10 DECEMBER 1870, Page 15

BOOKS.

NAPOLEON AT BERLIN.*

KING WILLLtss is at Versailles, but he has not yet entered Paris. It is not even now quite certain that Count Bismarck will be able to keep the appointment he is said to have given M. Thiess at the Tuileries on King William's birthday, the 7th of January. In such days as these, when the world stands aghast at the energy, the punctuality, the overwhelming and irresistible weight of the Prussian war-power, it is well to remember that the world has seen other war-powers, and especially one not very long ago, produced by the French, which smote with a far mightier and more victorious stroke, and which more than once easily defeated the armies of Russia and Germany leagued together. After four months of incessant and victorious war, in this year of grace, and blood, and iron, King William has arrived at the gates of Paris ; but be it remembered that Napoleon, in one month of the autumn of 1806, sprang from Paris to Berlin, and brought the power of Prussia to the ground. Napoleon had no needle-gun, and he had no crushing superiority of numbers. Colonel Hamley states the force of the Prussian Army in the campaign of Jena at 145,000, and that of the French at 190,000 ; but at the end of the campaign Napoleon declared that 100,000 of his soldiers had not fired a shot, and certain it is that in the toughest battle of the war, Devout had only 27,000 French to oppose to Brunswick's 51,000 Prussians. On that dire day, though almost two to one, the Teuton succumbed to the Celt. It may be doubted whether in any great battle of the present war—unless it were the last before Orleans—the German Army was not in the propor- tion of at least three to two. And withal the end is not yet. On the 1st of August King William started from Berlin nach Paris ; and he still, in these dreary December days, walks the hospitals, hunts, and gives birthday dinners at Versailles, while we are told that " the resistance of Paris causes dissatisfaction in Germany." But Napoleon, when Prussia insisted on war in 1806, took exactly thirty days to take Potsdam. We open the thirteenth volume of his Correspondence, and we find that he was writing letters at St. Cloud on the 24th of September ; and that he wan writing letters at Potsdam, which Mr. Murray calls "the Prussian Versailles," on the 24th of October. Three days, not three months, afterwards he entered Berlin ; and there he took his ease for over three weeks. The first Berlin letter is dated the 28th of October, and the last the 24th of November. There is among them a letter to the Sultan, in which he promises to see that his authority is restored in the Principalities (where a Hohenzollern is now Hospodar), and declares that it is his especial mission to save ■ Correspondence de Napoleon .1. VoL 8IIL Patti. the Turkish Empire. This letter bears the date " Ecrit en notre chateau imperial a Berlin, le 11 Novembre, 1806." When his Imperial Majesty left Berlin on the 25th of the same month, he appointed his Minister of War, Clarke, who like MacMahon, was of the old Irish Brigade extraction, Governor-General of Prussia. General von Roon will hardly ever carry the title of Governor- General of France, and even if he did, it would only be a title ; but General Clarke verily and actually governed Prussia and the Prussians until it pleased his master to appoint him to other func- tions, and to allow the King—King William's father—to resume the charge of affairs.

In all these proceedings Napoleon, like King William, humbly but persistently saw the hand of Providence. He was very pious at this period of his life. When he was leaving Paris, he assem- bled his Ministers and said to them, " I am innocent of this war ; I have in nowise provoked it ; it did not enter into my calcula- tions. May I be defeated if it has been of my making ! One of the principal motives which I have for my trust that my enemies will be destroyed is, that I see in their conduct the finger of Pro- vidence working that the traitors should be punished ; God so de- prives their counsels of wisdom, that thinking to attack me in a moment of weakness, they have, on the coptrary, chosen the time when I am strongest." On the 10th of October, Marshal Lannes attacked Prince Louis, commanding the Prussian advanced guard, at Saalfeld, and drove it back on Jena. The Prince was run through the body by a French hussar, to whom he heroically, or absurdly, refused to surrender. Napoleon wrote to the Marshal on the 12th, " The death of Prince Louis of Prussia seems to me to be a judgment of Heaven ; for he was the real author of this war." By the 12th, the French army was concentrated between the Elster and Saal ; Lannes and Augereau advanced to .Jena; Murat's cavalry cleared the country to the gates of Leipsic. Napo- leon wrote to the Empress, " With the help of God, in a few days this affair will have taken a very terrible aspect, I believe, for the poor King of Prussia, whom I pity personally because he is good." War waged on such pious principles evidently agreed with Napo- leon's constitution. " I am wonderfully well ; " he adds, " I have actually got fat since I started ; and yet I travel twenty to twenty- five leagues a day on horseback or in my carriage, in all sorts of ways. I go to bed at eight o'clock in the evening and rise at midnight." Then came the great day,—the day, said Napoleon, " which washed out the affront of Rosbach, and decided within seven days a campaign which has entirely calmed that bellicose frenzy which bad turned Prussian heads of late." The interposition of Provi- dence at the battle of Jena was especially manifest to Napoleon's mind. At the close of the official bulletin he says, " In an affair so hotly contested, in which the enemy lost almost all his Generals, we owe thanks to that Providence which watched over our army. Not one man of mark has been killed or wounded." From Weimar he wrote himself a letter to all the Bishops of the Empire, saying that the success which he had won over his enemies, " with the aid of Divine Providence," rendered it a duty for him and his people to " tender to the God of Armies solemn thanksgiving." The Bishops accordingly were ordered to sing the Te Deum and to ordain public prayers.

In this war Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, took part ; and the part assigned to him may well suggest, even at this hour, speculations as to the share of Providence in human affairs. " My intention," wrote Napoleon to him on the 17th of October, " is that with your own and Mortier's army corps you should enter Cassel, make the Elector prisoner, and disarm his troops You ought to be able early in November to enter Cassel and Possess yourself of that territory ; meantime, maintain friendly relations with the Elector." By the end of the month, however, Napoleon had changed his mind, and determined not to send King Louis thither. He paid his Dutch Majesty the compliment of saying that the mission was, after all, " pen delicate," and so Mortier was sent alone. Josephine, who awaited the end of the war, suffering much from ennui and somewhat from jealousy, at Mayence, wished to shift her Court to Wilhelmshoff. But Napo- leon refused his permission. "I think," he wrote, " you ought not to go to Cassel ; it would not be convenable. But you may go to Darmstadt." Queen Hortense was with her mother all this time, but King Louis was at the Hague, or in Hanover, always blundering, always exasperating his imperious, benevolent brother. "Already you have deranged all my plans of campaign," he wrote to him before the war began ; " you go on like a giddy fellow, without considering the consequences of things."

The causes or pretexts of the war, and the spirit in which the two powers entered upon it, suggest some curious points of com- parison between the war of 1806 and the war of 1870. The war of 1806 grew out of Pruasia's jealousy of the Confederation of the Rhine, just as the war of 1870 grew out of France's jealousy of the North-German Confederation. But the Southern States, Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, Baden were all with France in 1806, and Napoleon's letters to their sovereigns complaining of the ambition and rapacity of Prussia might serve, perhaps have served, as models for Count Bismarck. Napoleon again and again objurgate:I the light heart and also light head with which Prussia declared war. After the- battle of Jena, Kalkreuth, commanding in front of Soult, applied for an armistice. " What more can you want from us ?" said the- Prussian General ; " the Duke of Brunswick is dead ; our Generals are all killed, or wounded, or taken ; the greater part of our army has fled ; surely your successes are sufficiently grand." Soult answered in a tone of insolent morality, which the Prussian com-

manders have evidently studied and made their own We have in no respect provoked the unjust war which you have urged against us ; you declared it in mere gaiety of heart. The battle of Jena, has decided the future of the campaign. Our business is to do- you as much damage as we can. Lay down your arms, and I will await the Emperor's orders in your regard." When Napoleon entered Berlin, he was highly satisfied with his reception. The day was splendid, the streets were crowded. The corporation met. him at the gate and handed him the keys. Then the Chancellor and Ministers—the Prussian Chancellor and the Prussian Ministers,. be it remembered—paid their respects, also the Foreign Ambas- sadors, finally the judges, with whom His Majesty was pleased to talk in an entertaining way as to their methods of administering justice. He all at once felt as much at home with the Berliners as. with the Parisians. If Clarke had only happened to have married one of his sisters, he might have felt tempted to have made- him King of Prussia. A certain Count de Neale, whose name- suggests the same origin as Governor-General Clarke's, was much blamed by Napoleon as of the party who impelled the King to war. Letters from his daughter had been intercepted. Miss- Kathleen, or Norah de Neale, wrote such words as these, " Napo- leon does not wish to go to war ; but we must make him." " No,' said his Majesty, turning on M. de Neale, with Miss Kathleen's. letter in his hand, " I do not wish for war ; not that mistrust my power, as you think, but because the blood of my people is precious to me, and that my first duty is not to shed it. except for its security and its honour. But this good people of Berlin is the victim of the war, while those who brought it on have run away." It does not seem probable that King William will find the people of Paris so good, or will stay so long with. them, or write such nice letters to the Sultan from his Royal Schloss of the Tuileries. Latterly he has apparently been losing. his exuberant piety and sense of strict dependence on Providence,. just as Napoleon did after Ney had taken Magdeburg ; in one of his Polish despatches, about three months after Jena, the Emperor- says, in fact, that there has been rather too much public prayer.. But if Napoleon's account of the war of 1806 be as true as King: William's account of the war of 1870, then the part of Providence was what one should expect the part of Providence to be. After all, Providence, in the one as in the other case, would seem to- have at once declared against the promoters of an unjust and. aggressive war. It was not so much the big battalions, as wise- inspiration, stout heart, and good-lack which attended the French. eagle in 1806 and the Prussian eagle in 1870.