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CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FIRST SAXON CAMPAIGN

Despite the loss of the most splendid army ever marshalled by man, Napoleon abated no whit of his resolve to dominate Germany and dictate terms to Russia.  At Warsaw, in his retreat, he informed De Pradt that there was but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, that is, from the advance on Moscow to the retreat.  At Dresden he called on his allies, Austria and Prussia, to repel the Russians; and at Paris he strained every nerve to call the youth of the Empire to arms.  The summons met with a ready response:  he had but to stamp his foot when the news from East Prussia looked ominous, and an array of 350,000 conscripts was promised by the Senate (January 10th).

In truth, his genius had enthralled the mind of France.  The magnificence of his aims, his hitherto triumphant energy, and the glamour of his European supremacy had called forth all the faculties of the French and Italian peoples, and set them pulsating with ecstatic activity.  He knew by instinct all the intricacies of their being, which his genius controlled with the easy decisiveness of a master-key.  The rude shock of the Russian disaster served but to emphasize the thoroughness of his domination, and the dumb trustfulness of his forty-three millions of subjects.

And yet their patience might well have been exhausted.  His military needs had long ago drawn in levies the year before they were legally liable; but the mighty swirl of the Moscow campaign now sucked 150,000 lads of under twenty years of age into the devouring vortex.  In the Dutch and German provinces of his Empire the number of those who evaded the clutches of the conscription was very large.  In fact, the number of “refractory conscripts” in the whole realm amounted to 40,000.  Large bands of them ranged the woods of Brittany and La Vendee, until mobile columns were sent to sweep them into the barracks.

But in nearly the whole of France (Proper), Napoleon’s name was still an unfailing talisman, appealing as it did to the two strongest instincts of the Celt, the clinging to the soil and the passion for heroic enterprise.  Thus it came about that the peasantry gave up their sons to be “food for cannon” with the same docility that was shown by soldiers who sank death-stricken into a snowy bed with no word of reproach to the author of their miseries.  A like obsequiousness was shown by the officials and legislators of France, who meekly listened to the Emperor’s reproaches for their weakness in the Malet affair, and heard with mild surprise his denunciation against republican idealogy—­the cloudy metaphysics to which all the misfortunes of our fair France may be attributed.  No tongue dared to utter the retort which must have fermented in every brain.[281]