The Second Book of General Ignorance (20 page)

He wasn’t short.

The universal belief that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769– 1821) was tiny came about from a combination of mistranslation and propaganda.

Napoleon’s autopsy, carried out in 1821 by his personal physician Francesco Antommarchi, recorded his height as ‘5/2’. It is now thought this represents the French measurement ‘5 pieds 2 pouces’, which converts to English measurement as 5 feet 6½ inches (1.69 metres).

The average height of Frenchmen between 1800 and 1820 was 5 feet 4½ inches (1.64 metres), so Napoleon would have been taller than most of the people he knew and taller, in fact, than the average Englishman, who was then 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 metres). Napoleon was only 2½ inches shorter than the Duke of Wellington – tall for his day at 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres) – and 2½ inches taller than his other great rival Horatio Nelson, who was only 5 feet 4 inches (1.62 metres).

Shortly after seizing power in 1799, Napoleon imposed height requirements on all French troops. In the elite Imperial Guard, Grenadiers had to be at least 5 feet 10 inches tall (1.78 metres) and his personal guard, the elite Mounted Chasseurs, had to be a minimum of 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 m). So, for much of the time, the soldiers around him would have been noticeably taller, creating the impression that he was small.

The great British caricaturist James Gillray (1757–1815)
produced the first and most damaging image of a diminutive Napoleon in ‘The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver’, inspired by
Gulliver’s Travels
. In the cartoon George III holds Napoleon in the palm of his hand, inspects him with an eye-glass and comments, ‘I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious little odious reptiles that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.’

The survival of the ‘short Napoleon’ myth is perpetuated by the widespread use of the term ‘Napoleon complex’ to describe short people who supposedly make up for their lack of stature by being aggressive.

There isn’t much scientific evidence for this commonly held theory, however. It’s not an officially recognised psychiatric syndrome and it doesn’t seem to occur in the animal kingdom. Although one study found that, in contests between males in some species of swordtail fish, the smaller fish started 78 per cent of the fights, this is very much the exception.

Napoleon may have been aggressive, but he wasn’t small.

Apparently, it was Adolf Hitler.

The Duke of Wellington would have been horrified by the suggestion that he thought cricket had anything to do with his famous victory. Wellington hated sport. Furthermore, he was unhappy at Eton and during his time there the school didn’t have any playing fields.

According to the historian Sir Edward Creasy, the
misunderstanding came about in the following way. Decades after the battle of Waterloo, the Duke passed an Eton cricket match and remarked: ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo.’ But this was purely a general comment about the qualities of the British officer class, not an appreciation of his old school’s cricket coaching.

Adolf Hitler, it seems, took a very different view. In 1934, Anthony Eden went to meet him in Berlin. Eden was then the British cabinet minister responsible for the League of Nations and hoped to find common ground with Hitler by reminiscing about the old days (they had fought in opposite trenches at Ypres in the First World War). Eden described him as ‘reasonable, charming and affable’, but the Führer only wanted to talk obsessively about one thing: Eton.

Hitler was convinced Britain owed its victory in the First World War to strategic skills acquired at Eton. Eden, an Old Etonian himself, disagreed. He pointed out that the Eton College Officer Training Corps was a shambles.

His protests were in vain: one of the first things Hitler did after the outbreak of the Second World War was to arrange for Eton to be bombed.

Two bombs fell on the school. One shattered all the glass in the college chapel; the other narrowly missed a library full of boys studying. There were no reported casualties. When parents asked for the pupils to be moved to a safer location, the Headmaster, Charles Elliott, refused. If London’s poor couldn’t leave London, he said, Etonians wouldn’t leave Eton.

Eton College was founded in 1440 by Henry VI. Called the ‘King’s College of Our Lady of Eton beside Wyndsor’ it was originally intended as a charity school, providing free education for seventy poor students using scholars from the town as teaching staff. Henry VI lavished upon it a substantial income from land, and a huge collection of priceless holy
relics – including alleged fragments of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns.

Today Eton has 1,300 pupils and 160 masters and the annual school fee is £29,682. The Officer Training Corps still exists and the current British Prime Minister is a former member of it. By his own account, David Cameron’s favourite song is ‘The Eton Rifles’ (1978), a scathingly anti-public school composition by The Jam.

The German Revolution of November 1918. It’s much less well known than the Russian Revolution of 1917, but the repercussions were just as significant.

By the middle of 1918, most Germans knew they had lost the First World War. So when Admiral Franz von Hipper (1863–1932), commander of the German battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland, proposed a last do-or-die engagement with the British Navy, the reaction was less than enthusiastic
and several ships mutinied. Although the revolt was short-lived, it persuaded the German High Command to rescind the battle order and return the fleet to Kiel.

There, convinced they were back in control, the authorities arrested forty-seven of the mutineers. Local union leaders, outraged by the treatment of the sailors, called for a public demonstration. On 3 November, several thousand people marched through Kiel under banners demanding ‘Peace and Bread’. The military police opened fire on the march and seven protestors were killed.

Within twenty-four hours there was a mass uprising of soldiers, sailors and workers all over Germany, demanding an end to the war, the abdication of the Kaiser and the establishment of a republic. At this point, most states in the German Federation still had individual royal families but, in less than a week, they had all abdicated in favour of democratically elected Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

In Berlin Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), leader of the Social Democrats, the main left-wing political party, was worried that this might spark a communist revolution along Russian lines, plunging the country into civil war. To appease the rebels, he asked the Kaiser to abdicate. By this time even the troops on the Western Front were refusing to fight, but the Kaiser refused. Exasperated, the liberal Chancellor of the Reichstag, Prince Max von Baden, took matters into his own hands and sent a telegram announcing the Kaiser’s abdication.

The Kaiser promptly fled to the Netherlands where he remained until his death in 1941. Baden resigned and, on 9 November, Ebert declared a republic with himself as Chancellor. The Armistice was signed two days later.

Ebert then tackled the revolutionaries, who wanted the entire mechanism of the old state abolished. In early 1919 the newly formed German Communist Party provoked armed insurrections in many German cities. Ebert had them brutally
suppressed by the army. To the Left Ebert was now a traitor, and the militaristic Right hated him just as much for signing the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause in the Treaty of Versailles.

On 19 January 1919 Ebert established a new constitutional government, not in Berlin but at Weimar, the base of the great writers Goethe and Schiller and the spiritual home of German humanism. For the next fourteen years the Weimar Republic battled political instability and hyperinflation caused by punishing war debts. In one year, between 1921 and 1922, the value of the German Mark fell from 60 to 8,000 against the dollar. The German Revolution that had ended the First World War created the chaos out of which Nazism was born.

The worst were in the USSR. The second worst were in China.

The Soviet–German war of 1941–45 was the largest conflict in human history. When Hitler sent three million troops into the Soviet Union, he expected a quick victory. Four years later, an estimated 10 million Soviet troops and 14 million Soviet citizens had died. The Germans lost over 5 million men too: it was in Russia that the outcome of the Second World War was really decided.

It was a vast theatre, fought over thousands of square miles. The Red Army were untrained and hopelessly underequipped in the early stages of the war, with infantry often pitted against tanks. The initial German advance was swift, destroying countless towns and villages, and wrecking the
infrastructure of agriculture and industry. This left millions of Russians homeless and hungry. As the German advance became bogged down, the troops were ordered to show no mercy, systematically butchering prisoners and civilians alike.

It was a very similar set of factors that produced the war’s second largest death toll. Very little is known in the West about the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45, yet even the lowest estimates suggest 2 million Chinese troops and 7 million civilians died. The official Chinese death toll is a total of 20 million.

The Japanese invaded China in 1937 to provide a buffer between themselves and their real enemy, the USSR. China had no central government: much of it was still controlled by warlords and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists hated each other almost as much as they did the Japanese. Chinese troops were pitifully short of weapons and modern military equipment (some still fought with swords) and they were no match for the disciplined and ruthless Imperial Japanese army.

The invasion turned into the greatest, bloodiest guerrilla war ever fought. Both sides pursued horrific scorched earth policies, destroying crops, farms, villages and bridges as they retreated, so as to deny their use to the enemy. Widespread famine and starvation were the result. As in Russia, a lack of military hardware was made up for by the sheer numbers of Chinese willing to fight and die. And, by the end of the war, 95 million Chinese were refugees.

Early on in the conflict, after capturing Chiang Kai-Shek’s capital, Nanking, Japanese troops were sent on an officially authorised, six-week spree of mass murder, torture and rape that left 300,000 dead. Over the course of the war, 200,000 Chinese women were kidnapped to work in Japanese military brothels. Another 400,000 Chinese died after being infected with cholera, anthrax and bubonic plague dropped from
Japanese aircraft. But, no matter how appalling the casualties, the Chinese refused to give in.

All Japan’s military forces surrendered after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In China Mao Zedong’s Communist Party swept to power. In 1972 Mao expressed his gratitude to the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka. ‘If Imperial Japan had not started the war,’ he said, ‘how could we communists have become mighty and powerful?’