Bennigsen sent large bodies of men across the Alle into Friedland, and ordered them to begin fanning out towards Heinrichsdorf, where they could threaten the French rear. Nansouty’s cuirassiers were directed by Lannes towards Heinrichsdorf and drove the leading Russians back. Grouchy then moved up quickly from Posthenen, charged in from the flank and got in among the Russian guns, sabring the unprotected gunners. The by-then-disordered French cavalry were themselves counter-charged, but by 7 a.m. Grouchy had stabilized the French line to the east of Heinrichsdorf.
In the desultory fighting that followed, the wily, agile Gascon Marshal Lannes was in his element. Covered by an unusually thick line of skirmishers in the tall crops, he continually moved small units of infantry and cavalry up and down and inside and outside the woods, exaggerating the size of his force, for he still only had 9,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry to hold off the six Russian divisions that had crossed the Alle. Fortunately, just as Bennigsen deployed his forces and attacked, Mortier’s corps arrived on the field and drove into Heinrichsdorf just in time to deny it to the Russian infantry. Leaving three battalions of Oudinot’s grenadiers in the village, Dupas deployed to its right. Mortier’s Polish division then came onto the field and General Henri Dombrowski’s three Polish regiments moved into position, supporting the artillery at Posthenen. In terrific fighting in Sortlack Wood, Oudinot’s division effectively sacrificed itself to hold off the Russian infantry. By 10 a.m. Lannes had been joined by General Jean-Antoine Verdier’s division, bringing his total up to 40,000 men.
Bennigsen realized that the absent Napoleon – who was galloping to Friedland as fast as he could – was feeding more and more men onto the battlefield against him, and he changed his expectations for the outcome. He now merely hoped to hold his line until the end of the day so that he could effect another escape. Yet nightfall in midsummer falls very late at that latitude and at noon, having galloped on his Arab horse from Eylau with his bodyguard straining to keep up, Napoleon appeared on the battlefield. Oudinot, riding a wounded horse, his uniform torn by bullet holes, made his way over and begged the Emperor: ‘Give me reinforcements and I shall throw the Russians into the river!’ From the hill behind Posthenen, Napoleon immediately spotted Bennigsen’s gross tactical error. The split of the plain caused by the Millstream lake meant that Bennigsen’s left was vulnerable to being pushed up against the river.
While Napoleon and Oudinot awaited reinforcement, Napoleon allowed a lull in the battle, certain that Bennigsen couldn’t repair the damage even if he had seen it. The men on both sides welcomed the chance to find shade and water. Many were delirious with thirst as they had spent hours ripping saltpetre cartridges off with their teeth on a stifling, cloudless midsummer day that reached 30ºC in the shade. Napoleon sat on a simple wooden chair and ate a lunch of black bread within range of the Russian guns. When his attendants begged him to withdraw, he said: ‘They will dine less comfortably than I will lunch.’16 To those who worried that it was getting late to attack, and that the assault should be postponed to the next day he replied: ‘We won’t catch the enemy making a mistake like this twice.’17 The soldier-diplomat Jacques de Norvins watched Napoleon walking up and down hitting tall weeds with his riding crop and saying to Berthier: ‘Marengo day, victory day!’18 Napoleon was always highly attuned to the propaganda possibilities of anniversaries, as well as being superstitious.
At 2 p.m. he issued orders for the resumption of hostilities at 5 p.m. Ney was to attack towards Sortlack; Lannes would continue holding the centre, and Oudinot’s grenadiers would lean to the left to draw attention to themselves and away from Ney; Mortier would take and hold Heinrichsdorf, with Victor and the Imperial Guard staying in reserve behind the centre. Over on the church belfry, Bennigsen and his staff watched, as Hely-Hutchinson recorded, as ‘the horizon seemed to be bound by a deep girdle of glittering steel’.19 Too late, Bennigsen began issuing orders for a retreat, which he had to cancel immediately as withdrawal was by now too dangerous to attempt in the face of an oncoming enemy.
At 5 p.m. three salvoes of twenty guns signalled the start of the Grande Armée’s attack. Ney’s 10,000 infantry surged through Sortlack Wood and completely cleared it by 6 p.m. His columns then marched against the Russian left. General Jean-Gabriel Marchand’s division drove into Sortlack village and pushed many of its defenders bodily into the river. He then moved westwards along the river, sealing off the Friedland peninsula, bottling the Russians up inside. The French artillery could hardly miss them. Napoleon then sent Victor’s corps up the Eylau road towards Friedland itself from the south-west.
When Ney’s exhausted corps began to fall back, Sénarmont divided his thirty guns into two batteries of fifteen each, with 300 rounds per cannon and 220 per howitzer. Sounding ‘Action Front’ on his bugles, his teams galloped forward, unlimbered and fired first at 600 yards, then at 300, then at 150, and finally, with nothing but canister-shot, at 60. The Russian Ismailovsky Guards and the Pavlovsky Grenadiers tried to attack the batteries, but some 4,000 men fell to their fire in about twenty-five minutes. An entire cavalry charge was destroyed with two volleys of canister. The Russian left was utterly destroyed, and trapped against the Alle river. Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties. Ney’s regenerated corps, led by the 59th Line, battled through the streets of Friedland from the west, securing the town by 8 p.m. The Russians were pressed back towards the bridges, which caught fire, and many soldiers were drowned trying to cross the Alle.
At that point, Lannes’ and Mortier’s divisions poured out onto the plains and the Russian units to the right of Friedland were simply pushed into the river. Many Russians fought to the end with bayonets, although twenty-two cavalry squadrons escaped along the left bank of the Alle. Heat, exhaustion, nightfall and the pillaging of the town for food have all been advanced as explanations for why there was no Jena-style pursuit of the Russians after Friedland. It is also possible that Napoleon felt a wholesale massacre might have made it harder for Alexander to come to terms, and by then he very much wanted peace. ‘Their soldiers in general are good,’ he told Cambacérès, something he had hitherto not recognized, and which he would have done well to remember five years later.20
For sheer concentration of effort, Friedland was Napoleon’s most impressive victory after Austerlitz and Ulm. At the cost of 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, he had utterly routed the Russians, whose losses have been estimated at around 20,000 – or 43 per cent of their total – though only around twenty guns.21* Percy’s hundred surgeons had to work through the night, and a general later recalled ‘meadows covered with limbs severed from their bodies, those frightful places of mutilation and dissection which the army called ambulances’.22
The day after the battle Lestocq evacuated Königsberg and Napoleon issued a classic bulletin:
Soldiers! on 5 June we were attacked in our cantonments by the Russian army, which misconstrued the causes of our inactivity. It perceived, too late, that our repose was that of the lion; now it does penance for its mistake . . . From the shores of the Vistula, we have reached those of the Niemen with the rapidity of the eagle. At Austerlitz you celebrated the anniversary of the coronation; you have this year worthily celebrated that of the battle of Marengo, which put an end to the War of the Second Coalition. Frenchmen, you have been worthy of yourselves, and of me; you will return to France covered with laurels, after having acquired a peace which guarantees its own durability. It is time for our country to live in repose, sheltered from the malign influence of England. My rewards will prove to you my gratitude and the greatness of the love I bear you.23
On June 19 Tsar Alexander sent Prince Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky to seek an armistice, as the Russians re-crossed the Niemen and burned the bridge of the last Prussian town at Tilsit (present-day Sovetsk), where Napoleon arrived at 2 p.m. The Prussians, unable to continue the war without Russian
help, would now simply have to follow in the Tsar’s diplomatic wake. A month’s armistice was agreed in two days’ negotiation, and on the third evening Napoleon invited Lobanov-Rostovsky to dinner, drank a toast to the Tsar’s health and suggested that the Vistula was the natural boundary between the two empires, thus implying that he would not demand any Russian territory if an all-embracing peace could be reached. On that basis, arrangements were swiftly made for Napoleon and Alexander to meet. In order to provide neutral ground a pavilion was erected by General Jean-Ambroise Baston de Lariboisière, commander of the Guard artillery, on a raft in the middle of the Niemen river securely tethered to both banks at Piktupönen, the official ceasefire line near Tilsit.24 ‘Few sights will be more interesting,’ wrote Napoleon in his 85th campaign bulletin. Large crowds of soldiers did indeed turn up on both banks to watch the meeting.25 Its purpose, Napoleon repeated, was nothing less than to ‘give repose to the existing generation’. After eight months on campaign, he was keen to make peace, return to Paris and continue to oversee his far reaching reforms of so many aspects of French life.
• • •
The interview between the emperors on Thursday, June 25, 1807 was remarkable for much more than its bizarre location; it was one of the great summit meetings of history. Though genuine friendship is impossible at the apex of power, Napoleon made every effort to charm the twenty-nine-year-old absolute ruler of Russia, and establish a warm personal relationship with him as well as an effective working one. The peace treaties that the negotiations produced – signed with Russia on July 7 and Prussia two days later – effectively divided Europe into zones of French and Russian influence.
Napoleon arrived on the raft first, and when Alexander came aboard, dressed in the dark-green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the two men embraced. The Tsar’s first words were ‘I will be your second against England.’26 (A less regal version has it, ‘I hate the English as much as you do.’) Alexander had not shown the same antipathy to the English gold he had been readily accepting for years, but, whatever the phrase he used, Napoleon immediately appreciated that a wide-ranging agreement would be possible – indeed, as he put it later, ‘Those words changed everything.’27 They then entered the pavilion’s sumptuous salon and spoke alone for two hours. ‘I’ve just met the Emperor Alexander,’ Napoleon reported to Josephine. ‘I’m very well satisfied with him; he is a very handsome and good young emperor; he has more intelligence than one thinks.’28
Although the door of the raft’s pavilion (which Napoleon pronounced ‘beautiful’) was surmounted by representations of the eagles of Russia and France and large painted monograms of ‘N’ for Napoleon and ‘A’ for Alexander, there was no ‘FW’ for Frederick William of Prussia, who was present at Tilsit but made to feel very much the junior monarch. On the first day he wasn’t invited onto the raft at all but had to wait on the riverbank wrapped in a Russian greatcoat while the fate of his kingdom was decided by two men who had no instinctive affection for it.29 He was allowed onto the raft on the second day, June 26, so that Alexander could introduce him to Napoleon, whereupon it became clear to him that the coming Franco-Russian alliance was going to be bought at the grievous expense of Prussia. When, at the end of the second meeting on the raft, Alexander entered the town of Tilsit at 5 p.m. he received a 100-gun salute, was welcomed by Napoleon in person and was put up in the best mansion in the town. When Frederick William arrived there was no salute, no welcome, and he was billeted at the house of the local miller.30 His position was not helped by the fact that both Napoleon and Alexander found him a pedantic, narrow-minded bore of limited conversation.31 ‘He kept me half an hour talking to me of my uniform and buttons,’ Napoleon reminisced, ‘so that at last I said: “You must ask my tailor.”’32 Night after night thereafter, the three men would dine early, say goodnight, and then Alexander would return to Napoleon’s apartments to talk long into the small hours without Frederick William knowing.
Although there was a good deal of reviewing of each other’s guards and exchanging of orders and decorations – Napoleon gave a Russian grenadier the Légion d’Honneur at Alexander’s request – and mutually flattering toasts at grand banquets, it was the late-night conversations about philosophy, politics and strategy that shaped Napoleon’s relationship with the Tsar. In letters to his sister, Alexander wrote of these talks sometimes lasting four hours at a stretch. They discussed the Continental System, the European economy, the future of the Ottoman Empire and how to bring Britain to the negotiating table. ‘When I was at Tilsit I used to chat [je bavardai],’ Napoleon recalled, ‘call the Turks barbarians, and say that they ought to be turned out of Europe, but I never intended to do so, for . . . it was not in the interest of France that Constantinople should be in the hands of either Austria or Russia.’33 In one of their more surreal discussions, on the best form of government, the autocrat Alexander argued for an elective monarchy, whereas Napoleon – whose crown was at least confirmed by a plebiscite – argued for autocracy. ‘For who is fit to be elected?’ Napoleon asked. ‘A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that the election must be a matter of chance, and the succession is surely worth more than a throw of dice.’34
Alexander was under pressure to make peace from his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who felt that enough Russian blood had been shed for the Hohenzollerns, and from his brother Constantine, who frankly admired Napoleon. The deal he struck at Tilsit hardly reflected the scale of his defeat; Prussia paid almost the entire price and Russia lost no territory except the Ionian Isles (including Corfu, which Napoleon called ‘the key to the Adriatic’).35 Napoleon guaranteed that those German states such as Oldenburg which were ruled by the Tsar’s close family would not be forced into the Confederation of the Rhine. Alexander agreed to evacuate Moldavia and Wallachia, recently taken from the Turks (they had never been Russian), and he was given a free hand to invade Finland, which belonged to Sweden. The only significant concession that Alexander had to make at Tilsit was to promise to join the Continental System, which Napoleon hoped would greatly increase the pressure on Britain to make peace. Meanwhile, Alexander invited Napoleon to St Petersburg. ‘I’m aware he’s terrified of cold,’ he told the French ambassador, ‘but despite this I won’t spare him the journey. I’ll order his quarters warmed to Egyptian heat.’36 He also ordered that anti-Napoleonic literature be burned in Russia, where his new ally was now to be referred to in print only as ‘Napoleon’ and never as ‘Bonaparte’.37
By complete contrast with the extreme leniency shown to Russia, Prussia was subjected to drastic penalties. ‘Where I erred most fatally was at Tilsit,’ Napoleon said later. ‘I ought to have dethroned the King of Prussia. I hesitated for a moment. I was sure that Alexander would not have opposed it, provided I had not taken the King’s dominions for myself.’38 Alexander took the eastern Białystok region of Poland from Prussia – hardly the action of an ally – but the other heavy lashes were all dealt by Napoleon. Out of Prussian provinces acquired during the Second and Third Partitions of Poland he carved the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which Poles hoped would be the first stage on the path to the re-creation of their own kingdom, though it had no diplomatic representation abroad and its Grand Duke was a German, Frederick Augustus of Saxony, with a toothless parliament. Prussian lands west of the Elbe formed a new kingdom of Westphalia, Cottbus went to Saxony, and a huge war indemnity of 120 million francs was imposed. To pay it off, Frederick William had to sell land and raise the overall tax burden from 10 per cent of national wealth to 30 per cent. Prussia was forced to join the Continental System and was not permitted to impose tolls on various waterways such as the Netze river and the Bromberg Canal.39 Joseph was to be recognized as king of Naples, Louis as king of Holland and Napoleon as Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and French garrisons remained in the Vistula, Elbe and Oder fortresses. Prussia was reduced to a population of 4.5 million (half its pre-war number) and two-thirds of its territory
, and was allowed an army of only 42,000 men; in almost all territories between the Rhine and the Elbe ‘all actual or eventual rights’ of the Kingdom of Prussia ‘shall be obliterated for perpetuity’. The King of Saxony would even have the right to use Prussian roads to send troops to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. By imposing these humiliations on the great-nephew of Frederick the Great, Napoleon guaranteed that Prussia would feel perpetual resentment, but he calculated that Austrian revanchism over Pressburg and Prussian over Tilsit could be held in check by his new friendship with Russia.
As he began to approach the zenith of his power, Napoleon’s strategy was to ensure that, although he could always count on British hostility, there would be no moment when all three continental powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia would be ranged against him at the same time. He thus needed to play each off against the others, and as much as possible against Britain too. He used Prussia’s desire for Hanover, Russia’s inability to fight on after Friedland, a marriage alliance with Austria, the differences between Russia and Austria over the Ottoman Empire and the fear of Polish resurgence that all three powers felt to avoid having to fight the four powers simultaneously.40 That he achieved this for a decade after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, despite clearly being the European hegemon that each power most feared, was a tribute to his statesmanship. The effective dividing of Europe into French and Russian spheres of influence was the defining moment of this strategy.
One evening towards the end of his life, while he was in exile on St Helena, the conversation turned to when Napoleon had been most happy in his life. Members of his entourage suggested different moments. ‘Yes, I was happy when I became First Consul, happy at the time of my marriage, and happy at the birth of the King of Rome,’ he agreed, referring to the future birth of his son. ‘But then I did not feel perfectly confident of the security of my position. Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit. I had just surmounted many vicissitudes, many anxieties, at Eylau for instance; and I found myself victorious, dictating laws, having emperors and kings pay me court.’41 It was a wise moment to have chosen.
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