Napoleon[25] says of his officers at this period:—
“The character of several of the generals had been weakened by the events of 1814; they had lost something of that audacity, of that resolution, of that confidence, which had * * * contributed so much to the successes of former campaigns.”[26]
Charras has a passage to the same effect:[27]—
“Enriched, systematically corrupted, by the prodigality of the Empire; enervated by luxury and pleasure; fatigued by twenty years of war, several among the generals would have preferred the tranquil life of their own homes to the labors of the march and the discomforts of the bivouac. They had tasted of peace for a whole year; they looked back on that period with regret. Some among them had met with rude defeats while in independent commands, and they remembered them well. Others, shaken by the cruel recollections of 1813 and 1814, despaired of the issue of the war in view of the enormous armies of the coalition and of the feebleness of our means of defence. All remained brave, intrepid; but all had not preserved the activity, the resolution, the audacity of their early days. Their _moral_ was no longer equal to sustaining a reverse.”
These statements may very possibly be somewhat too highly colored, but there is little doubt that there was a good deal of truth in them. It is significant that they are made by writers who wrote of the campaign from opposite points of view. Napoleon in his narrative of the campaign sought to show that he was not the sole or even the chief cause of its failure, and claimed that his orders were not carried out with the spirit and energy which his lieutenants had once possessed. Charras on the other hand, throughout his history, is uniformly harsh in his comments on the Emperor’s conduct, and insists that he was greatly lacking both in physical strength and in energy of character. That both Charras and Napoleon, therefore, state that the higher officers of the army were not up to the mark of their earlier campaigns renders it very probable that such was the actual fact.
The importance of this fact is to be seen in its true light only when we bear in mind to how great an extent Napoleon’s campaigns required for their successful conduct qualities in his lieutenants by no means universally found even in respectable corps-commanders,—qualities far in excess of those commonly demanded. Napoleon was not content with mere obedience; he expected from his chief officers an intelligent comprehension of his views, and a vigorous and daring execution of the parts assigned to them,—a sort of coöperation, in fact. The movements with which the campaign of 1809 opened will best illustrate, perhaps, what is here referred to. It is not too much to say that without this hearty and intelligent work on the part of his lieutenants many of Napoleon’s most brilliant and successful campaigns could never have been carried out. We shall see in the course of this narrative how much he expected from Ney and Grouchy. Hence any inability or unwillingness on the part of the leading officers to render this assistance must be fully taken into account when we are seeking to understand this campaign of Waterloo.