The Age of Elegance

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The Age of Elegance Page 12

by Arthur Bryant


  1 "The cry 'We are cut off, the enemy is across the road,' began to be heard in our ranks!" Lapene, 264. See Fortescue, IX, 498-514; Oman, VII, 282, 343-75; Beatson, Orthez Campaign; Gurwood; Smith, I, 163-5; BelL I, 147-8; Foy, 238-42; Narrative of a Soldier; Brown, 259-60; Seaton, 201-2; Cooper, 110-11; Col. A. Burne, The Enigma of Toulouse (Army Quarterly, January, 1927).

  month, had overrun more than a third of France and were sweeping towards Paris in two great armies, one of 60,000 under Blücher driving westwards down the Marne, and the other of more than 100,000 under Schwarzenberg down the Seine, thirty miles to the south, while the advance-guard of a third army in the north under Bernadotte—the renegade French Marshal who had become Crown Prince of Sweden—was moving down from Flanders and had occupied Laon, Rheims and Soissons. The morale of Napoleon's troops, outnumbered by three to one and disastrously defeated at La Rothiere at the beginning of the month, was visibly disintegrating, and hordes of deserters were pouring towards a silent and appalled Paris, while Cossack patrols, spreading far across the country, had penetrated as far as Orleans and had reached the imperial palace of Fontainebleau. Everywhere the Emperor's cause seemed in ruin; from Italy news had come that his brother-in-law, Murat, in return for an Austrian guarantee of his Neapolitan throne, had joined the Allied cause, while in the north Flanders and Denmark had been overrun by his fellow traitor, Bernadotte. All Europe was hunting down Napoleon. Antwerp was closely besieged, Brussels taken, and a British force under Sir Thomas Graham was investing Bergen-op-Zoom, while in Germany the last surviving French garrisons faced starvation. In England, which had been blanketed by the worst frost of living memory—the Thames was frozen over at Blackfriars and there had been twenty-foot drifts in the Midlands—glorious rumours percolated. On February 21st a post-chaise, decked with laurels, dashed up the Dover road with news of a great victory won at the gates of Paris and of Napoleon's death at the hands of Cossacks. On 'Change, Government stocks rose six points, only to fall a few hours later after the owners of the chaise had made a fortune.

  For at that moment the campaign in France had taken a very different turn. Field Marshal Blucher, in his zeal to be the first in Paris, had allowed his army of Prussians and Russians to become dangerously strung out. Taking advantage of the leisurely pace of the main Austrian army down the Seine valley, Napoleon drove his famished and exhausted men northwards during the day and night of February 9th through the deep clay forest of Traconne and unexpectedly appeared at Champaubert on the morning of the 10th. Here, after annihilating a Russian division, he cut across Blücher's line of march; then turning westwards towards the head of his column, defeated another of his corps commanders at Montmirail on the nth, another at Chateau-Thierry on the 12th, and Blücher himself at Vauchamps on the 14th. In four swift battles that seemed to reach back across the years to Rivoli, in every one of which he brought superior numbers against the enemy's isolated columns, he inflicted 20,000 casualties and took fifty guns. Then, having flung back Blucher towards Chalons, he hurried back to the Seine where Schwarzenberg's army had driven Victor's and Oudinot's weak screen to within fifty miles of Paris. At Nangis on the 17th and Montereau on the 18th he inflicted a further 5000 casualties on the leading German and Russian corps. Appalled by the successive tidings of disaster, the Austrian Commander-in-Chief ordered a general retreat. By the 21st the Allies were back at Troyes; three days later, after a council of war, they began to retire—like Brunswick's army twenty-two years before—towards the Vosges. Against all probability Napoleon had saved his capital. His decision, speed and the legend of his name had snatched victory from defeat. The miracle of Marengo had been repeated. Or so it seemed to those whom he had so often defeated in the past.

  Thanks to the Royal Navy the British Foreign Secretary had never suffered that experience. While the Austrians were counselling retreat and even the brave Czar was sunk in a wave of despair, Castlereagh remained serene. He reminded his allies of their overwhelming superiority in numbers: even now, after their losses of the past fortnight, they commanded within or near the borders of France more than half a million men. He was supported by Blucher who, despite his recent drubbing, was all for trying again and marching on Paris. Only a few days' march away on the Aisne and the Flemish frontier were two Russian and one Prussian corps; joined to Blucher's depleted troops they would bring his army up to 100,000 men, a force greater than any Napoleon could interpose between it and Paris. When the sovereigns and statesmen round the council table at Bar-sur-Aube pointed out that these three corps formed part of Bernadotte's Army of the North and could not be taken from it without trenching on the jealously guarded rights of that crafty and exceedingly dilatory commander, Castlereagh replied that if Bernadotte refused the transfer, his monthly subsidies from London would be cut off. At this the decision to let Blucher advance was taken.

  The Austrians, however, continued their retreat and only stopped when Napoleon, turning back to chase Blücher away from his capital, ceased to pursue. Since Wagram it had been a canon of Austrian policy that it was better to try to civilise the revolutionary dictator of the West than to fight him. Only Napoleons refusal to be content with less than the domination of all Europe had induced the Emperor Francis to throw in his lot with the Allies after the failure of his attempts at mediation. Napoleon's son and heir, the infant King of Rome, was his grandson, and, to a cautious and far-sighted Austrian, an imperial France reduced to reasonable limits and governed in due course by a half-Habsburg seemed safer company than an enlarged Russia and Prussia unchecked by any Western counterpoise. The revolutionary barbarism of France might be redeemed by the civilising influence of the Habsburgs. That of Russia and her jackal, Prussia, were fundamental. To an Austrian, with his knowledge of the Orient, Russians and Prussians were barbarians in the bone.

  To this view the British had never subscribed. Since their unsuccessful attempt to live on terms with Napoleon twelve years before, they had refused to countenance any compromise with him. Their view was that, so long as he reigned, permanent peace was unobtainable. Anyone who would fight him relentlessly like themselves was their friend, Latin, Slav or Teuton. His insane resolve to yield nothing at all, and his persistence, even after Leipzig, in rejecting the Rhine frontier, gave them the chance to impress on their allies the need for restraining him once and for all. Castlereagh's instructions were to insist that France should relinquish all claims in Germany, Italy and Spain, that Holland should become an independent kingdom with sufficient territory to secure her from future French invasion, and that Antwerp should be placed in friendly hands.

  When, therefore, negotiations for a peace had been opened at Chatillon-sur-Seine in February the terms offered France were no longer the "natural frontiers" of Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees, but merely those she had enjoyed under her ancient kings. At one moment, after his defeat at La Rothiere, Napoleon had reluctantly given his Foreign Minister, Caulaincourt, authority to accept them if no other way of saving Paris seemed possible. But after his victories he had cancelled the recall of his troops from Italy and announced that he would carry the war to Munich. Despite lambent flashes of his old genius, his sense of reality seemed to have completely deserted him. He persisted in behaving as though he was at the head of a vast army, spoke of skeleton formations of disorganised survivors as though they were army corps in full -strength, and stormed at his Marshals when, with hopelessly attenuated forces, they failed to carry positions that only the vanished legions of his imagination could have taken. He cared nothing for peace; he was only concerned with recovering his former empire. The question whether it was arithmetically possible to do so interested him no more than whether it was morally desirable.

  His only hope of success lay not in his military prowess—for the sword was already broken in his hand—but in the likelihood of his enemies falling out. Throughout the Chatillon negotiations he continued to address secret proposals for a separate peace to his father-in-law; if Austria could be detached, he felt he could deal w
ith Russia and Prussia. It was Castlereagh's service that he defeated these efforts. Not only did he hearten the Czar, but he overcame the suspicions of Metternich. On March ist, the day that the Austrians, finding that Napoleon had turned back in pursuit of Blücher, cautiously resumed their advance, he secured the adhesion of his allies to a treaty which spelt the end of the usurper's power.

  By the Treaty of Chaumont the four contracting Powers, in the now certain event of Napoleon continuing to refuse their terms— for nothing would now induce him to give up the Rhine frontier and Antwerp—undertook to prosecute the war till he was overthrown. Each was to maintain 150,000 troops in the field and abjure a separate peace, while Britain, in addition, was to contribute an annual subsidy of five millions sterling to her allies. Secret clauses provided for a federal union of the liberated German states, an Austrian hegemony in Italy, the return of the Bourbons to Spain, the independence of Switzerland and, at Britain's instance, the enlargement of Holland to include Antwerp and the former Austrian Netherlands. The alliance was to last for twenty years. Its creation was almost wholly Castlereagh's.

  Meanwhile, Wellington, unaware of what was happening in the North, was exploiting his victory. The French rearguard made a show of standing at Aire on March 2nd but disintegrated when attacked. "It was all in vain," wrote Bell of the 34th, "the blood of the old bricks was up and we drove them into and right through the town." A few nights later he slept in a bedroom, with damask drapery, mirrors and polished furniture; it was the first time he had been in a bed since the occupation of Madrid two summers before. The campaign had suddenly become a picnic, with fowls to roast at the camp fires, wine at fifteen sous a bottle, and riflemen slicing slabs of bacon on their bread like English haymakers.1

  By his retreat eastwards Soult left the road to the north open. More than a hundred miles up the Atlantic coast from besieged Bayonne lay the great city of Bordeaux, the third in France and the capital of Gascony. While his field-army halted its eastward march to consolidate its communications, the British Commander-in-Chief extemporised a flying force under Beresford to seize the city and secure the Gironde estuary for his transports. Reports had reached him that its merchants, ruined by the blockade, were talking of a Bourbon restoration, and, though scrupulously anxious not to encourage any Frenchman to a step which might prove fatal in the event of an Allied peace with Napoleon, he could not afford to ignore a civil movement so favourable to his operations. On March 12th Beresford reached Bordeaux with two regiments of hussars. The mayor met him at the gates and, tearing off his tricolour scarf, trampled it in the mud with cries of "Abas les aigles!" "Vivent les Bourbons!" Subsequently, ignoring the delicate negotiations at Chaumont, he proclaimed, to Wellington's embarrassment and indignation, that he had been authorised by the Allies to conduct the administration of the city in King Louis' name.

  For under its own momentum the war was gathering speed at a rate transcending sober political calculations. Faced by the recoil upon itself of the revolutionary maxim of making war support war, and bled white by successive conscriptions and taxations, Napoleonic France was disintegrating. Her people could not take the medicine they had so often inflicted on others. Everywhere, save in her Emperor's immediate presence, her soldiers were on the run, watched by apathetic civilians who made no response to his proclamations enjoining them to emulate the Spanish guerrilleros and fall on the invaders' rear. The only result of his injunctions in the south was the

  1 Bell, 1,151-8; Smith, I, 175; Larpent, III, 32-3, 46, 75, 87-9; Gronow, I, 24-5; Pellot, Guerre des Pyrenees, ext. Alison, XIII, 33.

  formation of local guards to protect the villages from the depredations of these hypothetical partisans. On March 20th, two days after Wellington resumed his eastward advance against Toulouse, Lyons, the second city of France, fell to an Austrian column advancing from the Jura as Augereau's men, unsupported by the countryside, withdrew hastily before it.

  As the British swept forward, in sunshine at last, across a flat, water-logged meadow-country of orchards, vineyards and trout-streams, after Soult's scarecrow army, the people flocked out of their houses to greet them. At Bagneres Spa, even before the first redcoat appeared, the National Guard turned out to present arms to a party of English civilians. When Wellington reached the outskirts of Toulouse on March 26th, he had less than a battalion guarding the two hundred miles that separated him from his ships in the Bay of Biscay. The reinforcements which should have reached him from England had been deflected by the politicians, who, in their excitement at the news from the Continent, had forgotten their hard-earned lessons and sent every available man to Holland to enable Graham to capture Bergen-op-Zoom and Antwerp—places which were bound to fall in any case if the French armies were defeated in the field. But, since Wellington's discipline enabled him to dispense with lines-of-communication troops, it mattered little, except to Graham's unfortunate soldiers who were repelled from Bergen with heavy loss on March 8th.

  Meanwhile in the confused fighting on the misty, shivering heights above the Aisne—though no news of it had yet penetrated to the south across a disorganised France—Napoleon had made his last throw and lost. As Wellington had always said, he lacked the patience for defensive operations. Having forced back the Russians in a bloody battle at Craonne but failed to prevent their junction with Blücher's Prussians, he was repulsed at Laon on March 9th and 10th. Three days later, in a night attack on Rheims, he took his last town. His army was by now a horde of famished desperadoes in ragged greatcoats and bare feet, its guns and wagons worn out, its units inextricably confused. More than 70,000 veterans who might have brought its depleted ranks up to strength were locked up in fortresses beyond the Rhine which Napoleon, in his insane desire to retain the unretainable, had refused to relinquish. Even Blucher's army was now twice the size of his own. And along the Seine valley,

  Schwarzenberg's host, stirred into activity by the expostulations of Castlereagh and the Czar, was moving once more on Paris. On March 20th Napoleon, marching in haste to intercept it, fell on its flank at Arcis-sur-Aube and was again repulsed. Henceforward, while it pursued its way towards the capital, he was left to roam, furious but impotent, across its lines of communication with an army of ghosts; still sending hourly messages to Paris and his Marshals to resist, still summoning to his aid armies that had ceased to exist, still breathing threats of vengeance against Rhineland, Danube and Vistula.

  On March 28th, ignoring these demonstrations and driving Marmont's and Mortier's weak forces before them, the two Allied armies joined hands at Meaux, less than thirty miles from Paris. Two days later, while Napoleon desperately marched by way of Fontainebleau, with his men dropping in hundreds by the roadside, to rescue his capital, 180,000 invaders stormed its northern heights. Thirteen thousand fell as the Russian and Prussian columns fought their way up the slopes of Montmartre and the Butte de Chaumont and boys from the Ecole Militaire served the defenders' guns. That afternoon, with the Allied artillery commanding its streets, Paris surrendered. Its citizens had no stomach for a fight, and the bourgeois National Guard, called out to reinforce the hopelessly outnumbered regulars, was more concerned with guarding the shops from the mob than in dying for a lost cause.

  On the afternoon of April 5th, a British officer, who had set out from Paris with dispatches on the evening of March 30th, reached London via Antwerp. As men heard the news in street or counting-house, or stood breathless with the newspaper in their hands, they seemed to be in a dream. "It is the Lord's doing," wrote Sir William Pepys to Hannah More, "and it is marvellous in our eyes." All over England houses were decked with laurel, transparencies and coloured candles lit in windows, and the populace, dancing and singing, poured into the streets. The church bells rang and the mob joyously chalked rude notices on the doors of those who were supposed to have sympathised with Boney, and Wilberforce wished his old friend Pitt were alive to witness the end of the drama.

  During the Easter week-end—with warm sunshine thawing men's hearts afte
r the long frost—it became known that Napoleons Marshals had abandoned him, that his servile Senate had decreed his deposition and the recall of the Bourbons, and that the Allied Sovereigns had resolved on his abdication. "This dreadful scourge is at last removed from us," wrote Lord Auckland, who had been Ambassador at The Hague when the Revolutionary armies invaded Holland, "and after twenty years of distress and difficulty we breathe and live again." Only a handful of cantankerous radicals protested: to Lord Byron, who wrote an ode to the fallen tyrant, it seemed that the blockheads had won and Prometheus was chained. But most Englishmen at that moment could see nothing to admire in Napoleon; after keeping the world in oceans of blood, it seemed shameful that he should wish to survive the ruin he had created instead of perishing, sword in hand, at the head of his men. "This," wrote Walter Scott, "is a poor Devil!"1

  One thing gave almost universal pleasure. The Czar, in the hour of victory, seemed to have no other thought than how to restore peace to Europe. However much the French might deserve to be punished for the injuries they had inflicted, there was to be no revenge; the war had been waged against one man, and now that he had fallen, enmity was at an end. The Allied Sovereigns had come to France, Alexander declared, neither to conquer nor to rule, but to establish peace for all. "It is like a dream," wrote Dorothy Wordsworth, "peace, peace all in a moment—prisoners let loose, Englishmen and Frenchmen brothers at once!—no treaties, no stipulations!" For one magnanimous moment humanity seemed to stand in the dawn before the Bastille fell.

  But the war was not quite over. Six hundred miles away to the south, on the Languedoc plain, the British army was still fighting. Its commander did not yet know that Napoleon had abdicated, though he had learnt of the occupation of Paris. Soult, whose love of digging-in had become an obsession, had got his troops behind the walls of a fortified city with a flooded river between them and the British, and, in a dissolving world, it seemed as safe a place as any

 

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