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It was not Clive merely who gained India for England. French incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought on our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are those bulletins of his! After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration, assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!" and so on till Waterloo.
Yet it is in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland.
And the campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resident in masses of men.
For the sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at Eyiau or at Gravelotte?
Eyiau and Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben, illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in defence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal.
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