Waterloo

Excerpt from Chapter One

In 1815 the Emperor was no longer a lean, sinewy, tireless, eternally vigilant human tiger—the Napoleon of Rivoli and Marengo. He was no longer the consummate General-in-Chief of Austerlitz and Wagram. The mysterious lethargy which had overwhelmed him at the critical hour of Borodino, when he withheld the order for the Old Guard to charge and convert the Russian defeat into a decisive disaster, had been the first visit of the Evil Genius which was to come again. The strange loss of the power to decide between two totally different lines of action, which, at the Château Düben had kept him idle two days, lolling on a sofa, or sitting at his writing-table tracing on the paper big school-boy letters, was to become a recurrent calamity, puzzling all who knew him, and paralyzing the action of his lieutenants in the most critical emergencies'.

At Leipsic the reins had fallen from his hands; only one permanent bridge over the deep river in his rear had been provided to let him out of the death trap; and when the strong currents of the rout tore through the frantic city, the great Napoleon drifted with the furious tide, whistling vacantly.

The same unexplainable eclipse of genius, which General E. P. Alexander described as occurring to Stonewall Jackson, in the Malvern Hill movements of our Civil War, happened to the French Emperor, time and again, after that first collapse at Borodino.

In Spain he ordered a madly reckless charge of his Polish Light Cavalry against the heights of Sommo Sierra, where the Spanish army was entrenched and where the position easily admitted of successful flanking, got his best troops wastefully butchered—and could not afterward remember who gave the order to charge!

In Dresden, in 1813, he had won a brilliant victory which needed only to be ruthlessly pushed; and he was pushing it with all his tremendous driving power when, in the twinkle of an eye, his Evil Genius descended upon him, took his strength away...

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Audiobook: 9 April 2025