The Grande Armée was divided into three components. The 250,000-strong First Army Group was made up of three battalions, along with the Imperial Guard and the cavalry. The Second and Third Army groups, totaling 315,000 men, would play a mainly supporting role, guarding supply lines, patrolling the rear, and being called on to reinforce depleted battalions.
Napoleon led the Imperial Guard of 50,000 handpicked troops known as the “immortals.” These were the reserves, to be utilized to tilt a battle at the crucial moment. The Imperial Guard, essential to the outcome of so many battles past and to come, were Napoleon’s elite: Each had to be able to read and write and stand above five foot six (in a time when most Frenchmen were closer to five feet). Each had served in at least three campaigns and bore the scars of at least two wounds. They looked the part of the military beau ideal in their two-foot shakos: mustached, young, and strapping.
If you wanted to find living, breathing examples of what changes Napoleon had wrought, you could do worse than look to the ranks of this army, especially the men who led them, his marshals. They were the new aristocracy. The title of “marshal” had existed before the Revolution as part of the vast system of favor currying and court intrigue that had so depressed the young Napoleon and his peers, but the emperor refashioned it into an order of real accomplishment, open to anyone. He named twenty-six marshals between 1804 and 1815. In Louis XVI’s time, many of them would have toiled away in obscurity. Under Napoleon, they made his army even more formidable. Among them, Davout, Murat, and Ney, along with General Junot, stand out.
Louis-Nicolas Davout was the exception among the four: he would most likely have played a leading role in the French army if Napoleon had never been born. A strict taskmaster and disciplinarian, he was descended from a blue-blooded line of patrician warriors that extended back to the Crusades. Known as the “Iron Marshal,” the balding general was the archetype of the committed professional soldier that forms the backbone of any great army. Many commanders envied him, as Davout had been the first among them to achieve fame in France. He was as hated for his perfectionism and his temper as he was admired, but his troops knew at least that he would see to their every need and would suffer every hardship they suffered. He commanded I Corps.
Joachim Murat was a different kind of personality entirely. He had grown up around horses, working in the stables of his father, a country innkeeper, until he was sent away to join the priesthood, a perfectly respectable career. But it was the wrong one for Murat, who with his almost feminine good looks and thirst for fame wanted a career in the cavalry. Murat ran away to join the King’s Chasseurs at the age of twenty and became Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Italian campaign. Dressed in his trademark outré costumes—scarlet thigh-high leather boots, a tunic made of cloth of gold, a sky blue jacket, and a sword belt crusted with diamonds was a typical combination—he consistently matched his daring on the field with an instinctive flair for tactics, especially in a brilliant flanking maneuver in Egypt that won him his own division. Napoleon once snapped at the young general, “You look like a clown,” but he favored boldness in his generals and Murat exemplified it.
Murat did lack Davout’s almost genetic loyalty to his leader. He had flirted with Josephine, and he was thrown into a fit of depression and jealousy when Napoleon failed to name him king of Spain, instead awarding him Naples. The former seminarian was a brilliant field leader but nakedly ambitious and often reckless to a dangerous degree. He commanded the Grande Armée’s cavalry units.
At the head of III Corps, Michel Ney was known even before Russia as “the Bravest of the Brave.” His father was a poor cooper who couldn’t afford to set him up in a profession, so Ney took up arms. Imperturbable, vulgar, badly educated, he rose by a native talent for battlefield strategy and sheer fearlessness. One of his typical exploits dated from 1799, when Ney entered a town occupied by enemy Austrian units disguised as a Prussian civilian. Wandering the streets, he took note of every guard post and every tent, then strolled back across the picket lines to plan his offensive. Had he been caught, he would have been executed as a spy, but Ney seemed indifferent to the danger. The outnumbered French regiment attacked the next day and took the town easily.
A peasant in the best sense, Ney was also difficult to command and sometimes rash in his hurry to engage the enemy, but the emperor couldn’t resist his toughness. “That man is a lion,” he remarked to his staff at the Battle of Friedland as Ney marched by with his troops. From the emperor, it was high praise.
One key player without a marshal’s baton was Jean-Andoche Junot, who had been with Napoleon from 1793, and had been seriously wounded in the head at Lonato in 1796. Erratic, fearless, and loyal, Junot hated the fact that he had never become a marshal. Some said that the head wound had altered his personality. But Napoleon stood by him. It would prove to be a risky decision.
The men Napoleon had assembled to lead the Grande Armée in Russia had all proved themselves in battle and believed in daring over caution. Napoleon had no pure theorists or rear-echelon generals in his key commands. His leaders had risen largely through their own instincts, and they, like their leader, loved risk. They were an apt expression of his reign, and no one had been able to match them.
THE MAKEUP OF DIFFERENT units varied based on availability of men, casualties, illness, and the role of the particular force, but certain parameters were common throughout the Grande Armée. The smallest infantry unit was the company of 100-140 men. Six companies on average formed a battalion, which averaged around 600 men (but which could fluctuate down to 300 and up to 1,200). Four battalions made up a regiment of approximately 2,500 men. Two regiments on average made a division of 5,000 men or so, including an attached artillery unit. The largest force in the Russian campaign was the corps, made up of several divisions, allied with cavalry units and artillery.
The size of the corps varied from the 10,000-strong force under Prince Eugène, Napoleon’s stepson (from his marriage to Josephine) and ruler of Venice, to Murat’s 40,000 cavalrymen to Davout’s mammoth I Corps, which fielded 70,000 men at the start of the campaign, more troops than many armies had put into the field a generation before, and a force that underlined Napoleon’s confidence in the Iron Marshal. Attacks were most often carried out at the corps and division level, depending on how broad the field of battle was.
Napoleon was the undisputed head of the Grande Armée. Beneath him on the command chart was his chief of staff, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, who was closer to an exalted secretary, dispensing his orders and running the organization. Under Berthier were the marshals and a few high-ranking generals, each commanding one of the eleven corps put into the field. Each marshal or corps commander had a complete hierarchy under him: generals, majors, down to the commanders of the individual infantry battalions, artillery units, and cavalry regiments.
In all, Napoleon commanded 522,300 infantry, 94,000 cavalry, 47,000 artillery, and 21,000 miscellaneous troops. Some 449,000 of these were first-line troops intended for battle.
The deeper statistics were telling: Two-thirds of the troops were non-French. Napoleon had insisted that his allies bear a large share of the burden of his ambitions. That 80,000 were mounted on horseback indicated that Napoleon intended to strike fast and end the war quickly. (But with a sure hand—all the corps were commanded by French generals or marshals, apart from the Polish and Austrian forces.) The unprecedented size of the army meant not only that it would be a monumental task to keep it fed and organized, but that Napoleon, who had throughout his career maneuvered his regiments like an admiral commanding a fleet of highly maneuverable light cruisers, darting and speeding to arrive at an unexpected position at a crucial moment in time, was now at the helm of a massive and unwieldy ship.
These figures make Napoleon’s uncanny relationship with his soldiers even more impressive. Most of his troops, it has to be emphasized, were from nations he had conquered by force. The emperor had humiliated Austria in war after war, and yet its men fought
for him; he had forced Holland to accept his brother Louis as its king (later to remove him), but the Dutch would have enthralling moments in Russia. Certainly he had coerced their leaders, but most of his troops ought to have been sabotaging him at every turn, or performing only well enough to avoid being shot for desertion. But they would fight, for the most part, like lions. It was as if, in 1945, General Patton had convinced the conquered Germans to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific. Very few leaders throughout history could have done it.
Some have suggested that the emperor’s army was, in fact, too large. Napoleon biographer Frank McLynn argues that Napoleon had become an expert in winning with armies of 100,000 troops, “which permitted the speed and flexibility that produced an Austerlitz.” McLynn suggests that Napoleon failed to do the correct math: increasing his army’s striking ability sixfold increased his command and supply problems not by a similar number but exponentially. “It was an impossible dream,” McLynn writes, “something impracticable before the advent of railways and telegraph.”
But had Napoleon begun with one-quarter of the force he assembled and not won a quick and devastating battle, the killing agent that would turn up in those bones in Vilnius, and which was already filtering through his ranks, would have quickly whittled those numbers down to a pittance. Each strategy, in retrospect, had its risk.
ALEXANDER’S FRONTLINE FORCES in the beginning numbered only about 162,000, giving the French a three-to-one advantage at the beginning of the war. His army was strong at the bottom, dissolute in the middle, and often chaotic at the top. The ordinary Russian soldier was typically poorly fed, poorly equipped, but decently trained and ferocious in battle, especially in a defensive posture. Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.
The officer corps was a glaring weakness. Officers gambled, whored, and drank when they should have been drilling their men. Commanders weren’t held to account for the performance of their troops or junior officers. They treated the common soldiers more like automatons or serfs they had inherited than men to be inspired and led.
And the Russian high command, although it contained some brilliant officers, was riven with dissension. “The headquarters of the Emperor were already overrun with distinguished idlers,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the brilliant German strategist attached to the Russian headquarters staff. Petty intrigues, nationalist posturing between the Russians and Germans and Austrian commanders, coteries and cliques all contributed to an atmosphere where decisions were made and unmade in hours. Alexander lacked the backbone to stop the intriguing that every general, sensing the chance to mold the tsar to his wishes, engaged in.
The Russian army was divided into two forces. General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly led 160,000 men of the First Army in a line opposed to Napoleon’s northern positions. Barclay was an unspectacular but highly competent general, a straight-backed, balding, reserved man who suffered from several disadvantages in the position and historical moment he found himself in: He was descended from a Scottish clan and spoke German as his first language, deeply suspect credentials for a man defending a country that was whipping itself into a nationalist fervor. And although he had made his name in a thrilling battle during the 1809 Finnish war by marching his army over the frozen Gulf of Bothnia, an exploit worthy of the young Napoleon, he was conservative by nature.
The man who would quickly emerge to be his closest rival was General Pyotr Bagration, a hot-tempered nationalist eager for a confrontation with Napoleon. Bagration commanded the 60,000 troops of the Second Army, which would face the French positions in the south. Four years younger than Barclay, he was a firebrand, tetchy, capable of plunging into ecstasies of despair or joy depending on the progress of the battle (and of his career). He was as ambitious for himself as he was for his nation, and in his deeply emotional responses to the progress of the war, he would prove to have an innate understanding of the Russian mind that the phlegmatic Barclay often lacked.
Napoleon planned to drive between them east along the Orsha-Smolensk-Vitebsk land bridge, which would lead him almost directly due east toward Moscow, should he need to go that far. His plans were straightforward: keep the two armies separated; drive forward and encircle them separately; cut off their supply, communication, and reinforcement lines to the east; force them into a defensive posture near Grodno; and then annihilate them. Napoleon continued to believe that Alexander would sue for peace after a convincing French victory.
But in one respect Napoleon had radically misjudged Alexander. He was thinking in terms of empire. Alexander was mobilizing his people for another kind of conflict entirely. The tsar was convinced he was facing an Antichrist, a millennial figure who would destroy Russia itself. For him, the coming war was a religious crusade.
TWO ANCIENT WARS set the stage for the kind of conflicts the two men planned for and mark the vicious debut of the lethal pathogen that was already deeply embedded in the Grande Armée.
In 1489 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella fought a decisive battle with the Islamic forces of the Moors. The Moors had ruled Spain ever since crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in A.D. 711, leaving only a few lonely outposts of Christians in the north of Spain along the Bay of Biscay. The Christian warriors bided their time, taking advantage of dissension among the Muslim rulers, looking to the Crusades for inspiration in their slow war of toppling one Islamic stronghold after another. By the late 1400s, only the citadel of Granada was left.
During the siege of the city in 1489, a third combatant entered the field: a “malignant spotted fever” began carrying off Spanish soldiers at a fast clip. When the Catholic forces mustered their soldiers in the early days of 1490 to regroup, their commanders were shocked to learn that 20,000 of their men had gone missing. Only 3,000 had fallen in battle with the Moors, meaning that a full 17,000 had died of the mysterious disease. In an age when small armies of 30,000 to 40,000 were the rule, that figure represented a devastating loss of fighting power.
But this was the illness’s first foray into war, and it didn’t have the decision-changing impact it would later carry. The Spanish recruited more soldiers to replenish their ranks and returned to the campaign. On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Abu ’abd Allah Muhammad XI, departed the ancient province and left Spain to the Christians. January 2 remains a black day in the minds of Islamicists today.
Ferdinand and Isabella had fought a religious war in the context of empire (or, equally true, a war of empire in the context of religion). It was a template that fit Alexander’s view of the battle to come. The Spaniards had overcome the fatal disease that struck their armies primarily by luck and persistence: The battles were being fought on their territory, meaning their commanders could quickly replace troops lost in the epidemic. Alexander, whose religious mania exceeded that of the Spanish king and queen, would have the same advantage against the despoiler from France.
FORTY YEARS LATER, THE MALADY that would meet the emperor on the road to Moscow emerged from the shadows to fulfill its role as an arbiter of empires.
The conflict drew together the depressive King Charles of Spain, the greatest power on the Continent; King Francis I of France, a young ruler who wished to retrieve ancestral lands claimed by Charles (and his two sons, held for ransom in a previous war); and King Henry VIII of England, who had territorial ambitions in the war but also sought, by taking control of Italy and Rome, to gain control over Pope Clement VII and to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Drawing in the continent’s three most powerful monarchs, this was a war for control of Europe’s future.
King Charles expressed the ethos of the war they would fight. It was a contest between honorable knights, and Charles longed to live up to the code they shared:
Therefore I cannot but see and feel that time is passing, and I with i
t, and yet I would not like to go without performing some great action to serve as a monument to my name. What is lost today will not be found tomorrow and I have done nothing so far to cover myself with glory.
It was a passage that Napoleon could have written nearly three centuries later.
In 1527 the forces of King Francis (bolstered by a contingent from Henry VIII) met Charles’s mercenary army at the Italian port city of Naples, the French army with 30,000 men, the Imperial army of Charles with 12,000. If Francis could destroy the army inside the walls, Spain’s power, so dominant for so long, would be broken at least for the near future and perhaps for centuries.
But then a pathogen appeared in the ranks and began to kill wantonly. “There originates a slight internal fever in the person’s body,” wrote one ambassador, who later died of the illness, “which at first does not seem to be very serious. But soon it reappears with a great fervor that immediately kills.” It was the same inscrutable microbe that had emerged at the Spanish siege of Granada.
Bodies began to pile up. The Italian sun beat down on men who had fallen into stupors or raving fevers. Each day brought more cases, and soon the sick began to die in terrible numbers. “The dangers of war are the least we have to think about,” wrote one commander. The French lieutenants, convinced the air in the plain had turned bad, urged their commander to retreat to the hills, where the atmosphere was cooler and fresher. But he refused and the epidemic “literally exploded.” Desertions increased; men faked illness to get out of the death zone. Out of a force of 30,000, only 7,000 were fit for duty. Soon two out of every three of the soldiers had died, most of them from the nameless pathogen.
At the end of August, the French forces broke from their camps and fled in panic, leaving their artillery and their sick comrades behind. The siege was broken. Charles’s forces ran them down on the road from Naples to Rome, stripping, robbing, and killing the remnants. “Without a doubt,” one observer wrote, “one would not find in all of ancient and modern history so devastating a ruin of such a flourishing army.” Francis’s men were skeletal, sick, some of them clothed only in tree leaves. The disease claimed more on the way and bodies could be seen heaped on the side of the road. Of the 5,000 who started the retreat, perhaps 200 arrived safely in the holy city; from there, some French troops were forced to walk all the way back to their native land.
The Illustrious Dead Page 3