My own grandfather
did this and Heaven knows he was not born to be a hero.
Millions of other people's grandfathers did it. They received
no reward, but they expected none. They cheerfully
gave legs and arms and lives to serve this foreigner, who took
them a thousand miles away from their homes and marched
them into a barrage of Russian or English or Spanish or
Italian or Austrian cannon and stared quietly into space while
they were rolling in the agony of death.
If you ask me for an explanation, I must answer that I
have none. I can only guess at one of the reasons. Napoleon
was the greatest of actors and the whole European continent
was his stage. At all times and under all circumstances
he knew the precise attitude that would impress the spectators
most and he understood what words would make the deepest
impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before
the backdrop of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed
his shivering men on the dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no
difference. At all times he was master of the situation. Even
at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic,
a sick man at the mercy of a dull and intolerable British governor,
he held the centre of the stage.
After the defeat of Waterloo, no one outside of a few
trusted friends ever saw the great Emperor. The people of
Europe knew that he was living on the island of St.
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