Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  “The Emperor remained perfectly calm [throughout this latest crisis]” Marshal Marmont later recalled, as Eugène spontaneously ordered Marshal MacDonald to fall back on the left and form an immense square, supported by General Nansouty’s cavalry, in order to push back Kollowrat and Liechtenstein as well. But there were not enough French troops to fill all the gaps, and stopping the unopposed Klenau was quite another matter. Making a risky snap decision, Napoleon completely disengaged three of Masséna’s hard-pressed divisions from the front line and ordered them to march southward nearly five miles to take up a new emergency position before the Austrian-held village of Essling, with Bessières’s reserves brought up to fill the breach in the main line as they changed sectors in the heat of battle. It was a complicated, delicate procedure, which the veteran Masséna carried out with great skill.

  There remained several hundred yards of still insufficiently protected ground around Neu-Wirthaus, just south of MacDonald’s new position on the left, however, and Napoleon, ever the brilliant improvisor, ordered forty artillery pieces from Eugène’s army and another seventy-two cannon from the Imperial Guard to be brought up to form an enormous new battery under the able command of the tough General Lauriston. Long ago Napoleon’s aide-de-camp and being preened for a position as marshal, Count Lauriston had blotted his copybook with his arrogant boasting and his incessant demands for promotion, wealth, and honors, forever to be denied that supreme nomination thereafter. For all that he was an ideal man in this desperate situation, as he issued the complex orders required to bring up enormous supplies of powder, ball, and canister, not to mention the large artillery crews and all the horses for 112 big guns, all under very heavy fire. An extraordinary, hazardous move, nearly one thousand horses and fifteen hundred gunners weaving through French lines. But Lauriston did it.

  Even as the guns belched forth the first of hundreds of lethal missiles against the surging Austrians along the French left, on the far right Davout was ordered again to launch his hard-pressed and already battle-worn troops against Rosenberg’s powerful corps. They must hammer at the Austrians, Napoleon ordered unrelentingly as exhausted troops on their feet under intensive fire for many hours were pushed seemingly beyond human endurance in the stifling heat. Lauriston’s roundshot and case now hurled in continuous fiery sheets, stunning and then finally stopping the intrepid Austrians, but only after their guns had decimated large numbers of the exposed French battery at Neu-Wirthaus. The casualties on both sides were simply appalling.

  As for Klenau’s maverick corps closing on Essling, it was stopped only by the remaining large guns on Lobau, permitting Masséna to quick-march his exhausted troops to seize the fortifications of Essling, thereby barring Klenau’s route. The Austrians would advance no farther; nevertheless Napoleon’s great plan had gone very, very wrong.

  If Napoleon could depend on any two men in the entire French army, they had always been Lannes and Davout. Once again Davout fearlessly led his assault against murderous opposition, General Gudin at his side brought down by four simultaneous wounds, and Davout’s own horse killed under him, hurling him to the ground. An aide-de-camp quickly brought up a spare mount, and Davout was back in the saddle again. Although Rosenberg’s crack IX Corps did for a while penetrate and threaten Davout’s haggard line, nevertheless he did regain control, pushing Rosenberg’s entire front and second lines back well past Markgrafneusiedl.

  Sweeping the whole scene again with his telescope, Napoleon dispatched his aides-de-camp with a rash of fresh orders as he launched the final drive to break the brave Austrian army before him. While Davout was to continue to roll back Rosenberg’s corps, Oudinot was to charge the heights protected by Hohenzollern’s corps, and MacDonald, supported by Lauriston’s new battery, was to break through the Austrian line to the left, at the hinge linking Kollowrat’s and Liechtenstein’s corps in the direction of the hamlet of Süssenbrunn behind them.

  Despite the sweltering heat of the day, again in the nineties, MacDonald marched his twenty-one battalions in a bristling square formation forward to the beat of drums, protected by Imperial Guard Cavalry to the right and confident heavily armored cuirassiers to his left. But even the finest infantry square could not defy concentrated musketry and the flashing Austrian batteries. Kollowrat and Liechtenstein reduced MacDonald’s force of 8,000 men by 5,500 casualties in a matter of minutes. With barely 2,500 men left, a much shaken MacDonald pleaded for help, and Napoleon sent in Wrede’s Germans to the rescue.

  By two o’clock the diminutive Masséna was gaining full control of the ruins of Essling, preventing any further advance there by Klenau, while at the center the remainder of Eugène’s Italian army, now supported strongly by Marshals Oudinot and Marmont, were finally sealing the fate of the Austrian forces at Wagram. The splendid Davout remained in full control on the far right as he continued to rout Rosenberg’s corps, which was falling back quickly now.

  With the slaughter and his own casualties reaching phenomenal proportions, outnumbered from the start and apparently unconfident in his own plan while continuing to face this staggering French ferocity, Archduke Karl conceded defeat and began an orderly withdrawal of his troops from this immense battlefield. Far to the west, across the broad reaches of the Danube, the people of Vienna manned the walls of the ancient Habsburg capital, some with telescopes, and watched the tragic spectacle, or at least what could be seen of it through the long pall of sulfuric smoke thickened by the raging fires in the various villages and the burning fields of wheat around Wagram. The two mighty French batteries now had to silence their many dozens of big guns for fear of hitting their own men, who were advancing through the blazing fields, past smoldering villages and the charred remains of Austrian troops and horses frozen in place for eternity. The archduke’s army was departing for the hills of Bohemia once again. By four o’clock the fate of the enemy was sealed, and Napoleon at last realized that he had won the Battle of Wagram — one of the most extraordinary events in the annals of military history.

  The Austrians escaped in a long methodical retreat that the exhausted French were unable to pursue, although Marbot for one claims that Napoleon could have mustered a large enough force to smash them once and for all had he been more aggressive. But Napoleon, too, was weary, physically and mentally, after directing his troops for more than a dozen hours without a respite of any sort. His troops were in worse shape, many of them literally falling asleep where they stood or collapsing from wounds. Had the Austrians had a more confident commander, things might have turned out very differently indeed, for the archduke’s basic battle plan was a superb one. But he lacked character and confidence.

  Nevertheless, by the close of that afternoon, the Austrians had lost the battle, paying a very heavy price in 37,146 casualties (including killed, wounded, and prisoners) of whom 747 were officers (four of them generals) but only twenty guns. Precise French casualties were never established, but it appears they included at least 32,500 dead or wounded and another 7,000 men prisoners of the Austrians. In reality the French wounded figure was probably much higher. Unlike the Austrians the French had lost among their dead and wounded some 1,866 officers (including more than three dozen generals), not to mention the loss of twelve regimental colors and twenty-one guns. Not since Eylau and Auerstädt had the French suffered so grievously.

  Never before had the French lost so many big guns and regimental colors. Never before had Napoleon lost so many senior officers. Never before had he dismissed a marshal of the Empire — and on the field of battle before the enemy! For the first time in his career he had actually been outfoxed by excellent opposing battlefield tactics, as he would have been earlier at Aspern-Essling had Archduke Karl’s excellent plans been matched by an equal self-confidence and willpower to pursue the French. Here at Wagram the archduke’s superb feint along the extreme French right, while launching his massive turning attack on the extreme French left, had taken Napoleon utterly by surprise, for which he paid very heavily in troop l
osses. But if he had shamed and lost one marshal in Bernadotte, he had created and gained another in MacDonald. Really all French corps commanders performed superbly today, apart from Bernadotte. On the other hand, for the first time many thousands of green conscripts, French, Italian, and German, had broken and run under fire, forced back to their positions only at bayonet-point. Wagram was a very different sort of battle in most respects, and although a technical victory, hardly a sweeping, crushing one. And then, too, Napoleon had lost among his dead and gravely wounded many senior officers he could not easily replace, including d’Espagne, St.-Hilaire, LaSalle, and of course the irreplaceable Lannes, who had been with him since the early days of the Italy campaign under the Directorate.

  On July 8 Masséna, Marmont, Oudinot, and Davout were ordered to search for the retreating Austrians, resulting in some sharp rear-guard actions adding further to the calamitous casualty list. Spreading a wide net in this search, it was Andre Masséna who finally found the main body of the still well-organized Austrian army north of Znaim on the Thaya River reaching into southern Moravia, where a new battle was fought on the ioth. This proved too much for Archduke Karl and his exhausted and thoroughly demoralized army, which finally began breaking ranks and fleeing in all directions. The archduke duly sent a messenger asking for an armistice on the eleventh. That brief document was drawn up and signed by Masséna and Karl in the wee hours of the following morning.

  An angry Austrian Emperor Franz I, smarting over yet another defeat at the hands of that wretched Bonaparte and this humiliating armistice, one week later fired his brother, Archduke Karl, though there was no one to replace him.

  The war was over. After spending much time with the wounded, first on “misery island” and then in Vienna, Bonaparte returned to the “Camp of Schönbrunn Palace” with his bevy of aides-de-camp and staff, to analyze the entire campaign and to draft the final terms of the peace treaty with Austria.

  *

  There was another side to Wagram, all the Wagrams, Friedlands, Eylaus, Jenas, Auerstädts, and Austerlitzes — the medical side as seen by the surgeons and the wounded.

  “The general who consumes 6,000 men a day!” is how General Kléber had summed up Bonaparte during the Egyptian campaign. “The Empire turned its back on humanity,” two medical historians fully concurred more than a century later. “This is not the nicest part of war. It is sad and moving to see so many victims,” Napoleon himself had confessed to Josephine on leaving one of his famous battlefields “covered with the dead and wounded.” And yet after that terrible slaughter at Eylau, which he alone was responsible for, he continued to wage war rather than make an all-out effort to seek a lasting peace. There was something very sadomasochistic, something very perverted, about Napoleon’s wish to continue with slaughter after slaughter, followed by ritualistically contrite, tearful visits to the body-strewn fields of battle after the silencing of all guns. He was truly tormented by the sight of these hundreds of thousands of maimed and dead, and yet apparently it was a sight that he could not live without, even when it meant endangering those very close to him, not to mention his own existence. “I have 300,000 men to spend!” he revealingly boasted to Czar Alexander just before another great battle. “Once my great empire has been launched, no one must be allowed to get in its path; woe unto him who gets crushed under its wheels.” He was a human steamroller, crushing all those in his path — after having deliberately placed them in his way.

  With the same cold, calculating ruthlessness, Napoleon ignored the dead and wounded, and despite the pleas of the army’s chief surgeon, Dr. Dominique Larrey, year after year refused to create a permanent army medical corps. “There is no Medical Service whatsoever!” even the tough Marshal Davout had complained during the first Danube campaign. “On the eve of Austerlitz...Monsieur Larrey did not have a single bandage at his disposition,” Dr. d’Héralde, the sole surgeon attached to Soult’s corps, recalled. “He asked me to give him some. I had some cloth, and cannon swabs, but only enough for four or five hundred wounded, and a double amputation kit,” this before a major battle in which 9,000 or so French casualties were thus all but abandoned by Bonaparte. When Dr. Larrey’s fellow army surgeon, Pierre François Percy, presented a sweeping plan of reorganization for the medical service, it was neither approved nor appreciated. “I hope that Your Majesty will allow me to tell him how grievously the entire Army Medical Service has been affected by his rejection of the plan prepared by M. Percy, regarding the establishment of a regular field service on a permanent basis,” Dr. Jean-Baptiste Turiot complained to Napoleon following the débâcle of Eylau and just nine days before the great Battle of Friedland. The lamentations of physicians in his military medical service mounted, and even greater numbers of surgeons refused to consider service under such appalling conditions — one group of sixty such doctors, upon reaching a battlefield, were so shocked by what they saw that they immediately fled and returned to France.

  On April 13, 1809, Napoleon finally authorized the first permanent field service, including ten companies of army nurses (all male), comprising a total of 1,250 men for the entire army, and a few ambulances. And although Napoleon could mobilize and march an entire army (literally on foot) from Boulogne to the Rhine in one month, by the time of Wagram, three months after announcing the creation of this medical service, it still existed only on paper. When Napoleon commanded that something be done, it was. In this case there had been no such command.

  Almost as pathetic, the few surgical ambulance teams organized and dispatched from Madrid back at the beginning of March 1809 reached Vienna only on June 27, too late to help the French victims at Aspern-Essling in May, which Larrey put at 16,000 dead, and where he had operated literally almost single-handed. (As for the troops in Spain, they would simply have to do without.) It was following this butchery and the unattended dying that Napoleon’s troops renamed Lobau “l’ile de misère.”

  In a sense the tragedy of Wagram brought the full impact of all these unnecessary battles into focus, through a series of unsolicited letters to Napoleon Bonaparte by Turiot, the deputy chief surgeon of the Grand Army’s medical service. Writing angrily to Bonaparte on July 17, 1809, eleven days after the Battle of Wagram, Turiot barely remained civil as he explained the results of the lack of all basic services in those field hospitals. On his arrival at Lobau from Spain, he said that despite “an enormous armed place, complete with streets, workshops, depots and encampments...from the medical viewpoint everything was missing, except the devotion of the surgeons.” And what surgeons, in reality few of them qualified in medical schools or hospitals, and the majority of those so incompetent as to be unable to earn a living as a physician in French civilian life!

  At Essling, Surgeon Herteloup had found nothing available, even for rudimentary field operations, and after having operated as best he could, he attempted to protect the survivors against the sun, rain, and the night cold by building lean-tos of river reed covered by the coats taken from the dead. “All those wretches suffered from thirst and hunger,” and such food as could be found, butchered cavalry horses, was cooked in the armor of dead soldiers hammered into the shape of pots, for not even cooking utensils were made available by Napoleon for those hospitalized. For water, there was only the Danube. “But even the zeal and surgical virtuosity of Dr. Larrey could not prevent many from dying of tetanus, because most of those surviving operations were bandaged in dirty cannon swabs.” But, he added sarcastically, at least “you and your officers in full dress uniform visited the wounded on April 27, followed by four servants in your livery bearing baskets of gold pieces.”

  Turiot added that he had personally seen “the field of carnage” at Wagram, the wheat “aflame, and all the villages about us destroyed by artillery...But in the afternoon, after twelve hours of fighting, the victory, albeit hesitant, finally gave way before your implacable will. To be sure, so many laurels have not been acquired without immense sacrifice. Never was there such bloody fighting!” But there
were few surgeons on the battlefield, no medicine of any kind, no anesthesia, not even bandages or beds. The newly operated on — and frequently 60 to 70 percent of those never left the “hospital” alive[754] — were permitted to keep the blood-covered stretchers they were brought in on, though most usually were placed on the ground, and if straw was available, on it. More frequently the men were placed on muddy, blood-splattered dirt floors, or simply shoved aside.

  “For all the enormous size of your Grand Army, and the complexity of its organization,” Turiot continued:

  It was incapable of providing not only a reasonable sort of field medical service, but even the most rudimentary aspects of one. I am also going to take the extreme liberty of again telling Your Majesty how much bloodshed could have been spared, how many human beings could have been saved here, if M. Percy’s plan [for reorganizing the medical service] had been put into effect.

  At Wagram, “Certainly, we have all done our best,” Turiot insisted. “However, even the special medical service reserved for your Imperial Guard was quickly swamped, incapable of coping, as a result of the extent of the battle...The number of wounded increased in terrifying proportions to the increased severity of the bombardment,” and their field hospital “has been rapidly filled” by the wounded, leaving it “in total disorder. I even saw one colonel whose arm had just been amputated laid on a pile of manure and straw. I hate to mention the fate of just ordinary soldiers!”

  The soldiers who could not be brought in were left unattended in the burned stubble of the wheatfield where they had fallen. The fierce July sun left them parched, many dying of thirst and hunger, Turiot continued, covered “by that sort of enormous flies that are attracted to slaughterhouses.” Several days after death thousands were still left in the fields, “their wounds filled with maggots. Next to one burned-out ambulance, I saw the pieces of an arm and leg, the stench of the putrefaction filling the air,” the battle-hardened surgeon noted. It was worse for the wounded, forgotten for days, lying helplessly watching the maggot-infested corpses of their companions being eaten away, inch by inch, before their very eyes, driving many of them insane. Other bodies lay half buried by explosions. “Many of those unfortunate men were found only five or six days later. Those who were still strong enough called out or else waved a cloth on their rifle above the wheat...others, although half charred, somehow were still alive, which seems quite incredible,” having survived aby drinking their own urine...Most of the wounded collected after Wagram had almost bled to death, their tongues thickened and swollen out of their mouths, and they died shortly after reaching a hospital.” Blood transfusions were of course still unknown.