had hesitated and lost his great opportunity
at Borodino. They said that he had frightfully miscalculated at
Moscow, that his judgment had been grievously at fault in the whole
Russian campaign. They said that he had sat idle during a long day
when the fortunes of his empire might have been settled at Bautzen.
They said that, overcome by physical weariness, he had failed to grasp
his great opportunity after the victory at Dresden. They said that
Leipsic and the battles that preceded it showed that he had lost the
ability to see things with a soldier's eye. They declared that he made
pictures and presented them to himself as facts; that he thought as an
Emperor, not as a Captain. They said that in this very campaign in
France, the same imperial obsession had taken such hold upon him that
in striving to retain everything from Holland to the end of the Italian
peninsula he stood to lose everything. They said that, if he had
concentrated all his armies, withdrawn them from outlying dependencies,
he could have overwhelmed Bluecher and Schwarzenberg, the Czar
Alexander, the Emperor Francis and King William, and that, having
hurled them beyond the Rhine, these provinces in dispute would have
fallen to his hand again. They said that his practical omnipotence had
blinded his judgment.

Those things may be true. But, whether they be true or not, no man
ever showed a finer strategic grasp of a situation, no man ever
displayed more tactical ability on a given field, no man ever conducted
a series of more brilliant enterprises, no man ever utilized a small,
compact, well-handled force opposed to at least two and a half times
its number, no man ever conducted a campaign which stood higher from a
professional point of view than this one which began with the march
from Nogent and the destruction at Champaubert.

There was no rest for Napoleon that night. Undoubtedly he was not now
the man he had been. Paralyzing physical disabilities before and after
interfered with his movements. The enormous strains to which he had
subjected his body and brain sometimes resulted in periods of mental
blindness and physical prostration. It was whispered that a strange
malady--was it some form of epilepsy?--sometimes overcame the Emperor
so that his faculties and abilities were in abeyance for hours. No man
had ever abused such wonderful mental and physical gifts as he
originally had possessed by subjecting them to such absolutely
impossi