by Tom Reiss
Most of the Austrian troops would be pinned down in the Battle of Rivoli, but two columns of cavalry avoided the trap and headed straight for Mantua. In fierce fighting before dawn, the Austrians easily overwhelmed the smaller French divisions that guarded the northern approaches to the city.
General Serurier sent Dumas desperate letters—he seems to have written more than one an hour—wondering if they should retreat or regroup.
In what came close to insubordination, Dumas—from his position in the fortified village of San Antonio—told Serurier, stationed at Roverbella, that he could do what he pleased but that Dumas and his men were not moving and would stand and fight the Austrians. (Serurier was used to Dumas’s brash intensity by now; in a note typical of their correspondence, from four days earlier, Dumas wrote to his commander: “I am about to mount my horse. Tomorrow I will give you an account of the reasons that drive me to stay there all night.”) Dumas had only about six hundred men with him. In his memoir the novelist uses Alex Dumas’s mocking of Serurier’s concern as the basis for a conversation between Napoleon and his father in which Napolean pretends to reprimand him while privately approving:
“Ah! There you are, monsieur,” said Bonaparte, giving him a dark look.
My father could not let such a look pass without demanding an explanation.
“Yes, it’s me! Well, what is it?”
“General Serurier wrote you two letters yesterday, monsieur.”
“Well! What of it?”
“In the first he warned you of the possibility that he would retreat … What did you reply?”
“I replied, ‘Retreat to the devil, if you like; I couldn’t care less; but as for me, I’ll get myself killed, but I won’t retreat.’ ”
“Do you know that if you had written me a letter like that, I would have had you shot?”
“Maybe; but you would probably never have written me the kind of letter General Serurier wrote me!”
“That’s true,” Bonaparte said simply.
Then, turning to Dermoncourt:
“Go and form the troops into three columns, and report back when it’s been done.”
Dermoncourt left. Turning to my father, who was about to return to his room, [Napoleon said]:
“Stay here, General; I had to speak to you like that before your aide-de-camp; damn it! When a man writes such letters to his chief, he should at least write them himself, and not dictate them to his secretary. But we will say no more about it.”
The long-awaited breakout from the fortress came on the morning of January 16. If the troops from the fortress united with the Austrian troops coming to rescue them, Dumas’s force would be sunk. He would be outnumbered about ten to one.
But for now, it was only a little worse than three to one—the sort of odds that got Dumas’s blood going. Also, Dumas had heard that a few French units returning from the Battle of Rivoli had been spotted coming down the high road from Verona. He leapt into the saddle and rallied his men. They would ride to meet these French units and return together to confront the Austrians. So Dumas led the six hundred cavalrymen away from the position they were guarding and up the road toward Verona. The Austrians must have been pleased when they arrived at San Antonio and were able to take it without firing a shot. But their pleasure there was short-lived. After only an hour’s ride Dumas met the French units, and after brief introductions, they whirled around and all rode to San Antonio to face the Austrians.
As Dumas charged into town with the new troops at his back, the Austrians still outnumbered him—but now only about two to one.
Dumas always performed best when the odds were against him, and this morning proved no exception. As the white-jacketed Austrians charged from all sides, Dumas on his horse towered above the fray in his blue uniform with the red-white-and-blue sash, raining down saber blows. His sword arm was so powerful he could unseat a horseman with one blow, a great advantage in this sort of combat, and he had an intuitive sense for fighting multiple opponents at once. The chaos of battle was his home.
At one point, his horse was shot out from under him. But Dumas rose, found another horse, mounted, and continued slashing away at the Austrians. A cannonball landed directly in front of him, his new horse fell, and he went down a second time, only to rise again. By the end of the morning Dumas was still cutting down enemy troops without having sustained a single serious wound. His combined forces succeeded in driving the Austrian columns back—not only out of San Antonio but down the lakeside, across the bridge, and back through the gates of the citadel they’d just escaped.
DUMAS’S actions in beating back the Austrians’ breakout that morning prevented the uniting of the Austrian forces that could have broken the siege. By the time the large Austrian army finally arrived from the north, they found themselves trapped outside, isolated, unable to perform their mission. They fought the French in the fields, but at this point the rest of the French forces were returning victorious from the Battle of Rivoli. The hapless Austrian general who had made it all the way to Mantua now found himself squeezed by an accumulating catchall of French troops led by some of the finest commanders in the French army. After a couple of hours’ bloodshed, he surrendered. Two weeks later, Mantua finally caved: the Austrians raised the white flag of surrender over their main fortress in Italy. In Paris, Rivoli was celebrated as the greatest victory of the Italian war. But the whole point of Rivoli was to keep the Austrian reinforcements from rescuing and uniting with the army trapped inside Mantua, and it had been Dumas, at the head of his little force, who had saved the day at the fortress.
It was no wonder, then, that Dumas lost his temper when he read the official report of the battle, compiled by Napoleon’s aide-de-camp General Berthier, and saw that his role had been diminished to one of “in observation at San Antonio.” Berthier did include a phrase about Dumas’s fighting the enemy “well,” but this did nothing to make Alex Dumas reconsider what he was about to write into the official military record of the Army of Italy. Dumas picked up his quill and wrote to Napoleon a letter of such fantastical insolence it would be cited in every historical account of him as an example of his legendary temper:
January 18, 1797
GENERAL,
I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I stayed in observation throughout that battle. I don’t wish any such observation on him, since he would have shit in his pants.
Salute and Brotherhood!
ALEX. DUMAS
The Army of Italy was a tough-talking lot, but this was not a wise move. General Berthier was Napoleon’s right-hand man (he would later become his chief of staff). I made my way through Berthier’s report looking for the sentence that had infuriated Dumas. It comes on page 15 of what is a densely packed description of the entire campaign of the Army of Italy relating to the Siege of Mantua. It covers vast actions, such as the Austrian emperor’s redeployment of his forces from all around Europe to the Mantua effort, in just a paragraph. Given the scope of this report, obviously assembled from many sources and with an eye to being a strategic overview, Berthier’s description of Dumas’s role during the last day of the siege, while not correct, is not nearly so insulting as Dumas perceived it to be.
In the aftermath of great victories, Napoleon had a habit of reorganizing his forces and handing out promotions and spoils. Berthier sent out these appointments and, not surprisingly, Dumas got some bad news: he was not even being given his own division; rather, he was to command a subdivision under General Masséna, whom he did not like.
On Nivôse 28.
To General Bonaparte.
I have received your order, General.… I will not hide from you the surprise that the news of my transfer caused me. That on the day after a battle whose success I contributed to with all my power, I would see myself so dishonored!… and [that] you, General, who have always seemed to grant your esteem to the brave republicans in your a
rmy, you could, without even meeting with me, take [your esteem] away from me when I did everything to deserve it. I should have hoped for a little more consideration; after having commanded several armies, never defeated, finding myself the oldest general in this army at the moment when I believed I had [earned] new rights to the confidence of my chief and my comrades … I am sent to command a subdivision!
The letter went on quite a bit longer, and of course did nothing to improve his situation or get him what he calls, further down, “the justice I deserve.”
In a poignant coda to the incident, I discovered in Dumas’s military file the following testimony, written and mailed to Bonaparte one day later, signed by twenty-five members of “the 20th Dragoon Regiment, 1st Division, of the Mantua Blockade”:
We, Commander, officers, noncommissioned officers and Dragoons, members of the 20th Regiment, attest that Division General Dumas, in whose Division we [serve], took all possible measures and took all the actions in his power to get the Job done, that to our knowledge the General visited the outposts for three or four consecutive nights and gave himself no rest whatsoever.…
Moreover, we confirm that in the last affair of the 27th of this month, leading us, he acted as a Republican, full of honor and courage. Therefore we are signing the present declaration.
When Napoleon sent his January battle report to the Directory, he praised every other officer involved in ending the Siege of Mantua. General Dumas’s name was not mentioned once.
* I found another way of reliving the siege: when I was visiting Mantua and walking around the fortress, I met an interesting guide—a medical-parts salesman who became an eighteenth-century French infantryman on the weekends, his role in the local Napoleonic reenactors society. No casual weekend warrior, Massimo Zonca had spent years studying the northern Italian campaign of 1796–97 and had self-published a number of books on its battles, complete with elaborate maps and references. He showed me around the battlefields, gravesites, and redoubts where the fighting had occurred. He also showed me his costumes, including an authentic Charleville musket, which was so heavy I could barely heft it, and whose bayonet was the length of a small sword. We went to a meeting of his reenactment group’s “historical fencing society” in Verona, where old combat styles are practiced as a martial art, with real, bladed weapons.
15
THE BLACK DEVIL
THE demotion that humiliated Dumas proved to be an opportunity. By being denied his place as a general of division in charge of thousands, he was freed from administrative and political duties and thrown back into the role in which he had originally made his name: at the head of small mounted bands running reconnaissance missions and riding in to engage the enemy, in terrain too rugged or dangerous for the main army to reach yet.
In January 1797, Napoleon reorganized the French Army of Italy into three main columns, with the goal of driving the Austrians up into the Alps and out of Italy. If the French columns succeeded in this, they might even follow their enemy and burst down into the heartland of Austria itself, from which the enemy’s capital, Vienna, would be just a day’s ride away.
For the first two weeks of February 1797, Dumas and a small band of dragoons under the command of General André Masséna advanced relentlessly, driving the Austrian army ever farther north toward their own border. “[Dumas] flies from one city to another, from one village to another, hacking everything to pieces,” runs one account, “capturing two thousand prisoners here, one thousand there, he performs truly fantastic charges.” The Austrians came up with a name for the relentless French general who stalked them through the snow: die schwarze Teufel, the “Black Devil.”
Dumas arrived in Italy too late to be part of the core group of generals who were calling themselves “the men of Italy.” Dumas proved his mettle to these generals many times over, but he always kept himself a bit aloof. He was disturbed by the generals’ growing idolization of General Bonaparte. Without authorization from the government in Paris, Napoleon had started having honorary swords made to his own specifications, with his name and dedication engraved on them, and handing them out to officers for bravery after battles. He also gave out hefty cash rewards to the men of Italy to thank them personally for their service. The men of Italy talked a little too much of themselves and their brilliant commander-in-chief for Dumas’s taste, and too little of the goals and values of the Republic. The words of the “Marseillaise” were no mere martial lyrics to Dumas; they burned in his consciousness.
One of the generals greatly admired Dumas’s integrity. General Barthélemy Catherine Joubert desperately wanted to recruit Dumas to serve in his column. Joubert was also a true republican—a patriot in the 1790 style. Some lines he had written to Dumas as part of an update on siege preparations in late December read almost like a platonic love letter from one revolutionary general to another: “I have no less impatience for the moment, General, when I will meet a republican as good as you are. I gather up all personal glory to merit his esteem.”
Joubert had command of twenty thousand French troops facing an even greater number of the enemy dug into the rocky terrain running up along the Adige River into the Tyrol, the alpine borderland between Austria and Italy. It would be some of the toughest fighting the French had yet faced. The area was defended not only by Austrian regulars but by Tyrolean mountain militias, and both groups knew this country far better than the French blues ever could.
At the end of February, Joubert got his wish: Napoleon transferred Dumas to his column. Joubert briefed Dumas on the mission: to chase the Austrians all the way to the Brenner Pass, “the great gate” of Italy, through which countless barbarian invasions had passed—only this time the French invaders would be going in the other direction, north up through the Italian Tyrol, over the Alps, and down into the Austrian heartland.
Dumas must have been greatly relieved at being out from under Masséna and given a place with his fellow republican Joubert. On his first week with his new comrades, Dumas led a small force up a tributary of the Adige to outflank the Austrians. The enemy was camped out along the river, guarding every bridge. He took them out, one by one. In this close-in fighting, where the horses and men had to keep their footing sometimes in the torrent itself, Dumas’s imposing skills—lunging, jumping, unhorsing opponents with a single whack of his saber, or even a fist—did much to break enemy morale and cheer his own troops. Over and over again Dumas charged larger groups of Austrians and forced a surrender or put them on the run.
An official army report from the first week of March, describing the taking of a strategic point on the river, captures Dumas as an almost cinematic war hero: “The battle was uncertain, until General Dumas, commanding the cavalry, rushed into the village of Tramin, took six hundred prisoners, and captured two cannons; as a result, the enemy column … was blocked from entering Botzen [a key city in the Italian Tyrol], and was forced to scatter into the mountains.” Dumas went on to save General Joubert himself shortly thereafter, when his new commanding officer was ambushed on a maneuver by a larger Austrian force. Dumas snuck around the enemy soldiers and struck at them from behind, as Joubert described it to Napoleon, always with a faintly breathless admiration for the powerhouse who had been assigned to serve under him.
Dumas’s own battle reports describe the hot violence of the encounters with matter-of-fact professionalism: “I charged the enemy cavalry that was advancing on me, they were thoroughly routed although superior in number: I cut the face of a commander and the neck of a cavalryman; the regiment I was in command of killed, took and wounded several Austrian cavalrymen.” But he was careful to credit fellow officers as well: “The adjutant general Blondeau showed great courage. General Belliard’s column aided by the 8th Dragoon Regiment took 1,200 prisoners: this general again showed great distinction.”
Throughout February and March, despite the bitter cold weather, Dumas chose to camp by the banks of the Adige with his dragoon bands rather than settling into one of the captured
Austrian towns and fortresses that the French had taken alongside it. As Dermoncourt observed, the campaign Dumas was fighting was “more like a race than a war.” He had never fought better.
YET behind Dumas’s frenzied battling lay not just the desire for glory but the deepest anguish. On March 3 he wrote Marie-Louise: “My beloved, for the past nineteen days I haven’t received any of your precious news; I don’t know to what I should attribute this damnable delay. Our worries are at their peak, and I think I have more than one reason.”
Two days later, he wrote again, finally having heard from her. The letter Marie-Louise sent him has been lost, but in it she seems to have hinted that his fears were justified. A terrible event had befallen their younger daughter, Louise, a toddler of thirteen months.
To the only one I care about in the whole world
My virtuous friend, you have told me about an event that tears away half of my existence and I think I have been confirmed in my fear that something even more awful has happened; if it was unfortunately so, you must reveal everything … (the truth, that is)
… my poor Louise, my unfortunate child. It is perhaps in vain that I call out to you!… My divine friend, I will not live in peace until I receive a letter from you that tells me the truth (but I am still trembling) …
Adieu my love, your letter has distressed me too much to have the strength to say any more, give a big kiss [to] my, I don’t dare say children—or my child and our respectable parents, and above all you, forever.
It isn’t clear whether it was an illness or accident, but Dumas would soon learn that little Louise was dead. If anything his sense of loss and grief over the next weeks and months seems to have driven him to fight harder. The man the Austrians called the Black Devil continued to rout them out of the Adige River Valley. Dumas’s efforts were so effective that Joubert at one point began to refer to him as General of Division Dumas, even though he had no division. Joubert officially gave Dumas control of a few regiments, but whenever he could, Dumas rode out ahead with his small bands of dragoons.
