: The Eagle of the Empire: A Story of Waterloo by Brady Cyrus Townsend - War stories; Waterloo Battle of Waterloo Belgium 1815 Fiction Children's Fiction

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tire selfishness of the colossal man, but they cannot resist his appeal, even after one hundred years!

Yet in the long run no personal attachment, however deep, however ardent, however complete, can take the place as the inspiration for heroic deeds of that deeper passion of love of country. Nor can any personal devotion to a mere man produce such a steadfastness of character as is brought about by adherence to a great cause or a great land. A great passion like the love of a people for a great country and that for which it stands is eternal. Usually the feet of clay upon which the idol stands have only to be recognized to dissipate the ardor and fervor of the worshipers. But Napoleon was then an exception to all rules. Though he slew men, wasted them, threw them away, they trusted him. We look at him through the vista of years and in some way understand his soldiers. Reason to the contrary, we can experience in some degree, at least, even in the cold-blooded humanitarian materialism of the present, the old thrill and the old admiration. Did his contemporaries love him because they believed he thought in terms of France, we wonder?

So that this body of soldiery was probably the most formidable army in the quality of its units that had ever been mustered on the globe. There was not a man in it who was not a veteran. Some of them were veterans of fifteen years of campaigning with Napoleon. This that came was to be the sixtieth pitched battle in which some of them had participated. Even the younger men had gone through more than one campaign and taken part in much hard fighting. Back from the prisons where they had been confined and the great fortresses they had held until the Emperor's abdication had come the veterans. The Old Guard had been reconstituted. As a reward for its action at Grenoble, the Fifth-of-the-Line had been incorporated in it as a supplementary regiment, a second Fifth regiment of Grenadiers. The ranks of the Guard had been most carefully culled, the unserviceable had been weeded out, their places taken by men well fitted by their record, their physical prowess and their personal appearance to belong to that famous corps. Not the Immortals of Xerxes, the Spartan Band of Leonidas, the Companion Cavalry of Alexander, the Carthaginians of Hannibal, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the Spanish Infantry of Parma, or the Ironsides of Cromwell, had surpassed the record of these Pretorians of Imperial France.

The same weeding-out process had been carried out in the rest of the army. The flower of French cavalry, the matchless French artillery and the famous infantry which had trampled down the world were ranged under the Eagles. Other corps had been drained for equipment. But in some particulars the army differed from the Imperial armies of the past. With two exceptions, the great Marshals were not there. Murat, king of horsemen and swordsmen, was a prisoner in his ignoble Neapolitan realm awaiting trial and execution. Marmont and Mortier dared not present themselves before the Emperor they had betrayed. Wily Massena, the wisest and ablest of them all, was old and in convenient retirement. Macdonald, the incorruptible, was with the fat-bodied, fat-witted Bourbon King in Ghent. Berthier, with his marvelous mastery of detail and his almost uncanny ability to translate the Emperor's thoughts even into orders, had not rejoined the Eagles--a terrible loss, indeed.

There were but two of the Marshals of old with Napoleon. Soult, in some respects the acutest strategist and finest tactician, was Chief of Staff. He tried his best to fill Berthier's position and did it acceptably, if not with the success of that master. The other Marshal was pre?minently the battle-leader, red-headed Michael Ney, the fighter of fighters, a man whose personality was worth an army-corps, whose reputation and influence with the soldiers was of the very highest.

The rest of the officers, while veterans, were younger and less-known men. Drouet d'Erlon commanded one of the corps; Reille another; Grouchy another; Druot was the leader of the Guard; Kellerman, Milhaud, Gerard and Maurice the cavalry. It was an army of veterans, officered by young men, commanded by the greatest of soldiers.

But the army had not yet "found itself." It had no natural coherence and there had been no time to acquire any. It had not yet been welded together. Officers, men, regiments, brigades, divisions were, more or less, new and strange to one another. There was a vast deal of suspicion in the ranks. The discipline was rather because of past habit than present practice. That army needed a few victories, and badly needed them. A welding process was required. Given time and success to shake it together, and it might laugh at the world.

Would it get time and win victory? That was the question. And if it got neither, what then? How would it stand up under the strain? Would the tie that bound hold in defeat? Could the rest of the army live up to the Guard, for instance? Yes, that was the grave, the all-important question.

There was an enormous disparity in numbers between the French army--or it would better be called Napoleon's army--and that of the allies he purposed to attack. The allies were to the French in the ratio of about two to one. Whatever else was lacking, Napoleon had not lost his audacity, nor when his intentions are disclosed by a study of his plans, can it be argued that his strategic intention was lacking in brilliancy or daring.

He determined with his smaller but compact and manageable army to thrust himself between the two wings of the somewhat loosely coherent enemy under its divided command; to hold off one while he smashed the other and then to concentrate upon the surviving half and mete out to it the same hard fortune. In other words, trusting to his ability, he deliberately placed his own army between two others, each of which practically equaled his own. He thrust himself within the jaws of a trap, to use a homely simile, intending to hold one arm of the trap open while he broke up the other. He intended to burst through the allied line and smash up each half in succession.

Of course there was always the danger that he could not burst through that line; or that he could not hold back one half while he fought the other, or that holding back one half he could not beat the other, or having beaten one half he would be too weak to fall on the other. There was always the danger that the trap would be sprung, that he would be caught in its jaws or, to change the metaphor, that he would be like the wheat between the upper and the nether millstone. Still he did not think so, and he did not go into the undertaking blindly. As he had said, in his own case, "War was not a conjectural art," and he had most carefully counted the cost, estimated the probabilities. In short, he looked well before he leaped--yet a man may look well and leap wrong after all.

On these considerations he based his grand strategy. The army of the Prussians had approached the French frontier from the east; the army of the English and allies from the northwest. Napoleon had a complete knowledge of one of the Captains opposing him. He knew and accurately estimated Bl?cher. He did not know and he did not accurately estimate Wellington. He viewed the latter with contempt; the former with a certain amount of disdainful approbation, for while Bl?cher was no strategist and less of a tactician, he was a fighter and a fighter is always dangerous and to be dreaded. Gneisenau, a much more accomplished soldier, was Bl?cher's second in command, but he was a negligible factor in the Emperor's mind. The fact that Wellington had beaten all of Napoleon's Marshals with whom he had come in contact had intensified the Emperor's hatred. Instead of begetting caution in dealing with him, Napoleon's antagonism had blinded him as to Wellington's ability.

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