Page 2 of 78 NAPOLEON BONAPARTE - Napoleon Bonaparte

At this call all the martial spirit of France rushed to arms. Napoleon, supremely devoted to the welfare of the State, seemed to forget even his own glory in the intensity of his desire to make France victorious over her foes. With the most magnanimous superiority to all feelings of jealousy, he raised an army of 150,000 men, the very elite of the troops of France, the veterans of a hundred battles, and placed them in the hands of Moreau, the only man in France who could be called his rival. Napoleon also presented to Moreau the plan of a campaign in accordance with his own energy, boldness, and genius. Its accomplishment would have added surpassing brilliance to the reputation of Moreau. But the cautious general was afraid to adopt it, and presented another, perhaps as safe, but one which would produce no dazzling impression upon the imaginations of men. "Your plan," said one, a friend of Moreau, to the First Consul, "is grander, more decisive, even more sure. But it is not adapted to the slow and cautious genius of the man who is to execute it. You have your method of making war, which is superior to all others. Moreau has his own, inferior certainly, but still excellent. Leave him to himself. If you impose your ideas upon him, you will wound his self-love, and disconcert him."

Napoleon, profoundly versed in the knowledge of the human heart, promptly replied. "You are right, Moreau is not capable of grasping the plan which I have conceived. Let him follow his own course. The plan which he does not understand and dare not execute, I myself will carry out, on another part of the theatre of war. What he fears to attempt on the Rhine, I will accomplish on the Alps. The day may come when he will regret the glory which he yields to me." These were proud and prophetic words. Moreau, was moderately victorious upon the Rhine, driving back the invaders. The sun of Napoleon soon rose, over the field of Marengo, in a blaze of effulgence, which paled Moreau's twinkling star into utter obscurity. But we know not where, upon the page of history, to find an act of more lofty generosity than this surrender of the noblest army of the Republic to one, who considered himself, and who was deemed by others, a rival--and thus to throw open to him the theatre of war where apparently the richest laurels were to be won. And he know where to look for a deed more proudly expressive of self-confidence. "I will give Moreau," said he by this act, "one hundred and fifty thousand of the most brave and disciplined soldiers of France, the victors of a hundred battles. I myself will take sixty thousand men, new recruits and the fragments of regiments which remain, and with them I will march to encounter an equally powerful enemy on a more difficult field of warfare."

Marshal Melas had spread his vast host of one hundred and forty thousand Austrians through all the strongholds of Italy, and was pressing, with tremendous energy and self-confidence upon the frontiers of France. Napoleon, instead of marching with his inexperienced troops, two-thirds of whom had never seen a shot fired in earnest, to meet the heads of the triumphant columns of Melas, resolved to climb the rugged and apparently inaccessible fastnesses of the Alps, and, descending from the clouds over path-less precipices, to fall with the sweep of the avalanche, upon their rear. It was necessary to assemble this army at some favorable point;--to gather in vast magazines its munitions of war. It was necessary that this should be done in secret, lest the Austrians, climbing to the summits of the Alps, and defending the gorges through which the troops of Napoleon would be compelled to wind their difficult and tortuous way, might render the passage utterly impossible. English and Austrian spies were prompt to communicate to the hostile powers every movement of the First Consul. Napoleon fixed upon Dijon and its vicinity as the rendezvous of his troops. He, however, adroitly and completely deceived his foes by ostentatiously announcing the very plan he intended to carry into operation.

		Maybe this world is another planet's hell. Aldous Huxley