Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  That night an aide-de-camp made Napoleon an omelette, but couldn’t find any wine or dry clothing, upon which the Emperor remarked good-humouredly that he had never before gone without his Chambertin, ‘even in the midst of the Egyptian desert’.67 ‘The day was dreadful,’ he wrote of the capture of Elchingen, ‘the troops were up to their knees in mud.’68 But he now had Ulm completely surrounded.

  On October 16 Ségur found Napoleon in a farmhouse in the hamlet of Haslach near Ulm, ‘dozing by the side of a stove, while a young drummer was dozing also on the other side’. Sometimes Napoleon’s naps would last only ten minutes, but they would leave him re-energized for hours. Ségur recalled the incongruity of seeing how ‘the Emperor and the drummer slept side by side, surrounded by a circle of generals and high dignitaries, who were standing while waiting for orders’.69 The next day Mack opened negotiations with a promise to surrender if he hadn’t been relieved by the Russians within twenty-one days. Napoleon, who was starting to run low on provisions and didn’t want to lose momentum, gave him a maximum of six.70 When Murat defeated a relief effort by Field Marshal Werneck and captured 15,000 men at Trochtelfingen on October 18, the news hit Mack like a blow to the solar plexus and he ‘was obliged to support himself against a wall of the apartment’. Napoleon wrote to Josephine from Elchingen the next day to say that ‘Eight days of constantly being soaked to the skin and having cold feet have made me a little unwell, but I have not gone out all day today and that has rested me.’71 In one bulletin he boasted of not having removed his boots for over a week.72

  Mack surrendered Ulm at 3 p.m. on October 20, together with around 20,000 infantry, 3,300 cavalry, 59 field guns, 300 ammunition wagons, 3,000 horses, 17 generals and 40 standards.73 When a French officer who did not recognize him asked who he was, the Austrian commander replied: ‘You see before you the unfortunate Mack!’74 The soubriquet stuck. ‘I have carried out all my plans; I have destroyed the Austrian army simply by marches,’ Napoleon told Josephine, before inaccurately claiming, ‘I have made 60,000 prisoners, taken 120 artillery pieces, over ninety flags, and over thirty generals.’75 In his 7th bulletin he wrote ‘not more than 20,000 men escaped of that army of 100,000 men’, another wild exaggeration even taking into account all the engagements since Günzburg.76

  The surrender took place on the Michelsberg plateau outside Ulm. From the Aussichtsturm tower just outside the Old Town one can see the (now partly afforested) place where the Austrian army filed out of the city and laid down their muskets and bayonets, prior to going off into captivity to work on French farms and Parisian building projects. When an Austrian officer, remarking on Napoleon’s mud-spattered uniform, said how fatiguing the campaign in such wet weather must have been, Napoleon said: ‘Your master wanted to remind me that I am a soldier. I hope he will own that the imperial purple has not caused me to forget my first trade.’77 Speaking to the captured Austrian generals, he added: ‘It’s unfortunate that people as brave as you, whose names are honourably quoted everywhere you fought, should be the victims of the stupidity of a cabinet which only dreams of insane projects, and which does not blush to compromise the dignity of the State.’78 He tried to persuade them that the war had been entirely unnecessary, merely the result of Britain bribing Vienna to protect London from capture. In one Order of the Day, Napoleon described the Russians and Austrians as mere ‘mignons’ of the British (meaning ‘plaything’ or ‘lapdog’, although the word also had the slight sexual connotation of a catamite).

  Rapp recalled that Napoleon ‘was overjoyed at his success’ – as he had every reason to be, since the campaign had been flawless and almost bloodless.79 ‘The Emperor has invented a new method of making war,’ Napoleon quoted his men saying in one bulletin; ‘he makes use only of our legs and our bayonets.’80

  With almost poetic timing – though Napoleon wasn’t to learn of it for another four weeks – the Coalition wreaked its revenge on France the very next day. Off Cape Trafalgar, 50 miles west of Cadiz, Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships-of-the-line were destroyed by Admiral Nelson’s twenty-seven ships-of-the-line, with a total of twenty-two French and Spanish ships lost to not one British.* Displaying what later became known as ‘the Nelson touch’ of inspired leadership, the British admiral split his fleet into two squadrons that attacked at a ninety degree angle to the Combined Fleet’s line and thereby cut the enemy into three groups of ships, before destroying two of them piecemeal. With the Grande Armée on the Danube it was entirely unnecessary for Villeneuve to have given battle – even if he had won, Britain couldn’t now have been invaded until the following year at the earliest – yet Napoleon’s persistent orders to engage had led directly to the disaster.† The battle led to British naval dominance for over a century. As the philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel put it, ‘Napoleon was master in Europe, but he was also a prisoner there.’81 The only slight compensation for Napoleon was Nelson’s death in the battle. ‘What Nelson had he did not acquire,’ Napoleon was to say on St Helena. ‘It was a gift from Nature.’82 The victory at Trafalgar allowed Britain to step up its economic war against France, and in May 1806 the government passed an Order-in-Council – effectively a decree – which imposed a blockade of the entire European coast from Brest to the Elbe.

  Instead of now abandoning his invasion dreams entirely, Napoleon continued to spend huge amounts of money, time and energy trying to rebuild a fleet that he believed could threaten Britain again through sheer numbers. He never understood that a fleet which spent seven-eighths of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity. While a conscript in the Grand Armée could be – indeed very often was – trained in drill and musketry while on the march to the front, sailors couldn’t be taught on land how to deal with top-hamper lost in a gale, or to fire off more than one broadside in a rolling sea against an opponent who had been trained to fire two or even three in the same length of time.83 Napoleon’s mastery of land warfare was perfectly balanced by British mastery at sea, as the events of the autumn of 1805 were to demonstrate.

  There was now nothing to hold up the Grande Armée before it reached Vienna. Yet the campaign was far from over, as Napoleon had to stop Kutuzov’s 100,000-strong westward-moving Russian army from combining with the 90,000-strong Austrian army under Archduke Charles, which was then in Italy. Napoleon’s hope that Charles could be prevented from protecting Vienna was realized when Masséna managed to hold the Austrians to a draw in the hard-fought battle of Caldiero over three days in late October.

  ‘I’m on the grand march,’ Napoleon told Josephine from Haag am Hausruck on November 3. ‘The weather is very cold; the country covered by a foot of snow … Happily there is no lack of wood; here we are always in the midst of forests.’84 He couldn’t know it, but that same day Prussia signed the Treaty of Potsdam with Austria and Russia, promising armed ‘mediation’ against France on receipt of a British subsidy. Rarely has a treaty, which was ratified on November 15, been more swiftly overtaken by events. Frederick William III of Prussia was willing to put pressure on France when her lines of communication were extended, but he was too timid to strike, and failed to extract Hanover from Britain as the price for his ‘mediation’.

  Napoleon marched on towards Vienna. The supply dislocations encountered led to vocal complaints from the ranks, and even from officers as senior as General Pierre Macon, but he spurred the army forward and on November 7 gave ‘most stringent orders’ against pillaging, with hundreds being punished at Braunau and elsewhere, deprived of their spoils and even flogged by their comrades (which was very unusual in the French army).85 ‘We are now in wine country!’ he was able to tell the army from Melk on November 10, though they were allowed to drink only what had been requisitioned by the quartermasters.86 The bulletin ended with a now-customary tirade against the English, ‘the authors of the misfortunes of Europe’.87

  At 11 a.m. on November 13, the key Tabor bridge ov
er the Danube was taken by little more than bluster by the French, who spread the entirely false news that peace had been signed and Vienna declared an open city. Austrian artillery and infantry under Field Marshal Prince von Auersperg were ready to fight, and charges were primed to blow up the bridge, but Murat and other officers screened the advance of two battalions of Oudinot’s grenadiers, who ‘threw the combustible matters into the river, sprinkled water on the powder, and cut the fuses’; one tale is told of a grenadier grabbing a lit match off an Austrian soldier.88 Once the truth had been discovered it was too late, and Murat peremptorily ordered the Austrians to vacate the area. It was thus a ruse de guerre that delivered Vienna into French hands, although the Austrian high command had not planned to resist much beyond blowing up the bridges. When Napoleon heard the news he was ‘beside himself with delight’ and quickly pushed on to occupy the Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn, staying there that same night and entering Vienna in pomp with his army the next day as Francis and his court retreated eastwards towards the oncoming Russians.89 The triumph was only marred when Murat allowed an Austrian army to escape capture at Hollabrünn on November 15.

  Eager to press on fast for the decisive victory he required, Napoleon left Schönbrunn on the 16th ‘in a fit of anger’ with Murat.90 He was no happier with Bernadotte, of whom he wrote to Joseph: ‘He made me lose one day and on one day depends the fate of the world; I would not have let one man escape.’91 He was at Znaïm on the 17th when he learned about Trafalgar. The censorship he ordered was so complete that most Frenchmen heard about the disaster for the first time only in 1814.92

  The need to garrison captured towns and protect his supply lines meant that Napoleon was reduced to 78,000 men in the field by late November, as he marched a further 200 miles eastwards to make contact with the enemy. With the Prussians adopting a threatening posture to the north, archdukes Johann and Charles marching from the south and Kutuzov still ahead of him to the east in Moravia, the Grande Armée was starting to seem very exposed. It had been marching solidly for three months and was by now hungry and weary. Captain Jean-Roch Coignet of the Imperial Guard estimated that he had covered 700 miles in six weeks. In one of the clauses of the subsequent peace treaty Napoleon demanded shoe-leather as part of the war reparations.

  Napoleon was ‘surprised and delighted’ by the surrender of Brünn (present-day Brno) on November 20, which was full of arms and provisions and where he made his next base.93 The following day he stopped 10 miles east of the town, on ‘a small mound by the side of the road’ called the Santon, not far from the village of Austerlitz (present-day Slavkov), and gave orders that the lower section should be dug out towards the enemy’s side so as to increase its escarpment.94 He then rode over the ground, carefully noting its two large lakes and its exposed areas, and ‘stopping several times over its more elevated points’, principally the plateau known as the Pratzen heights, before declaring to his staff: ‘Gentleman, examine this ground carefully. It’s going to be a battlefield, and you will have a part to play upon it!’95 Thiébault’s version goes: ‘Take a good look at those heights; you will be fighting here in less than two months.’96 On that same reconnaissance, which took him in addition to the villages of Grzikowitz, Puntowitz, Kobelnitz, Sokolnitz, Tellnitz and Mönitz, Napoleon told his entourage: ‘If I wished to stop the enemy from passing, it is here that I should post myself; but I should only have an ordinary battle. If, on the other hand, I refuse my right, withdrawing it towards Brno, [even] if there were three hundred thousand of them, they would be caught in flagrante delicto and hopelessly lost.’97 From the start, therefore, Napoleon was planning a battle of annihilation.

  The Russians and Austrians had developed a plan to try to trap Napoleon between them. The main field army, accompanied by the two emperors, was to march west from Olmütz with a force totalling 86,000 men, while Archduke Ferdinand would strike south from Prague into Napoleon’s open rear. Napoleon stayed at Brno until November 28, allowing the army some rest. ‘Each day increased the peril of our isolated and distant position,’ recalled Ségur, and Napoleon decided to use that fact to his advantage.98 In his meetings at Brno with two Austrian envoys on November 27, Count Johann von Stadion and General Giulay, he feigned concern over his position and general weakness, and gave orders for units to retreat in front of the Austrians, hoping to instil over-confidence in the enemy. ‘The Russians believed the French did not dare fight a battle,’ wrote General Thiébault of this stratagem.

  The French had evacuated all the points they threatened, fled from Wischau, Rausnitz and Austerlitz at night; had retreated eight miles without halting; had concentrated instead of trying to threaten the Russian flanks. These signs of hesitation and apprehension, this appearance of backing down, seemed to them a final proof that our nerve was shaken and for themselves a sure presage of victory.99

  Napoleon was tougher towards Frederick William’s envoy, Count Christian von Haugwitz, the next day, rejecting any concept of ‘mediation’, before leaving at noon for a post-house and coaching inn at Posorsitz, the Stara Posta.

  Learning from a deserter that the Coalition forces were definitely on the offensive, and from Savary’s intelligence service that they were not going to wait for 14,000 Russian reinforcements, Napoleon concentrated his forces. With Marmont at Graz, Mortier in Vienna, Bernadotte in the rear watching Bohemia, Davout moving towards Pressburg watching so-far-quiescent Hungary, and Lannes, Murat and Soult spread out in front of him on the Brno–Wischau–Austerlitz axis, Napoleon needed to bring all his corps together for the battle. He met Tsar Alexander’s arrogant young aide-de-camp, the twenty-seven-year-old Prince Peter Petrovich Dolgoruky, on the Olmütz road outside Posorsitz on November 28. ‘I had a conversation with this whippersnapper,’ Napoleon told Elector Frederick II of Württemberg a week later, ‘in which he spoke to me as he would have spoken to a boyar that he was sending to Siberia.’100 Dolgoruky demanded that Napoleon hand over Italy to the King of Sardinia, and Belgium and Holland to a Prussian or British prince. He was answered suitably drily, but Napoleon didn’t send him away until he was allowed to spot what looked like preparations for a retreat.101

  A sentry from the 17th Légère had overheard the prince’s demands. ‘Do you know, these people think they are going to swallow us up!’ Napoleon told him, to which the sentry replied, ‘Let them just try it; we should soon choke them!’102 That put Napoleon in a better mood. These brief but obviously heartfelt interactions with private soldiers, inconceivable for most Allied generals, were an integral part of Napoleon’s impact on his men. That night, after giving orders urgently recalling Bernadotte and Davout, on the receipt of which the latter moved 70 miles in just forty-eight hours, Napoleon slept at the Stara Posta.

  Napoleon’s original plan was for Soult, Lannes and Murat to fight a holding action to lure forward the 69,500 Austro-Russian infantry, 16,565 cavalry and 247 guns, and for Davout and Bernadotte to arrive once the enemy were fully engaged and their weak points had become apparent. Although Napoleon had only 50,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry with him in total, he had 282 guns and managed to concentrate more men at Austerlitz than the Allies – who were ill-served by their intelligence departments – even knew he possessed. In order further to lull the enemy into thinking that he was about to retreat, Soult was ordered to abandon the Pratzen heights with what looked like undue haste. Despite their name, the heights are more undulations than cliff-like slopes and the folds of the ground were capable of hiding relatively large bodies of troops quite close to its plateaued summit. Some parts of them were deceptively steep, and must have seemed more so when marching uphill under fire.

  The days of November 29–30 were both spent in reviews and reconnaissance, entrenching the Santon hillock on the north end of the battlefield with earthworks that can still be seen today, and awaiting the arrival of Davout and Bernadotte. ‘Bivouacking for the last four days among my grenadiers,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand at 4 p.m. on the 30th, ‘I’ve only been able to
write on my knees, thus I have been unable to write anything to Paris; besides that I’m very well.’103

  The Allies also recognized the importance of the Pratzen heights; their plan, drawn up by the Austrian chief-of-staff General Franz von Weyrother, was for General Friedrich von Buxhöwden to oversee the attack of three (out of five) columns from the heights onto the French right in the south. These would then turn north and roll up the French line as the whole army closed in. In the event, this concentrated far too many men on broken ground in the south of the battlefield, where they could be checked by smaller French forces, while leaving the centre wide open for Napoleon’s counter-attack.104 Tsar Alexander approved these plans, although his battlefield commander, Kutuzov, disagreed with them. By contrast, French strategy derived solely from one presiding authority.

  Thomas Bugeaud of the Imperial Guard wrote to his sister on November 30 and told how within two miles of the enemy ‘The Emperor came there himself and slept in his carriage in the middle of our camp … He was always walking through all the camps, and talking to the soldiers or their officers. We gathered round him. I heard much of his talk; it was very simple and always turned upon military duty.’ Napoleon promised them he would keep his distance so long as victory followed, ‘but if by mischance you hesitate a moment, you will see me fly into your ranks to restore order’.105

  On December 1 Napoleon learned that Bernadotte was at Brno and would arrive the next day, so battle could now be joined. After giving his generals orders at 6 p.m., he dictated some ideas about the establishment of the Saint-Denis boarding school for the daughters of members of the Légion d’Honneur.106 Later, at 8.30 p.m., he dictated the general dispositions of the army for the forthcoming battle, the last thing that survives on paper from him until his post-battle bulletin. Later that night, after an alfresco dinner of potatoes and fried onions, he walked from campfire to campfire with Berthier, talking to the men. ‘There was no moon, and the darkness of the night was increased by a thick fog which made progress difficult,’ recalled one of those present, so torches were made of pine and straw and carried by the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard. As they approached the troops’ bivouacs, ‘In an instant, as if by enchantment, we could see along our whole line all our bivouac fires lighted up by thousands of torches in the hands of the soldiers.’107 Louis-François Lejeune of Berthier’s staff, who later became one of the greatest of all Napoleonic battlefield painters, added ‘Only those who know the difficulty of securing a little straw to sleep on in camp can appreciate the sacrifice made by the men in burning all their beds to light their general home.’108 The cheers that greeted Napoleon, thought Marbot, were all the louder because of the good omen that the following day would be the first anniversary of his coronation. The many torches held aloft by the troops were mistaken by the Austrians for the burning of the French camp before a retreat, in a classic example of cognitive dissonance, whereby pieces of evidence are forced into a predetermined set of assumptions.