On 9 April Bonaparte transferred to Savona as his three corps took up their positions, with Masséna on the right, Augereau in the centre and Sérurier to their left. But it was the Austrians who struck first. Beaulieu had misinterpreted a French reconnaissance along the coast as the vanguard of an attack on Genoa, and, assuming that the whole French army would be following, decided to drive in its flank through Montenotte and Monte Legino. His attack on what he assumed to be the French flank ran head-on into the units at Monte Legino preparing to attack.13
Bonaparte had intended to strike at the gap where the Alps ended and the Apennines began, which was the juncture between the Sardinians and their Austrian allies. While Sérurier pinned down the Sardinians frontally and Augereau turned their flank at Millesimo, Masséna was to move into the gap between the two armies. Bonaparte calculated that if he inserted a wedge between the two and prised them apart, strategic imperatives would force the Sardinians to fall back in a northerly direction towards their base at Turin and the Austrians to retreat eastwards towards theirs at Milan. He would then be able to defeat them separately. His studies had convinced him that it was superior numbers that won battles, and that the art of war could be reduced to the one principle of bringing greater forces to bear at a given point.14
As they sheltered from the torrential rain that night, planning to renew their attack the next morning, the Austrians at Monte Legino were unaware that, quickly appraising the situation, Bonaparte had ordered Masséna to veer right and make a forced march through the night to Montenotte in their rear. ‘Everything suggests that today and tomorrow will go down in history,’ Berthier wrote to Masséna with his latest orders.15
The following morning, as the Austrian commander was about to push home his attack, the dispersing mist revealed Masséna’s divisions deploying on his flank and rear. Coming under simultaneous attack from two sides, he ordered a retreat which quickly turned into a rout. It had been little more than a skirmish, with Austrian losses in dead, wounded and prisoners around 2,700 and the French no more than a hundred, but Bonaparte accorded it the status of a full-scale battle. In his self-aggrandising report to the Directory, he claimed that the main Austrian force commanded by Beaulieu himself was involved, that it had lost up to 4,000 men and ‘several’ flags (in fact only one was captured), and blew the event up to epic proportions. His order of the day to the troops echoed this, praising them for their glorious exploit. It was the first brush-stroke of what was to be a masterpiece of mendacity.16
Beaulieu had in fact spent the day several kilometres away, sitting badly bruised by a roadside while his escort struggled to repair the carriage that had pitched him to the ground. He had realised his mistake too late and had lost valuable time, which Bonaparte was not going to let him regain. He urged Augereau, most of whose men were still marching without boots, and many without muskets, to hasten his attack on Millesimo, and Masséna to strike further into the Austrian rear at Dego. Once Augereau had accomplished his task, he was to swing left and begin to roll up the extremity of the Sardinian line.
Bonaparte needed to keep up the momentum so that neither of his opponents had time to regroup and strike back; if they did, he would be caught between two fires. He therefore reacted violently to any apparent hitch. After Augereau had sent the Sardinians reeling at Millesimo, one force of about 1,000 men under General Provera had ensconced themselves in an old fortress at Cosseria. Knowing them to have no more supplies or water than those they carried, Augereau meant to leave a few hundred men to pin them down and take their inevitable surrender while he went after the retreating main body of Sardinians. But Bonaparte insisted he storm Cosseria. In the ensuing assault the French suffered heavy losses from the Sardinians sniping from the battlements. Provera offered to capitulate, but Bonaparte tried to bully him into unconditional surrender, threatening to take no prisoners, and ordered Augereau to attack once more. This attack proved as futile as the first. Provera duly surrendered the next morning, having lost no more than 150 men, while Bonaparte’s impatience had cost the French at least 600 and possibly as many as 1,000 casualties. He did have the good grace to admit his mistake and express regret.17
To Augereau’s right, Masséna attacked the citadel of Dego, where over the next two days some of the most serious fighting took place, with the citadel changing hands several times. After the final assault, which he directed himself, Bonaparte promoted a young chef de bataillon named Lannes whose dash had caught his attention.
On 16 April Bonaparte learned that Beaulieu was retreating to Acqui on the road to Milan; his plan had worked. He ordered Masséna to move northwards against the Sardinians. Colli’s dwindling force was falling back in order to defend Turin. It fought doggedly, inflicting heavy losses on the French, but on 21 April, after a brief defence it had to abandon its base and stores at Mondovi. That evening the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus, summoned a special council in Turin. As Beaulieu had signalled that he was not able to come to his aid further resistance seemed pointless; on the morning of 23 April Colli requested an armistice.
Bonaparte replied that he lacked the necessary powers and continued his advance. When pressed by the desperate Sardinians to agree to a ceasefire, he replied that he would be putting himself at risk if he did so without guarantees, and could only sign one if they handed over the fortresses of Coni, Tortona and Alessandria. In order to prevent Beaulieu from attempting to succour his Sardinian allies, he moved quickly on Cherasco and Alba, where he encouraged Piedmontese revolutionaries to establish a ‘Republic’, as a signal to the king that he could overthrow him if he wished. He applied further pressure by raising his demands to include the cession of Savoy and Nice to France, and the supply of his army with all its needs. These he delivered as an ultimatum on 27 April.18
The two men sent to conclude the negotiations and sign the armistice, the old Piedmontese General La Tour and Colli’s chief of staff Colonel Costa de Beauregard, found Bonaparte late on the night of 27 April in a barely guarded house in Cherasco. He was haughty and firm, threatening to launch further attacks every time they suggested softening his terms. At one o’clock in the morning he informed them that his troops were under orders to begin the advance on Turin at two. But having bullied them into signing the armistice he offered them a snack of broth, cold meats, hardtack and some pastries made by the local nuns, during which he became talkative. Although Beauregard was impressed by the brilliance and wide-ranging interests Bonaparte displayed, he found him cold, proud, bitter, and lacking in any grace or amenity. He also noted that he was very tired and his eyes were red. As they parted he said to Bonaparte, ‘General, how sad that one cannot like you as much as one cannot help admiring and esteeming you!’19
Bonaparte had weightier concerns than the affection of his enemies. He had exceeded both his brief and his duty as a soldier. He was single-handedly deciding French foreign policy, presenting the Directory with a fait accompli. He was, it is true, acting in concert with commissioner Saliceti who was with him during the negotiations, but he was still at risk of being recalled in disgrace. As he had meant to act independently all along, he had anticipated this eventuality and been shoring up his position.
His treatment of the troops under his command had been designed from the start not only to make them more effective as fighting men, but also to turn them into his men. He had achieved the first aim by giving them victory: nothing acts on the soldier’s self-esteem like success. It was clear to them that this success was largely due to Bonaparte’s talents, yet he made them feel it was all down to them. He had developed a gift for talking to the men as equals. His extraordinary memory allowed him to remember their names, their units, where they came from, their ages, histories, and above all their military exploits. He would come up to a man and ask about some personal problem or congratulate him on a past feat like an old comrade. He was not shy of reprimanding officers in front of the troops, to show that he was their friend.
He had refrained from being too strict with them at
first, allowing these men who had been starved of food, comforts and action for so long to indulge their basic instincts. They preyed on the country they went through, and by the time he had reached Cherasco he had to admit to being frightened by the ‘horrors’ they were committing. ‘The soldier who lacks bread is driven to excesses of violence which make one blush for humanity,’ he reported on 24 April. By then they had had a chance to fill their bellies and pull boots and items of clothing they lacked from Austrian and Sardinian dead or prisoners. Once he had halted his advance and managed to capture Sardinian stores, Bonaparte was able to begin reining them in. ‘The pillage is growing less widespread,’ he reported to the Directory on 26 April. ‘The primal thirst of an army lacking everything is being quenched.’ He had three men shot and six others condemned to hard labour, then shot a few more for looting a church. ‘It costs me much sadness and I have passed some difficult moments,’ he admitted.20
While he tightened discipline, he took care to flatter the soldiers’ self-esteem, making throwaway statements such as ‘With 20,000 men like that one could conquer Europe!’ He described their feats of arms in superlative terms in his proclamations. In that of 26 April he listed the engagements they had taken part in as if they were great battles, gave inflated figures of enemy dead and wounded, guns and standards captured, and told them they were heroic conquerors and liberators who would one day look back with pride on the glorious epic they had shared in. He encouraged the sense that they were making history with references to Hannibal as they came over the Alpine passes.21
A mixture of growing self-confidence and the urge to earn praise fed their eagerness to live up to his expectations of them. ‘I can hardly express to what degree of intoxication and pride such resounding, repeated and rapid triumphs transported our army, and what a noble emulation inspired all ranks,’ noted Collot. ‘They vied with each other to be the first to reach a redoubt, to be the first to storm a battery, the first across a river, to show the most devotion and audacity.’22
Bonaparte’s despatches to the Directory were no less hyperbolic. He wrote dramatic descriptions of every engagement, exaggerating the obstacles and the efforts with which they had been overcome, playing fast and loose with facts and figures, and singling out individual acts of courage in melodramatic images of republican heroism. At the same time, he stressed his lack of equipment and berated his masters in Paris for failing to send him guns and trained artillery officers and engineers. To Carnot he expressed his ‘despair, I could almost say my rage’ at not having the tools with which to do the job he had been set.23
Desperate to reap the fruits of success, the Directory proclaimed the victories of French arms loudly and published extracts from the despatches. The name of Bonaparte was soon familiar throughout the country, and was becoming subliminally associated with heroism, genius and victory. On 25 April Bonaparte sent Joseph and Junot to Paris with the twenty-one enemy standards captured so far, knowing that their progress through France and their arrival in Paris would make an impression. ‘It would be difficult to convey the enthusiasm of the population,’ Joseph confirmed. After signing the armistice of Cherasco, Bonaparte sent Murat with the document and more standards. Whatever their feelings about him and his doings, the Directory were happy to bask in the reflected glory, and could only hail him as a national hero.24
Murat was burdened with another mission – to persuade Josephine to come to Italy. From the moment he left Paris Bonaparte had not stopped thinking about her and longing for her to join him, and nothing could banish her from his thoughts. He could not understand why she did not write more often, why her letters were often lukewarm, and why she had not made haste to join him. He wrote to her every day, sometimes more than once, even after exhausting marches and hard-fought engagements. He had thoughts for nobody else. After Dego he was brought a beautiful young woman taken prisoner along with an Austrian officer, but he passed up the chance of having her and allowed her to go on her way.25
When he sent Joseph to Paris he entrusted him with a letter for Josephine, whom he had yet to meet. She was sure to like him, he wrote. ‘Nature has endowed him with a gentle, even and thoroughly good character; he is full of good qualities,’ he assured her. He wanted her to come out to Italy with the returning Junot. ‘You must come with him, do you understand?’ he wrote, urging her to seek inspiration and strength by reading Ossian. ‘Take wing, come, come!’ He had also written to Barras, asking him to press her to come. From Cherasco the day following the armistice he assured her that no woman was ever ‘loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness’, and that his love grew with every day that passed. He could not understand how she had come to mean so much to him. He had a carriage, silver and china for her, so all she needed was to bring a chambermaid and a cook.26
Josephine had no intention of leaving Paris, with its parties and theatres and the many friends she loved. And she had recently taken up with Hippolyte Charles, a dashing hussar officer, a good lover and a jovial companion who kept her entertained. Bonaparte had begun to suspect something of the sort, but his mind was taken up with more pressing matters.
11
Lodi
Beaulieu was by no means beaten, and given the chance to rally he would be in a position to crush the French. Bonaparte’s forces had been whittled down by fighting and forced marches, and although he had received reinforcements, his army’s cohesion and morale were still frail. According to his own assessment, the French soldier’s outstanding quality was the ability to march quickly in pursuit of a retreating enemy, building up as he went a determination and an impetus which gave him the edge. But this was lost when he came under attack from seasoned regulars.1
He ordered Sérurier to feign crossing the Po at Valenza in order to prompt Beaulieu to defend that stretch of the river. He himself led a small body of troops in a forced march covering sixty-four kilometres in thirty-six hours along the right bank of the river to Piacenza. There, deep in the Austrian rear, he crossed the river on 9 May 1796, hoping to cut off Beaulieu’s line of retreat. ‘The second campaign has begun,’ he wrote to Carnot that evening. ‘Beaulieu is disconcerted; he calculates poorly and constantly falls into the traps set for him.’ But the Austrian commander had realised what was happening and hastily fell back across the next line of defence, the river Adda. Bonaparte pursued him but failed to catch up, reaching the little town of Lodi as the Austrian rearguard was crossing the river. He only just managed to bring up a couple of guns and open fire to prevent them from destroying the bridge.2
No sensible general would have considered trying to cross this 200-metre-long wooden bridge, no more than ten metres wide, at the other end of which the Austrians had placed cannon which could rake it with fire. But Bonaparte was not a sensible general, and his men were buoyed by success. Without waiting for the rest of his force to arrive, he drew up the troops at his disposal, made a rousing speech and ordered them to storm the bridge. They surged forward, only to be mown down by canister shot, but others followed, led by Berthier, Masséna and Lannes, who showed total disregard for danger. Having got halfway across, some of the men climbed down the piles onto a sandbank from which they waded across to the opposite bank, where they engaged the Austrian defenders from the flank. After two more attempts the French managed to charge across the bridge and dislodge the Austrians, who fell back leaving 153 dead, 182 wounded and 1,701 prisoners. French losses totalled less than 500, possibly as little as 350.3
‘Pero non fu gran cosa,’ Bonaparte commented that evening at dinner in the residence of the Bishop of Lodi. But he was determined that to the outside world it should be a grandissima cosa. ‘The battle of Lodi, my dear Director, gives the whole of Lombardy to the Republic,’ he wrote to Carnot that evening, announcing that he was about to pursue and finally defeat Beaulieu. His description of the capture of the bridge was predictably florid, and he claimed for this ‘battle’ a significance which it would acquire only thanks to his efforts. Saliceti followed up with an acc
ount that was outright poetic. These would be broadcast to the public in France, and would soon be supplemented by images. Bonaparte asked the French minister in Genoa, Guillaume Faipoult, to commission an engraving of the glorious feat, the result of which was an image of himself, standard in hand, leading his men across the bridge under a hail of shot. He made sure that from now on every feat of arms was immortalised by an icon.4
He needed to enhance his authority by any means available. While at Lodi he had received two letters from Paris, one welcome, one less so. The first was from Murat, informing him that Josephine had only delayed coming out to join him in Italy because she was pregnant and feared travelling. It was not true, but she could think of no other excuse to avoid leaving Paris. Bonaparte was pleased by the news that he was to become a father, and while he was concerned for her health, he felt that her supposed condition would guarantee her fidelity.5
Earlier that day he had received less welcome news. The Directory felt he had accomplished his prescribed aim of creating a diversion to assist the two French armies operating in Germany, and now sent him new instructions. They ordered the remainder of the Army of the Alps into Italy, and planned to divide the French forces on the peninsula into a northern one under the sixty-five-year-old professional soldier and acclaimed victor of the invading Prussians at Valmy in 1792, General Kellermann, and a southern under Bonaparte, which was to march on Rome and overthrow ‘the last of the popes’.
This did not suit him at all, as he was set on his cherished enterprise of the subversion of Italy. On 1 May he had written to Faipoult in Genoa asking for material on the topography, resources, constitutional arrangements and economic potential of every state on the peninsula. During his march to Piacenza he had crossed territory belonging to the neutral duchy of Parma. He had made a feint as though he were about to attack its capital, which prompted the duke to despatch envoys to ask for his neutrality to be respected – which it was, in return for a huge bribe in silver, corn, oats and other victuals, 1,600 horses, twenty works of art, and an undertaking to maintain hospitals for the French wounded. ‘These little princes need to be managed,’ Bonaparte commented in his report to the Directory, ignoring the fact that it was not his business to manage anybody beside his soldiers. ‘The war in Italy at this moment is half military and half diplomatic,’ he explained, instructing his superiors in Paris on the positions they should take in negotiating a treaty with the King of Sardinia.6
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