THE GREAT NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
(From an Engraving after a Portrait by Paul Delarothe.)
It is impossible here even to touch on his campaigns in any detail; nor is it possible to select any one campaign or a single battle as a type of his generalship or his tactics, because perhaps the chief reason of all his success is that he was so very able to vary them according to the needs of each case. It was this, that there was no reckoning what he was likely to do, that confused his enemies so greatly.
But in all his campaigns we find a common point, that he realised probably more fully than any of his opponents the value of time, and had so masterly a power of organisation that he nearly always arrived at the place where he had determined to give battle before his enemies were ready for him.
It was just so with this his first campaign in Italy. He was across the Alps, with his army, and into Milan and the Austrian dominions far quicker than he had been expected; and here he did execute one of his most favourite manœuvres, which, at all events, might always be foreseen if the opportunity for it were given him. He thrust his army in between the armies of the Austrians eastward and the Sardinians westward and so disabled the latter, and less powerful, foe from any valuable co-operation at the very outset. Then, turning eastward, he defeated the Austrians again and again, driving them from Italy and pursuing them far along the road to Vienna.
He turned southward thence and seized the lands of Venice. In the treaty which ended this campaign, in 1797, France gained the Netherlands, the Ionian Islands, and territory along the Rhine and in Albania. The following year the French were in Rome, which they captured, making the Pope a prisoner and establishing what was called the Tiberine Republic.
We have to note that in all these early battles of the French Republic, the victors—for they were nearly always victorious—came with the pretence, at all events, that their purpose was to relieve the populace from their burdens, their dukes and archdukes and kings. Accordingly they set up this Tiberine Republic along the Tiber, and the Transpadane Republic, of the country beyond the river Po, and the Cis-Alpine Republic on this side of the Alps, and so on. We have already seen how they had set up the Batavian Republic in Holland. By these fine promises and pretences they gained much favour with the civil population in all countries. In 1798 Napoleon was no longer in Italy: he was in Egypt, intent on extending the French power over the East—thus quickly had events moved since France, only three or four years before, had been fighting for her very existence among the nations of Europe!
It was English sea-power that foiled him in that Eastern enterprise, and in the following years he was back again—badly needed. For there was war again with the Austrians, who had recuperated their forces in North Italy, and the fortunes of the war were going all against the French. They had been forced to retire from Italy and from a part of Switzerland which they had held. French armies, moreover, had suffered defeat on the Rhine, and in consequence the Directory had fallen from popular favour.
The First Consul