Having withdrawn successfully, the Russians went into winter quarters around Bialystok, and on December 28 Napoleon suspended hostilities and cantoned the army along the Vistula, returning to Warsaw on New Year’s Day. He had little choice considering the bad weather, terrible state of the roads and the fact that due to fever, injury, hunger and exhaustion, 40 per cent of his army was absent at any one time, much of it looking for food in land that could barely support its own population in peacetime, let alone two huge armies at war.64 Orders were given to build hospitals, workshops, bakeries and supply depots, as bridgeheads and fortified camps went up so that the Grande Armée wouldn’t have to force a passage over the river in the spring.
‘Never was the French army so miserable,’ noted Baron Pierre Percy, its surgeon-in-chief.
The soldier, always marching, bivouacking each night, spending days in mud up to his ankles, doesn’t have one ounce of bread, not a drop of brandy, doesn’t have the time to dry his clothes, and he falls from exhaustion and hunger. We found some who had expired on the side of ditches; a glass of wine or brandy would have saved them. His Majesty’s heart must be torn by all this, but he marches to his goal and fills up the great destinies he prepares for Europe; if he failed or only got mediocre results the army would be demoralized and cry out.65
It was estimated that one hundred soldiers had committed suicide by Christmas.66
Napoleon had long placed great emphasis on the treatment, evacuation and care of the wounded, writing around six hundred detailed letters on the subject since the start of the Italian campaign ten years earlier. He often wrote to his senior doctors, Percy and Dominique Larrey, praising the ‘courage, zeal, devotion and, above all, patience and resignation’ of the army’s service de santé.67 He was constantly quizzing surgeons about diseases, and asking them how French medicine differed from that of other countries.68 ‘Here you are, you great charlatan,’ Napoleon would tease his own doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart. ‘Did you kill a lot of people today?’69 He liked and trusted Corvisart, who cured his sciatica and kept him generally healthy until a series of minor but irritating diseases starting afflicting him from the Russian campaign onwards. On other occasions Napoleon could be coruscating about doctors, writing to Jean-Gérard Lacuée in January 1812: ‘The inexperience of the surgeons does more harm to the army than the guns of the enemy.’70
Napoleon only put suggestions for an ambulance service into practice in 1813, when lack of resources prevented it from taking proper effect.71 Yet he did increase the numbers of medical officers serving in the French army, from 1,085 in 1802 to 5,112 a decade later, and the number of battlefield surgeons from 515 to 2,058.72 These few doctors had to deal with truly vast numbers of patients in the Polish campaign; between October 1806 and October 1808, French military hospitals treated 421,000 soldiers. Even when the fighting was fiercest in that period, less than a quarter of these were actually wounded in battle; the rest were ill, mostly from fever.73
• • •
On January 1, 1807, on his way back from Pultusk to Warsaw, Napoleon changed horses in a post-house at Błonie and there met the beautiful blonde, white-skinned twenty-year-old Polish Countess Marie Colonna-Walewska, who he soon discovered was married to an aristocratic landowner a full fifty-two years older than her.74 He arranged to meet her again at a ball, after which she quickly became the mistress to whom he became the most attached. One of the other ladies present at the ball, the gossipy diarist Countess Anna Potocka, ‘saw him squeeze her hand’ at the end of a dance, which she assumed equated to a rendezvous. She added that Marie had a ‘delicious figure but no brains’.75
Napoleon quickly rescinded his invitation to Josephine to join him in Warsaw. ‘It’s too great a stretch of country to cover between Mainz and Warsaw,’ he told her two days after meeting Marie. ‘I’ve many things to settle here. I think you should return to Paris, where you are needed . . . I’m well, the weather’s bad. I love you with all my heart.’76 To her subsequent pleas to be allowed to join him, he replied: ‘I’m more vexed about this than you are; I would have loved to share these long winter nights with you, but one has to yield to circumstances.’77*
• • •
Napoleon visited Rapp in Warsaw, who had been wounded for the ninth time at the battle of Golymin, this time in his left arm. ‘Well, Rapp,’ he said, ‘you are wounded again, and in your unlucky arm too.’ Rapp told him it was small wonder, as ‘we are always in the midst of battles’. ‘We shall perhaps have done fighting when we are eighty years old,’ Napoleon replied.78 This indication that he expected to live far longer than his father is supported by a letter to Dalberg at this time, in which he wrote: ‘One is only two-thirds of the way through life at sixty.’79
Although Napoleon was quite content to let the Russians hibernate through the winter, Ney was desperately short of supplies, so entirely contrary to orders he suddenly struck north on January 10, hoping to capture the major supply depot of Königsberg by surprise. It was the kind of adventurous insubordination that he knew Napoleon would condone if he were successful. He reached Heilsberg a week later, where he stumbled on Lestocq’s Prussian Corps, thereby uncovering the fact that Bennigsen had begun his own surprise attack, and was moving quietly through the 500-square-mile Johannisburg Forest, north-east of Warsaw.
Prisoners captured by Ney and later Bernadotte allowed Napoleon to piece together a major enemy offensive moving towards the Vistula. He immediately spotted the opportunity for a devastating counter-attack. With so much of his army to the south, Napoleon saw a way of operating on Bennigsen’s flank and maybe also on his rear, since the further west the Russians moved, the easier it would be for the French to cut them off. He therefore decided on an attack from Warsaw one hundred miles north to Allenstein on the Alle river. Marshal Lefebvre, who had been taken off the inactive list in 1805, was given a corps with which to besiege Danzig, and was retained at Thorn. Augereau was moved across the Vistula. Bernadotte was ordered to put a screen along the Passarge river and to be ready to make a fighting retreat through Elbing if necessary. Meanwhile, Napoleon pivoted on Thorn, swinging the entire army from south to north. Davout was guarding the eastern flank until replaced by Lannes, whereupon his corps pushed forward towards Ostrolenka and Makow. By January 19 Napoleon’s advance guard met Bennigsen’s moving towards Danzig. The weather was still dire. ‘Never has a campaign been tougher,’ wrote the artillery General Alexandre de Sénarmont. His cannon were up to their axles and his gunners up to their knees in mud.80 Soon after the ground hardened in the frost, and several feet of snow further slowed the army.
On January 27 the Grande Armée was still moving north by forced marches, while Ney and Bernadotte were ordered to continue their retreat westwards, thereby drawing Bennigsen further into Napoleon’s trap. ‘My health has never been better,’ he boasted to Joseph, ‘and in consequence I have become more galant than before.’81 He was by now vigorously pursuing his affair, using the ‘tu’ form to address Marie which he otherwise reserved solely for Josephine and the Shah of Persia: ‘Oh! come to me! Come to me!’ he wrote to her, ‘all your desires will be fulfilled. Your homeland will be dear to me if you take pity of my poor heart. A few days later, sending her a brooch, he wrote
Please accept this bouquet; may it become a secret link that ties us together through the crowds that surround us. When all eyes are on us, we will have a secret code. When my hand touches my heart, you will know that you fill it entirely, and in response, you will put your hand on your bouquet! Love me, my sweet Marie, and may your hand never leave your bouquet!82
He was generous to her too, giving her 50,000 francs in three tranches up to October 1809.83*
• • •
On January 31, the day after Napoleon left Warsaw for the front, Cossacks in the Russian General Bagration’s advance guard captured an aide-de-camp carrying a message from Napoleon to Bernadotte, the aide having failed to destroy his uncoded despatch
es in time. (Napoleon ordered his aides-de-camp to keep messages sewn into the heels of their boots; ‘An aide-de-camp may lose his trousers on his way,’ he once quipped, ‘but never his despatches or his sabre.’84) The message ordered Bernadotte to rejoin the left of the Grande Armée by a secret night march. It included the dispositions of the entire Grande Armée and made clear his intention to cut off the entire Russian army by attacking up from the south. Bennigsen calmly ordered an immediate retreat to the Alle.85 Unaware that his plan had been compromised, Napoleon continued striking north, along terrible roads in atrocious weather. For a commander for whom speed was always the essential element, Poland’s winters were exceptionally frustrating. On February 2 Napoleon learned that instead of advancing to the Vistula, Bennigsen was now retreating towards the Alle, back to safety. He moved as fast as possible to Bergfried in an effort to fix him in position before he escaped. He only had five infantry divisions, Murat’s Cavalry Reserve and part of the Imperial Guard with him. The next day Bennigsen crossed the Alle, leaving only a rearguard to hold off the French. Napoleon called off the assault, and by the following day the Russians had gone. ‘I’m in pursuit of the Russian army,’ he told Cambacérès, ‘and am going to force it back beyond the Niemen.’86*
When Murat caught up with the Russian rearguard at the bridge over a tributary of the River Frisching at Hof on February 6, General Jean-Joseph d’Hautpoul charged his cuirassiers straight at the Russian cannon, taking the position. Half an hour later in front of the whole division Napoleon embraced the enormous, loud and salty-tongued veteran, who true to form turned to his troops afterwards and bellowed: ‘The Emperor is pleased with you, and I am so pleased with you that I kiss all your arses!’87 Murat took 1,400 casualties at Hof. His adversary, the Scots-Lithuanian-born General Michael Barclay de Tolly, lost 2,000 Russians, but Bennigsen had successfully extricated himself again.88 The only way for Bennigsen to protect Königsberg 20 miles to the north – where he could not allow himself to be trapped – was to give battle at Eylau (present-day Bagrationovsk), then an East Prussian town of 1,500 inhabitants 130 miles from the Russian border. He had around 58,000 men with him but was expecting Lestocq to arrive shortly with 5,500 more. Napoleon had 48,000, but Ney 12 miles to the west and Davout 10 miles to the south-east were on their way with nearly 30,000. The Russians had a huge advantage in artillery, however, with 336 guns to Napoleon’s 200.
The main road from Landsberg to Königsberg passes for some 9 miles between a plain and a forest until it emerges onto an undulating plain about 11/2 miles from Eylau, which ends in a slight elevation. From this point Napoleon had a clear view over the broad valley leading to the pronounced ridge on which the Russian army was deployed. On his left foreground was Lake Tenknitten, on his right Lake Waschkeiten. For a thousand yards between them is a slight elevation, more marked at the road crossing after which the road then drops down for the last half mile into Eylau across a slight valley. A church and its cemetery stand on a small hillock to the right of what was in 1807 a town of solid houses on an important crossroads. There were several frozen lakes and marshes and birch woods dotted about. The high point of the plain was the village of Serpallen, where the snow was three feet deep in places.
Bennigsen’s army deployed for battle on the late morning of Saturday, February 7, 1807. At 2 p.m. Murat’s cavalry and the head of Soult’s infantry reached the woods before the village of Grünhofschen. Augereau came up next and deployed towards Tenknitten. Soult sent the 18th and 46th Line into battle against the Russian vanguard unsupported; the former crossed the end of the frozen Tenknitten lake under heavy artillery fire, veered to its right and, much shaken, were attacked by bayonet. Then the St Petersburg Dragoons, looking for revenge after their defeat at Hof, crossed the frozen lake and attacked their left rear, catching both battalions out of square and breaking them, where the 18th Line lost its eagle.* French dragoons arrived in time to counter-charge and save them from complete destruction, but there was much carnage. The 46th Line were able to retire in good order. When Soult deployed his artillery between Schwehen and Grünhofschen, the Russian vanguard began to fall back towards the main body of the army.
Napoleon now held all the plateau ground up to the valley, but his losses had been severe; three weeks later there was still a mound of corpses visible there. He had not intended to storm Eylau that evening, preferring to wait for Ney and Davout to arrive, but various accidents and misunderstandings summed up in that useful phrase ‘the fog of war’ forced him to do so. Soult’s explanation was probably best, that some of the Reserve Cavalry had followed the Russians into Eylau, and that his 24th Line had gone in after them, whereupon general fighting for the church and cemetery had begun which naturally sucked in more men as it progressed. Whatever the reason, the battle was now a two-day affair, with 115,000 men contesting an area only five miles square.
The church and cemetery were stormed by Saint-Hilaire’s division, during which Barclay de Tolly, one of the best generals of the Russian army, was severely wounded by grapeshot, which left him hors de combat for fifteen months. Bagration would have evacuated Eylau but Bennigsen ordered it recaptured it at all costs, so he led three columns in on foot against French infantry and artillery firing canister shot. By 6 p.m. the Russians had retaken most of the town, though not the church and cemetery. Bennigsen then changed his mind, and at 6.30 p.m. he ordered the Russian troops to pull back from the town to the slight elevation that contemporary writers referred to as ‘heights’ to the east, whereupon the French reoccupied the town.
As night fell, Legrand’s division moved just beyond Eylau; Saint-Hilaire camped out in the open near Rothenen; Milhaud’s cavalry was at Zehsen; Grouchy was behind Eylau; Augereau was in a second line between Storchnest and Tenknitten, and the Imperial Guard slept on the elevated area where Bagration had started the day. As snow fell both armies huddled around bivouac fires. Because the supply wagons could not stay apace with the army on forced marches, a number of soldiers hadn’t had bread for three days, and some ate the flesh of dead horses from the battlefield. One soldier complained to Captain Blaze of the Imperial Guard that he had nothing to smoke but hay.89 In Marbot’s words, the French army had ‘for days been living on nothing but potatoes and melted snow’.90
An hour before nightfall, Napoleon visited Eylau. ‘The streets were full of corpses,’ Captain François-Frédéric Billon recalled, ‘what a horrible spectacle. Tears welled in the Emperor’s eyes; nobody would have believed possible such an emotion from this great man of war, however I saw them myself, these tears . . . The Emperor was doing his best to prevent his horse stepping on human remains. Being unsuccessful . . . it’s then that I saw him crying.’91 On a freezing night with snow falling after midnight, Napoleon slept in a chair in the ransacked post-house below the Ziegelhof without taking off his boots.
• • •
At 8 a.m. on the morning of Sunday February 8 the Russians began a furious cannonade upon Eylau, their sheer numbers making up for any lack of accuracy. The French artillery reply did great damage to the Russian formations exposed against the snow. With freezing winds and recurrent snow flurries, visibility was to be a major factor that day, dropping down to ten yards at times, so that the Russians on the heights sometimes couldn’t see Eylau and very often commanders couldn’t see their own troops.
At 9.30 a.m. Napoleon ordered Soult to move north-west of Eylau on the extreme left of his line. Davout’s corps was approaching the town from the other direction, and the Emperor wanted to divert Bennigsen’s attention. By 10 a.m., however, Soult was being forced back by the Russians into Eylau itself. ‘Three hundred cannon on either side pouring out a hail of grapeshot at close quarters wreaking terrible havoc,’ recalled Lejeune. When Davout’s corps arrived on Napoleon’s right they were held up by ferocious attacks from Ostermann-Tolstoy’s cavalry against Friant’s advance-guard. With the left under Soult weak, and Davout deploying painfully slowly, Napoleon needed
a major diversion on the right. He instructed Augereau to attack the Russian left with his 9,000 men and try to link up with Davout. Augereau was very ill before the battle and so cold he had a scarf wrapped around his head with his marshal’s hat jammed on top; he had to be supported in his saddle by an aide-de-camp. As he advanced he got lost in the blizzard and marched straight into a Russian battery firing grapeshot at point-blank range, its direction only discernible by the flashes from the barrels. (Walking along Augereau’s approach at Eylau, with its multiple slopes and folds in the ground, it’s easy to see how brigades could have become completely disorientated in the snowstorm.) Five thousand soldiers and officers were killed or wounded in fifteen minutes, and Augereau himself was wounded.92 Saint-Hilaire’s division, which had stayed on course to try to relieve Davout, was also flung back. By 11.15 the situation was serious. Napoleon watched from Eylau church despite its being fired at by Russian artillery. His left was effectively wrecked, his right had been badly mauled, and reinforcements were delayed. He found himself in personal danger too, when a column of Russian infantry managed to get into Eylau during the battle and came close to the church before it was checked and destroyed.
At 11.30, once it was clear that Augereau had failed, Napoleon sprung one of the great audacious moves of his military career. As the blizzard abated, he flung almost the whole of Murat’s Cavalry Reserve into the greatest cavalry charge of the Napoleonic Wars. Pointing to a Russian cavalry attack developing on Augereau’s smashed corps, he said to Murat either ‘Are you going to let those fellows eat us up?’ or ‘Take all your available cavalry and crush that column’ (or possibly both).93 Murat, who was wearing a green Polish cape and green velvet bonnet for the occasion, and carried only a riding whip, then led 7,300 dragoons, 1,900 cuirassiers and 1,500 Imperial Guard cavalry into a headlong attack. ‘Heads up, by God!’ cried Colonel Louis Lepic of the Guard grenadiers-à-cheval. ‘Those are bullets, not turds!’ The Russian cavalry was hurled back against its own infantry; Russian gunners were sabred alongside their guns; Serpallen was recaptured, and Murat only stopped when he reached Anklappen. (Lepic refused to surrender during a Russian counter-attack and was later rewarded by Napoleon with 50,000 francs for his bravery, which he shared out to his men.)
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