Napoleon's A Brandy And Wellington Is An Old Rubber Boot

May 02, 1994|By Jon Margolis.

WATERLOO, Belgium — It's just a farm. There's a big old barn, a farm-house and gently rolling fields. The setting, right near a major highway, is hardly picturesque, and though there's a small woods to the south, the scenery qualifies only as pleasant, not striking.

But every day people come to see the farm known as the Hougoumont. They park their cars along the service road off the highway just to stand and look at the place.

All because one spring day in 1815, a bunch of guys wearing blue coats couldn't take the place away from a bunch of guys wearing red coats.

The guys in the blue coats were French soldiers under the command of their emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. The guys in the red coats were British soldiers under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, who later said that had his men not held the Hougoumont, Napoleon would have won the Battle of Waterloo.

In which case, no one would bother to visit. The persistent appeal of Waterloo is not the battle, but the result, and it is a result worth celebrating.

Not because it was a victory for the Old Order, and not for anyone's military genius. There's no mystery about how Wellington won. With his Dutch and Prussian allies, he had almost twice as many men in the field. Had Napoleon somehow managed to win here (and he almost did) he would have lost soon afterward someplace else.

Nor was Waterloo a victory for democracy. Prussia was no democracy, and were it not for Gebhard L. Von Blucher and his 45,000 Prussian troops, Wellington would have been driven from the field.

No, Waterloo is to be cherished because here occurred the most decisive defeat of the romantic by the prosaic. On this field one of history's most dashing warriors and most imaginative military geniuses was beaten by a stolid, if distinguished, commander who according to some interpretations (including Napoleon's) blundered into victory.

Napoleon was the ultimate romantic. "What a ballad my life has been," he once proclaimed, as he insisted that "the laws of morality and convention cannot be applied to me." He was driven by an obsession with himself and with that conceit of every romantic-his destiny, whatever that is.

It was this obsession as much as his genuinely enlightened policies which attracted so many artists, poets and scholars, starting with that abysmal fool, Lord Byron. The main character in Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" is entranced by Napoleon. Great artists such as Jacques David painted his portrait and distinguished authors wrote his biography. Thanks to movies, almost everyone knows about Napoleon's wife, Josephine, and one of his mistresses, Desiree. His name describes an expensive brandy and a rich pastry.

Beef Wellington is a pot pie. Almost no one can name Wellington's mistresses, though he probably had more than Napoleon. His portrait was painted, but neither as often as Napoleon's nor by artists as distinguished. He became a powerful and partly successful prime minister, but if his name is in poems and novels, they are mediocre ones. He was a national hero, but never an inspiration to young men of vision.

And no wonder. It would never have occurred to the duke to exempt himself from the rules. Wellington was ambitious, but not obsessed by some bizarre sense of personal destiny. He never tried to conquer the world and rearrange it according to his own whim, so he never became one of those people whose picture is pasted on the walls of young dreamers.

Good for him. With the possible exception of Alexander the Great, people who try to conquer the world do far more harm than good. And so do most of those whose pictures get pasted on the walls of young dreamers.

Now that conquest is obsolete, the dangerous romantics are revolutionaries such as Mao and Castro, artists and writers who glorify rebellion for its own sake and gloomy rock stars who think it's cool to flirt with drug overdoses and sing the praises of death.

They are dangerous not because the lure of anti-social romanticism is not seductive, but because it is. No one with any imagination can fail to be tempted by it. That's why gangster and jewel-heist movies are so popular, and why the audience grieves when the bad guys get cought. Something within each of us despises the restraint that civilization requires.

That was Napoleon's appeal. He was the doomed, driven solitary genius who defied convention. Here, he got beat by a soldier who was doing a job of work. In all, a good result for humanity, and reason enough to come to this place to pay it homage.