By then the Grande Armée was marching through Poland to meet the oncoming Russians, and on 25 November Napoleon left Berlin to join it. Late on 27 November he drove into Posen, which was illuminated in his honour. He was greeted like a saviour, and young men rode in from the surrounding countryside hoping to fight for their country under his command. Murat, who rode into Warsaw on the following day, wrote that he ‘had never seen such a strong national spirit’. The inhabitants were inviting officers and men into their houses, offering them food and drink. ‘The Poles are all asking for arms, leaders and officers,’ he went on. The following day, after talking to some of the locals, he wrote that he was convinced they were ready to rise and fight, and would be prepared to accept any ruler he chose to give them. He asked for instructions on how to proceed.13
Napoleon wrote back from Posen that the Poles were superficial and unreliable, and telling him to offer nothing. ‘Make them understand that I have not come to beg a throne for one of my people, as I do not lack thrones to give my family,’ he warned Murat, who was already being lined up by Paris gossip as the next King of Poland. He had always been a dashing dresser, never conforming to regulation uniforms, preferring to swagger in skin-tight buckskin breeches adorned with ribbons, embroidered dolmans and turned-down buccaneer boots, but when he first saw traditional Polish noble dress, he stepped into another sartorial world. He had a new wardrobe run up in his version of the Polish model, with fur-trimmed velvet tunics, slashed hanging sleeves and fur cap, in a variety of colours. ‘He had all the majesty of an actor trying to play a king,’ commented one Polish lady, but she admitted that the Polish people would have accepted him as such if it had meant independence.14
Napoleon meant to keep his options open as to how he would settle the ‘great questions’ raised by his victory over Prussia. While he encouraged Poles to join the ranks, in talks with local notables he did little more than demand supplies for his army. On 2 December he attended a ball given by the local nobility to mark the anniversary of his coronation, only to tell them they should be booted and spurred, not wearing stockings and pumps. After the ball he wrote to Josephine saying he loved and missed her, he found the nights long without her and he would soon be sending for her to join him. He was frustrated, as he had devised a sweeping manoeuvre designed to destroy the Russian army now in Poland under General Bennigsen. He had sent detailed instructions to his corps commanders, but while his plan looked straightforward on the map, it was proving difficult to implement, and he realised he needed to be closer to the theatre of operations.
On 16 December he left for Warsaw, which he reached on horseback, having had to abandon his carriage because of the state of the roads. He entered the city at night in order to avoid having to face a reception committee, spent four days there making arrangements for what he hoped would be a decisive battle, then left to take charge of operations, crossing the Vistula and the Bug to join his army at Nasielsk on Christmas Day. Intelligence on the whereabouts of the main Russian forces was confused, and while Lannes with 25,000 men attacked what proved to be Bennigsen’s main force of 40,000 near Pułtusk, Napoleon marched towards Gołymin, where Davout, Augereau, Ney and Murat were engaged against other Russian units. By the time he realised what was going on and struggled back to join Lannes, it was all over. Lannes had beaten Bennigsen, who retired, but pursuit was out of the question due to atrocious conditions.
A sudden thaw had melted the snow and ice, turning the roads, mere tracks, into rivers of mud. The conditions were so bad that gun carriages sank into the sludge, dragging down their horse teams; even doubling the teams could not pull them free. Sunk to their bellies in mud overnight, the animals died, their crews helpless. Soldiers took off their boots and carried them, but it was not just boots that were swallowed up by the mud. According to the artillery officer Louis Brun de Villeret, ‘in one single regiment, eighteen men drowned in this mud during a night march, their comrades being unable to help them without running the same risk’. Caulaincourt complained of ‘mud up to one’s ears’, and Napoleon himself had to spend the night with only a few wisps of straw between him and the mud in an old barn. ‘Regiments melted away by the day,’ remembered Lieutenant Théodore de Rumigny.
Matters were not improved by a dire lack of supplies. ‘No commander ever gave as many orders to provide victuals for his army as Napoleon,’ remarked one infantryman, ‘and none were more poorly executed.’ What little supplies there were had got bogged down as well, and the under-populated, poor countryside provided scant resources. Men died of hunger and exposure, and some took their own lives out of despair. The mud of Poland entered French military lore alongside the burning sands of Egypt.15
Napoleon’s usual method, of moving fast and seizing opportunities as they offered themselves, proved useless in these conditions, but he had also fallen behind the army and could not coordinate operations. It is allegedly from this moment that he began to refer to his Guard as ‘grognards’ on account of their grumbles over the conditions and lack of food. They had learned the Polish for bread, ‘chleb’, and for ‘There is none,’ ‘Nie ma.’ Whenever he passed marching troops they would shout ‘Chleba, chleba!’ to which he would shout back, ‘Nie ma!’ They were not just grumbling over the lack of food; it was the first campaign on which he was not constantly in their midst. There was also criticism of his conduct of the campaign, and his prestige in the ranks was dented.16
Back in Pułtusk on 29 December, given the impossibility of fighting on, he ordered his army to take winter quarters. On his return to Warsaw on 1 January 1807 he declared that since they could not fight, everyone should enjoy themselves. He was certainly meaning to do so himself. On 31 December news had reached him that Éléonore de la Plaigne had given birth to his son – proof that it was not, as Josephine had always maintained, he who was infertile. In his letters there was no further mention of her coming out to join him.
He spent the whole of January in Warsaw. There were parades, balls and concerts. Polish society fêted their French guests, and many women gave themselves to their putative liberators with patriotic fervour. ‘The time we spent in Warsaw was magical,’ recalled Savary. Major Boulart of the Guard Artillery remembered to the end of his days a pair of ‘beautiful eyes’ and the joy of flying around the sparkling, snowbound city in a sleigh.17
Napoleon was viewed with respect, and in some cases with genuine awe. ‘He seemed to have a halo,’ noted the thirty-year-old Countess Potocka, who was ‘bedazzled’ by the sense of power he exuded. But if he was expecting to enjoy the privileges of a conqueror, he was to meet with disappointment. At a ball he spotted the beautiful Princess Lubomirska, and in the morning sent an aide to inform her he would call that evening. Fearing for her virtue, the princess ordered her carriages and left for the country, and when he called Napoleon found himself, as the Polish saying went, kissing the door handle. ‘Silly woman,’ he snapped.18
Josephine, still in Mainz, was eager to join him in Warsaw, but he put her off, using the distance and the bad roads as a pretext. He urged her to return to Paris and enjoy herself, promising to let her know when she could join him. His letter of 18 January was a little more impatient: ‘I am very well and love you very much, but if you keep crying I will begin to think you have no courage and no character.’ He did add a saucy phrase about kissing her breasts, but it was not hers he was thinking of.19
The evening before, at a ball given by Talleyrand in one of the Warsaw palaces, he had danced with a young woman he had spotted at a reception ten days earlier, and was smitten. Her name was Maria Walewska. She was twenty and married to a seventy-one-year-old, and though she did not love her husband, she had strong principles and believed in the sanctity of marriage. Her two brothers, both officers in the French army, and various other Polish patriots who had noticed Napoleon’s interest, urged her to at least humour the man on whom the future of their country depended. She appears to have given him some hope, and the following day he sent her a note thro
ugh Duroc. ‘I saw only you, I admired only you, I desire only you,’ he wrote, demanding a prompt response ‘to calm the impatient ardour of N’. She refused to go with Duroc to the ardent Napoleon. He wrote again. ‘Have I offended you, Madame? I had the right to expect the contrary. Your emotions have cooled, while mine have grown. Thoughts of you do not let me sleep! Oh! Give a little joy, of happiness to a poor heart which is ready to adore you. Must it be so difficult to obtain a reply? You owe me two.’ She did come to him at the royal castle that evening, but left at four in the morning without having given herself to him. That morning he wrote Josephine a testy note ordering her to be ‘merry, charming and happy’, and stop nagging him.20
Walewska’s reticence was a novel experience for one who had grown used to submission. In his short, eager letters he cast himself as the lonely man at the top whose cares only she could dispel by allowing him to throw himself at her feet. ‘Oh! Come to me, come to me! All your wishes will be granted. Your motherland will be dear to me if you take pity on my poor heart,’ he cajoled, counting on her patriotism. The more she resisted him, the more loving the tone of his letters, the more he followed her around at receptions, watching her every move like a lovelorn teenager. At the same time his tone forbidding Josephine to even think of coming to join him grew imperious. Walewska did agree to call on him again, and after expending every argument he could, and faced only with her tears, he appears to have as good as raped her.21
He had set up a council of prominent Poles as a provisional administration, but it was firmly supervised by Talleyrand and Maret, and its brief was limited to raising a Polish army and providing victuals and horses for his troops. At the same time, he ordered the setting up of a French-style administrative structure and even the introduction of his Civil Code. He would not make further commitments until the military situation had clarified.22
He left Warsaw on 30 January, travelling north through Pułtusk, where he visited the sick Lannes, who told him the place was not worth fighting for and they should go home, a view echoed by many in his entourage. Three days later he watched a skirmish between Soult’s corps and Bennigsen, who fell back, and on 4 February himself attacked Bennigsen at Allenstein, forcing him to retreat in a northerly direction and, on 7 February, to abandon the little town of Eylau. The weather had changed again, and it was snowing. The troops had not had any bread since leaving Warsaw a week earlier, and that evening Napoleon sat by a bivouac fire baking potatoes along with his grenadiers. Bennigsen counter-attacked in the morning, and there followed a chaotic battle fought in a blizzard, in which Napoleon himself was nearly captured. Both sides fought with determination, and although Bennigsen retired and his losses were greater, it could hardly be termed a French victory, and there was little doubt that Napoleon had not been fully in control.23
‘The victory was mine, but I lost many men,’ he wrote to Josephine at three o’clock in the morning after the battle. ‘The enemy’s losses, which are even greater, are no consolation to me.’ Many of his best troops had been killed, and the sub-zero temperatures meant that most of the wounded who could not move froze to death in the night. The sight of the battlefield the next day had a demoralising effect on the survivors: the dead lay so close that it was difficult not to walk over them. Napoleon himself was horrified by the carnage. ‘This is not the pretty aspect of war,’ he wrote to Josephine a couple of days later. ‘One suffers and one’s soul is oppressed by the sight of so many victims.’ The army shared his feelings, and the men were anxious, knowing the losses could not be easily made good so far from home. The weather and the mournful landscape made them homesick, and morale plummeted as they once more went into winter quarters at Osterode. According to some accounts, over 20,000 men were suffering from dysentery.24
As usual, the Bulletins proclaimed a decisive victory and minimised French losses, but letters from husbands, brothers and sons spread anxiety in Paris. Josephine expressed it and wished he would come home, not least because rumours of his romance were beginning to circulate. He wrote telling her she had no grounds for sorrow. ‘I do know how to do other things than making war, but duty comes first,’ he chided her. ‘Throughout my life, I have sacrificed everything – tranquillity, interest, happiness – to my destiny.’25
On 1 April Napoleon moved into the nearby castle of Finckenstein, where he was joined by Maria Walewska. She was delivered at night in an unmarked carriage by one of her brothers, and having been shown to her quarters would not leave them for the next six weeks. Her presence was supposed to have been a secret, and only Napoleon’s valet Constant and his secretary Méneval were allowed to see her, but there was talk in the surrounding camps of ‘la belle polonaise’, and Warsaw society knew she was there.26
She later admitted to a friend that her scruples had vanished, for Napoleon made her feel as though she were his wife. Innocent and uncomplicated, she was unlikely to have been critical of or dissatisfied with his sexual prowess, and seems to have fallen in love with him. They behaved as a married couple, even taking their breakfast together in her red-damask upholstered bed. He found the castle ‘very fine’, and its numerous fireplaces suited him, as he liked to see a fire burning when he got up in the night. He was in good health, he assured Josephine, noting that the weather was cold but fine. He inspected troops almost every day and took exercise on horseback, and in the evenings played cards.27
His strategic position was not good. He had some 70,000 men at Osterode, but many were sick, the rest hungry and dispirited, and rates of desertion were alarming. He was facing a constantly growing Russian force. The last fortress in Prussian hands, Danzig, had fallen to Marshal Lefèbvre (who became duc de Danzig), but although the Prussian army had all but disintegrated, many of its officers were making their way to take service with Russia. On 26 April Frederick William signed the Convention of Bartenstein with Russia, by which both powers vowed not to make a separate peace. At his back, Napoleon had Austria, which was only being held in check by the presence of an Italian army under Eugène on its southern border. He had recently got wind of contacts between the Spanish minister Godoy and the British concerning the possibility of Spain joining the anti-French coalition. In May Napoleon concluded the Treaty of Finckenstein with Persia, which he hoped would result in military action on Russia’s southern border. He was also encouraging the Turks to make a move that might divert Russian forces; he had received a Turkish envoy at Finckenstein in this spirit. But a British fleet had sailed into the Dardanelles, accompanied by a British invasion of Egypt, to pressure the Porte to make peace with Russia and expel the French ambassador.
At the beginning of June Bennigsen attacked Ney’s corps, and with a couple of deft manoeuvres managed to sow confusion among the other French corps. Napoleon rallied them and followed Bennigsen, who fell back on the little town of Friedland in a curve of the river Alle, where on 14 June he was forced to accept battle. With no room to manoeuvre and no possibility of falling back when two of the three bridges over the river were destroyed by French artillery, his army was cut to pieces, losing by some estimates as much as 50 per cent of its effectives. It was the anniversary of Marengo, and Napoleon made much of this, saying the battle had been as decisive as Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena.28
The tsar, who was close by, had no option other than to request an armistice, and Napoleon, who was keen to make peace and take his homesick army home, agreed to one on 21 June. Three days later, at his headquarters in the small town of Tilsit, he received a note from Alexander stating that for the past two years he had longed for an alliance with France, as only that could guarantee the peace and well-being of Europe, and requesting a meeting.29
Alexander had been humiliated and lost an army at Austerlitz, and now another at Eylau and Friedland. He could raise more men, but his officer corps was not up to doing much with them. If he retreated he would be drawing the French into an area taken from Poland only ten years before, in which they would be welcome and he not. He was single-handedly support
ing the crushed and ineffectual Frederick William and felt abandoned by his British ally; British gold had bought nothing but Russian blood and embarrassment. Something of a fantasist, he fancied he would be able to seduce Napoleon.
Napoleon for his part had begun to reflect on a possible alliance with Russia, against the advice of Talleyrand, who consistently pressed for a strategic alliance with Austria. On the day he received Alexander’s note he had received a report from his ambassador in Vienna, General Andréossy, that Austria was hostile and only waiting for a chance to take revenge. The other news Napoleon had that day was that there had been a palace revolt in Constantinople, and the sultan Selim III, with whom he had been negotiating, had been deposed, so he could expect no support against Russia from that quarter. He agreed to Alexander’s offer, and invited him to a meeting on the following day.
He ordered his sappers to construct a raft with a tented structure on it, decorated with the arms and ciphers of the two monarchs, and to moor it midstream on the river Niemen (Neman). When Alexander arrived with his suite on the opposite bank, he was rowed out to the raft, where Napoleon greeted him with an embrace as his troops, drawn up on the western bank, cheered. Frederick William, who had come with Alexander, was left sitting on his horse on the east bank, pointedly left out. Symbolism was the order of the day, and the showman in Napoleon had taken over.
‘My Dear, I have just met the emperor Alexander,’ he wrote to Josephine that evening. ‘I am very pleased with him; he is a very handsome and good young emperor, he is more intelligent than is commonly thought. He is coming to stay at Tilsit tomorrow.’ Over the next two weeks he entertained Alexander to dinner, had his troops parade before him, and held private conversations with him, sometimes lasting long into the night. As they strolled arm in arm he played the part of the great conqueror who appreciated the hidden qualities of the younger man and graciously treated him as an equal, taking him into his confidence as he discoursed on weighty matters of state. This was balm to the young tsar, a man of complexes, weak, unsure of himself, desperate to cut a figure as a military leader. He was intelligent enough to appreciate what Napoleon had achieved in rebuilding the French political edifice and society, something he dreamed of doing himself in Russia. Although a part of him resisted (strongly supported by his mother and his sister Catherine), he could not help falling under the spell of Napoleon, who tempted him with prospects of being able to play a part in the affairs of the Continent and even to fulfil the Russian monarchy’s dream of conquering Constantinople, and of a combined march on India to expel the British and extend their own empires. This was accompanied by typically Napoleonic gestures, such as his asking the Russian guards parading before him to name their bravest, and presenting him with the Legion of Honour.
Napoleon Page 49