Finland, and the dissensions which, following the friendship pledged on the Niemen, were left unappeased by the meeting at Erfurt of the two potentates already distrusting each other. Napoleon soon began to repent of the promises he had made to Alexander respecting the Turks; but he continued to use the Russian alliance, unstable as it was, for his grasping ambition. The Czar, I have said, perhaps consented that his conqueror should work his will on Spain; and before the Grand Army had nearly returned to France, Napoleon had begun to make preparations to annex the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. A quarrel was forced on Portugal, on the pretence that she was evading the Continental system, and would not exclude English trade from her ports; and Junot, Duke of Abrantes in the Napoleonic peerage, was sent with an army of conscripts, at the close of 1807, from the Pyreneean frontier, to occupy Lisbon. The fate of Spain had been already settled; that Monarchy had, for many years, been almost an abject vassal of France; it had given her ships, soldiers, and a noble colony; and it had sacrificed a navy in her cause at Trafalgar. But the fiat had gone forth that the House of Bonaparte should replace the House of Bourbon on the throne of Charles V. Junot was ordered to “observe” the Spanish fortresses; and large bodies of French troops were gradually moved towards the borders of Spain, from the Loire and the Garonne. I cannot dwell on the Machiavellian statecraft which brought about the invasion that followed, on Aranjuez, and the plot of Bayonne. The dotard Charles fell into the arms of the tempter; the rights of Ferdinand his son were set aside with contempt, and Joseph, a brother of Napoleon, put off the Crown of Naples to assume that of Spain and the Indies.

The Emperor, however, might have recollected what the character is of that strange people, which has more than once baffled the greatest warriors, amidst the ranges of its hills and defiles, and has done wonders in the defence of its cities. Spain sprang up to a man, from the coasts of Galicia to Andalusia and the Pillars of Hercules; “Death to the foreigner!” was the fierce national cry; local juntas were formed in every province to direct and sustain the great movement; levies were poured into the army by thousands; and a call to arms, like that of France in 1793, led to an almost universal rising. Napoleon ere long found that it was no easy task to pacify and subdue a country like this; and his contemptuous scorn of popular passions--“the stirrings of the _canaille_” was a common phrase of his--made him neglect obvious precautions of war, and had soon involved his arms in a signal disaster. When the insurrection broke out, in the summer of 1808, he had about 120,000 men in Spain, along the main roads between Bayonne and Burgos; and had he operated after his wonted fashion, he could easily have conquered the northern provinces. But in his disdain of “armed mobs,” he tried to overrun the whole country at once; and, simply ignoring every rule of strategy, he divided his armies into small fractions, and sent them, in flying columns, west, east, and south. Thus employed, his forces could not perform their task; Bessières, indeed, a marshal, the Duke of Istria, routed a considerable army at Rio Seco; Moncey penetrated into the heart of Valencia; and Dupont, a soldier of brilliant promise, marched into Andalusia, sacked Cordova, and even approached Cadiz. The insurrection, nevertheless, was everywhere; swarms of guerillas, gathering on all points of vantage, and impossible to destroy, cut off the French by hundreds; and Moncey and other generals found themselves checked by armed multitudes, formidable behind ramparts. Ere long, terrible news from the south arrived; Dupont was caught and surrounded by the chief part of the regular army of the fallen Monarchy, in the recesses of the Sierra Morena, and with his troops was compelled to lay down his arms; and though possibly he might have done more than he did, he was hemmed in by immensely superior numbers. Even worse intelligence came from Portugal, and the French army at the mouth of the Tagus. I shall afterwards review the career of Wellington; enough here to say that he first set foot in Portugal in the early days of August 1808; and he defeated Junot, who by this time, too, was isolated in the midst of a national rising, with considerable loss to the French, at Vimeiro. The beaten chief and his army were too glad to effect their escape from a victorious foe, and an insurgent country, by accepting terms; and they were ultimately embarked in British transports, and landed on the western coast of France. By the autumn of 1808 the French armies in Spain, humbled and baffled by a despised enemy, had evacuated almost the whole Peninsula, and had fallen back behind the course of the Ebro.

The indignation and amazement of the Lord of the Continent at these untoward events, may be easily conceived. The great master of war had been found wanting; “a French general,” he exclaimed, “had justified Mack”; and, worst of all, his trained and disciplined troops had failed before rude and half-armed masses. He shut Dupont up in a State prison, and kept him immured through the rest of his reign; and how bitterly he felt the disgrace of his arms is seen in his admirable remarks, made at St. Helena, on the ruinous effects of capitulations in the field. The Emperor lost no time in endeavouring to repair the injured renown of the French army--the Czar and his ministers had secretly rejoiced--and, in November 1808, he left the capital and invaded Spain with an enormous force, determined, he wrote, “to put down rebellion.” He had five corps and the Guard in his hands; the weak Spanish armies, indulging in foolish boasts, and spread upon an immense line, extending from Biscay to the verge of Aragon, were pierced through and scattered like sheep; and Espinosa and Tudela were two battles that were little better than huge butcheries. Yet these “examples,” as they were called by the Emperor, were not attended by decisive success. Napoleon’s manœuvres were perfectly designed; but plunged in the depths of a hostile country, and utterly unable to procure intelligence, Soult and Ney failed to cut off the retreat of the Spaniards, and the wrecks of their routed forces were soon restored by insurrectionary levies flocking in by thousands. The way to the capital was, however, open; Napoleon mastered the Somo Sierra by a magnificent charge of his Polish horsemen, for he scorned to make a regular attack; and he entered Madrid, in the last days of December, at the head of a force that defied resistance. King Joseph was now installed on his throne; but there was no popular voice to say “God bless him”; the city was one of silence and mourning; and though a Constitution was announced for Spain, which abolished all kinds of old abuses and inaugurated many real reforms, the invaders remained as detested as ever. Against the feeble protests of his crowned dependant, Napoleon continued to rule by terror and force; when, as 1808 was closing, his attention was directed to a new enemy.

After Vimeiro, the successful army, placed under the command of Sir John Moore, had held Lisbon and been reinforced; and a fresh body of troops, led by Sir David Baird, had landed at Corunna to assist the Spaniards. Moore had marched northwards and joined Baird; and near the close of December he had approached Valladolid, threatening the communications of the French with Bayonne, and at the head of about 30,000 men. Napoleon had soon broken up from Madrid with an army perhaps 40,000 strong; he crossed the Guadarramas by a forced march in the hope of reaching and crushing his foe; and he directed Soult to combine the movement so as to fall on the rear of the British force. Moore, however, ably changing the line of his operations, made for Corunna; the Emperor pressed his enemy in vain; and he abandoned the pursuit in the first days of January, the attitude of Austria having become menacing and requiring his immediate presence in France. It is unnecessary to dwell on the events that followed; the British army made good its retreat, though with heavy loss, through the mountainous tracts that divide Leon from the Galician seaboard; and Soult proved unable to to bring it to bay. Moore turned to fight at Corunna when about to embark; he beat Soult off in a well contested action; and though he fell, he knew that he had saved his army. He had shown great ability in this brief campaign, remarkable for this too, that it was one of the few occasions on which the Imperial Guard beheld British troops, until ruin lowered on it on the field of Waterloo.