The Battle of Waterloo, which was fought just one hundred years ago and with which the story in this book ends, is popularly regarded as one of the decisive battles of the world, particularly with reference to the career of the greatest of all Captains. Personally some study has led me to believe that Bautzen was really the decisive battle of the Napoleonic wars. If the Emperor had there won the overwhelming victory to which his combinations and the fortunes of war entitled him he would still have retained his Empire. Whether he would have been satisfied or not is another question; and anyway as I am practically alone among students and critics in my opinions about Bautzen they can be dismissed. And that he lost that battle was his own fault anyway!

However Napoleon’s genius cannot be denied any more than his failure. In this book I have sought to show him at his best and also almost at his worst. For sheer brilliance, military and mental, the campaigning in France in 1814 could not be surpassed. He is there with his raw recruits, his beardless boys, his old guard, his tactical and strategical ability, his furious energy, his headlong celerity and his marvellous power of inspiration; just as he was in Italy when he revolutionised the art of war and electrified the world. Many of these qualities are in evidence in the days before Waterloo, but during the actual battle upon which his fate and the fate of the world turned, the tired, broken, ill man is drowsily nodding before a farmhouse by the road, while Ney, whose superb and headlong courage was not accompanied by any corresponding military ability, wrecks the last grand army.

And there is no more dramatic an incident in all history, I believe, than Napoleon’s advance on the Fifth-of-the-line drawn up on the Grenoble Road on the return from Elba.

Nor do the Roman Eagles themselves seem to have made such romantic appeal or to have won such undying devotion as the Eagles of the Empire.

This story was written just before the outbreak of the present European war (World War One) and is published while it is in full course. Modern commanders wield forces beside which even the great Army of the Nations that invaded Russia is scarcely more than a detachment, and battles last for days, weeks, even months — Waterloo was decided in an afternoon! — yet war is the same. If there be any difference it simply grows more horrible. The old principles, however, are unchanged, and over the fields upon which Napoleon marched and fought, armies are marching and fighting in practically the same way today. And great Captains are still studying Frederick, Wellington and Bonaparte as they have ever done.

The author modestly hopes that this book may not only entertain by the love story, the tragic yet happily ended romance within its pages — for there is romance here aside from the great Captain and his exploits — but that in a small way it may serve to set forth not so much the brilliance and splendour and glory of war as the horror of it.

We are frightfully fascinated by war, even the most peaceable and peace-loving of us. May this story help to convey to the reader some of the other side of it; the hunger, the cold, the weariness, the suffering, the disaster, the despair of the soldier; as well as the love and the joy and the final happiness of the beautiful Laure and the brave Marteau to say nothing of redoubtable old Bal-Arrêt, the Bullet-Stopper — whose fates were determined on the battlefield amid the clash of arms.