In the middle of all this activity Murat was recalled to Paris, and it was only after many months and many experiences that he set eyes upon his kingdom again. Had his advice, which was to halt the 1812 campaign at Smolensk and establish a settled Government in Poland, been followed, it is possible, and more than possible, that the disastrous affair would have had a different termination, for Napoleon could have kept his communications open; but the Emperor, at that time, suspected Murat and Ney and Rapp, believing that a weariness of war and a desire to reap some of the fruits of their labour were at the bottom of the really excellent counsel that they offered him, and so he pushed on to Moscow, partly from impatience, partly to satisfy the gnawing appetite of the _folie de grandeurs_ which had hold of him, partly because he did not trust his own men. “Ours is not an army of position,” he said; “it is an army of attack—not of defence.” Murat’s conduct during the campaign was such as to extract an unwilling praise even from the Emperor, who was no believer in praise as an agent for anything but the rank and file. Only when Murat left the wreck of the army, the command of which Napoleon had entrusted to him, on the Oder, did the quarrel which the war had drugged into a false quiet break out again. Napoleon, on hearing of Joachim’s return to his kingdom, wrote a frightful letter to Caroline, and this falling into her husband’s hands drew from him a reply which threatened to break up the relations between the two for all time, and it was only Caroline’s self-control and tact that healed the breach for the time-being. A common danger and the ties of their old comradeship drew them together again when Murat arrived in Bohemia, and then he fought stoutly and well. It is hardly credible and, were it not history, it would be absolutely inconceivable, that, while battling whole-heartedly for the French in Bohemia, Murat was engaged, through his Government, in an attempt to unify Italy by the assistance of Great Britain, which was to supply 25,000 men, who, with his own troops and the disaffected Italians in the ranks of the French garrisons, were to drive the tricolour over the Alps. He contrived to persuade himself that he was honest in his intentions, too, by a process of reasoning peculiar to several of the Emperor’s lieutenants in those times. As Frenchmen they marched with the armies of France, and served her to the best of their splendid ability; as kings and grand dukes they served their subjects—or thought they did—with equal enthusiasm. Bentinck, however, being an Englishman, failed to understand the presence of their separate political entities in one person, and withdrew, so that the unification of Italy, fortunately, one cannot but think, fell through, and Joachim returned to Naples in 1813.