The Man Who Saw Napoleon

By STRIX IN 1912 the Russians celebrated the centenary of the Battle of Borodino. The present Duke of Wellington, then serving in the British Embassy at St. Petersburg, was staying at a country house not far from the battlefield and was taken over to see the fun.

A number of descendants of those who had taken part in the action had been assembled; and there was one man who had actually fought in the battle. His claim to be 126 years old had after rigorous scrutiny been authenticated and he was naturally something of a prize exhibit.

'And did you see Napoleon?' they asked him.

'I did, Your Honour,' the old man answered. `He was standing on a balcony, surrounded by his generals.'

`What did he look like?'

`He was a very tall gentleman,' said the cen- tenarian, 'with a fair beard.'

This tranche de vie came into my mind while I was talking yesterday to a man who had been closely concerned with the production of the new film about the Titanic. It is a film which aims at accuracy, at reproducing as far as possible what actually did happen on the night of the disaster; and I asked my friend to what extent he had found the memories of survivors helpful.

He replied that they had been of only a limited value. Almost all had become, with the passage of time, so distorted or embellished that they con• tained only the dregs of truth; some survivors gave, in perfectly good faith, first-hand accounts of incidents which, as contemporary records proved, they could not possibly have taken part in or even witnessed.

I was not surprised to hear this. For the past few months I have been trying to reconstruct the history of a siege which took place less than sixty years ago. There are not many living survivors; most of them were small children and had no clear idea of what was going on. But interest in the siege was very great, and when it was raised many of the ex-besieged, and many of their rescuers as well, published, in several languages, accounts of their experiences.

Almost all these accounts were written immedi- ately after the event. Some were, others purported to be diaries. Some were official despatches. Each has a strong claim to authenticity. None is the truth.

The victims of a siege resemble in many ways people on board a ship which is slowly sinking and has no lifeboats. They are herded together in a confined space. All are more or less equally affected by everything that happens. All see the same sights, hear the same sounds, quail or rejoice at the same rumours. One would thus expect their memories, especially when fresh, to corre- spond very closely with each other.

And so, up to a point, they do. As one ploughs through narrative after narrative describing the same events (and I must have read more than a hundred) a feeling of satiety comes over one. Here and there one notes a new sidelight—an episode, a rumour, a grievance, which nobody else has mentioned; but the total impression produced is of being almost over-documented, of having col- lated more truth than One can hope to digest.

Then one starts to write. All goes swimmingly for a time; the events of the first two or three days were clear-cut and made much the same sharp impact on everyone. But the siege lasted several weeks, and gradually one realises that in the quest for truth one is no longer following a breast- high scent. `A quiet morning,' writes Captain Smith on July 10, 'and only desultory firing in the afternoon.' Yet Lieutenant de vaisseati Dupont, manning a barricade only two hundred yards away, remembers being subjected to 'des mousquetades vivaces et meurtieres pendant touts la journee': while Dr. Schmidt does not mention the scale of attack but speaks of the universal horror caused by an incident which according to everybody else happened on the following day.

In time the witnesses grade themselves in their varying degrees of reliability. From the narra- tives of others, though not from his own, it emerges that A, who has much to say about technical policies of the siege, was never actually in the firing-line; his description of sorties, snipers' exploits, enemy casualties and so on can therefore only have been based on hear- say. B shines on such matters; but, since he virtually never left his isolated bastion, his breezy outlook on the whole affair was scarcely affected by the fluctuating hopes and fears of the non- combatants. He is an almost definitive authority on the number of rounds fired daily, the height of the barricades, and the effect of heavy rain on improvised sandbags. But he can no more tell you what the siege was like than A can tell you what really happened in the fighting round the perimeter.

C behaved badly—everyone says so—and since his main concern is to justify himself he is an unreliable witness. D's purpose is to prove that everything that went wrong was the fault of the British. E is completely clueless; he gets all his dates wrong, leaves out half the important events and draws the wrong deductions from the others. F was in charge of the laundry and thus sees an heroic feat of arms from a somewhat specialised angle. Even the best and most dispassionate wit- nesses, with no axes to grind, sooner or later sud- denly let you down : like Miss G, the pretty little American, who after describing the whole ordeal with cheerful fidelity, recalls, in the unforgettable moment when the relief force marched in, that it included a contingent of Zouaves. Well, it didn't.

It was the declared intention of their assailants to massacre every man, woman and child within the beleaguered perimeter. If they had succeeded, we should not have had a hundred eye-witness accounts of the siege; but perhaps one diary would have been discovered among the ruins by the avenging armies. If it had been, it would have become The Truth.

I find the thought sobering. How much do we ever know about what really happened—even to ourselves? The things we remember about our- selves, the things other people remember about us —how much of them is truth, how much legend, how much involuntary fabrication?

Is there such a thing as historical truth? Or does all past reality sprout a kind of protectivo, fuzz of fancy, like Napoleon's chin?