Introduction

The twelfth of May, 1796, in north Italy, at Tavazzano, on the
road from Lodi to Milan. The afternoon sun is blazing serenely
over the plains of Lombardy, treating the Alps with respect and
the anthills with indulgence, not incommoded by the basking of
the swine and oxen in the villages nor hurt by its cool reception
in the churches, but fiercely disdainful of two hordes of
mischievous insects which are the French and Austrian armies. Two
days before, at Lodi, the Austrians tried to prevent the French
from crossing the river by the narrow bridge there; but the
French, commanded by a general aged 27, Napoleon Bonaparte, who
does not understand the art of war, rushed the fireswept bridge,
supported by a tremendous cannonade in which the young general
assisted with his own hands. Cannonading is his technical
specialty; he has been trained in the artillery under the old
regime, and made perfect in the military arts of shirking his
duties, swindling the paymaster over travelling expenses, and
dignifying war with the noise and smoke of cannon, as depicted in
all military portraits. He is, however, an original observer, and
has perceived, for the first time since the invention of
gunpowder, that a cannon ball, if it strikes a man, will kill
him. To a thorough grasp of this remarkable discovery, he adds a
highly evolved faculty for physical geography and for the
calculation of times and distances. He has prodigious powers of
work, and a clear, realistic knowledge of human nature in public
affairs, having seen it exhaustively tested in that department
during the French Revolution. He is imaginative without
illusions, and creative without religion, loyalty, patriotism or
any of the common ideals. Not that he is incapable of these
ideals: on the contrary, he has swallowed them all in his
boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely
clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and stage
manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the
shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a
would-be author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof
and punishment as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape
from dismissal from the service so narrow that if the emigration
of the nobles had not raised the value of even the most rascally
lieutenant to the famine price of a general he would have been
swept contemptuously from the army: these trials have ground the
conceit out of him, and forced him to be self-sufficient and to
understand that to such men as he is the world will give nothing
that he cannot take from it by force. In this the world is not
free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a merciless
cannonader of political rubbish, is