The Battle of Waterloo, which was fought just one hundred years ago and
with which the story in this book ends, is popularly regarded as one of
the decisive battles of the world, particularly with reference to the
career of the greatest of all Captains. Personally some study has led
me to believe that Bautzen was really the decisive battle of the
Napoleonic wars. If the Emperor had there won the overwhelming victory
to which his combinations and the fortunes of war entitled him he would
still have retained his Empire. Whether he would have been satisfied
or not is another question; and anyway as I am practically alone among
students and critics in my opinions about Bautzen they can be
dismissed. And that he lost that battle was his own fault anyway!

However Napoleon's genius cannot be denied any more than his failure.
In this book I have sought to show him at his best and also almost at
his worst. For sheer brilliance, military and mental, the campaigning
in France in 1814 could not be surpassed. He is there with his raw
recruits, his beardless boys, his old guard, his tactical and
strategical ability, his furious energy, his headlong celerity and his
marvelous power of inspiration; just as he was in Italy when he
revolutionized the art of war and electrified the world. Many of these
qualities are in evidence in the days before Waterloo, but during the
actual battle upon which his fate and the fate of the world turned, the
tired, broken, ill man is drowsily nodding before a farmhouse by the
road, while Ney, whose superb and headlong courage was not accompanied
by any corresponding military ability, wrecks the last grand army.

And there is no more dramatic an incident in all history, I believe,
than Napoleon's advance on the Fifth-of-the-line drawn up on the
Grenoble Road on the return from Elba.

Nor do the Roman Eagles themselves seem to have made such romantic
appeal or to have won such undying devotion as the Eagles of the Empire.

This story was written just before the outbreak of the present European
war and is published while it is in full course. Modern commanders
wield forces beside which even the great Army of the Nations that
invaded Russia is scarcely more than a detachment, and battles last for
days, weeks, even months--Waterloo was decided in an afternoon!--yet
war is the same. If there be any difference it simply grows more
horrible. The old principles, however, are unchanged, and over the
f