carry at least half a dozen silver forks there next day.

It must be understood, by the way, that the French army does not
make war on the Italians. It is there to rescue them from the
tyranny of their Austrian conquerors, and confer republican
institutions on them; so that in incidentally looting them, it
merely makes free with the property of its friends, who ought to
be grateful to it, and perhaps would be if ingratitude were not
the proverbial failing of their country. The Austrians, whom it
fights, are a thoroughly respectable regular army, well
disciplined, commanded by gentlemen trained and versed in the art
of war: at the head of them Beaulieu, practising the classic art
of war under orders from Vienna, and getting horribly beaten by
Napoleon, who acts on his own responsibility in defiance of
professional precedents or orders from Paris. Even when the
Austrians win a battle, all that is necessary is to wait until
their routine obliges them to return to their quarters for
afternoon tea, so to speak, and win it back again from them: a
course pursued later on with brilliant success at Marengo. On the
whole, with his foe handicapped by Austrian statesmanship,
classic generalship, and the exigencies of the aristocratic
social structure of Viennese society, Napoleon finds it possible
to be irresistible without working heroic miracles. The world,
however, likes miracles and heroes, and is quite incapable of
conceiving the action of such forces as academic militarism or
Viennese drawing-roomism. Hence it has already begun to
manufacture "L'Empereur," and thus to make it difficult for the
romanticists of a hundred years later to credit the little scene
now in question at Tavazzano as aforesaid.