On "Napoleon", by Andrew Roberts. Spolier Spoiler: Napoleon Still Loses the War

So I recently read Andrew Robert's recent book on Napoleon Bonaparte, aptly titled Napoleon.  Not Napoleon: A Life, or Napoleon: His Life and Times.  No.  Just Napoleon.

It was a very well written book, one that was almost a joy to read, easy to pick up off the nightstand.  It seems like its one of those books that everyone - or at least a lot of people -  should read; I was therefore surprised that no one stopped me as I lugged it around the Atlanta airport on the way to Denver a couple of weeks ago.  I thought that someone, perhaps a tall, tanned blonde with green eyes, would ease into the seat next to me on the plane and say "Oh, wow, is that Napoleon by Roberts?  What do you think of it?  Oh, I loved it.  Chardonay?  I always buy too much.  Where is your glass....there we are.  So, what's your favorite battle?  Mine is Marengo.  I just love the way the name rolls of the tongue. Marengo....Marengo....Marengo...."

Napoleon:  A man....

Or perhaps a portly British gentleman with horny rimmed glasses, smelling of tobacco and bacon.  He plops down in the seat next to me and says "Napoleon?  Do you like it?  I thought it was quite stimulating.  Fancy a Figgy Newton?  I always buy too many.  Damn things are just so good, and you can't buy these across the pond.  That and Chick-Fil-A sandwiches. MMMM God!  So good!"

But no.  Nope, nope nope.  I instead had to take to announcing to my exasperated colleagues at work where in life Napoleon happened to be as I read along.  Here, for instance, he is a young man, losing his virginity to a prostitute while he writes over wrought stories and novels full of just romantic fluff and horrific violence....if he was a student today he'd have probably been flagged as a threat and forced to undergo counseling and heavy meds.  He would have ended up studying chartered accountancy and living a comfortable life in the burbs....but every so often in the morning before the wife and kids woke up he'd break out the Risk board and play a lengthy game alone, trying to take over the world....

But no again.  Napoleon grew up in the late 1700s and while literature certainly wasn't his balliwick, soldiering was.  You could also say balliwick back then without getting looked at like an odd 'un, though I am pretty sure I remember Roberts using it once himself in his book.  Anyways, when Napoleon was first commissioned in the Artillery he spent most of his time away from his regiment and back home in Corsica, trying to steer her towards the revolutionary ideals of France.  But the Coriscan leadership did not agree, and he and his family were banished in 1793 to France. Napoleon threw his lot in with the Tricolor.

His rise to the rank of General, commanding the Army of Italy at the young age of 26 was due to a combination of luck and skill.  He always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and he was skillful enough (and occasionally ruthless enough) to make the most of all opportunities.  He did so when he commanded the Army of Italy, when through the help of a series of training montages he took the Army from a bunch of ragtag ragamuffins and made it into the greatest fighting force in the world, beating the heavily favored Austrians in the Championship Game thanks in part to deployment of such tactical innovations as "The Flying V".  The fat kid also turned out to be a hell of a goalie.  Quack!  Quack!  Quack!  Quack!

The rest as the say, is history.

I learned a lot.  This book dispelled a lot of myths for me about Napoleon and framed him in a new light.  I always imagined him of something of a ruthless dictator who ruled Europe with an iron fist.  Not so.  Ruthless he could be, but he was no more ruthless than any of the regimes he fought against, and there were times when by comparison he was positively enlightened.  His ambition and arrogance, certainly, were his least admirable traits - and yet without them its hard to imaging him accomplishing half of what he did.

....and his (first) wife....

I also imagined that his marriage to Josephine was an unhappy one - not necessarily.  Josephine saw the
match as advantageous to her and he was bonked over the head by her beauty and, I think, her reputation (her claim to fame was that she performed "zig-zags" in bed, though what those were Roberts was unable to deduce). It was tumultuous - he always loved her desperately but she did not reciprocate at first.  They cheated on each other relentlessly.  But they grew in love and even after they divorced so Napoleon could sire an heir with Marie Louise of Austria (that worked out well, he said sarcastically) they remained friendly.

Equally interesting was Roberts' analysis of the Waterloo campaign.  Most books I have read on the subject seem to make it sound like a near run thing (to paraphrase Wellington himself).  Roberts though seems to believe that Waterloo, from the French perspective, was the worst lead battle of the Napoleonic wars.  Napoleon himself was lethargic, waiting too long to pursue the beaten Prussians after the Battle of Ligny, allowing them to escape to fight, crucially, another day.  Then, without having fixed the Prussians in place, he keeps his army divided, hoping that he can brush Wellington aside despite the fact that the Duke was fighting on ground of his own choosing and was excellent in defense (Napoleon, interestingly, was not, leading better in attack).  He starts the attack too late (on the advice of his artillery generals; it had rained hard the day before, and allowing the ground to dry some would allow the artillery to be better placed and render it more effective).  Even despite all this, there is perhaps a chance for France to win - but the attacks through the day lack support and when France maybe does have one last chance to seize the day by committing the Imperial Guard at a crucial moment Napoleon doesn't act fast enough.

....and his hat.

Roberts notes that when Waterloo is war gamed (even without Grouchy's corps) the French usually win - they attack earlier in the day and don't keep feeding troops into the fight for Hougemont.  Wellington is broken before the Prussians arrive, and Napoleon is the one living on to fight another day.

Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

In that way, though, The Battle is like a symphony.  Just as two orchestras have different interpretations of Beethoven's 6th, so it is that no two authors seem to represent it in quite the same way, and no two engineers who dabble in military history see the same reasons for the loss (really, I got into a brief but heated argument about it sitting in Repair 3 of CVN78).

And that, my friends, is the beauty of history.

That, and Josephine de Beauharnais's Zig Zags. Really, what could those be??   Maybe.....