11
Gamblers almost invariably plunge when their luck is running out and both men were always prepared to risk everything on the throw of a dice rather than compromise. The fact that each was gambling with the fate of an entire nation was irrelevant. They had been brilliantly successful during the first half of their careers and neither could believe that fortune had deserted them; they would play the game out, until either they had broken the bank or were ruined beyond redemption. What was at stake was power, without which they did not consider life worth living.
At the beginning of 1814 Napoleon held only France and northern Italy. In public he admitted openly that he was ringed by foes – ‘Wellington has invaded the south of France, the Russians threaten our northern frontier, and Prussians, Austrians and Bavarians are on our eastern.’ The Allies offered him the ‘natural frontiers’ of France – the boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Rhine if he would make peace. In practice this would mean evacuating northern Italy and an undertaking never to disturb Europe or go to war again. He refused these extraordinarily generous terms. He could not bring himself to part with the Grand Empire, to abandon his dream of hegemony over Europe. His former power had poisoned his reason beyond recovery.
Far from postponing their invasion until March or April, when the roads would be in better condition and their troops able to live off the countryside, the Allies began their invasion of northern France in December 1813. They mustered a joint army of nearly 400,000 men, with reserves at home of well over 400,000. And these figures did not take into account the army under Wellington which now numbered 160,000 British, German and Spanish troops. The Emperor had no choice but to leave southern France to cope with Wellington – his sole remaining hope lay in defeating the invaders in the north. His own forces amounted to slightly less than 120,000, of which the field army – with which he was going to have to fight for his very existence – was a bare 60,000. While there was a stiffening of veterans, most were boys even younger than the ‘children’ on whom Metternich had remarked, together with old soldiers in their fifties and sixties, some of them near-cripples from the Invalides. Napoleon had no illusions about their quality, telling the Senate that the boys were fit for nothing but hospitals.
The Legislative Body presented an address stating that France was suffering from destitution unparalleled in her entire history – ‘commerce is destroyed, industry is dying’. Their master dismissed them, snarling, ‘Is this the time to mull over past mistakes, when 200,000 Cossacks are crossing our frontier? It isn’t a question of the individual’s liberty or safety. What matters is the nation’s independence!’ Behind the scenes he admitted that France was finished. ‘Rouse the nation? When the Revolution has destroyed the nobles and the priests, and when I myself have destroyed the Revolution?’
The ‘home front’ was in a disastrous state. For the first time his troops were living off the French countryside, requisitioning food and wine, transport and livestock and fodder. It did not add to the war’s popularity. The Notables now regarded Napoleon as a dangerous liability, a view confirmed by the Allies’ declaration in December 1813 that they were fighting the Emperor, not France. Probably the entire bourgeoisie had been unhappy with the régime since the vast increase in foreign commitments in 1808. Conscription was evaded more widely than ever, deserters being shot in batches every day. The salons seethed with disloyalty. Fouché and Talleyrand were already in touch with the Bourbons; Talleyrand commented, ‘It’s the beginning of the end!’ Attempts to revive Revolutionary fervour – reintroducing the Marseillaise, long banned for its Jacobin associations – failed totally, even the Paris mob remaining unenthusiastic. There was strong resistance to swingeing new taxes. The Imperial treasury was nearly bankrupt, with an astronomical deficit. Only 10 million francs were left from the secret hoard of 75 million in gold which Napoleon kept in a vault beneath the Tuileries. (He had hoarded it out of pure greed; on St Helena he told General Bertrand, ‘Money means everything.’)
The capital grew terrified as refugees from the north flooded in, pushing what remained of their possessions in carts or clutching bundles. As usual the Emperor decided on an offensive campaign instead of going over to the defensive. He remarked to his chief of staff Berthier, ‘I shall have to fight the campaign of Italy all over again.’ His army was miserably inadequate, very different from that of 1797; unable to call on the 120,000 men cut off in German garrisons, he made do with adolescents who had never fired a gun before, hastily given an overcoat, a shako and a firearm; some of the latter were fowling pieces. Such boys were pitifully vulnerable, ignorant of what lay ahead – forced marches in the coldest winter in living memory across the flat plains of Champagne along roads ankle-deep in slush or mud, sleeping drenched by snow or rain beneath a freezing sky with no food, let alone shelter, to be found in the villages.
Despite such poor tools Napoleon savaged Blücher at St Dizier on 27 January 1814. Four days later, however, he was repulsed at La Rothière, being forced to fall back on Troyes. On 7 February the Allies delivered an ultimatum; this time he was no longer offered France’s ‘natural’ boundaries but only the frontiers of 1789. When the Emperor’s advisers suggested he should accept the terms he roared with rage, ‘like a trapped lion’, shouting that he would never give up the territory conquered by the Revolutionary armies, never leave France smaller than he had found her.
He possessed one valuable advantage over the invaders in knowing the ground over which the ensuing campaign would be fought, while he had much better maps. Blücher’s 120,000 Prussians were dangerously extended in a long, thin column which reached from Châlons to La Ferté-sur-Jouarre. On 10 February he sliced through it at Champaubert, cutting Sacken off from Blücher, he then defeated Sacken on 11 February at Montmirail and on 13 February at Château-Thierry, driving him north in headlong retreat. The following day he hit Blücher so hard at Vauchamps that he almost severed his line of retreat, forcing the old warrior to take refuge inside Châlons. Marching his wretched young soldiers at an unheard-of pace, he intercepted Schwarzenberg’s Austrians at Montereau, fifty miles south-east of Paris, striking with such ferocity on 16 February that he wiped out their rearguard. Another attack at Méry-sur-Seine sent the Austrians reeling back. Napoleon had won seven victories in eight days.
Understandably, he was elated, literally ‘drunk with joy’ after Champaubert, deluding himself that he would regain everything. ‘The enemy are going to retreat over the Rhine much more quickly than they came and I shall be back on the Vistula,’ he announced, to the horror of his generals. He had lost all sense of political reality.
The campaign was a bravura performance, even by Napoleonic standards of military genius. As he had promised, he had recovered all the mobility and flair for surprise which he had displayed in Italy in 1797. What makes it so astonishing is that for many years he had been showing signs of physical deterioration. Even during the Consulate the playwright Kotzebue had noticed that he was putting on weight, ‘which does not suit a man like Bonaparte’. In 1808 the Duc de Broglie was shocked by the dramatic change in his appearance since those days: ‘His torso was short and much thickened, his small legs fat, his face livid, his forehead balding and his profile like something on a Roman coin.’ Nevertheless, his health seemed reasonably good, apart from occasional pains in the bladder (which the doctors attributed to the herpes he had contracted during the siege of Toulon). By 1811 he was stout to the point of being bloated, his complexion was yellow and his head was sunk on his shoulders. His obesity has been attributed to sharing Marie Louise’s meals of many courses, while the other signs of weariness indicate that the burden of power was taking its toll. The Russian and German campaigns exhausted him still further; during the latter he seldom went to bed but slept in his carriage with his head tied in a handkerchief. The Imperial Post Master, the Comte de Lavalette, saw him on his return in November 1813 and thought him ‘so downhearted and so worn out that it really frightened me’. Baron Fain confided in him that while Napoleon retired at eleven he always got up at three in the morning, working right through the day until he went to bed again at night. ‘It can’t go on’, said Fain (who was his secretary). ‘If it does, it will kill him.’ How Napoleon summoned up the energy to fight the campaign of 1814 is a mystery.
Clearly he believed that he was going to win. Since he did not have enough troops for a knockout blow, his strategy was to disrupt the Allies’ communications and prevent them from co-operating. Each time he had struck the enemy in the rear, and by skilfully concentrating his scanty forces had succeeded in routing opponents who outnumbered him by two or even three to one. Yet, as Clausewitz emphasizes, he underestimated ‘old Blücher’, who had been born in 1742 and whom he ridiculed still more than ‘the Sepoy general’ Wellington – ‘he is just like a bull, glaring all around with rolling eyes and charging whenever he sees danger’. However, on St Helena Napoleon admitted grudgingly, ‘The old ruffian always attacked me with the same fury and after the most terrible beatings would be on his feet again in a flash, ready for the fight.’
Throughout his career the Emperor had a tendency to underrate opponents, whether armies, statesmen or generals. The most obvious examples are his failure to appreciate the fighting qualities of Russian and British troops, the Machiavellianism of Metternich and the professionalism of Wellington. He was to lose in 1814 through not reckoning with the strategic sense of both Blücher and Schwarzenberg. In his opinion no enemy was worthy of him.
Blücher regrouped and advanced on Paris early in March. The Emperor attacked him so successfully that he took shelter behind the wall of Soissons. He emerged, to be beaten again at Craonne on 7 March, withdrawing to a strong position at Laon. Napoleon attacked him here on the following day, with 40,000 men against 100,000, this time launching a frontal assault, but failed to dislodge him, suffering casualties he could ill afford. Nevertheless, even if as he himself put it, the Young Guard – the one decent corps left to him – was ‘melting away like snow’, he drove Blücher back from Rheims on 13 March, and a week later fought an indecisive battle with Schwarzenberg at Arcis-sur-Aube. By now the boys whom he called his soldiers were collapsing from disease, hunger and sheer exhaustion to such an extent that he was down to 30,000 ‘men’; he had to find more troops or give up the struggle. As so often, he decided on a gamble. Learning that the Allies were marching on Paris, he decided not to meet them but to march east,reinforcing his army from local garrisons as he went, and cut their communications. He was confident the National Guard and the Parisian workers would fight for their city, that his brother Joseph was capable of directing its defence; at the worst Marshal Marmont had 8,000 infantry, 3,000 sabres and 60 cannon with which to delay them. Marmont reassured him, ‘Sire, I can guarantee my army corps.’ But Napoleon was unwise enough to send word of what he intended to Marie Louise in an uncoded note – ‘I have decided to make for the Marne in order to drive the enemy back from Paris.’ The note was intercepted by a Russian patrol, whereupon after an agitated debate the Allies decided to continue their drive on Paris. Marmont’s attempt to stop them at La Ferté-Champenoise was easily brushed aside.
The Emperor had ordered that Paris must be defended to the last man, even if this meant that it would be reduced to rubble in the process.29 It had no fortifications, not even street barricades, and Joseph Bonaparte was incapable of mobilizing the Parisians. There were 200 cannon standing idle in the Champs de Mars and a mere 60 on the heights of Montmartre. On 30 March Marmont signed an armistice to save the city from a general assault. Blücher and Schwarzenberg marched in the following day. It was the end.
On 9 March the Allies had signed a ‘Grand Alliance’, pledging themselves to fight on until they destroyed Napoleon Bonaparte and to reject any surrender other than unconditional. On 3 April the Senate, smoothly manipulated by Talleyrand, deposed the Emperor. Three days later it called upon Louis XVIII to ascend the throne of France.
As has been seen, as early as the spring of 1812 and even before the ‘Campaign of Russia’ Napoleon’s senior officers had been very worried. There is no reason to disbelieve Metternich’s testimony that by the summer of 1813 they were desperately anxious men. The last straw was their master’s refusal to contemplate peace, with such remarks as ‘Back on the Vistula.’ When he hurried to Fontainebleau after the fall of Paris he might still conceivably have assembled a viable army from troops south of the Loire. But his marshals had had enough. We know very little of the officers’ plot of 1814 apart from what Napoleon himself dictated on St Helena, yet one may at least guess that it had been brewing for some time. It is generally regarded as a spontaneous phenomenon, though it is more than likely that there was an original instigator – still unidentified.
The Emperor’s version is that at Fontainebleau on 4 April, after taking a parade, Berthier told him the marshals wanted an audience. When they entered they were accompanied by the great officials of his Court, including Caulaincourt. One of the marshals then ‘stammered’ that everything was lost if he did not abdicate. ‘The army is demoralized, exhausted and disorganized. Desertions are only too noticeable. We cannot consider returning to Paris. Any attempt to do so will shed blood uselessly.’ What they did not say was that most junior officers were eager to go on fighting. The Emperor, who later claimed he did so to avoid civil war, wrote out his abdication. Even Marshals Berthier and Ney – ‘Bravest of the Brave’ – deserted him, although like everyone else they feared he might have them shot. He signed a further, unconditional, abdication on 11 April. The following day he tried to commit suicide with poison ‘which I wore round my neck in a little silk bag’ but agonizing pains brought on a nausea which made him vomit it up. On 20 April, after a theatrical farewell to the Imperial Guard he finally left Fontainebleau for the island of Elba (where the Allies had decided he must live). He told one of the guardsmen, ‘I have abdicated but surrender nothing.’
One should not see any resemblance between the officers’ plots of 1814 and 1944. Napoleon’s relationship with his marshals was much more like that of Hitler with his party satraps than the Führer’s relations with his generals. Wellington later suggested that the Emperor had been more ‘in awe’ of his marshals than was suspected, but this was simply not true. They owed everything to him, while in the last analysis he secretly despised them. This was Hitler’s attitude to men like Goering and Himmler.
The story of 1814 was not a tale to amuse the Führer. ‘I, perhaps better than anyone else, can well imagine the torments suffered by Napoleon,’ he dictated to Bormann on 26 February 1945. He must have found Vom Kriege compulsive reading if he consulted the book during his own not unsimilar final crisis. In Clausewitz’s view Napoleon was far from being beaten, at any rate in February 1814, despite the daunting odds against him and despite having to fight on French soil. (Wellington shared his opinion.) He thinks that his fatal mistake, after winning the battles at Champaubert, Montmirail and Vauchamps, was to switch his attentions from the Prussians to the Austrians:
What would have been the result if, instead of turning from Blücher upon Schwarzenberg, he had tried another blow at Blücher, and pursued him to the Rhine? We are convinced that it would have completely changed the course of the campaign, and that the Allied army, instead of marching to Paris, would have retired behind the Rhine.
He attributes the Emperor’s successes in 1814 against hugely superior numbers to a brilliant exploitation of the mistakes made by the Allies in dividing their forces. Clausewitz is quite certain that the fall of Paris was decisive, even if taking an enemy’s capital does not win a war – as in the case of Moscow:
In 1814 by the capture of Bonaparte’s capital the object of the war was attained. the political divisions which had their roots in Paris came into active operation, and an enormous split left the power of the Emperor to collapse of itself … through these causes the forces and defensive means of Bonaparte were suddenly very much diminished, the superiority of the Allies, therefore, just in the same measure increased, and any further resistance then became impossible.
As will be seen, the first passage may have inspired Hitler’s last desperate Western offensive in the Ardennes, while the second may have influenced his decision to stay in Berlin.
Model, a ‘dynamic genius’ in Goebbels’ eyes, had astounded the Allies by re-establishing Germany’s western front. No doubt some of his success was due to carrying out the Führer’s exhortations. On 16 September the latter ordered every able-bodied man to fight fanatically, warning his troops: ‘There can no longer be any large-scale opposition on our part. All we can do is hold our positions and die.’ Yet like Napoleon he was by nature incapable of remaining on the defensive. (Indeed, he had to go over to the offensive or the Reich would collapse sooner rather than later.) The Allies’ new long-range fighter-bombers not only gave superiority in the air but by October had destroyed the last plants producing synthetic fuel; the scanty hoard which remained would soon be exhausted. Like the Emperor in March 1814, he decided to make one last throw, a final Western offensive, even if to mount it he had to borrow men and armour from the East – just as Napoleon had transferred the Young Guard from Spain. However, he let the troops facing the Russians keep their 88mm anti-aircraft guns (used as anti-tank weapons), weakening his new offensive’s ability to deal with enemy aircraft. The tanks were given the lion’s share of the fuel – there was very little to spare for the Luftwaffe. He chose the Ardennes, the scene of his triumph in 1940. The four defending American divisions were under-strength and poorly supplied. He planned to attack along a 70-mile front, with a central Schwerpunkt of about 15 miles, his objective being Antwerp.
Although Field Marshal von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief West, thought it ‘a nonsensical operation’, the plan – drawn up by the OKW or Supreme Command on the Führer’s instructions – was to be implemented by Field Marshal Model, by General of Panzer Troops Hasso von Manteuffel and by SS Colonel-General Sepp Dietrich. These were Hitler’s chosen tools, all three prepared to implement his ideas. Yet privately they accepted Rundstedt’s assessment – ‘the available forces were too small’. Manteuffel told Liddell Hart, ‘We were agreed in our objections to the plan’, while Sepp Dietrich recalled ironically, ‘All I had to do was to cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take the port of Antwerp.’ Even so, they were ready to try.
In contrast to their superiors, junior officers were full of confidence, elated by the prospect of attacking once again. The Führer strengthened their resolve by ordering any officer who doubted victory to hand over to a subordinate and fall in under his command. ‘The war will decide whether the German people will continue to exist or perish’, he warned them.
The second Ardennes offensive opened before dawn on 16 December, taking the Americans completely by surprise. They had settled into winter quarters, convinced that the Germans were by now incapable of mounting such an operation. Thick fog and mist prevented the Allies from exploiting their superiority in the air. At first the 300,000 Germans – some of them battle-hardened veterans of the Russian front – had dramatic success, disrupting the Americans’ communications, cutting them off from their supplies. So alarmed were the latter that they called in Field Marshal Montgomery to take command of part of the front. However, after a week the Germans had failed to capture Bastogne, a vital communications centre, and Model saw that no further progress was going to be made; on Christmas Eve Rundstedt advised withdrawal. Hitler refused – this was his last throw. On Christmas Day the fog lifted, enabling Allied aircraft to decimate the panzers. German fuel ran out on 26 December, although some tanks came within a quarter of a mile of the American depot at Stavelot, which contained two and a half million gallons of petrol. Early in 1945 the Allies launched a counter-offensive, and by 16 January the gamble was over.
After the war Rundstedt called the defeat in the Ardennes ‘Stalingrad No. 2’. The Germans had lost 120,000 men, together with 600 tanks and tracked guns – the entire reserve of armour for the Western front. German soldiers none the less went on fighting, without panzers or air cover, though more and more were surrendering; often they even lacked ammunition for their rifles. In the East the front was crumbling before the inexorable Russian onslaught, the Red Army crossing the Vistula on 18 January 1945. As vast numbers of German troops were captured their places were taken by members of the Hitler Jugend – boys sometimes as young as twelve, or the Volkssturm, a species of aged National Guard whose ranks included men in their sixties and seventies. At the end of January Albert Speer presented the Führer with a memorandum which stated that, with the loss of Upper Silesia, German factories could no longer provide the German army with sufficient ammunition, artillery or tanks. Hitler’s response, ‘in a cold cutting voice’, was ‘You must leave me to draw any conclusions about the state of the armaments’ industry:’
His attitude is interpreted very differently by Goebbels and Speer, the two most informed witnesses during the final months of his life. The first, half crazed by his refusal to accept doom, shared his master’s delusions. The second’s autobiography may be always subtly self-exculpatory, but it gives an objective and indeed thoroughly convincing portrait of the Führer.
‘Who knows when the moon may not crash into the earth and this whole planet go up in flames and ashes’, Goebbels records Hitler as pontificating. ‘Nevertheless it must be our mission to do our duty to the last.’ Goebbels notes how at the beginning of March 1945 he ‘is totally unshaken by the fearful blows to which we are now subjected. His steadfastness is admirable. If anyone can master this crisis he can.’ The sorcerer’s apprentice adds, however: ‘The general mood in the Reich Chancellery is pretty dismal. I would rather not go again because the atmosphere is infectious. The generals hang their heads and the Führer alone holds his head high.’
Speer tells us how in the last half of March Hitler extorted from him an emotional and insincere agreement that the war could still be won. He describes his patron in the final months of his life as ‘shrivelling up like on old man. His limbs trembled; he walked stooped, with dragging footsteps. Even his voice became quavering and lost its old masterfulness … His complexion was sallow, his face swollen; his uniform, which in the past he had kept scrupulously neat, was often neglected in this last period of his life and stained by the food he had eaten with a shaking hand.’
He threatened even his top advisers, not just ordinary Germans, that they would be shot as traitors if they said to anybody that the war was lost. He had the head of the Gestapo, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, present at every situation conference to cow those who might voice ‘defeatist’ opinions. During February and March he sometimes hinted he was taking steps to contact the Allies; Speer’s view is that he was merely trying to reinforce the impression they were irreconcilable. He was hovering between an unbreakable will to win and enthusiasm for a suitably majestic funeral pyre.
So warped was his judgment by his terrible obsession with power that even in these last moments he refused to abandon the least fragment of what remained of his former empire. Such an attitude made it impossible to defend the Reich’s heartland. He resisted Guderian’s frantic plea to ship the 26 divisions in Latvia back across the Baltic, shouting furiously, ‘We cannot give up those areas.’
All sources agree on the Führer’s physical deterioration, which accelerated after the assassination attempt of 1944. Manteuffel, who had spent the previous Christmas as his guest, was horrified when he visited him just before the Ardennes offensive – by the ‘stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to violent twitching which he did his best to conceal’. Captain Gerhard Boldt, meeting him for the first time in February 1945, records that he moved as though senile, that his face wore a look of total exhaustion. Trevor-Roper attributes it to turning night into day, and to drugs injected by his doctors. If his sleep pattern had been irregular since his time as a runner during the 1914 war, some of the drugs (belladonna and strychnine) were undoubtedly harmful; Dr Brandt, who suspected he might have Parkinson’s Disease, described the injections as ‘using the elixir of life years ahead of time’. John Keegan suggests that the cause of this terrifying disintegration was primarily psychological, the knowledge that he had not been worthy of the German people. Yet he convinced Abert Speer and others that he regarded the German people as having failed him; he told Speer in March, ‘The nation has proved to be the weaker and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.’
In mid-March the Allies crossed the Rhine, and within a month 350,000 German troops surrendered to them. Model, the ‘Führer’s Fireman’, shot himself. However, the Russians postponed their final assault, preferring to mop up East Prussia, Hungary and Austria.
Amid the wreckage of his Thousand Year Reich Hitler still refused to accept that he was finished. On 21 April Goebbels, equally deluded, noted that ‘a high ranking man from the Soviet Union in Stockholm’ had asked for talks but the Führer said no, arguing that such talks would be seen as a sign of weakness. Goebbels protested that talks would not tell the enemy anything which they did not know already. Hitler was adamant; talks would only encourage the British and Americans to co-operate more closely with the Soviets.
He had always shared the Emperor’s fatal weakness for underestimating opponents, such as ‘the drunkard Churchill and the criminal Roosevelt’. However, when news came on 13 April of the President’s death, for a moment he thought it was proof that ‘Providence’ was watching over him, the political miracle for which he had been holding out; he awaited envoys from Harry S Truman. Even in the insane atmosphere of his bunker, it soon became clear that nothing had changed, but in his momentary euphoria he issued two final Führer Directives on 15 April. In the first, No. 73, explaining that Germany was likely to be cut in two, he announced that the area separated from him was to have its own commander in chief, though ‘as far as communications will allow, the unified control of operations by myself personally, as hitherto, will not be altered’. In No. 74, which was to go down to company level to reach the troops, he exhorted them to fight on:
In these hours, the whole German people looks to you, my fighters in the East, and only hopes that, thanks to your weapons, and under your leadership, the Bolshevik assault will be choked in a sea of blood.
There had been talk of an ‘Alpine redoubt’ in Bavaria into which the Nazi leadership and a picked force of dedicated troops were to withdraw to prolong the fight to the bitterest of all ends – in the conviction that ‘Providence’ would never abandon National Socialist Germany. While much of the south remained unoccupied by the Allies and contained mountainous country well suited for a last stand, the concept was almost certainly a device of Hitler to strengthen his followers’ will to endure until he himself decided that that there was no further hope. Clausewitz had stressed how political opposition revived as soon as Napoleon was deprived of his capital, something the Führer must surely have feared. As it was Goering and Himmler were both plotting to take his place.
As his world crumbled around him in a hellish scenario of exploding bombs, crashing masonry and fire-storms Hitler stayed in his bunker 50 feet underground, clinging to the tatters of the power which had consumed him. (According to Otto Dietrich, he had a sign hung at the entrance to the bunker – ‘No smoking’.) He played Wagner’s Götterdämtnerung on the gramophone, over and over again.
On 15 April, the same day as his two final Führer directives, three Russian armies started an offensive whose object was the capture of Berlin. In a vain attempt to beat them back, he juggled divisions existing only in his imagination on an operations map which bore no relation to reality. (Among his capital’s few defenders were the Waffen SS, men of the Charlemagne Division.) By 25 April the city was completely surrounded, those within being cut off from all hope of rescue or escape.
Three days before the Führer had at last admitted that the war was lost. On 22 April, learning at the daily situation conference that Obergruppenführer Steiner’s counter-attack would never happen, his control snapped. He shrieked and raved at his horrified ‘courtiers’ shouting that the army had betrayed him, that he was surrounded by traitors. The Third Reich was over, he cried, and he would stay and meet death in Berlin.
During the Emperor’s flight from Russia in 1812 he speculated as to what the Allies would do if they caught him. ‘Can you picture to yourself, Caulaincourt, the figure you would cut in an iron cage, in the main square of London?’ He then had a fit of hysteria. Hitler had no illusions. He knew that he would be put on show and then executed. By 28 April 1945 the Russians were only half a mile away from the bunker. On 29 April, in the one chivalrous gesture of his entire life, he married Eva Braun. Next day both retired to their bedroom to die. Clutching a photograph of his mother, the Führer shot himself, while Eva took poison.
Amid his own ruin in 1814 Napoleon confided in a loyal supporter ‘My dear fellow, if the Cossacks reach the gates of Paris it’s the end of Emperor and Empire.’ As it was, Tsar Alexander’s Cossacks stabled their horses in Paris. In 1945 Stalin’s Cossacks rode into Berlin. Neither capital need have entertained them had it not been for their rulers’ madness. Determined to escape from a war on two fronts, both had been destroyed by such a war.
So long as his reign lasts there will be war.
Hippolyte Taine, Origines de la France contemporaine
I WILL TELL YOU NO MORE. LET THE DEAD LIE.
HOWEVER IT FARED AFTER WITH THE HUNS,
MY TALE IS ENDED. THIS IS THE
FALL OF THE NIBELUNGS.
Nibelungenlied