Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/297

Rh exploits accomplished by individuals under the influence of an extraordinary enthusiasm. Revolutionary literature is not entirely false, when it reports so many grandiloquent phrases said to have been uttered by the combatants; doubtless none of these phrases were spoken by the people to whom they are attributed, their form is due to men of letters used to the composition of classical declamation; but the basis is real in this sense, that we have, thanks to these lies of revolutionary rhetoric, a perfectly exact representation of the aspect under which the combatants looked on war, a true expression of the sentiments aroused by it, and the actual accent of the truly Homeric conflicts which took place at that time. I am certain that none of the actors in these dramas ever protested against the words attributed to them; this was no doubt because each found beneath these fantastic phrases, a true expression of his own deepest feelings.

Until the moment when Napoleon appeared the war had none of the scientific character which the later theoretists of strategy have sometimes thought it incumbent on them to attribute to it. Misled by the analogies they discovered between the triumphs of the revolutionary armies and those of the Napoleonic armies, historians imagined that generals anterior to Napoleon had made great plans of campaign; such plans never existed, or at any rate had very little influence on the course of operations. The best officers of that time were fully aware that their talent consisted in furnishing their troops with the suitable opportunities of exhibiting their ardour; and victory was assured each time that the soldiers could give free scope to all their enthusiasm, unfettered by bad commissariat, or by the stupidity of representatives of the people who looked upon themselves as strategists. On