Battle Of The Bunnies

I believe the legend that the first time Major-General Louis Berthier met Napoleon, in March of 1796, he confided to a fireside comrade, “I don’t know why, but the little bas--d scares me.” He was called “Berthier the Ugly” because of his squat build and his hook nose that rose out of his cheeks like a talon. Berthier had spent his entire adult life in the military, rising through the ranks under the “Old Regime”. He had even fought with distinction under Rochambeu at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781. But Napoleon, at 26, was already a comet on the French political scene, while “ugly, little” Berthier, who was 34 years old, had survived the revolution by keeping his head so low it could not be conveniently guillotined. But perhaps Berthier sensed on that blistery March morning that the “Little Corsican” would use him over the next 20 years to slaughter a million Frenchmen and three million others who would die opposing Napoleon. I wonder if he also sensed the sacrifice of all those bunnies, as well. * Napoleon’s amazing string of victories began at Montenotte, in Piedmont on April 12 and continued over the bridge at Lodi on May 10, 1796. Berthier was there, sharing the hardships as Napoleon’s chief of staff, translating Napoleon’s detailed instructions into coherent orders, organizing the advance of his armies from the Battle of the Pyramids in Egypt to the capture of Haifa in 1798. And when Napoleon abandoned his Egyptian army in 1799, he was careful to bring Berthier back to France with him. And Berthier repaid his master, insuring the victory pulled from defeat at Marengo, in 1800. * Four years later, in the spring of 1805, it was Berthier, Marshal of France now, who meticulously directed the lightning strike of Le Grande Armiee across the Rhine to crush Austria at Ulam, capture Vienna, and defeat the combined Austrian and Russian armies at the Emperor of France’s greatest victory, Austerlitz. In 1806 Berthier oversaw Napoleon’s crushing of Prussia at Jena, and the frozen bloodbath against the Russians at Eylau, followed by the decisive victory over the Czar at Friedland. By the late summer of 1807 Napoleon was the master of Europe, called by his implacable English foes, The Beast of Europe. And he would not have been so accomplished if it were not for the efforts of ugly little Berthier. And so it was obvious that when the Emperor sought an afternoon’s diversion, a summer picnic and a hunt in the countryside outside of Paris, it would be Berthier who would organize the entire affair. Surely the man who could plan the conquest of nations could arrange a simple afternoon’s hunt. * They arrived en masse, like a column of revolutionary infantrymen swarming a defensive position. The Emperor went nowhere alone these days. A squadron of cavalry stood guard, and messengers arrived and were dispatched forth, for an Empire run by one man cannot survive long without assurance that the master is always watching. There were ambassadors and royalty and a dozen Marshalls covered in glittering gold braid, and Generals to carry their eyeglasses and purses, and servants to set the tables and keep the

Champaign glasses bubbling over, and chiefs to cook the lamb and fish and chicken Marengo, and dozens of carriages and wagons to carry them all from their palaces and barracks and back home again. And after the repast the Emperor and his guests put away their knives and Champaign glasses and took up their weapons. * Berthier had prepared this too, down to the smallest detail. He had tried to obtain rabbits raised on local farms for the hunt, but the local peasants had been taxed so heavily to pay for the Grande Army and all that gold braid that they had stripped the local woods and fields of wild game. So the ever resourceful Berthier had bought every domesticated rabbit in the Paris market, some 30,000 of them in all, fattened in pens and cages. And they had been released the afternoon before, in an adjacent field. There were beaters, to drive the game to the guns, for an Emperor does not have all day to spend stalking his prey. So as the Emperor Napoleon advanced into the field with his shotgun held at the ready, Berthier gave the signal and the beaters advanced. And such was a sight then seen, the likes of which had never been seen before in all of history. * Thirty-thousand Leporidae Oryctolagus cuniculus (European bunny rabbits) charged desperately toward the first human they had seen in 24 hours; a human, the source of all food and warmth in their entire sheltered lives, the answer to a domesticated rabbit’s hopes and prayers after and endless cold night in the strange, forbidding emptiness of a field. If they could have spoken they would have cried out in unison in their little bunny voices, “Take me home, take me home, get me out of here!” But they could not cry out. They could not speak. And so what Napoleon saw and heard, as he entered the field with “rodenticide” in his heart, was thirty thousand rodents stampeding silently toward him, perhaps with regicide in their hearts. * Where they afflicted? Where they part of a devilish English plot to murder him? He had no way of knowing, and little time to decide. But even if the Emperor suspected the actual cause behind the stamped of cottontails, hunting is not a sport when the prey rush you and demand to be butchered en masse. The servants thrashed at the rabbits with whips, the ambassadors and royalty snickered behind their lace cuffs and the generals and Marshals of France threw their gold braid between the homesick bunnies and their Emperor. But in the end Napoleon was forced to retreat to his royal coach, and then to withdraw back within the walls of his palace, his afternoon sport spoiled. It was prescience of the night after Waterloo, of the snowy road home from Moscow, of the voyage to Elba and Helena. At a time when no force could stand up to the Beast of Europe, Napoleon had been defeated by an army of bunnies.