In the nine days between receiving the appointment and leaving for his headquarters in Nice on March 11, Napoleon asked for every book, map and atlas on Italy that the war ministry could provide. He read biographies of commanders who had fought there and had the courage to admit his ignorance when he didn’t know something.
‘I happened to be at the office of the General Staff in the rue Neuve des Capucines when General Bonaparte came in,’ recalled a fellow officer years later:
I can still see the little hat, surmounted by a pickup plume, his coat cut anyhow, and a sword which, in truth, did not seem the sort of weapon to make anyone’s fortune. Flinging his hat on a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general named Krieg, a man with a wonderful knowledge of detail and the author of a very good soldiers’ manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table, and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order and their rapidity, no less than the way by which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve into other questions which he deduced in consequence from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.
[…]
He reached Nice in fifteen days. When someone made the rather otiose point that he was very young, at twenty-six, to command an army, Napoleon replied: ‘I shall be old when I return.’
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Desire." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 72, 73. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Pratt, ‘Vignettes’ p. 59.
Dubroca, Life of Bonaparte p. 94.
Poultier, History of the War p. 260.
Further Reading:
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