Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Massed artillery fire was old in World War I (Napoleon used it first), but standards set at Sill are incredible to oldtime two-percenters.* Twenty-five seconds after the target is pointed out, shells from a dozen 105s are on their way-an hour would be comparable 25 years ago. In routine exercises more than 100 guns obliterate targets 800 yards square less than five minutes after they are assigned-incredible by the standards at Soissons or Saint-Mihiel. Some of this speed-up comes from having changed the firing unit from the battery of four guns to the battalion...
...passion, virtue and foolishness." Eugenie was almost a textbook image of ambitious and dislocated womanhood, tinged with the dread occupational diseases of hysteria and frigidity. But in her flaming devotion to an idea, she was magnificent. Her 93 years were one long, un-flickering act of faith in the Napoleonic legend. The intensity of this faith brought her marriage to Napoleon III, and helped make history, and helped unmake...
Passion. Eugenie was born during an earthquake. Her father, a Spanish count who had served under Napoleon, was a sort of primitive Pavlov. He used to seat the nervous little girl astride a cannon and fire it off again & again while, with the one good eye the wars had left him, he studied her reactions. Eugenie became a Napoleon-cultist, a frenzied romantic. After the death of her father, Eugenie and her mother wintered in Paris, where the new emperor, Louis Napoleon, fell passionately in love with her. But her marriage (in 1853) was no love match; she was infatuated...
...high-water mark); Leo X (a worldly, cultivated gentleman who excommunicated Martin Luther and proved incapable of dealing with the problems of the Reformation); Alexander VI (a Borgia, who practiced simony and nepotism and failed in his master plan to conquer and unify Italy); Pius VII (whose Concordat with Napoleon restored Catholicism to France); Leo XIII (whose encyclical, Rerum Novarum, first diagnosed for Catholics the sickness of contemporary society and called upon them authoritatively to cure...
...Bazaine rode out to command the vital border fortress of Metz in 1870 (and, a month later, to become Commander in Chief of France's Army of the Rhine), he was heard to mutter: "Nous marchons a un désastre. (We're marching to a disaster.)" Napoleon III, unable to sit a horse (because of bladder trouble), his face rouged (to conceal his deathly pallor from his troops), followed close behind General MacMahon's doomed army. When MacMahon blundered into a German trap at Sedan, the Emperor mounted a horse despite his pain, rode along...