Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Napoleon stayed at Chamartin until December 22, when he heard news that a British expeditionary force under General Sir John Moore had returned to Salamanca, 110 miles west of Madrid. Bausset recorded that he ‘experienced a lively joy at finding that he could at last meet these enemies on terra firma’.146 Moore began to retreat towards Corunna on December 23, and to pursue him Napoleon had to cross the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range in gales and blizzards. Together with the Alpine crossing and the Eylau campaign this convinced him that his men were hardy enough for any climatic conditions, a disastrous conclusion for his decision-making in the future. Up in the mountains, Napoleon fell off his horse, but was unhurt.147 For most of the crossing he went on foot at the head of one of the columns, through weather that froze Bausset’s brandy-sozzled servant to death on the mountainside.148 ‘We passed the mountains of Guadarrama in a frightful hurricane,’ recalled Gonneville, ‘the snow was driven by whirlwinds and fell with extreme violence, enveloping and covering us with a thick coating that made its way through our cloaks … There was incredible difficulty in taking the artillery over.’149 They managed it, however, with Napoleon continually pressing them on, even though on occasion the grognards swore at him to his face. ‘My love,’ he wrote to Josephine from Benavente on the last day of 1808, ‘I’ve been in pursuit of the English for some days; but they keep on flying in panic.’150 The English were not in fact panicking, merely pragmatically withdrawing before his far larger force.

  Although Napoleon was looking forward to catching up with Moore and throwing the British off the peninsula, his spies in Vienna were warning him that Austria was rearming fast, indeed might be mobilizing. Years later Wellington would claim that Napoleon left Spain because ‘he was not sure of victory’ against Moore, but that is quite wrong.151 ‘I am pursuing the English, sword to their kidneys,’ Napoleon wrote on January 3, 1809.152 Yet the next day the dire news from Austria compelled him to hand over the pursuit to Soult, so that he could return to Benavente and then Valladolid to assume better communications with France.153 From Valladolid he sent his Polish aide-de-camp Adam Chlapowski to Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Cassel and Dresden to warn the German princes that they needed ‘to ready their forces immediately for war’, and another aide-de-camp, the son of the Comte de Marbeuf, his family’s benefactor from Corsica, to Stuttgart and Munich with the same message.154

  At Valladolid, Napoleon suppressed the Dominican monastery when the corpse of a French officer was found in its well.155 He summoned all forty monks and furiously ‘expressed himself somewhat militarily, and plainly used a very strong word’, in Bausset’s prim reminiscence of the event. The diplomat Théodore d’Hédouville, who was translating, passed over the expletive, upon which Napoleon ‘ordered him to deliver the villainous word in question with firmness, and the same tone’.156 In the middle of January, when he became certain of the need to return to Paris, he asked Joseph to put some apartments aside for him in the Royal Palace for the time when he could come back to Madrid.157 He never did.

  The ‘Spanish ulcer’ forced Napoleon to station 300,000 men in the Iberian peninsula in the winter of 1808; the number rose to 370,000 for the spring offensive of 1810 and to 406,000 in 1811, before falling to 290,000 in 1812 and to 224,000 in 1813. Except at the very beginning, these were troops he simply could not afford to spare.158 Too often he sent untested conscript battalions, led by elderly or wounded veterans or inexperienced National Guard officers, and conscripts were grouped together rather than being fed into established regiments to make up losses.159 He constantly raided units fighting in Spain to fill spaces in artillery, garrison, gendarme, transport, Imperial Guard and engineering units elsewhere, so that four-battalion brigades that ought to have had 3,360 men in them actually had only around 2,500. While he didn’t take many men away from Spain for the 1812 campaign in Russia, he severely cut back the number of recruits who were sent there, and no army can fight without reinforcements, especially considering the regular wastage experienced in Iberia, where one-fifth of the army was on the sick list at any one time.160 Overall, France suffered around a quarter of a million casualties in Spain and Portugal.161 ‘I embarked pretty badly on this affair, I admit it,’ Napoleon acknowledged years later, ‘the immorality showed too obviously, the injustice was too cynical, and the whole of it remains very ugly.’162

  21

  Wagram

  ‘Artillery should always be placed in the most advantageous positions, and as far as possible in the front of the line of cavalry and infantry, without compromising the safety of the guns.’

  Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 54

  ‘To cannon, all men are equal.’

  Napoleon to General Bertrand, April 1819

  ‘The Court of Vienna is behaving very badly,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph from Valladolid on January 15, 1809, ‘it may have cause to repent. Don’t be uneasy. I have enough troops, even without touching my army in Spain, to get to Vienna in a month … In fact, my mere presence in Paris will reduce Austria to her usual irrelevance.’1 He did not know at that stage that Austria had already received a large British subsidy to persuade her to fight what would become the War of the Fifth Coalition. Archduke Charles had been putting all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five into uniform in the new Landwehr militia, some of whose units were indistinguishable from the regular army. He had used the period since Austerlitz to impose deep-seated reforms on the Austrian army, streamlining command structures, improving service conditions, simplifying drill movements, introducing the Bataillonsmasse method of protecting infantry against cavalry through making squares more solid, abolishing regimental guns to provide a larger artillery reserve, modifying skirmishing tactics, raising nine Jäger regiments (one-third rifle-armed) – and, above all, adopting the corps system. The archduke had co-written a book on military strategy in 1806, Grundsätze der Kriegkunst für die Generale (The Art of War for Generals), and meant to put his ideas to the test.

  When in April 1807 Talleyrand had suggested to Napoleon that Austria should be encouraged to love (aimer) France and her successes, Napoleon had replied, ‘Aimer: I don’t really know what this means when applied to politics.’2 It was true; his view of international affairs was largely self-interested, based on the assumption that states were in continual competition. Napoleon understood that Austria wanted revenge for the humiliations of Mantua, Marengo, Campo Formio, Lunéville, Ulm, Austerlitz and Pressburg, but he felt she would be foolish to go to war with only Britain and Sicily as allies, especially when Britain offered no troops. By contrast, Napoleon led a coalition that included Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Naples, Holland, Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Westphalia. ‘Prussia is destroyed,’ said Metternich, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, summing up the prevailing situation, ‘Russia is an ally of France, France the master of Germany.’3 Despite it being an inopportune time for Austria to declare war, they did, in yet another attempt to win back their position in Italy and Germany. It was precisely because there was no long period of peace after 1805 that the European Powers were able to wear France down, and much of the credit for that must go to Austrian persistence.

  Once he was certain of his intelligence, Napoleon made a lightning dash from Valladolid to Paris. Galloping with Savary, Duroc, Roustam, an aide-de-camp and a small detachment of chasseurs, he covered the 70 miles to Burgos in four hours, much of it through guerrilla country. Thiébault saw him riding past his carriage ‘simultaneously lashing the horse of his aide-de-camp and digging the spurs into his own’.4 He left at 7 a.m. on January 17 and was back in Paris by 8 a.m. on the 23rd, having covered more than 600 miles in six days, an extraordinary feat. ‘While all the cabinets of the Allied powers believed he was engaged in operations in the north of Spain,’ recorded General Dumas, ‘he had returned to the centre of the empire, was organising another great army … surprising by this incredible activity those who expected to surprise him.’5 Napoleon later contrasted the campaigning in Spain and Austria, describing th
e Austrians to Davout as ‘a nation so good, so reasonable, so cold, so tolerant, so far removed from all excesses that there is not an example of a single Frenchman having been assassinated during the war in Germany’, whereas the Spanish were fanatics.6

  As soon as he was in Paris, Napoleon ordered the legislature, a now emasculated body that sat for a total of only four months in 1809 and 1810, to call up the 1810 conscription class a year early, allowing him to mobilize 230,000 troops, the largest army he had ever commanded. In addition to keeping him extremely well informed about Austrian intentions and actions – Francis had taken the decision to go to war on December 23 and confirmed it in February – Napoleon’s spy network had also warned him of a dangerous rapprochement between Talleyrand and Fouché, who had long been sworn enemies but who were now plotting to put Murat on the French throne if Napoleon was killed in Spain. Lavalette’s interceptions of letters between Fouché’s and Talleyrand’s friends, supported by information that Eugène passed on, told Napoleon all he needed to know. On the afternoon of Saturday, January 28 he summoned Cambacérès, Lebrun, Decrès, Fouché and Talleyrand to his office at the Tuileries to deliver a diatribe against the last two that continued either for half an hour (according to Pasquier, who heard about it from Madame de Rémusat, who was told by Talleyrand) or two hours (according to Mollien, who wasn’t present but knew everyone involved).

  Napoleon complained that Fouché and Talleyrand had criticized the Spanish campaign in the salons, despite the fact that it was going relatively well – Soult had forced the British off the peninsula from Corunna, killing Sir John Moore on January 16. They had also conspired against Joseph’s succession to the throne by promoting Murat, which meant they had broken their oath of allegiance to him. ‘Why,’ Napoleon concluded, addressing Talleyrand, ‘you are nothing but a shit in silk stockings.’7 Talleyrand remained perfectly calm, listening ‘with apparent insensibility’, and confined himself to telling a friend later on, ‘What a pity that such a great man should be so ill bred.’8 Two days after the interview Napoleon dismissed Talleyrand as Vice-Grand Elector, but allowed him to retain his other titles and rank and, inexplicably, didn’t exile him. Fouché kept his ministry as well. Soon afterwards, Metternich paid a ‘Monsieur X’ between 300,000 and 400,000 francs for detailed information about the French order of battle; Talleyrand is considered the prime suspect.9

  Metternich remained in Paris until the last possible moment before requesting his passports, perhaps in order to continue gathering secret intelligence from ‘Monsieur X’. As usual, Napoleon gave his enemy dire warnings of the consequences of going to war. When he saw Metternich just prior to the rupture of diplomatic relations on March 23, he asked:

  Were you bitten by a tarantula? What’s threatening you? Who do you resent? You still want to set fire to the world? Why? When I had my army in Germany, you didn’t find your existence threatened, but now it’s in Spain you find it compromised! There’s some strange reasoning. What will result? I’m going to arm because you are arming; because finally I have something to fear, and it pays to be cautious.10

  Metternich protested in suave diplomatic language but Napoleon cut in: ‘Where do your concerns come from? If it’s you, monsieur, who have communicated them to your Court, speak, I’ll give all the explanations you need to reassure it … Monsieur, I was always duped in all my transactions with your Court; we have to talk straight.’11 As with the Wars of the Third and Fourth Coalitions, Napoleon did not want or need this conflict, and was vocal in his desire to avoid it. Yet he once again wasn’t willing to make any compromises to prevent it, since he was confident he would win. On March 9 alone he sent twenty-nine letters preparing for the coming clash.*

  Archduke Charles’s plan was to lead eight corps into Bavaria, while simultaneously sending one into Poland and two into Italy. He hoped for a declaration of war from Prussia and significant revolts against Napoleon’s rule across Germany, but when it became clear that neither would be forthcoming he switched his main effort south of the Danube, to cover Vienna and liaise with his forces in Italy. This led to extreme disorder in the army as units crossed and re-crossed the region, and the loss of precious time. When Saragossa finally fell on February 20, after an heroic resistance, Joseph was re-established in Madrid two days later, and Napoleon could concentrate fully on the threat to his ally Bavaria.

  By March 30 Napoleon had set out his entire strategy for Berthier, whom he put in command of the Army of Germany until he could arrive in person, knowing he could not give either Davout or Masséna command over the other, since both were proud, successful, senior marshals who thought themselves equals. A huge bataillon carré was to be put in place, to lure the Austrians into a gigantic trap when they launched their offensive, which was expected some time after April 15. In the vanguard, along the Isar river, was Lefebvre’s Bavarian corps of three divisions under Prince Louis of Bavaria, Prince Carl-Philipp Wrede and Count Bernard Deroy, with General Jean-Baptiste Drouet (later Comte d’Erlon) its chief-of-staff. Lefebvre would be joined by Lannes’ corps once that great fighter had returned from Spain. On the left between Bayreuth and Nuremberg was Davout’s large corps of three infantry divisions plus one new reserve and one new German division, the 2nd Heavy Cavalry Division and a light cavalry brigade, some 55,000 men and 60 guns in all. On the right was Oudinot’s corps of infantry and light cavalry at Pfaffenhoffen. Masséna’s corps formed the rearguard around Augsburg. The Cavalry Reserve under Bessières, consisting of two light and two heavy divisions, and the Imperial Guard and Vandamme’s Württembergers were formed up at Strasbourg. In total, the Army of Germany numbered 160,000 men and 286 guns, the corps within relatively short marching distances of each other, with Ratisbon (present-day Regensburg) as the central pivot of their deployment. Should the Austrians attack before April 15, Napoleon ordered Berthier to concentrate instead between Augsburg and Donauwörth.

  In reply to Napoleon’s request for aid against Austria under the terms of the Erfurt Convention, Tsar Alexander sent 70,000 men under Prince Golitsyn, but they managed to cross the border into Austrian Galicia near Lemberg only on May 22 and thereafter avoided all contact with the enemy; they suffered just two casualties throughout the entire campaign.12 The Austrians therefore had to divert the minimum resources to the east, and were able to concentrate almost everything against Napoleon, to his deep ire.

  Austria formally declared war on France and Bavaria on April 3, and Archduke Charles (though he was personally opposed to the declaration, thinking that war came too early) issued a martial proclamation to the Austrian people on the 6th.* Four days later, 127,000 Austrians crossed the River Inn and entered Bavaria, but instead of showing the speed Archduke Charles had hoped for, they were slowed down by bad weather to 6 miles a day and reached the Isar only on the 15th, the same day that Austria also invaded the Duchy of Warsaw. The opening moves of the French campaign were badly bungled by Berthier, who misunderstood Napoleon’s orders and panicked when the Austrians attacked five days earlier than expected. On April 14 he sent Davout’s corps to concentrate on Ratisbon rather than Augsburg and he dispersed the army along the River Lech, 52,300 troops to the north of it and 68,700 south, many of whom were out of marching range of each other, while a concentrated mass of Austrians descended on Landshut. Calm returned to the Donauwörth headquarters only when Napoleon – having been warned by telegraph on April 12 that the Austrians had crossed the Inn – arrived five days later.* ‘Soldiers!’ he proclaimed. ‘I arrive in the midst of you with the rapidity of the eagle.’13

  ‘Berthier had lost his head when I reached the seat of war,’ Napoleon later recalled.14 It was true, but as soon as he arrived in Donauwörth and discovered how badly dispersed his forces were he recognized the Austrian attack on Landshut to be both a threat and an opportunity: his corps could now converge on Archduke Charles from several directions at once. Masséna and Oudinot were ordered to advance on Landshut to threaten enemy lines of communication; Vandamme and Lefebvre w
ere sent to Abensberg; Davout was ordered to rejoin the main army, which involved a tough 80-mile march, leaving a garrison of the 65th Line under his cousin, Colonel Baron Louis Coutard, to hold the bridge at Ratisbon. So important were these orders that Napoleon sent four aides-de-camp with each, rather than the usual three. Masséna was ordered to push forward quickly to Pfaffenhoffen and attack the enemy’s flank, while making sure that Augsburg was kept as an impregnable base of operations.

  By April 18 the Austrians found themselves not pursuing a retreating enemy, as they had imagined they would be, but instead facing a resurgent one. Napoleon was on the road to Ingolstadt with Lannes at his side, encouraging his German troops as he passed them. A colonel of the Austrian general staff was captured during the day and brought before Napoleon for questioning. When he refused to answer, the Emperor said, ‘Don’t worry, sir, I know everything anyway,’ and he then quickly and accurately described the locations of all the Austrian corps and even the regiments facing him. ‘With whom have I the honour of speaking?’ asked the impressed Austrian. ‘At this,’ recalled Chlapowski, ‘the Emperor inclined himself forward, touched his hat and replied “Monsieur Bonaparte”.’15 (The colonel must have been spectacularly unobservant, because, as Chlapowski noted, throughout the interview the French infantry were crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as they marched past.)

  That evening Napoleon wrote to Masséna explaining that Charles ‘has debouched from Landshut upon Ratisbon with three corps, estimated at 80,000 strong. Davout, leaving Ratisbon, is marching towards Neustadt … the enemy is lost if your corps, debouching before daybreak by way of Pfaffenhoffen, falls upon the rear of Archduke Charles. Between the 18th, 19th and 20th, therefore, all the affairs of Germany will be settled.’ In his own handwriting, Napoleon wrote a postscript that read: ‘Activité, activité, vitesse! Je me recommande à vous.’ (Activity, activity, speed! I’m counting on you.)16 Masséna replied by promising to march through the night if necessary, and was as good as his word; his bravery and tenacity during this campaign were extraordinary. Archduke Charles, who had received reports that Davout had come south of the Danube with some 30,000 men, wanted to destroy his corps in isolation from the rest of Napoleon’s army, rather as Bennigsen had hoped to do to Lannes at Friedland. He had clearly forgotten what Davout’s corps had managed to achieve on its own at Auerstädt three years before.