• • •
The villages of Aspern and Essling lie 3 miles apart on the north-eastern side of the Danube 22 miles east of Vienna. At midnight on May 20, Masséna climbed the church tower at Aspern and, seeing relatively few campfires, informed Napoleon that the Austrians were retreating, whereas in fact they were forming up to attack. It was the same mistake that Murat had made on the morning of Eylau. Napoleon crossed at dawn on Sunday, May 21, and, showing characteristic foresight, immediately ordered that the defences of the bridgehead be improved. Unfortunately, Masséna had failed to fortify Aspern properly, probably considering it unnecessary if Archduke Charles was withdrawing. By 8 a.m. it became very clear that he wasn’t.
In 1809, Aspern consisted of 106 two-storey houses with walled gardens running east–west along two roads with a handful of traverse streets, a church and cemetery with a chest-high wall (the church houses today’s museum), a solid vicarage and a large garden on a slight rise at its western end. An earth bank lined the road to Essling – and still does – which in turn had fifty-six houses in two groups on either side of the village square, and a large granary with 3-foot-thick stone walls. Napoleon intended to use these two villages and the road between them as bastions, while developing his attack across the Marchfeld plain beyond. The plain was so flat that it had been used by the Austrian army as a parade-ground.
The Danube had risen 3 feet overnight and by 10 a.m. the northernmost boat-bridge had been smashed by a laden barge. The French repaired it in time for General Jean d’Espagne’s heavy cavalry to get across, walking over by dismounted squadrons. Napoleon, just east of Aspern, considered retreating when he learned about the damage to the bridge, since one of the cardinal laws of war is never to fight with a river to one’s back, but his generals (except the silent Berthier) assured him they could hold the ground. At 1 p.m. he heard that a large Austrian army was on its way across the Marchfeld, something he might have been aware of earlier had his light cavalry’s intelligence gathering not been disrupted by Austrian skirmishers. The numbers involved were daunting: some 37,000 Austrians attacked on Sunday May 21 and the next day 85,000 with 292 guns. Some 30,000 Frenchmen had crossed on Sunday and 20,000 more on Monday, but they had only 58 guns.34 If Davout’s corps had managed to get across the Danube, those unpromising ratios would have been more even, but the state of the bridges now precluded that.
The first clashes came between 1 and 2 p.m. at Aspern, where 5,000 French defenders had to fend off vastly more attackers. French artillery punished the attacking columns and a battalion of the 67th Line stood up behind the cemetery walls and delivered a crushing volley. But the Austrians came on relentlessly, and savage fighting developed in the village streets. Dense clouds of smoke from gunfire added to the grimness of the struggle. After 3 p.m. a ninety-gun Austrian battery further blasted the village, sweeping away the outer barricades.
Napoleon followed the battle’s progress sitting on a drum in a little hollow near where the Aspern Tileworks is today, about halfway between the two villages. He ordered Bessières to use four divisions to secure the centre – a role similar to that of Murat at Eylau – which was achieved in four major cavalry charges. As the charges went forward, Napoleon massed his artillery to help defend Aspern by punishing Austrian cavalry that came too close. By 4.30 p.m. an Austrian attack of three columns after a major bombardment forced the defenders out of the church and cemetery. An hour later Legrand’s division was ordered in, and the 26th Légère and 18th Line recaptured Aspern, but half an hour later Archduke Charles himself accompanied a six-battalion attack, with thirteen more in support, crying: ‘For the Fatherland! Forward courageously!’ (It was said he carried a flag himself, but he later denied this.) The church and cemetery were stormed as the village caught fire and the French pulled out.
Despite several further bridge collapses, General Claude Carra Saint-Cyr of Masséna’s 4th Corps – no relation to Gouvion Saint-Cyr – managed to get his division across the Danube and rush to Aspern, retaking the southern edge of the village. The fighting went on until 9 p.m. Some 8,000 Austrian and 7,000 French spent the night there, as the bridge was repaired yet again by 10 p.m. Fourteen Guard battalions, Lannes’ corps and enough guns to give Napoleon a total of 152 now managed to cross the Danube, but still not Davout’s corps. The Austrians had attacked the village of Essling and its near-impregnable granary (where one can still see the bullet holes in the wooden door) at 4.40 p.m. Lannes personally supervised the defences – cutting loopholes, sighting batteries, barricading streets, crenellating walls – until the fighting there ceased at 11 p.m.
The second day began at 3.30 a.m. when Masséna’s 18th and 4th Line crashed into Aspern and charged in column up the two main streets, supported by the 26th Légère and 46th Line, and the Baden Jägers. Most of the village was regained by 4 a.m., though not the church. Fighting carried on at sunrise, and at 7 a.m. Masséna reported to Napoleon that he had the whole village back after seeing it change hands four times, although by 11 a.m. the Austrians had regained most of it again. At Essling, the Young Guard pushed into the village just in time to stop it falling.
Between 6 and 7 a.m. Napoleon was ready to launch a major three-divisional attack in close battalion columns. Lannes went in on the right with Saint-Hilaire’s division, Oudinot was in the centre and General Jean Tharreau on the left. Behind them were General Antoine de Lasalle’s light cavalry and Nansouty’s heavy cavalry. Though covered by an early-morning fog, the massed Austrian artillery punished them terribly. Immense courage was shown. At one point Saint-Hilaire had the 105th Line bayonet-charge a regiment of Austrian cuirassiers, forcing them back onto the reserve grenadiers behind them. By 9 a.m. the French were low on ammunition, since wagons couldn’t cross the bridge, and the attack stalled after Saint-Hilaire – who had been promised a marshal’s baton – lost his foot to a cannonball (he died fifteen days later when the wound went gangrenous).
With the bridge down again and Charles bringing up a huge battery in the centre, making further French attacks there impossible, Napoleon began considering the complexities of a full-scale retreat over the makeshift bridges, sending word to Lannes to wind down the attack. Lannes got his battalions into two lines of squares and they fell back with remarkable discipline, as if on parade. In the course of the withdrawal, Oudinot’s entire staff was killed or wounded, and he himself picked up yet another wound. Napoleon had to refuse the suicidal request of General Dorsenne, who had had no fewer than three horses shot from under him, to attack the enemy guns with the Old Guard.
By 3 p.m. Austrian grenadiers had taken most of Essling except the granary, which was held by General Jean Boudet. When Napoleon personally ordered the Old Guard to the left of Essling to check an advance by Archduke Charles, the soldiers insisted that he retire to safety before they attacked. It was just as well, as one in four men were killed or wounded in the ensuing fight. Masséna led three battalions of the Young Guard on foot into Aspern at 11 a.m., but by 1 p.m. the Austrians were again in control. An hour later both sides were utterly exhausted after eleven hours of almost non-stop fighting. By 3.30 p.m. Archduke Charles had concentrated a grand battery of between 150 and 200 guns – the largest in the history of warfare up to that moment – in the centre, silencing one battery of Lannes’ artillery after another. Then they turned on any exposed French formations; in all the Austrian artillery fired 44,000 rounds during the two days of battle. Among their many victims was Lannes himself. Sitting cross-legged on the bank of a ditch, he had both knees smashed by a ricocheting 3-pound cannonball. The thirty-year-old was taken back to the French camp of Ebersdorf, beyond the Danube, where the head surgeon, Larrey, amputated his left leg and fought to keep the right one. In the days before anaesthetics, the pain of these operations is unimaginable, but all the witnesses of Lannes’ wounding agree that his courage was exemplary.
At about 4 p.m., with the bridges just about passable again, Napoleon ordered his army to fall b
ack over the Danube to Lobau Island. He commandeered twenty-four guns and all the available ammunition to cover the bridgehead. First the wounded, then the artillery, then the Guard infantry (except the tirailleurs or light infantry skirmishers still engaged at Essling), then the heavy cavalry, then the infantry, then the light cavalry and finally the rearguard infantry divisions went back over the Danube; some voltigeurs did not make it to the island until long after nightfall, making the journey by boat. Archduke Charles felt that his army was too exhausted to disturb the French retreat, although several Austrian generals heatedly disagreed, so the Austrians remained on the other side of the river. At 7 p.m. Napoleon held one of his very infrequent conferences of war. Berthier, Davout and Masséna all wanted to retreat far back beyond the Danube, but Napoleon persuaded them that Lobau had to be the base for future operations and that if he evacuated the island he would have to abandon Vienna.
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Napoleon had been defeated for the first time since Acre ten years before, and for only the fourth time in his career so far. (The relatively minor Bassano and Caldiero battles had both taken place in November 1796.) His total losses were estimated at between 20,000 and 23,000 killed and wounded and 3,000 captured, but only 3 guns had been lost, testament to the discipline of the retreat. Austrian losses were similar, with 19,000 killed and wounded, though only 700 captured.35 Napoleon’s bulletin the next day, which admitted only to 4,100 killed and wounded, referred to the battle of Aspern-Essling as ‘a new memorial to the glory and inflexible firmness of the French army’ – which was as close as he could come to an admission of defeat. Later he would claim that when Lannes regained consciousness he had said: ‘Within an hour you will have lost him who dies with the glory and conviction of having been and being your best friend’, a grammatical construction unlikely to have leaped to the mind of a man who had just had one leg amputated and might have been about to lose the other.36
As the Austrians were claiming to have won the battle of Aspern, Napoleon made Masséna the Prince of Essling, although Masséna hadn’t set foot there during the battle. In Paris, the prefecture of police was ordered to put up posters asking Parisians to light up their front rooms to celebrate the victory.37 Yet on the morning of May 23 the bridge linking Lobau with the northern bank was dismantled, and the island was turned into a fortress. That evening, exhausted French soldiers sat down to a dinner of horseflesh, which Marbot recalled was ‘cooked in cuirasses and seasoned with gunpowder’ instead of pepper. Provisions and ammunition were taken to Lobau by boat, the wounded were sent to Vienna, field hospitals were set up and new, stronger bridges were built and protected by stakes driven into the riverbed.
Gangrene set into Lannes’ leg and it took him nine days to die. Napoleon visited him twice daily, and arrived to see him moments after he had expired.38 His valet Louis Constant found the Emperor shortly afterwards in his quarters, ‘seated immobile, mute, and staring into space, in front of his hastily prepared meal. Napoleon’s eyes were inundated with tears; they multiplied and fell silently into his soup.’39 Napoleon’s anguish is confirmed by the accounts of Ségur, Las Cases, Pelet, Marbot, Lejeune and Savary.* Both Constant and Napoleon’s pharmacist, Cadet de Gassicourt, claimed that Lannes had berated the Emperor for his ambition, but Marbot, Savary and Pelet vehemently denied it.40 Today Lannes lies in caverne XXII of the Panthéon, in a coffin draped with the tricolour, under nine flags hanging from walls covered with the names of his battles. ‘The loss of the Duke of Montebello, who died this morning, has grieved me much,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine on May 31. ‘So everything ends!!! Adieu, my love; if you can do anything toward consoling the Marshal’s poor widow, do it.’41
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‘I was right not to count on allies like those,’ Napoleon told Savary of the Russians in early June,
what could be worse if I hadn’t made peace with Russia? And what advantage do I get from their alliance, if they aren’t capable of ensuring peace in Germany? It is more likely that they would have been against me if a remnant of human respect hadn’t prevented them from betraying right away the sworn faith; let’s not be abused: they all have a rendezvous on my grave, but they don’t dare to gather there . . . It’s not an alliance I have here; I’ve been duped.42
By the time Napoleon returned to Schönbrunn Palace on June 5 the goodwill of Tilsit, more or less maintained at Erfurt, had been seriously damaged.
It was not all anger at that time, however, especially once Marie Walewska arrived.* One evening at Schönbrunn, Napoleon asked for a cold chicken as a late supper; when it was brought he asked: ‘Since when has a chicken been born with one leg and one wing? I see that I am expected to live off the scraps left me by my servants.’ He then pinched Roustam’s ear, teasing him for having eaten the other half.43 Rapp records the Emperor as being ‘pretty generally in good humour’ at this time, despite the loss of Lannes, though he was understandably infuriated by a police report from Paris containing the latest rumour, that he had gone mad. ‘It is the faubourg St Germain which invents these fine stories,’ he said, settling on his habitual bugbear of the aristocratic and intellectual salons of that district; ‘they will provoke me at last to send the whole tribe of them to the flea-bitten countryside.’44 The problem, as he told Caulaincourt, was that ‘Society in the salons is always in a state of hostility against the government. Everything is criticized and nothing praised.’45
After Aspern-Essling Archduke Charles massed his forces along the Danube north of Vienna. Although the Austrians invaded Saxony on June 9, five days later Eugène won a significant victory over Archduke Johann at the battle of Raab in Hungary, which delighted Napoleon both because it denied Archduke Charles much-needed reinforcements and because Eugène’s Army of Italy could now join him. He was also impressed with the fight that Prince Poniatowski’s Poles were putting up against the Austrians in Silesia, in conspicuous contrast to the Russians, who were reluctant to engage at all.
By early July the Grande Armée’s engineers had built such strong bridges to Lobau Island that Napoleon could boast, ‘The Danube no longer exists; it’s been abolished.’46 With flexible pontoons capable of being swung into operation from Lobau to the north bank, he was now ready, six weeks after Aspern-Essling, to exact revenge. Wearing a sergeant’s greatcoat he personally reconnoitred the best places to cross, going to within musket-range of the Austrian pickets on the other bank. Instead of due north, as he had previously, he decided this time he would head east towards the town of Gross-Enzersdorf. On the evening of July 4, 1809 the crossings began.
Napoleon had now amassed 130,800 infantry, 23,300 cavalry and no fewer than 544 guns manned by 10,000 artillerymen, three times his force at Aspern-Essling. Captain Blaze recalled that ‘all the languages of Europe were spoken’ on Lobau Island – ‘Italian, Polish, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, and every kind of German’. Through intense planning and preparation, Napoleon got this enormous polyglot force – roughly the same number as attacked Normandy on D-Day – across one of Europe’s largest rivers into enemy territory on a single night, with all its horses, cannon, wagons, supplies and ammunition, and without losing a single man.47 It was an astonishing logistical achievement. As soon as his men reached the far bank they crossed over the Marchfeld to face Archduke Charles’s army numbering 113,800 infantry, 14,600 cavalry and 414 guns. The battle they were about to fight was the largest in European history up to that point.
Like Arcole, Eylau, Eggmühl and Aspern-Essling, the battle of Wagram was fought over two days. By 8 a.m. on Wednesday, July 5, Gross-Enzersdorf had fallen to the French and by 9 a.m. Oudinot, Davout and Masséna had all crossed the river. (Masséna rode in a carriage having been injured in a fall from his horse on Lobau.) Napoleon set up his headquarters on the knoll at Raasdorf, the only pimple of ground for miles around on the otherwise totally flat Marchfeld. Archduke Charles lined his troops behind the fast-flowing Russbach, a stream about 25 to 30 feet across, hopi
ng that his brother Archduke Johann would arrive in time from Pressburg, some 30 miles away to the south-east.
Napoleon placed Davout’s corps and two dragoon divisions on the right flank, with Oudinot in the centre and Masséna and the light cavalry on the left. Bernadotte’s corps of 14,000 Saxons were in close support, and a second great line was formed by the Army of Italy under Eugène and Macdonald, Marmont’s corps and the Imperial Guard. Bessières’ Reserve Cavalry made up a third. The Portuguese Legion secured the bridgehead from Lobau, and ammunition and supply wagons continued to pour across in prodigious numbers. Napoleon’s plan was for Davout to turn the enemy’s left flank while Oudinot and Bernadotte pinned down the Austrians frontally and Masséna protected the connection to the island. At the right moment the Army of Italy would then break through the centre. Archduke Johann’s appearance behind Davout on the right flank could have compromised Napoleon’s plan seriously, so both sides were constantly on the lookout for him.
At 2 p.m. the French army advanced under a hot sun across the waist-high cornfields of the Marchfeld, fanning out over the 16-mile-wide battlefield as they went. At 3.30 Bernadotte quickly took Raasdorf without firing a shot and by 5 p.m. was deployed before Aderklaa, a vital village on the battlefield, the seizure of which could nearly cut the Austrian army in two. Napoleon assaulted the whole Austrian line from Markgrafneusiedl to Deutsch-Wagram, ordering Oudinot, rather ambiguously, to ‘push forward a little, and give us some music before night’.48 Oudinot sent his troops wading across the Russbach, their muskets and ammunition pouches carried above their heads. At 7 p.m. his 7,300 troops attacked Baumersdorf, a thirty-house hamlet on the river defended by 1,500 Austrians, taking heavy casualties. Napoleon’s evening attacks on July 5 came too late in the day, were too unspecific in their objectives and were unco-ordinated. Although the Russbach was little more than a stream, it disordered infantry and was impassable to cavalry and artillery except by its very few bridges. The attack did pin down the Austrians, but by 9 p.m. the French had been pushed back across the Russbach everywhere, and Oudinot had lost a large number of men.
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