We know what Napoleon's opinion of short-service men was. Decrès once said to him in council, "I cannot extemporise a sailor as you do a soldier. It takes seven years to make a sailor. You turn out a soldier in six months." "Taisez-vous," said Napoleon. "Such ideas are enough to destroy an empire. It takes six years to make a soldier."[1] On another occasion he wrote of himself: "The First Consul did very good things, he put everything in the right way, but he did not work miracles; the heroes of Hohen-Linden and Marengo were not recruits, but good and old soldiers."[2] Evidently Napoleon's knowledge of the levies of 1792 and 1793 had not inclined him to suppose that enthusiasm can be a substitute for drill. His own experience was, in fact, very significant. The French navy, deprived of its best officers and gunners, who were largely Royalist, had to trust to reconstruction under such administrators as the man who wound up his official report with the words, "Legislators, these are the impulses of an ingenuous patriot, who has no guiding principle but nature, and a truly French heart"; or the other, who appended a marginal note to his acceptance of resignations from the old staff: "there are plenty more to be got."[3] The result was seen in those engagements when ships, officered and manned by men who for courage were worthy foes of Nelson and Collingwood's heroes, were constantly out-manœuvred and destroyed in the first engagement.[4] Napoleon's fall is
- ↑ Thiers quoted by Senior, Conversations, vol. i. p. 291.
- ↑ Napoleon, Notes et Mélanges, tome ii. p. 218.
- ↑ Jurien de la Gravière, Guerres Maritimes, tome i. pp. 138, 139.
- ↑ "In 1810 or 1811," said Admiral Mathieu, "I was on board a French corvette, which fought an action with an English vessel, the Lively. We passed three times under her stern, and raked her each time. We ought to have cleared her decks. Not a shot touched her."—Senior's Correspondence of A. de Tocqueville, tome ii. p. 202.
