The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864. Various
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and in Dalmatia, at the same time that it was fast approaching Moscow; and it was thought of with as much fear as hatred at Vienna and Berlin. No wonder that the world forgot or overlooked the earlier and fewer triumphs of the first Republican commanders, when dazzled by the glories that shone from Arcola, the Pyramids, Zürich, Marengo, Hohenlinden, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eckmühl, Wagram, Borodino, Lützen, Bautzen, and Dresden. But those young generals of the Republic and the Empire were sometimes found unequal to the work of contending against the old generals of the Coalitionists. Suvaroff was in his seventieth year when he defeated Macdonald at the Battle of the Trebbia, the Frenchman being but thirty-four; and a few months later he defeated Joubert, who was thirty, at Novi. Joubert was one of Bonaparte's generals in his first Italian wars, and was so conspicuous and popular that he had been selected to command the Army of Italy by the moderate reactionists, in the hope that he might there win such glory as should enable him to play the part which Bonaparte played but a few months later,—Bonaparte being then in the East, with the English fleets between him and France, so that he was considered a lost man. "The striking similarity of situation between Joubert and Bonaparte," says Madame d'Abrantes, "is most remarkable. They were of equal age, and both, in their early career, suffered a sort of disgrace; they were finally appointed to command, first, the seventeenth military division, and afterward the Army of Italy. There is in all this a curious parity of events; but death soon ended the career of one of the young heroes. That which ought to have constituted the happiness of his life was the cause of Joubert's death,—his marriage. But how could he refrain from loving the woman he espoused? Who can have forgotten Zaphirine de Montholon, her enchanting grace, her playful wit, her good humor, and her beauty?" Like another famous soldier, Joubert loved too well to love wisely. Bonaparte, who never was young, had received the command of the Army of Italy as the portion of the ex-mistress of Barras, who was seven years his senior, and, being a matter-of-fact man, he reduced his lune de miel to three days, and posted off to his work. He knew the value of time in those days, and not Cleopatra herself could have kept him from his men. Joubert, more of a man, but an inferior soldier, took his honeymoon in full measure, passing a month with his bride; and the loss of that month, if so sweet a thirty days could be called a loss, ruined him, and perhaps prevented him from becoming Emperor of the French. The enemy received reinforcements while he was so lovingly employed, and when he at length arrived on the scene of action he found that the Allies had obtained mastery of the situation. It was no longer in the power of the French to say whether they would fight or not. They had to give battle at Novi, where the tough old Russian of seventy years asserted his superiority over the héros de roman who had posted from Paris to retrieve the fortune of France, and to make his own. When he left Paris, he said to his wife, "You will see me again, dead or victorious,"—and dead he was, in less than a month. He fell early in the action, on the fifteenth of August, 1799, the very day on which Bonaparte completed his thirtieth year. Moreau took the command, but failed to turn the tide of disaster. The French are unanimous in ascribing their defeat to Joubert's delay at Paris, and it is certain that the enemy did take Alexandria and Mantua during that month's delay, and thus were enabled to add the besieging forces to their main army, so that Joubert was about to retreat to the Apennines, and to assume a defensive position, when Suvaroff forced him to accept battle. But something should be allowed for the genius of the Russian general, who was one of the great master-spirits of war, and who seldom fought without being completely victorious. He had mostly been employed against the Turks, whose military reputation was then at the lowest, or the Poles, who were too divided and depressed to do themselves and their cause justice, and therefore his character as a soldier did not stand so high as that of more than one man who was his inferior; but when, in his seventieth year, he took command in Italy, there to encounter soldiers who had beaten the armies of almost all other European nations, and who were animated by a fanatical spirit as strong as that which fired his own bosom, he showed himself to be more than equal to his position. He was not at all at fault, though brought face to face with an entirely new state of things, but acted with his accustomed vigor, marching from victory to victory, and reconquering Italy more rapidly than it had been conquered three years before by Bonaparte. When Bonaparte was destroying the Austrian armies in Italy, Suvaroff watched his operations with deep interest, and said that he must go to the West to meet the new genius, or that Bonaparte would march to the East against Russia,—a prediction, it has been said, that was fulfilled to the Frenchman's ruin. "Whether, had he encountered Bonaparte, he would have beaten him, is a question for the ingenious to argue, but which never can be settled. But one thing is certain, and that is, that Bonaparte never encountered an opponent of that determined and energetic character which belonged to Suvaroff until his latter days, and then his fall was rapid and his ruin utter. That Suvaroff failed in Switzerland, to which country he had been transferred from Italy, does not at all impeach his character for generalship. His failure was due partly to the faults of others, and partly to circumstances. Switzerland was to him what Russia became to Napoleon in 1812. Massena's victory at Zürich, in which half of Korsakoff's army was destroyed, rendered Russian failure in the campaign inevitable. All the genius in the world, on that field of action, could not have done anything that should have compensated for so terrible a calamity. Zürich saved France far more than did Marengo, and it is to be noted that it was fought and won by the oldest of all the able men who figure in history as Napoleon's Marshals. There were some of the Marshals who were older than Massena, but they were not men of superior talents. Massena was forty-one when he defeated Korsakoff, and he was a veteran soldier when the Revolutionary wars began.
The three commanders who did most to break down Napoleon's power, and to bring about his overthrow, namely,—Benningsen, and Kutusoff, and Blücher,—were all old men; and the two last-named were very old men. It would be absurd to call either of them a great commander, but it is indisputable that they all had great parts in great wars. Benningsen can scarcely be called a good general of the second class, and he is mostly spoken of as a foolish braggart and boaster; but it is a fact that he did some things at an important time which indicated his possession of qualities that were highly desirable in a general who was bound to act against Napoleon. Having, in 1807, obtained command of the Russian army in Poland, he had what the French considered the consummate impudence to take the offensive against the Emperor, and compelled him to mass his forces, and to fight in the dead of winter, and a Polish winter to boot, in which all that is not ice and snow is mud. True, Napoleon would have made him pay dear for his boldness, had there not occurred one or two of those accidents which often spoil the best-laid plans of war; but as it was, the butcherly Battle of Eylau was fought, both parties, and each with some show of reason, claiming the victory. Had the Russians acted on the night after Eylau as the English acted on the night after Flodden, and remained on the field, the world would have pronounced them victorious, and the French Empire might have been shorn of its proportions, and perhaps have fallen, seven years in advance of its time; but they retreated, and thus the French made a fair claim to the honors of the engagement, though virtually beaten in the fight. Benningsen boasted tremendously, and as there were men enough to believe what he said to be true, because they wished it to be true, and as he had behaved well on some previous occasions, his reputation was vastly raised, and his name was in all mouths and on all pens. If the reader will take the trouble to look over a file of some Federal journal of 1807, he will find Benningsen as frequently and as warmly praised as Lee or Stonewall Jackson is (or was) praised by English journals in 1863,—for the Federalists hated Napoleon as bitterly as the English hate us, and read of Eylau with as much unction as the English of to-day read of the American reverses at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, while Austerlitz and Friedland pleased our Federalists about as well as Donelson and Pulaski please the English of these times. A few months after Eylau, Benningsen repulsed an attack which Napoleon imprudently made on his intrenched camp at Heilsberg, which placed another feather in his cap; nor did the smashing defeat he met with four days later, at Friedland, lessen his reputation. The world is slow to think poorly of a man who has done some clever things. We have seen how it was with the late Stonewall Jackson, concerning whom most men spoke as if he had never known defeat, though it is, or it should be, notorious, that he was as often beaten as successful, that more than once he had to fly with wind-like swiftness to escape personal destruction, and that on one occasion he was saved from ruin only because of an exhibition on our side of more than a usual amount of stupidity. But he had repeatedly showed some of the best qualities of a dashing general, and all else was overlooked in admiration of the skill and the