This is why he is competent right from the beginning, general in the artillery, major-general, diplomatist, financier and administrator of all kinds. Thanks to this fertile apprenticeship, beginning with the Consulate, he shows officials and veteran ministers who send in their reports to him what to do.
"I am a more experienced administrator than they,[55] when one has been obliged to extract from his brains the ways and means with which to feed, maintain, control, and move with the same spirit and will two or three hundred thousand men, a long distance from their country, one has soon discovered the secrets of administration."In each of the human machines he builds and manipulates, he perceives right away all the parts, each in its proper place and function, the motors, the transmissions, the wheels, the composite action, the speed which ensues, the final result, the complete effect, the net product.
Never is he content with a superficial and summary inspection; he penetrates into obscure corners and to the lowest depths "through the technical precision of his questions," with the lucidity of a specialist, and in this way, borrowing an expression from the philosophers, with him the concept should be adequate to its purpose.[56]
Hence his eagerness for details, for these form the body and substance of the concept; the hand that has not grasped these, or lets them go, retains only the shell, an envelope. With respect to these his curiosity is "insatiable."[57] In each ministerial department he knows more than the ministers, and in each bureau he knows as much as the clerks. "On his table[58] lie reports of the positions of his forces on land and on water. He has furnished the plans of these, and fresh ones are issued every month"; such is the daily reading he likes best.
"I have my reports on positions always at hand; my memory for an Alexandrine is not good, but I never forget a syllable of my reports on positions. I shall find them in my room this evening, and I shall not go to bed until I have read them."He always knows "his position" on land and at sea better than is known in the War and Navy departments; better even than his staff-officers the number, size, and qualities of his ships in or out of port, the present and future state of vessels under construction, the composition and strength of their crews, the formation, organization, staff of officers, material, stations, and enlistments, past and to come, of each army corps and of each regiment. It is the same in the financial and diplomatic services, in every branch of the administration, laic or ecclesiastical, in the physical order and in the moral order. His topographical memory and his geographical conception of countries, places, ground, and obstacles culminate in an inward vision which he evokes at will, and which, years afterwards, revives as fresh as on the first day. His calculation of distances, marches, and maneuvers is so rigid a mathematical operation that, frequently, at a distance of two or four hundred leagues,[59] his military foresight, calculated two or four months ahead, turns out correct, almost on the day named, and precisely on the spot designated.[60] Add to this one other faculty, and the rarest of all.
For, if things turn out as he foresaw they would, it is because, as with great chess-players, he has accurately measured not alone the mechanical moves of the pieces, but the character and talent of his adversary, "sounded his draft of water," and divined his probable mistakes. He has added the calculation of physical quantities and probabilities to the calculation of moral quantities and probabilities, thus showing himself as great a psychologist as he is an accomplished strategist. In fact, no one has surpassed him in the art of judging the condition and motives of an individual or of a group of people, the real motives, permanent or temporary, which drive or curb men in general or this or that man in particular, the incentives to be employed, the kind and degree of pressure to be employed. This central faculty rules all the others, and in the art of mastering Man his genius is found supreme.
III. His acute Understanding of Others.
His psychological faculty and way of getting at the thought and feeling of others.- His self-analysis. - How he imagines a general situation by selecting a particular case, imagining the invisible interior by deducting from the visible exterior. - Originality and superiority of his style and discourse. - His adaptation of these to his hearers and to circumstances. - His notation and calculation of serviceable motives.
No faculty is more precious for a political engineer; for the forces he acts upon are never other than human passions. But how, except through divination, can these passions, which grow out of the deepest sentiments, be reached? How, save by conjecture, can forces be estimated which seem to defy all measurement? On this dark and uncertain ground, where one has to grope one's way, Napoleon moves with almost absolute certainty; he moves promptly. First of all, he studies himself; indeed, to find one's way into another's soul requires, preliminarily, that one should dive deep into one's own.[61]