Hero Tales from History — Napoleon, The Corsican Boy Who Ruled Europe
NAPOLEON, THE CORSICAN BOY WHO RULED EUROPE
Though Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest soldier of his time, he was small in body.
His fullest height was a little above five feet.
The story of his strange career shows how a poor, puny little lad made himself emperor of France and master of Europe, so that kings, generals, and prime ministers bowed, like so many servants, to his imperial will.
He began, while he wore petticoats, to wish to be a soldier.
He threw away his baby rattle for a brass cannon, and his first playthings were little iron soldiers.
When he was old enough to play with other boys, he always chose to be a soldier and, small as he was, he was the one who told the bigger boys just what to do.
Even then, if his mother gave him a piece of cake, he would go out to the edge of the little town and trade it to an old soldier for some coarse, black army bread.
As he grew older, this soldier-longing became his ambition.
His health was never very good.
He was often nervous, wilful, and hard to manage.
But he had a keen sense of honor, and always despised a coward.
Napoleon’s home was the rugged island of Corsica.
While he was still a little boy, he found, between some rocks, near the shore, a cave which he claimed for his own.
This is still pointed out to thousands who come to visit the boy’s birthplace, as “Napoleon’s Grotto.
” At that time there was a feud between the boys of the town and the shepherd lads on the hills around.
Little Napoleon told the other town boys that if they would do as he said, he would make those big country boys stop throwing stones at them whenever they met.
The town lads agreed to this; so Napoleon told them to gather stones and pile them in a row a little distance below the fortress which the shepherds had chosen behind some rocks on top of their hill.
The pale Bonaparte boy led his young army up till the country youths fired a volley of stones at them.
Then he turned and ran down the hill followed by his company.
The enemy came out and gave chase, pell-mell.
This was just what Napoleon expected.
When the little leader got down to the piles of stones he shouted--_“Halt!
”_ His soldiers obeyed.
_“Stones!
”_ Each boy gathered up as many as he could carry.
“_About face!
_--FIRE!
” Before the astonished shepherds could stop they were met by a shower of rocks.
The big fellows broke and scattered in all directions, and two of them were taken prisoner.
Captain Bonaparte would not let them go till the other country boys pledged themselves not to touch his “men” again.
Thus eight-year-old Napoleon became the leader of the boys in his home town.
Before he was ten, he was sent to a military school in France, where sons of noblemen were educated.
Some of those French boys were wayward, mean, and savagely cruel.
They made fun of the shy country lad, for his rough Corsican ways and speech, and because he was small and sallow.
Napoleon had entered the school on a scholarship, so they sneered at him as “the charity boy.
” He could not speak French at first, and pronounced his own name so that it sounded like the French words for “Nose of straw.
” As Napoleon’s nose was long, straight, and thin, they laughed and shouted his nickname, “Mr. Straw Nose!
” All this made the proud, sensitive lad speechless with rage.
He kept himself away from the rest.
A garden plot was assigned for each cadet to tend.
A few of the others were too idle to take care of theirs, so they gave them to Napoleon and he kept them in order as his own.
In the center of his little kingdom he built an arbor where he could stay alone to study and plan as he had done in his little cave in Corsica, and woe to those who entered there without his permission.
He had suffered this sort of life nearly four years before his father and mother managed to visit their boy, who was almost a prisoner in military school.
Napoleon wrote of the shock the visit gave his mother: “When she came to see me at Brienne she was frightened at my thinness.
I
was indeed much changed, because I employed the hours of recreation in working, and often passed the nights in thinking about the days’ lessons.
My nature could not bear the idea of not being first in my class.
” After finishing at this academy, Napoleon went to the military college at Paris.
Father Bonaparte’s death, about this time, left the family poorer than ever.
Sometimes Napoleon did not have enough to eat.
But that did not prevent him from studying hard.
His great ambition kept him from starving.
Some time after his graduation he was assigned to a small command in Paris.
“Red” revolutionists were trying to destroy the city.
Young Napoleon thought it high time to stop them.
A mob gathered in a public square threatening to kill people and burn their houses.
He opened fire on the mob and cleared that square in short order.
It was said afterward, “Bonaparte stopped the French Revolution with a whiff of grapeshot!
” From being “the Man of the Hour” Napoleon went on until he became “the Man of Destiny.
” He was raised to the highest rank, and as General Bonaparte became commander-in-chief of the French army in Italy, where he gained brilliant victories over the Austrians.
But the Austrians would not stay beaten, and while Napoleon was away in Egypt, Austria started in to win back its control of northern Italy.
When Napoleon returned to Paris he was the idol of the people.
They elected him consul, a kind of president, of the French republic.
The Austrians were pleased at this, as it would keep “the Little Corporal,” as the soldiers called Napoleon, in Paris.
He would have to send another commander to Italy, and the Austrians had gotten such a start that they could win the victory before the French forces could go around the Alps.
Austria was already crowing over its triumph and all Europe was laughing because General Bonaparte had been “caught napping,” when one May morning Consul Napoleon and a great army came tobogganing down the mountain sides into the plains of Italy, as if they had fallen from the sky.
In a letter to his older brother, Napoleon wrote of this: “We have dropped here like a thunderbolt; the enemy didn’t expect it, and hardly believe it yet.
” He had made his soldiers climb up the Alps Mountains in the highest, steepest place, dragging heavy cannon and army supplies after them.
By his wonderful feat of crossing the Alps, Napoleon won by surprise the victory at Marengo, just as he had beaten the shepherd lads when he was a boy of eight.
The people now made their hero consul for life.
After that it was easy for him to make himself Emperor of the French.
At his coronation Napoleon snatched the crown out of the hands of the pope and placed it on his own head, to show that he was emperor by the right of his own might.
Yet Emperor Napoleon kept on leading his armies in person.
He still had to fight with other nations to hold his place as master of Europe.
He gained even more brilliant victories, as Emperor Napoleon, than he had won as General Bonaparte.
Not content with his record as a great conqueror, he gave the French people the _Code Napoléon_, a set of laws [Illustration: EMPEROR NAPOLEON AT THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO WATCHING THE DOWNFALL OF HIS WONDERFUL ARMY.
_From the painting by David Neal_] which proved him to be also a wise statesman and law-giver.
The kings and nobles of Europe always hated Napoleon.
They said he was vulgar, and called him “the Corsican upstart.
” But the French people loved him as one of themselves.
No general or emperor ever had more devoted followers than Napoleon Bonaparte.
Millions of men gave their lives willingly to fight his battles.
He waged war after war till there were but few fighting men left in France.
Then the people began to think that Napoleon loved them because they could help him win victories to give him more power and fulfill his high ambition.
They began to say among themselves, “He is sacrificing us for his own glory.
” While at the height of his power, Napoleon exclaimed, “What are a million lives to a man like me!
” When the people lost their faith in him, Napoleon began to lose instead of win his battles.
Generals and nobles stopped flattering him and began to fight him.
His own brothers and sisters, whom he had made kings and queens, deserted him.
Even his wife forsook him, taking with her his only son, the idol of his heart.
Napoleon’s last battle was at Waterloo, in Belgium.
Because this loss brought ruin to him, the name of the place became a kind of proverb.
When overwhelming defeat comes to a great man, people say, “He has met his Waterloo!
” The conquered conqueror was taken prisoner and sent thousands of miles away as a captive to the bleak island of St. Helena.
He made the best of his hard lot as “the fortunes of war.
” But the years of loneliness endured by this friendless conqueror, who all his life had been selfish and merciless, are suggested by a well-known picture, which shows Napoleon on the shore of that far-off rock in the southern sea, standing with hands clasped behind him, looking off across the ocean to where France lay.
