In the early summer it seemed that he might at last be able to gain the upper hand against the nation which was so determinedly challenging his vision for Europe. On March 30, taking advantage of a storm that blew Nelson’s blockading fleet off-station at Toulon, Admiral Villeneuve had escaped and sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, rendezvoused with a Spanish fleet from Cadiz and headed off for Martinique, which he reached on May 14. Once Nelson realized that Villeneuve was not sailing to Egypt, he crossed the Atlantic in pursuit, reaching the West Indies on June 4. The next part of Napoleon’s master-plan for the invasion of Britain was in place. ‘It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only,’ Napoleon wrote to Decrès on June 9, ‘and England will have ceased to exist. There is not a fisherman, not a miserable journalist, not a woman at her toilette, who does not know that it is impossible to prevent a light squadron appearing before Boulogne.’24 In fact the Royal Navy had every intention of preventing a squadron of any size from appearing at Boulogne or any of the invasion ports. Yet with Villeneuve now re-crossing the Atlantic and hoping to break the blockade at Brest, Napoleon was convinced by mid-July that the long-awaited invasion might at last take place. ‘Embark everything, for circumstances may present themselves at any moment,’ he ordered Berthier on the 20th, ‘so that in twenty-four hours the whole expedition may start . . . My intention is to land at four different points, at a short distance from each other . . . Inform the four marshals [Ney, Davout, Soult and Lannes] there isn’t an instant to be lost.’25 He also gave orders that letters from Italy should no longer be disinfected with vinegar for a day before being sent on: ‘If plague was going to come from Italy, it would be through travellers and troop movements. This is simply bothersome.’26
On July 23, after losing two ships in the fog-bound battle of Cape Finisterre against Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Calder’s smaller fleet, Villeneuve obeyed Napoleon’s orders to sail to Ferrol near Corunna in northern Spain, thereby losing the crucial time advantage he had won on his transatlantic journey. On Elba, Napoleon criticized Calder for not attacking on the second day of the action, so allowing Villeneuve to escape. His British interlocutor pointed out that Calder was to the leeward, and therefore couldn’t attack, which Napoleon dismissed as ‘only an excuse, advanced from national pride, for the Admiral ran away during the night of the 23rd’.27 In failing to appreciate the difference between leeward and windward, Napoleon once again demonstrated his huge nautical lacuna.
Under constant harrying from Napoleon – ‘Europe is in suspense waiting for the great event that is being prepared’ – Villeneuve put to sea from Ferrol with thirty-three ships-of-the-line on August 10, hoping to join Ganteaume at Brest with twenty-one ships, which, when added to Captain Zacharie Allemand’s squadron at Rochefort, would give the Combined Fleet no fewer than fifty-nine ships-of-the-line.28 Yet the next day, fearful that the Royal Navy was tracking his movement, instead of sailing north to the Channel Villeneuve sailed south to Cadiz, where he anchored on August 20 and was soon afterwards blockaded by Nelson, who had raced back across the Atlantic and instinctively found him.
• • •
Unbeknown to Napoleon, Austria had secretly joined the Third Coalition on August 9, angered by the Italian coronation, the Genoan annexation and the alliances that Napoleon had concluded with Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden. Although Napoleon privately told Talleyrand on August 3 ‘there is no sense in a war’, he was ready for one if it broke out.29 Within the space of a few days in early August he ordered Saint-Cyr to be ready to invade Naples from northern Italy if necessary, gave Masséna the command in Italy and sent Savary to Frankfurt to secure the best maps of Germany available and to try to spy on the Aulic Council in Vienna.30
Tuesday, August 13 was a very busy day for Napoleon. At 4 a.m. the news of the battle of Cape Finisterre was brought to him at Pont-de-Briques. The intendant-general of the imperial household, Pierre Daru, was summoned and later reported that the Emperor ‘looked perfectly wild, that his hat was thrust down to his eyes, and his whole aspect was terrible’. Convinced that Villeneuve would be blockaded at Ferrol – even though he was in fact sailing away from it by then – Napoleon cried: ‘What a navy! What an admiral! What useless sacrifices!’31 With separate news that the Austrians seemed to be mobilizing, it was clear that the invasion of Britain would have to be postponed. ‘Anyone would have to be completely mad to make war on me,’ he wrote to Cambacérès. ‘Certainly there isn’t a finer army in Europe than the one I have today.’32 Yet once it became clear later in the day that Austria was indeed mobilizing, he was adamant. ‘My mind is made up,’ he wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I want to attack Austria, and to be in Vienna before November to face the Russians, should they present themselves.’ In the same letter he ordered Talleyrand to try to frighten ‘this skeleton Francis, placed on the throne by the merit of his ancestors’, into not fighting, because ‘I want to be left in peace to carry out the war with England.’33 He instructed him to say to the Austrian ambassador to Paris, who was a cousin of the foreign minister Ludwig von Cobenzl, ‘So, M. de Cobenzl, you want war then! In that case you shall have it, and it is not the Emperor who will have started it.’34 Not knowing whether Talleyrand would succeed in cowing Austria, Napoleon continued to urge Villeneuve – whom he described to Decrès as ‘a poor creature, who sees double, and who has more perception than courage’ – to sail north, writing: ‘If you can appear here for three days, or even twenty-four hours, you’ll have achieved your mission . . . In order to help the invasion of that power which has oppressed France for six centuries, we could all die without regretting life.’35
Although Napoleon still did not want to abandon his plans to invade Britain, he appreciated that it would be unwise to try to fight simultaneously on two fronts. He now needed a detailed plan to crush Austria. He had Daru sit down to take dictation. ‘Without any transition,’ Daru later told Ségur,
without any apparent meditation, and in his brief, concise and imperious tones, he dictated to [me] without a moment’s hesitation the whole plan of the campaign of Ulm as far as Vienna. The Army of the Coast, ranged in a line of more than two hundred leagues [600 miles] long fronting the ocean, was, at the first signal, to break up and march to the Danube in several columns. The order of the various marches, their durations; the spots where the various columns should converge or re-unite; surprises; attacks in full force; divers movements; mistakes of the enemy; all had been foreseen during this hurried dictation.36
Daru was left in admiration at ‘the clear and prompt determination of Napoleon to give up such enormous preparations without hesitation’.37
• • •
Berthier’s detailed filing system (which could fit into one coach) was one of the edifices upon which the coming campaign was based; the other was Napoleon’s adoption of the corps system – essentially a hugely enlarged version of the division system with which he had fought in Italy and the Middle East. The time spent in encampment at Boulogne and on continual manoeuvres between 1803 and 1805 allowed Napoleon to divide his army into units of 20,000 to 30,000 men, sometimes up to 40,000, and to train them intensely. Each corps was effectively a mini-army, with its own infantry, cavalry, artillery, staff, intelligence, engineering, transport, victualling, pay, medical and commissary sections, intended to work in close connection with other corps. Moving within about one day’s march of each other, they allowed Napoleon to swap around the rearguard, vanguard or reserve at a moment’s notice, depending on the movements of the enemy. So, in either attack or retreat, the whole army could pivot on its axis without confusion. Corps could also march far enough apart from each other not to cause victualling problems in the countryside.
Each corps needed to be large enough to fix an entire enemy army into position on the battlefield, while the others could descend to reinforce and relieve it within twenty-four hours, or, more usefully, outflank or possibly even envelop the enemy. Individual corps commanders –
who tended to be marshals – would be given a place to go to and a date to arrive there by and would be expected to do the rest themselves. Having never commanded a company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division or corps of infantry or cavalry in battle, and trusting to his marshals’ experience and competence, Napoleon was generally content to leave logistics and battlefield tactics to them, so long as they delivered what he required.38 Corps needed to be capable of making significant inroads into an enemy force on the offensive too.39
It was an inspired system, originally the brainchild of Guibert and Marshal de Saxe.40 Napoleon employed it in almost all his coming victories – most notably at Ulm, Jena, Friedland, Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden – not wishing to relive the perils of Marengo where his forces had been too widely spread. His defeats – particularly at Aspern-Essling, Leipzig and Waterloo – would come when he failed to employ the corps system properly.
‘During the Revolutionary wars the plan was to stretch out, to send columns to the right and left,’ Napoleon said years later, ‘which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was that the evening before a fight, instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I massed them there.’41 Napoleon pioneered an operational level of warfare that lies between strategy and tactics. His corps became the standard unit adopted by every European army by 1812, and which lasted until 1945. It was his unique contribution to the art of war, and its first use in 1805 can be regarded as heralding the birth of modern warfare.
• • •
‘Austria appears to want war,’ Napoleon wrote to his ally Elector Maximilian-Joseph of Bavaria on August 25. ‘I cannot account for such erratic behaviour; however, she will have it, and sooner than she expects.’42 The next day he received confirmation from Louis-Guillaume Otto, then France’s envoy at Munich, that the Austrians were about to cross the River Inn and invade Bavaria. In expectation of this, some French units of what was now officially renamed the Grande Armée had already left Boulogne between August 23 and 25.43 Napoleon called it his ‘pirouette’, and finally said to his staff of his plan to invade Britain: ‘Well, if we must give that up, we will at any rate hear the midnight mass in Vienna.’44 The Boulogne camp wasn’t physically dismantled until 1813.
In order to keep Prussia out of the Coalition, he told Talleyrand to offer Hanover, ‘but it must be understood that this is an offer I shall not make again in a fortnight’.45 The Prussians declared their neutrality, but still insisted on the independence of Switzerland and Holland. Even while preparing for war – sending three letters to Berthier on August 31, two each to Bessières, Cambacérès and Gaudin, and one each to Decrès, Eugène, Fouché and Barbé-Marbois – Napoleon was decreeing that ‘Horse-racing shall be established in those departments of the Empire the most remarkable for the horses they breed: prizes shall be awarded for the fleetest horses.’46 Of course there was a military application to this but it is illustrative of the cornucopia of his thinking even, or perhaps particularly, in a crisis. In the same month he also declared that dancing near churches shouldn’t be forbidden, for ‘Dancing isn’t evil . . . If everything the bishops said was to be believed, then balls, plays, fashions would be forbidden and the Empire turned into one great convent.’47
By September 1, when Napoleon left Pont-de-Briques for Paris to ask the Senate to raise a fresh levy of 80,000 men, he told Cambacérès, ‘there is not a single man in Boulogne beyond those necessary for the protection of the port’.48 He imposed a total news blackout about troop movements, telling Fouché to ban all newspapers ‘from mentioning the army, as if it no longer exists’.49 He also came up with an idea for tracking enemy mobilization, ordering Berthier to get a German-speaker ‘to follow the progress of the Austrian regiments, and file the information in the compartments of a specially made box . . . The name or number of each regiment is to be entered on a playing-card, and the cards are to be changed from one compartment to another according to the movements of the regiments.’50
The following day the Austrian General Karl Mack von Leiberich crossed the Bavarian border and quickly captured the fortified city of Ulm, expecting to be reinforced soon afterwards by the Russians under General Mikhail Kutuzov, bringing the Coalition forces up to a total of 200,000 men in that theatre. Yet Ulm was dangerously far forward for the Austrians to come without already being in direct contact with the Russians, who for some reason – bad staff-work has been blamed, as has the eleven-day difference between Russia’s Julian and the rest of Europe’s Gregorian calendar – were very late deploying.51 Meanwhile, Archduke Charles prepared to attack in Italy, where Napoleon had replaced Jourdan with Masséna. After warning Eugène and his army commanders of the Austrian attack on September 10, Napoleon took time that day to instruct the fifty-three-year-old Pierre Forfait, prefect of Genoa, to stop taking his young mistress – ‘a Roman girl who is no more than a prostitute’ – to the theatre.52
The seven corps of the Grande Armée under marshals Bernadotte, Murat, Davout, Ney, Lannes, Marmont and Soult, totalling over 170,000 men, raced eastwards at astonishing speed, crossing the Rhine on September 25. The men were delighted to be fighting on dry land and not hazarding the English Channel in flimsy flat-bottomed boats, and marched off merrily, singing ‘Le Chant du Départ’. (It wasn’t unusual for a demi-brigade to know as many as eighty songs by heart; as well as keeping up morale on marches and before attacks, musicians doubled as stretcher-bearers and medical orderlies during battles.) ‘Finally everything is taking on colour,’ Napoleon told Otto that day.53 It was the largest single campaign ever conducted by French troops. Arriving from Boulogne, Holland and elsewhere, the front stretched across nearly 200 miles, from Coblenz in the north to Freiburg in the south.
The day before the Grande Armée reached the Rhine, a rumour swept Paris that Napoleon had seized all the gold and silver reserves of the Bank of France to pay for the campaign and that consequently there wasn’t enough to cover the notes in circulation. (Although no gold had in fact been removed, the Bank had circulated 75 million francs in paper against 30 million francs in collateral.) The Bank was besieged by crowds, whom it first paid slowly, then stopped paying altogether, and later paid very slowly at 90 centimes in the franc.54 Napoleon was acutely aware of the crisis, in which the police had to be summoned to quell panicking crowds who feared a return of the days of the paper assignat. He felt that Parisian bankers were not showing enough confidence in France, and realized that a quick victory and profitable peace were more important than ever.
Napoleon left Saint-Cloud on September 24 and joined the army at Strasbourg two days later, where he left Josephine and headed towards the Danube east of Ulm to try to encircle Mack and cut him off from the Russians. General Georges Mouton was sent to the Elector of Württemberg to demand passage for Ney’s corps of 30,000 men, which could hardly be refused, and when the Elector asked that Württemberg be promoted to a kingdom Napoleon laughed: ‘Well, that suits me very well; let him be a king, if that’s all he wants!’55
The corps system allowed Napoleon to turn his entire army 90 degrees to the right once over the Rhine. The manoeuvre was described by Ségur as ‘the greatest change of front ever known’ and meant that by October 6 the Grande Armée was in a line facing south, all the way from Ulm up to Ingolstadt on the Danube.56 This agile placing of a very large army across Mack’s line of retreat before he even knew what was happening, at the loss of no troops, stands as one of Napoleon’s most impressive military achievements. ‘There is no further premise to negotiate with the Austrians,’ he told Bernadotte at this time, ‘except with cannon-fire.’57 He was buoyed by the fact that contingents from Baden, Bavaria and Württemberg had all now joined with the Grande Armée.
Years after the campaign, Napoleon’s toymaker made a miniature carriage that was harnessed to four mice, in order to amuse some children with whom the Emperor was staying. When it wo
uldn’t move, Napoleon told them ‘to pinch the tails of the two leaders, and when they started the others would follow’.58 All through late September and early October, he pinched the tails of Bernadotte and Marmont, pushing them on to Stuttgart and beyond, with Bernadotte marching through the Prussian territories of Ansbach and Bayreuth, to Berlin’s private fury but without any public response. ‘I am at the court of Württemberg, and although waging war, am listening to some very good music,’ Napoleon told his interior minister, Champagny, from Ludwigsburg on October 4, commenting on Mozart’s ‘extremely fine’ Don Juan. ‘The German singing, however, did seem somewhat baroque.’59 To Josephine he added that the weather was superb and the pretty Electress ‘seems very nice’, despite being the daughter of George III.60
On the evening of October 6 Napoleon pushed on to Donauwörth, in the words of Ségur, ‘in his impatience to see the Danube for the first time’.61 The word ‘impatience’ recurs often in Ségur’s narrative, and might almost be considered the most constant of all Napoleon’s military, indeed personal, traits. Of those closest to him on this campaign – Berthier, Mortier, Duroc, Caulaincourt, Rapp and Ségur – all mention his great impatience throughout, even when his plans were ahead of schedule.
Napoleon wrote the first of thirty-seven bulletins while still at Bamberg, prophesying from there the ‘total destruction’ of the enemy.62 ‘Colonel Maupetit, at the head of the 9th Dragoons, charged into the village of Wertingen,’ he wrote in a report of a fight in which Murat and Lannes defeated an Austrian force on October 8; ‘being mortally wounded, his last words were: “Let the Emperor be informed that the 9th Dragoons have showed themselves worthy of their reputation, and that they charged and conquered, exclaiming ‘Vive l’Empereur!’”’63 Napoleon’s bulletins were exciting to read, even as fiction. He used them to inform the army of the meetings he had held, how cities were decorated, and even of the ‘extraordinary beauty’ of Madame de Montgelas, wife of the Bavarian prime minister.64
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