1997, Harper Collins, NY, 888 pages

The title above is taken from a quote by Beethoven concerning the bombing of Vienna, which was the artistic heart of Europe at the time of its conquest by Napoleon. Other working titles included, The Total War Experiment, The Corsican Meat Grinder and Military Icon as Jerk. The title sets the theme, so I decided on the viewpoint of someone who mattered in human terms. I’ll examine the book according to my three aborted schemes.

First of all, this is not light reading. The book is a lively war narrative that flows well. The story itself, if you are not familiar with it, is oppressive. This is 800 plus pages of one asshole engineering mass murders on a self-serving industrial scale for over a decade. Napoleon is one of those rare figures whose entire life is essentially just a narrative of conflict and incarceration. I grew up admiring no one more than great fighters and ingenious generals, happy to my bones to embrace the narrative of the world as the ‘march of great captains’. Something though, about Napoleon, always rubbed me the wrong way.

This really came to a head for me when I played Napoleon in the year-long table-top seven-man war game Empires in Arms. The game was set up to encourage players to recreate the actions of the past. The French player must stay at war for most of the 11 years of ‘game time’ in order to place in the lead. I decided on an experiment. I retired Napoleon, the most potent counter on the board, and ‘managed’ France as a ‘superpower’; negotiating, intimidating, etc. I was cursed by my fellow players and went down in E & A history as the man who killed a game. We did not get to roll enough dice to keep us awake and, even though I was headed for a ‘loss’, the other players could not touch me militarily and voted to end the war game I had ruined by using diplomacy rather than constant war to rule the world. This experiment suggests that millions died for nothing but a man’s ego. I literally, in game terms, saved the army that Napoleon wasted, just using it to back my diplomats. I wanted to see what a professional historian had to say about this.

Mister Schom exposes Napoleon as the pivotal figure in the rise of total war as a the central article of modern state ideology. Napoleon exhumed and adapted Roman iconography to prop up his proto-fascist state. He can be seen as the central military actor in the extinguishment of the humanity of the fighting man. European war fighters were already criminal ciphers in the big scheme, but it was a scheme that Napoleon amplified to frenzied levels of combat, even turning hero generals into mere shreds of ground beef. Napoleon took ‘the season’ away from a soldier. There was no longer a time for rest, only combat.

Alan does not make this case for Napoleon as our total war Archimedes. It is also a thesis that some of my fellow war gamers have shot holes in. However, in reading this record of Bonaparte, I come away with a sense that he was the man who reached into ancient history, when the primal state was nothing but an instrument of war, and then resurrected this spirit of annihilation-as-a-divine-good and used it to harness the ‘dogs of war’ to the emerging science- and global trade-based industrial economies to unleash a nation-eating beast. It failed miserably, killing millions in the process. In my view he laid the ground work for the most violent century on earth, when Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, Roosevelt and Truman would by turn pick up the torch of virtuous-total-war and use it to extinguish fifty million plus.

While Schom only lays out some evidence for the above theory, this is his bread and butter as we would say in boxing. Far from the peerless military leader who was worshipped by a century of generals until the machine-gun absolutely proved he was just a bloody body pusher, Schom’s Napoleon comes to light as a brutal, ham-fisted gangster with genius-level math skills. Most of his victories were due to him simply having far better troops and one of the best officer corps in history. Only Alexander and Robert E. Lee were so well served in terms of talented subordinates and superhumanly tough soldiers.

There is one abstract military scenario that may be used to slot a general, or a military establishment, into a behavioral template. There are three basic military templates. Napoleon’s gift to history was to decide on one at the expense of the others and pass that down to us, for it is now the U.S. Military template.

Let us say you are a military commander who has come up against fierce resistance, typified by a fortified hill. Let us envision our resistance as that fortified hill. You have three basic options:

1. Go around [maneuver]

2. Go in [mass]

3. Turn it into a crater [firepower]

As an artillery man Napoleon grasped the firepower option well. He was, however, at odds with the character of his army, which possessed a mass battle ethic. His British enemies, thanks to their naval and colonial experiences, were more at home with the firepower model and prevailed.

Napoleon played his same cards [tough resourceful soldiers and tougher and even more resourceful generals] over and over and over again until France was bled white, and that same card just did not get it done. This is, to be sure, less than genius level generalship, but can be understood. What is truly reprehensible in retrospect was his callous treatment of his wounded men and his open resentment and purposeful alienation of his best officers.

Napoleon consciously used ‘war crimes’ not only as an instrument of state terror, but to vent emotionally. He ordered the execution of thousands after one battle because they had fought well, enraging him. Alexander, psychopath that he was, would have praised them and made his officers marry their daughters. Napoleon just comes off as a brat.

Over the course of various actions, in Italy, early in his career, he left tens of thousands of his victorious soldiers who had literally saved his ass, to die, in the face of numerous pleas from his head medical officer who begged to be permitted to treat these men and save them.

He abandoned one of the best armies he ever had in Egypt—just left them to die as he sailed home with the credit for their victory.

He fled all the faster out of Russia, by special means, even as hundreds of thousands died behind him to cover his retreat.

He screwed his naval commanders—who were heroically loyal and fearless men—one by one; even having one assassinated and made to look like a suicide.

Napoleon was a punk and no one has shown this more brilliantly than Alan Schom, who remains fair to the late great maniac throughout. Alan is also an entertaining writer, who enlivens the war narrative with some very nice textual pieces. My favorite was the battle that Napoleon lost against a swarm of rabbits! I’m not going to give it away. You will have to read the book.