Napoleonica
The Hundred Days (1815). By Philip Guedalla. (Peter Davies. 5s.) Letters of Napoleon. Translated and edited by J. M. Thompoon. (Basil Blackwell. 10.3. ad.)
IN just over a hundred and fifty pages, Mr. Guedalla has contrived to give his readers an astonishingly vivid account of the Hundred Days. Not one of the dramatic or melo- dramatic incidents of that wonderful journey from Porto Pernik) to Paris is omitted, though one may perhaps regret that no allusion is made to the gradual change of style in Napoleon's proclamations which, starting with the strong Jacobinical cry of " Citoyens ! " in the first, grows less and less revolutionary as success becomes more sure and respon- sibility approaches. One would have thought it would have appealed to Mr. Guedalla's sense of humour, which comes out well in his admirable account of the Emperor's stay in Paris, with its absurd pretence that Napoleon could ever be a constitutional monarch, and its solemn farce of a civilian Napoleon played at the Champ. de Mai. Yet Mr. Guedalla is not blind to the pathetic side of the story, and does full justice to the helplessness of Napoleon even when convinced of the treachery of Fouche. In the account of the Waterlco campaign, otherwise quite admirable, perhaps the reader is not given sufficient indication of the weary length of the battle—it must have seemed long enough to Wellington— for Mr. Guedalla's account gives the impression that it might almost have been over in an hour ; nor perhaps does he give enough emphasis to the really critical state of affairs that faced Wellington when La Haye Sainte fell into the enemy's hands.
In an appendix Mr. Guedalla advances the theory that the main objective of Napoleon was Brussels, and makes a sort of kit motif through the book by means of the remarks that fell from Napoleon during the previous year. But is it not possible to exaggerate the lure of " Brussels as the capital of Belgium " ? For Belgium then had no political importance, and if Napoleon's objective was the capital of the country, then Brussels could only be a stage on the road to The Hague. He can scarcely have anticipated from the fall of a mere provincial town the political results that, attended the capture of Vienna and Berlin, and that he expected to obtain from the fall of Madrid and Moscow. Mr. Guedalla frankly admits that his theory is not entirely satisfactory ; on the other hand there is justice in his claim that it suits the facts better than those which attribute Napoleon's defeat to his generals, the weather and the tactical mistakes of the Duke of Wellington. The four drawings of the battlefield, made within a day or two of the action, and taken from His Majesty's collection at Windsor, are not the least remarkable feature of a very interesting book.
Mr. Thompson's book is at once more original and less original than Mr. Guedalla's : less original because it is composed of extracts from correspondence, more original because no one has yet faced the task of making a selection from the 54,000 (or is it 80,000 ?) letters of Napoleon. Mr. Thompson gives us 292 letters drawn from all available sources with the intention, not that they should be illustrative of Napoleon's history so much as of the multifarious character of his genius, such as an administrator, a legist, a diplomat, a restorer of altars, an oppressor of the Pope, a promoter of education, a muzzier of the Press, a family man, a gentleman, a cad. Mr. Thompson has laid the ordinary English reader under a debt, because even through the veil of translation, the peculiar jerky quality of Napoleon's style comes clearly out, whether he is writing a hard business letter, or whether he is writing claptrap, in which art he was as great a master as in other things. If the book leads anyone to browse in Napoleon's correspondence, and nothing else can give any adequate conception of his versatility, it will have done good service, especially if it serves to correct some prevalent ideas about Napoleon. The selection is well done ; if another edition is called for, it might be well to insert the letter which Napoleon wrote after the carnage of Borodino : c'est le plus beau champ de bataille que fat vu. It shows what Napoleon thought was the characteristic to be desired in a battlefield.
Previous page
