The Man of Destiny | Page 5

a devoted army led by a general who regards loot as the natural right
of the soldier. I am such a general. En avant, mes enfants!" The result
has entirely justified him. The army conquers Italy as the locusts
conquered Cyprus. They fight all day and march all night, covering
impossible distances and appearing in incredible places, not because
every soldier carries a field marshal's baton in his knapsack, but
because he hopes to carry at least half a dozen silver forks there next
day.

It must be understood, by the way, that the French army does not make
war on the Italians. It is there to rescue them from the tyranny of their
Austrian conquerors, and confer republican institutions on them; so that
in incidentally looting them, it merely makes free with the property of
its friends, who ought to be grateful to it, and perhaps would be if
ingratitude were not the proverbial failing of their country. The
Austrians, whom it fights, are a thoroughly respectable regular army,
well disciplined, commanded by gentlemen trained and versed in the
art of war: at the head of them Beaulieu, practising the classic art of
war under orders from Vienna, and getting horribly beaten by Napoleon,
who acts on his own responsibility in defiance of professional
precedents or orders from Paris. Even when the Austrians win a battle,
all that is necessary is to wait until their routine obliges them to return
to their quarters for afternoon tea, so to speak, and win it back again
from them: a course pursued later on with brilliant success at Marengo.
On the whole, with his foe handicapped by Austrian statesmanship,
classic generalship, and the exigencies of the aristocratic social
structure of Viennese society, Napoleon finds it possible to be
irresistible without working heroic miracles. The world, however, likes
miracles and heroes, and is quite incapable of conceiving the action of
such forces as academic militarism or Viennese drawing-roomism.
Hence it has already begun to manufacture "L'Empereur," and thus to
make it difficult for the romanticists of a hundred years later to credit
the little scene now in question at Tavazzano as aforesaid.
The best quarters at Tavazzano are at a little inn, the first house reached
by travellers passing through the place from Milan to Lodi. It stands in
a vineyard; and its principal room, a pleasant refuge from the summer
heat, is open so widely at the back to this vineyard that it is almost a
large veranda. The bolder children, much excited by the alarums and
excursions of the past few days, and by an irruption of French troops at
six o'clock, know that the French commander has quartered himself in
this room, and are divided between a craving to peep in at the front
windows and a mortal terror of the sentinel, a young gentleman-soldier,
who, having no natural moustache, has had a most ferocious one
painted on his face with boot blacking by his sergeant. As his heavy
uniform, like all the uniforms of that day, is designed for parade
without the least reference to his health or comfort, he perspires

profusely in the sun; and his painted moustache has run in little streaks
down his chin and round his neck except where it has dried in stiff
japanned flakes, and had its sweeping outline chipped off in grotesque
little bays and headlands, making him unspeakably ridiculous in the
eye of History a hundred years later, but monstrous and horrible to the
contemporary north Italian infant, to whom nothing would seem more
natural than that he should relieve the monotony of his guard by
pitchforking a stray child up on his bayonet, and eating it uncooked.
Nevertheless one girl of bad character, in whom an instinct of privilege
with soldiers is already dawning, does peep in at the safest window for
a moment, before a glance and a clink from the sentinel sends her
flying. Most of what she sees she has seen before: the vineyard at the
back, with the old winepress and a cart among the vines; the door close
down on her right leading to the inn entry; the landlord's best sideboard,
now in full action for dinner, further back on the same side; the
fireplace on the other side, with a couch near it, and another door,
leading to the inner rooms, between it and the vineyard; and the table in
the middle with its repast of Milanese risotto, cheese, grapes, bread,
olives, and a big wickered flask of red wine.
The landlord, Giuseppe Grandi, is also no novelty. He is a swarthy,
vivacious, shrewdly cheerful, black-curled, bullet headed, grinning
little man of 40. Naturally an excellent host, he is in quite special spirits
this evening at his good fortune in having the French commander as his