NAPOLEON, FINDING HIS PROFFERS OF peace rejected by England with contumely and scorn, and declined by Austria, now prepared, with his wonted energy, to repel the assaults of the allies. As he sat in his cabinet at the Tuileries, the thunders of their unrelenting onset came rolling in upon his ear from all the frontiers of France. The hostile fleets of England swept the channel, utterly annihilating the commerce of the Republic, landing regiments of armed emigrants upon her coast, furnishing money and munitions of war to rouse the partisans of the Bourbons to civil conflict, and throwing balls and shells into every unprotected town. On the northern frontier, Marshal Kray, came thundering down, through the black Forest, to the banks of the Rhine, with a mighty host of 150,000 men, like locust legions, to pour into all the northern provinces of France. Artillery of the heaviest calibre and a magnificent array of cavalry accompanied this apparently invincible army. In Italy, Melas, another Austrian marshal, with 140,000 men, aided by the whole force of the British navy, was rushing upon the eastern and southern borders of the Republic. The French troops, disheartened by defeat, had fled before their foes over the Alps, or were eating their horses and their boots in the cities where they were besieged. From almost every promontory on the coast of the Republic, washed by the Channel, or the Mediterranean, the eye could discern English frigates, black and threatening, holding all France in a state of blockade.
One always finds a certain pleasure in doing that which he can do well. Napoleon was fully conscious of his military genius. He had, in behalf of bleeding humanity, implored peace in vain. He now, with alacrity and with joy, roused himself to inflict blows that should be felt upon his multitudinous enemies. With such tremendous energy did he do this, that he received from his antagonists the most complimentary sobriquet of the one hundred thousand men . Wherever Napoleon made his appearance in the field, his presence alone was considered equivalent to that force.
The following proclamation rang like a trumpet charge over the hills and valleys of France. “Frenchmen! You have been anxious for peace. Your government has desired it with still greater ardor. Its first efforts, its most constant wishes, have been for its attainment. The English ministry has exposed the secret of its iniquitous policy. It wishes to dismember France, to destroy its commerce, and either to erase it from the map of Europe, or to degrade it to a secondary power. England is willing to embroil all the nations of the Continent in hostility with each other, that she may enrich herself with their spoils, and gain possession of the trade of the world. For the attainment of this object she scatters her gold, becomes prodigal of her promises, and multiplies her intrigues.”
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.
Of course, the allies thought that this was a foolish attempt to draw their attention from the real point of attack. The more they ridiculed the imaginary army at Dijon, the more loudly did Napoleon reiterate his commands for battalions and magazines to be collected there. The spies who visited Dijon, reported that but a few regiments were assembled in that place, and that the announcement was clearly a very weak pretense to deceive. The print shops of London and Vienna were filled with caricatures of the army of the First Consul of Dijon. The English especially made themselves very merry with Napolcon’s grand army to scale the Alps. It was believed that the energies the Republic were utterly exhausted in raising the force which was given to Moreau. One of the caricatures represented the army as consisting of a boy, dressed in his father’s clothes, shouldering a musket, which he could with difficulty lift, and eating a piece of gingerbread, and an old man with one arm and a wooden leg. The artillery consisted of a rusty blunderbuss. This derision was just what Napoleon desired. Though dwelling in the shadow of that mysterious melancholy, which ever enveloped his spirit, he must have enjoyed in the deep recesses of his soul, the majestic movements of his plans.
On the eastern frontiers of France there surge up, from luxuriant meadows and vine-clad fields and hill sides, the majestic ranges of the Alps, piercing the clouds and soaring with glittering pinnacles, into the region of perpetual ice and snow. Vast spurs of the mountains extend on each side, opening gloomy gorges and frightful detiles, through which foaming torrents rush impetuously, walled in by almost precipitous cliffs, whose summits, crowned with melancholy firs, are inaccessible to the foot of man. The principal pass over this enormous ridge was that of the Great St. Bernard. The traveler, accompanied by a guide, and mounted on a mule, slowly and painfully ascended a steep and rugged path, now crossing a narrow bridge, spanning a fathomless abyss, again creeping along the edge of a precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir tops in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow, that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy rocks would precipitate the traveler, a mangled corpse, a thousand feet upon the fragments of granite in the gulf beneath. As higher and higher he climbed these wild and rugged and cloud-enveloped paths, borne by the unerring instinct of the faithful mule, his steps were often arrested by the roar of the avalanche and he gazed appalled upon its resistless rush, as rocks, and trees, and earth, and snow, and ice, swept by him with awful and resistless desolation, far down into the dimly discerned torrents which rushed beneath his feet. At God’s bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel’s trump could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding sheet. Having toiled two days through such scenes of desolation and peril, the adventurous traveler stands upon the summit of the pass, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, two thousand feet higher than the crest of Mount Washington, our own mountain monarch. This summit, over which the path winds, consists of a small level plain, surrounded by mountains of snow of still higher elevation.
The scene here presented is inexpressibly gloomy and appailing. Nature in these wild regions assumes her most severe and sombre aspect. As one emerges from the precipitous and craggy ascent, upon this Valley of Desolation, as it is emphatically called, the Convent of St. Bernard presents itself to the view. This cheerless abode, the highest spot of inhabited ground in Europe, has been tenanted, for more than a thousand years, by a succession of joyless and self-denying monks, who, in that frigid retreat of granite and ice, endeavor to serve their Maker, by rescuing bewildered travelers from the destruction with which they are ever threatened to be overwhelmed by the storms, which battle against them. In the middle of this ice-bound valley, lies a lake, clear, dark, and cold, whose depths, even in mid-summer, reflect the eternal glaciers which soar sublimely around. The descent to the plains of Italy is even more precipitous and dangerous than the ascent from the green pastures of France. No vegetation adorns these dismal and storm-swept cliffs of granite and of ice. Even the pinion of the eagle fails in its rarified air, and the chamois ventures not to climb its steep and slippery crags. No human beings are ever to be seen on these bleak summits, except the few shivering travelers, who tarry for an hour to receive the hospitality of the convent, and the hooded monks, wrapped in thick and coarse garments, which their staves and their dogs, groping through the storms of sleet and snow. Even the wood which burns with frugal faintness on the hearths, is borne, in painful burdens, up the mountain sides, upon the shoulders of the monks.
Such was the barrier which Napoleon intended to surmount, that he might fall upon the rear of the Austrians, who were battering down the walls of Genoa, where Massena was besieged, and who were thundering, flushed with victory, at the very gates of Nice. Over this wild mountain pass, where the mule could with difficulty tread, and where no wheel had ever rolled, or by any possibility could roll, Napoleon contemplated transporting an army of sixty thousand men, with ponderous artillery and tons of cannon balls, and baggage, and all the bulky munitions of war. England and Austria laughed the idea to scorn. The achievement of such an enterprise was apparently impossible. Napoleon, however was as skillful in the arrangement of the minutest details, as in the conception of the grandest combinations. Though he resolved to take the mass of his army, forty thousand strong, across the pass of the Great St. Bernard, yet to distract the attention of the Austrians, he arranged also to send small divisions across the passes of Saint Gothard, Little St. Bernard, and Mount Cenis. He would thus accumulate suddenly, and to the utter amazement of the enemy, a body of sixty-five thousand men upon the plain of Italy. This force, descending, like an apparition from the clouds, in the rear of the Austrian army, headed by Napoleon, and cutting off all communication with Austria, might indeed strike a panic into the hearts of the assailants of France.
The troops were collected in various places in the vicinity of Dijon, ready at a moment’s warning to assemble at the point of rendezvous, and with a rush to enter the defile. Immense magazines of wheat, biscuit, and oats had been noiselessly collected in different places. Large sums of specie had been forwarded, to hire the services of every peasant, with his mule, who inhabited the valleys among the mountains. Mechanic shops, as by magic, suddenly rose along the path, well supplied with skillful artisans, to repair all damages, to dismount the artillery, to divide the gun-carriages and the baggage-wagons into fragments, that they might be transported, on the backs of men and mules, over the steep and rugged way. For the ammunition a vast number of small boxes were prepared, which could easily be packed upon the mules. A second company of mechanics, with camp forges, had been provided to cross the mountain with the first division, and rear their shops upon the plain on the other side, to mend the broken harness, to reconstruct the carriages, and remount the pieces. On each side of the mountain a hospital was established and supplied with every comfort for the sick and the wounded. The foresight of Napoleon extended even to sending, at the very last moment, to the convent upon the summit, an immense quantity of bread, cheese, and wine. Each soldier, to his surprise, was to find, as he arrived at the summit, exhausted with Herculean toil, a generous slice of bread and cheese with a refreshing cup of wine, presented to him by the monks. All these minute details Napoleon arranged, while at the same time he was doing the work of a dozen energetic men, in reorganizing the whole structure of society in France. If toil pays for greatness, Napoleon purchased the renown which he attained. And yet his body and his mind were so constituted that this sleepless activity was to him a pleasure.
The appointed hour at last arrived. On the 7th of May, 1800, Napoleon entered his carriage at the Tuileries, saying, “Good-by, my dear Josephine! I must go to Italy. I shall not forget you, and I will not be absent long.” At a word, the whole majestic array was in motion. Like a meteor he swept over France. He arrived at the foot of the mountains. The troops and all the paraphernalia of war were on the spot at the designated hour. Napoleon immediately appointed a very careful inspection. Every foot soldier and every horseman passed before his scrutinizing eye. If a shoe was ragged, or a jacket torn, or a musket injured, the defect was immediately repaired. His glowing words inspired the troops with the ardor which was burning in his own bosom. The genius of the First Consul was infused into the mighty host. Each man exerted himself to the utmost. The eye of their chief was every where, and his cheering voice roused the army to almost super-human exertions. Two skillful engineers had been sent to explore the path, and to do what could be done in the removal of obstructions. They returned with an appalling recitasl of the apparently insurmountable difficulties of the way. “Is it possible ,” inquired Napoleon, “to cross the pass?” “Perhaps,” was the hesitating reply, “it is within the limits of possibility .” “Forward, then,” was the energetic response. Each man was required to carry, besides his arms, food for several days and a large quantity of cartridges. As the sinuosities of the precipitous path could only be trod in single file, the heavy wheels were taken from the carriages, and each, slung upon a pole, was borne by two men. The task for the foot soldiers was far less than for the horsemen. The latter clambered up on foot, dragging their horses after them. The descent was very dangerous. The dragoon, in the steep and narrow path, was compelled to walk before his horse. At the least stumble he was exposed to being plunged headlong into the abysses yawning before him. In this way many horses and several riders perished. To transport the heavy cannon and howitzers pine logs were split in the centre, the parts hollowed out, and the guns sunks into grooves. A long string of mules, in single file, were attached to the ponderous machines of war, to drag them up the slippery ascent. The mules soon began to fail, and then the men, with hearty good-will, brought their own shoulders into the harness—a hundred men to a single gun. Napoleon offered the peasants two hundred dollars for the transporation of a twelve-pounder over the pass. The love of gain was not strong enough to lure them to such tremendous exertions. But Napoleon’s fascination over the hearts of his soldiers was a more powerful impulse. With shouts of encouragement they toiled at the cables, successive bands of a hundred men relieving each other every half hour. High on those craggy steeps, gleaming through the midst, the glittering bands of armed men, like phantoms appeared. The eagle wheeled and screamed beneath their feet. The mountain goat, affrighted by the unwonted spectacle, bounded away, and paused in bold relief upon the cliff to gaze upon the martial array which so suddenly had peopled the solitude.
When they approached any spot of very especial difficulty the trumpets sounded the charge, which re-echoed, with sublime reverberations, from pinnacle to pinnacle of rock and ice. Animated by these bugle notes the soldiers strained every nerve as if rushing upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. “We are not toiling for money,” said they, “but for your approval, and to share your glory.”
Napoleon with his wonderful tact had introduced a slight change into the artillery service, which was productive of immense moral results. The gun carriages had heretofore been driven by mere wagoners, who, being considered not as soldiers, but as servants, and sharing not in the glory of victory, were uninfluenced by any sentiment of honor. At the first approach of danger, they were ready to cut their traces and gallop from the field, leaving their cannon in the hands of the enemy. Napoleon said, “The cannoneer who brings his piece into action, performs as valuable a service as the cannoneer who works it. He runs the same danger, and requires the same moral stimulus, which is the sense of honor.” He therefore converted the artillery drivers into soldiers, and clothed them in the uniform of their respective regiments. They constituted twelve thousand horsemen who were animated with as much pride in carrying their pieces into action, and in bringing them off with rapidity and safety, as the gunners felt in loading, directing, and discharging them. It was now the great glory of these men to take care of their guns. They loved, tenderly, the merciless monsters. They lavished caresses and terms of endearment upon the glittering, polished, death-dealing brass. The heart of man is a strange enigma. Even when most degraded it needs something to love. These blood-stained soldiers, brutalized by vice, amidst all the honors of battle, lovingly fondled the murderous machines of war, responding to the appeal “call me pet names, dearest.” The unrelenting gun was the stern cannoneer’s lady love. He kissed it with unwashed, mustached lip. In rude and rough devotion he was ready to die rather than abandon the only object of his idolatrous homage. Consistently he baptized the life-devouring monster with blood. Affectionately he named it Mary, Emma, Lizzie. In crossing he Alps, dark night came on as some cannoneers were floundering through drifts of snow, toiling at their gun. They would not leave the gun alone in the cold storm to seek for themselves a dry bivouac; but, like brothers guarding a sister, they threw themselves, for the night, upon the bleak and frozen snow, by its side. It was the genius of Napoleon which thus penetrated these mysterious depths of the human soul, and called to his aid those mighty energies. “It is nothing but imagination,” said one once to Napoleon. “Nothing but imagination!” he rejoined. “Imagination rules the world.”
When they arrived at the summit each soldier found, to his surprise and joy, the abundant comforts which Napoleon’s kind care had provided. One would have anticipated there a scene of terrible confusion. To feed an army of forty thousand hungry men is not a light undertaking. Yet every thing was so carefully arranged, and the influence of Napoleon so boundless, that not a soldier left the ranks. Each man received his slice of bread and cheese, and quaffed his cup of wine, and passed on. It was a point of honor for no one to stop. Whatever obstructions were in the way were to be at all hazards surmounted, that the long file, extending nearly twenty miles, might not be thrown into confusion. The descent was more perilous than the ascent. But fortune seemed to smile. The sky was clear, the weather delightful, and in four days the whole army was reassembled on the plains of Italy.
Napoleon had sent Bertlier forward to receive the division, and to superintend all necessary repairs, while he himself remained to press forward the mighty host. He was the last man to cross the mountains. Seated upon a mule, with a young peasant for his guide, slowly and thoughtfully he ascended those silent solitudes. He was dressed in the gray great coat which he always wore. Art pictured him bounding up the cliff, proudly mounted on a prancing charger. But truth presents him in an attitude more simple and more sublime. Even the young peasant who acted as his guide was entirely unconscious of the distinguished rank of the plain traveler whose steps he was conducting. Much of the way Napoleon was silent, abstracted in thoughts. And yet he found time for human sympathy. He drew from his young and artless guide the secrets of his heart. The young peasant was sincere and virtuous. He loved a fair maid among the mountains. She loved him. It was his heart’s great desire to have her for his own. He was poor and had neither house nor land to support a family. Napoleon struggling with all his energies against combined England and Austria, and with all the cares of an army, on the march to meet one hundred and twenty thousand foes, crowding his mind, with pensive sympathy won the confidence of his companion and elicited this artless recital of love and desire. As Napoleon dismissed his guide, with an ample reward, he drew from his pocket a pencil and upon a loose piece of paper wrote a few lines, which he requested the young man to give, on his return, to the Administrator of the Army, upon the other side. When the guide returned, and presented the note, he found, to his unbounded surprise and delight, that he had conducted Napoleon over the mountains; and that Napoleon had given him a field and a house. He was thus enabled to be married, and to realize all the dreams of his modest ambition. Generous impulses must have been instinctive in a heart, which in an hour so fraught with mighty events, could turn from the toils of empire and of war, to find refreshment in sympathizing with a peasant’s love. This young man but recently died, having passed his quiet life in the enjoyment of the field and the cottage which had been given him by the ruler of the world.
The army now pressed forward, with great alacrity, along the banks of the Aosta. They were threading a beautiful valley, rich in verdure and blooming beneath the sun of early spring. Cottages, vineyards, and orchards, in full bloom, embellished their path, while upon each side of them rose, in majestic swell, the fir-clad sides of the mountains. The Austrians pressing against the frontiers of France, had no conception of the storm which had so suddenly gathered, and which was, with resistless sweep, approaching their rear. The French soldiers, elated with the Herculean achievement they had accomplished, and full of confidence in their leader, pressed gayly on. But the valley before them began to grow more and more narrow. The mountains, on either side, rose more precipitous and craggy. The Aosta, crowded into a narrow channel, rushed foaming over the rocks, leaving barely room for a road along the side of the mountain. Suddenly the march of the whole army was arrested by a fort, built upon an inaccessible rock, which rose pyramidally from the bed of the stream. Bristling cannon, skillfully arranged on well-constructed bastions, swept the pass, and rendered further advance apparently impossible. Rapidly the tidings of this unexpected obstruction spread from the van to the rear. Napoleon immediately hastened to the front ranks. Climbing the mountain opposite the fort, by a goat path, he threw himself down upon the ground, when a few bushes concealed his person from the shot of the enemy, and with his telescope long and carefully examined the fort and the surrounding crags. He perceived one elevated spot, far above the fort, where a cannon might by possibility be drawn. From that position its shot could be plunged upon the unprotected bastions below. Upon the face of the opposite cliff, far beyond the reach of cannon-balls, he discerned a narrow shelf in the rock by which he thought it possible that a man could pass. The march was immediately commenced, in single file, along this giddy ridge. ………. And even the horses, insured to the terrors of the Great St. Bernard, were led by their riders upon the narrow path, which a horse’s hoof had never trod before, and probably will never tread again. The Austrians, in the fort, had the mortification of seeing thirty-five thousand soldiers, with numerous horses, defile along this airy line, as if adhering to the side of the rock. But neither bullet nor ball could harm them.
Napoleon ascended this mountain ridge, and upon its summit, quite exhausted with days and nights of sleeplessness and toil, laid himself down, in the shadow of the rock, and fell asleep. The long line filed carefully and silently by, each soldier hushing his comrade, that the repose of their beloved chieftain might not be disturbed. It was an interesting spectacle, to witness the tender affection, beaming from the countenances of these bronzed and war-worn veterans, as every foot trod softly, and each eye, in passing, was riveted upon the slender form, and upon the pale and wasted cheek of the sleeping Napoleon.
The artillery could by no possibility be thus transported; and an army without artillery is a soldier without weapons. The Austrian commander wrote to Melas, that he had seen an army of thirty-five thousand men and four thousand horse creeping by the fort, along the face of Mount Albaredo. He assured the commander-in-chief, however, that not one single piece of artillery had passed or could pass beneath the guns of his fortress. When he was writing this letter, already had one half of the cannon and ammunition of the army been conveyed by the fort, and were safely and rapidly proceeding on their way down the valley. In the darkness of the night trusty men, with great caution and silence, strewed hay and straw upon the road. The wheels of the lumbering carriages were carefully bound with cloths and wisps of straw, and, with axles well oiled, were drawn by the hands of these picked men, beneath the very walls of the fortress, and within half pistol-shot of its guns. In two nights the artillery and the baggage-trains were thus passed along, and in a few days the fort itself was compelled to surrender.