Part 15
Strategy will always remain the same art. Its uses are to-day varied by railroads, telegraphs, arms of precision. What was not allowable in the Napoleonic era can be undertaken now with safety. But all this has only modified, it has not changed strategy. The tendency of modern armies is toward better organization. Ramrod discipline is giving way to dependence on the individuality of officers and men, and to instruction in doing what at the moment is the most expedient thing. But every great soldier will be great hereafter from the same causes which have made all captains what they were; in conducting war he will be governed by the same intellectual and moral strength which they exhibited, and will do, as they always did, what befits the time, unfettered by rules and maxims, but with a broad comprehension of their true value.
Napoleon is so close to this generation that he sometimes appears to us gigantic beyond all others. He certainly moulded into shape the method in use to-day, which the Prussians have carried forward to its highest development by scrupulous preparation in every department, personal service, and the teaching of individuals to act with intelligent independence. That Napoleon was always intellectually the equal, and, in the first part of his career in the moral forces, the equal of any of the captains, cannot be denied. But we must remember that because Napoleon wrought in our own times we can the better appreciate what he did, while our more meagre knowledge of the others makes it impossible to see as clearly the manner in which, to accomplish their great deeds, they must have patterned their means to the work to be done. “The most important qualities of an army leader,” says Jomini, “will always be a great character or constitutional courage, which leads to great determinations; _sang froid_ or bodily courage which conquers danger; learning appears in third line, but it will be a strong help.”
Napoleon exhibited these qualities in full measure up to 1808, and comes close to being, at his best, the greatest of the captains. He failed to exhibit the moral power in as great measure thereafter. It was not years, for Cæsar and Frederick were older when they showed these same qualities in the highest degree. That Napoleon lost activity and decisiveness, and thereby forfeited success, is no reproach. No man can keep his faculties beyond a certain period. He lacked that equipoise which enables a man to stand success. He did not last as the others lasted; and proved that only so long as a man retains the highest grade of character can he remain a great captain. At the same time it is but fair to repeat that the conditions under which Napoleon worked gradually became more difficult; that the allies learned from him as the Romans did from Hannibal, and made fewer mistakes as the years went on; that he was not always able to retain about him the most efficient of his marshals; that he commanded vastly larger armies than the other captains. His task was larger accordingly.
Napoleon’s strategy shows a magnificence in conception, a boldness in execution, and a completeness and homogeneity not shown by any other leader. The other captains can only stand beside him because they builded so that he might add; they invented so that he might improve. But while Napoleon reached a height beyond the others, they did not show the decrease of genius which he showed.
Too little time is left to draw a satisfactory comparison between Napoleon and his peers in arms. In Frederick we recognize a man of higher standard than Napoleon reached. Not merely because Frederick was, of all the captains, the only one who, with vastly smaller forces, attacked troops equal to his own and defeated them right and left,--in other words, because he was typical tactician, the typical fighter,--but because he was steadfast in victory and defeat alike; because he was so truly a king to his people as well as a soldier; because he so truly merged his own self in the good of Prussia. Napoleon flared like a comet. Frederick burned like a planet or a fixed star,--less brilliant, less startling, but ever constant. Frederick at the close of his life was the same great man. Napoleon had burned out his lamp. Frederick never waned. Years or infirmity never changed his force or determination, or limited his energies. Moreover, Frederick, like Hannibal, was greater in disaster than in success. Napoleon succumbed to disaster. Frederick and Hannibal alone held themselves against overwhelming civilized armies. They were stronger, more able, more determined, more to be feared the more misfortune crowded upon them. We instinctively couple Napoleon’s genius with his greatest success; we couple Hannibal’s or Frederick’s with their direst disasters. Alexander and Gustavus never looked real disaster in the face, as Frederick before Leuthen, or Hannibal after the Metaurus. Nor indeed did Cæsar. But Cæsar opposed wonderful countenance to threatening calamity.
Looking at Napoleon and Gustavus, it is perhaps impossible to compare them. Gustavus was immeasurably above all the others in purity of character, and their equal in force and intellect. To him we owe the revival of intellectual war, lost for seventeen centuries; and on what he did Frederick and Napoleon builded. Napoleon is nearer akin to Cæsar. Perhaps, take them all in all, as soldiers, statesmen, law-givers, Cæsar and Napoleon are the two greatest men. But they sink below the rest in their motives and aspirations. Neither ever lost sight of self; while Alexander’s ambition was not only to conquer the East, but to extend Greek civilization; the motive of Hannibal and Frederick was patriotic, and that of Gustavus love of country and religion. Three of the captains were kings from the start. Their ambition was naturally impersonal. Of the other three, Hannibal alone worked from purely unselfish motives.
Nor can we compare Napoleon with Hannibal. In his successes Napoleon is equally brilliant, more titanic; in his failures he falls so far below the level of this great pattern of patient, never-yielding resistance to adversity as to be lost. To Alexander fighting semi-civilized armies, Napoleon can only be likened in his Egyptian campaigns, and in this he in no sense rises to the height of the Macedonian. Napoleon’s genius was most apparent on the familiar fields of Europe.
In intellectual grasp, all six great captains stand side by side. In enthusiastic activity and in all the qualities which compel good fortune, Alexander stands clearly at the head. No one but Frederick has perhaps so brilliant a string of tactical jewels as Hannibal, while in a persistent unswerving struggle of many years to coerce success against the constantly blackening frowns of Fortune, Hannibal stands alone and incomparable. Cæsar was a giant in conception and execution alike, and stands apart in having taught himself in middle life how to wage war, and then waging in it a fashion equalled only by the other five. Gustavus will always rank, not only as the man who rescued intellectual war from oblivion, but as the most splendid character, in nobility of purpose and intelligence of method, which the annals of the world have to show. Frederick is not only the Battle Captain who never blenched at numbers, but truly the Last of the Kings,--king and priest, in the history of mankind. Napoleon carries us to the highest plane of genius and power and success, and then declines. We begin by feeling that here is indeed the greatest of the captains, and we end by recognizing that he has not acted out the part. No doubt, taking him in his many-sidedness, Cæsar is the greatest character in history. It may not unfairly be claimed that Napoleon follows next, especially in that he preserved for Europe many germs of the liberty which was born of the blood of the Revolution. Cæsar was the most useful man of antiquity; Napoleon comes near to being the most useful man of modern times. But neither Cæsar nor Napoleon appeal to us as do splendid, open-hearted Alexander; patient, intrepid, ever-constant Hannibal; the Christian hero, Gustavus; and daring, obstinate, royal Frederick.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
Page 85: “He went to school as Cæsar” was originally printed as “He went to school to Cæsar.”