When a revolution was fresh, life was good
From a royal bloodline, it's nobility of Italy, a commander was born
It has been repeated that Bonaparte was
the greatest military commander of all time
His coup d'état, the 18th of Brumaire,
led to French Consulate, and on to Emperor
His campaigns, so victorious
Would he have ever dreamed, two hundred years later,
military academies would study his tactics all throughout the world?
Bonaparte, the Emperor
With a Grande Armée, their faith so religiously placed upon him
He who spent his youthfulness hating a country he would one day rule
A barbarous Corsican, stories would say
He would eventually conquer his conqueror
and he would have his good day
An idealistic revolutionary
He vowed that Corsica would be part of Revolutionary France
Exiled, a mountain man for days, his own people chasing him out
He became a refugee, banished from the land of his birth
Little did France know, what rebel their beloved Emperor would be
When he was twenty-six he wrote, "The enemy attacked us.
We killed a great many of them. Now all is quiet... I could not be happier."
And on he would reign
With a guerrilla in Spain, Napoleon would shake
Bonaparte would soon make his most fatal mistake
An invasion of Russia, would leave the French hegemony in Europe,
bitter and weak
Crossing the river, Neman, half a million men strong,
the Grande Armée marched through western Russia
The fate of the war, decided on the Moscow front
Napoleon's army, frailed
Russians, settled and scorched-earth
The largest and bloodiest single action of the Napoleon Wars
While he was left with no more men waiting to refill his loses,
Russia rained with millions
With Russia replenished, someone else lived this good life
Napoleon was forced to retreat the same way he had come to
Moscow, emptied
And riddled with death
When Tolstoy wrote, soon after, "..one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it.
Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
He would write of Napoleon's war and his peace.
For Fireblossom Friday at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads
