A. P. on Nappie

WHY WATERLOO? (352 pp.)--A. P. Herbert--Doubleday ($4).

"Look!" trilled Napoleon's Empress Marie Louise. "I can twitch my ears!" "And so she could," continues Author A. P. Herbert, "without moving a muscle of her face. It was not enough for a long evening, and they gently introduced her to the game of billiards."

Humorist Herbert is a man to whom the ear action of an empress will always be of more concern than her political action. Yet in Why Waterloo? he is trying to be Historian Herbert and keep a reasonably straight face about it; and so he gently and almost apologetically introduces the reader to the game of politics as it was played about Napoleon during his ten months of exile on the Isle of Elba.

King of Elba. The reader, especially if he knows the spry, dry Herbert of Independent Member and Holy Deadlock, may wonder what in the world possessed him to add his tuppence to the Napoleonic legend. Herbert's explanation runs something like this: "What say? Oh. Well, as it happens, you know, I was just passing Elba one day on a boat when I happened to look up and--ha, ha. One thing leads to another, you see and--hm." The real explanation appears to be that the tough old witsnapper just has a soft spot for the great Frenchman; besides. Historian Herbert, working most of the time in dead earnest, is convinced that all other English historians have too long been in league against the truth.

"Napoleon," roars Herbert, "did not 'break out' of Elba: he was driven out."He was driven out, says Herbert, by the allies and the restored Bourbons, who, in violation of their treaty obligations, did not allow Napoleon enough money to keep himself as king of the little Mediterranean island.

Furthermore, says Herbert, the allies most shamefully prevented Napoleon's wife & child from joining him on Elba. They practiced on the wife with a plausible count (one General Neipperg, who played the piano in a way no woman could resist), until she had all but forgotten him.* They ripped the young Napoleon from the nursery he loved, set him among servants he did not like, and made him answer to the name of Francis. Worst of all, the sinister Talleyrand set talk agoing at the Congress of Vienna that Napoleon should be shifted from Elba to the bleak isle of St. Helena, off the west coast of Africa.

Unfit Congressmen. Historian Herbert makes a touching case for poor old (45) Napoleon on Elba--a powerless figure who, for ten months "on his mountain, hardly slept at all, a lonely, miserable, well-meaning, anxious man." Herbert rather conveniently ignores the fact that when Napoleon himself had the power, the rest of Europe hardly slept at all. Yet such considerations are inconsiderable when A. P. opens his proper vein and lets the lemon juice flow on the Castlereaghs, Talleyrands, Metternichs and other notable Congressmen of Vienna. He is particularly acidulous with the Blirnpish British colonel who was supposed to keep an eye on the King of Elba, and was off on an expedition to the Italian baths of Lucca when the great bird flew.

Indeed, as Napoleon's little squadron sails northward to France through the British blockade, Herbert can hardly restrain a huzzah. Miraculous! he chortles. "The gods were on Napoleon's side." However, says Herbert, the decision to escape was by no means a pleasant one for Napoleon. The conqueror of Europe, Herbert assures his readers, wanted nothing but to make Elba "an island Athens," and "die peaceful and happy" there. "The charge is not that one man, through wild ambition, would not accept defeat. It is that the many, having no magnanimity, were unfit for victory." The book ends with Napoleon on his way to Waterloo, a battle Herbert clearly considers one of the most unnecessary ever fought.

* After Napoleon's death, Marie Louise married the general.

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