Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, the casualty rates in battles increased exponentially: at Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%. This was partly because with ever-larger armies being raised, battles tended to last longer – Eylau was Napoleon’s first two-day engagement since Arcole; Eggmühl, Aspern-Essling and Wagram in 1809, Dresden in 1813 were also two and Leipzig in 1813 went on for three – but mainly because of the huge increase in the numbers of cannon present. At Austerlitz the ratio was two guns per thousand men, but by Eylau this had leapt to nearly 4, and at Borodino there were 4.5. Eylau therefore represented a new kind of battle of the Napoleonic Wars, best summed up by Ney at its close: ‘What a massacre! And without any result!’99

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  Tilsit

  ‘A father who loses his children finds no charm in victory. When the heart speaks, even glory has no illusions.’

  Napoleon on Eylau

  ‘I can do other things than just conduct wars, but duty comes first.’

  Napoleon to Josephine, March 1807

  ‘My love, we had a great battle yesterday,’ Napoleon reported to Josephine from Eylau at 3 a.m. on the night of the battle, February 10. ‘Victory rested with me, but I have lost many men; the enemy’s loss, which is still more considerable, does not console me.’1 That evening he wrote again, ‘in order that you may not be uneasy’, now claiming that he had taken 12,000 prisoners at the loss of 1,600 killed and between three and four thousand wounded. One of the dead, his aide-de-camp General Claude Corbineau, had been Josephine’s master of horse. ‘I was singularly attached to that officer, who had so much merit,’ he wrote, ‘his death caused me pain.’

  The Grande Armée had been battered so badly that it could not follow up the victory, as it had after Jena. Soult’s aide-de-camp Colonel Alfred de Saint-Chamans recalled after the battle, ‘The Emperor was passing in front of the troops; in the middle of cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” I heard many soldiers cry “Vive la paix!”, others “Vive la paix et la France!”, others even shouted “Pain et paix!” [Bread and peace!]’2 It was the first time he had seen the morale of the army ‘a bit shaken’, which he put down to ‘the butchery of Eylau’. The day after the battle, Napoleon announced in a bulletin that an eagle had been lost, and said, ‘The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy.’3 The reason the unit wasn’t named was that in fact five eagles had been lost.*

  Napoleon was still at Eylau on February 14, writing to Josephine: ‘This country is strewn with dead and wounded. It is not the prettiest side of war; one suffers, and the soul is crushed to see so many victims.’4 He soon became concerned that officers’ letters back to Paris were dwelling too much on the losses. ‘They know as much about what happens in an army as people walking in the gardens of the Tuileries know about what happens in a cabinet,’ he told Fouché. Then he heartlessly added: ‘And what are two thousand men killed in a great battle? Every single battle of Louis XIV and Louis XV claimed many more lives.’ This was demonstrably untrue; Blenheim, Malplaquet, Fontenoy and Rossbach claimed more, but by no means every battle of the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Successions or the Seven Years War. Napoleon as usual was dissembling about the number killed at Eylau, which was closer to 6,000, with around 15,000 more wounded.5

  After Eylau there was one significant clash at Ostrolenka on February 16, and another between Bernadotte and Lestocq in late February, but otherwise both armies went into their winter cantonments – the French along the Passarge river, the Russians along the Alle – until the campaigning season could start again in mid-May. This didn’t mean that Napoleon rested, of course. Pierre Daru was intendant-general of the imperial household on campaign and in his correspondence from March 1807 are scores of letters concerning the army’s shortages of cash, horses, ovens, mutton, beef, uniforms, shirt fabric, caps, sheets, flour, biscuit, bread and, especially, shoes and eau-de-vie.6 Daru did his best, boasting to Napoleon on March 26 that the army had 231,293 pairs of shoes, for example, but the soldiers were suffering. Daru requisitioned 5,000 horses from eight German cities in December, of which 3,647 were delivered by the end of the month.7 Napoleon was kept informed of how much rye, wheat, hay, meat, straw, oats and bread had been requisitioned from which provinces by which date, figures presented to him in neat lists; similarly he was told how many men were in his 105 hospitals in Germany and Poland. (On July 1, for example, there were 30,863 French, 747 French allies, 260 Prussians and 2,590 Russians.8) The army needed its time of rest and recuperation after the desperate rigours of the campaign.

  When Joseph tried to equate the travails of the Army of Naples fighting the Calabrian rebels to those of the Grande Armée, Napoleon would have none of it:

  Staff officers, colonels and officers did not undress for two months and some not for four (I myself went fifteen days without removing my boots). We were surrounded by snow and mud, without bread, wine, brandy, potatoes and meat. We went on long marches and counter-marches without anything to relieve the harshness, fighting with bayonets, often under fire, having to evacuate the wounded on open sledges over distances of fifty leagues [130 miles]. It is therefore in bad taste to compare us to the Army of Naples, doing battle in the beautiful Neapolitan countryside, where there is wine, bread, oil, cloth, bed-linen, a social life and even women. Having destroyed the Prussian monarchy, we are fighting against the rest of the Prussians, against the Russians, the Cossacks, the [Volgan] Kalmyks and those people of the North that once invaded the Roman Empire.9

  With Russia and Prussia still at war with him, Napoleon also used the time to call up a Bavarian division of 10,000 men, raise a levy of 6,000 Poles, bring in reinforcements from France, Italy and Holland, and conscript the 1808 recruits more than a year early. Eylau had struck at his myth of invincibility, a blot that needed to be expunged if the Austrians were to remain neutral – especially when in late February Frederick William rejected much more lenient peace terms than Duroc had offered the Marquis di Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, after Jena.

  An aggressive campaign could not be fought in the spring until the rich and well-fortified port of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) had fallen, as otherwise the Russians could launch an attack in Napoleon’s rear with the help of the Royal Navy. After Victor had been kidnapped in Stettin on January 20, 1807 by twenty-five Prussian soldiers disguised as peasants, the grizzled fifty-two-year-old Marshal Lefebvre was given the task of besieging Danzig. When he succeeded in taking it on May 24, so securing the French left flank, Napoleon sent him a box of chocolates. The marshal was unimpressed until he opened it, when he found it stuffed with 300,000 francs in banknotes. A year later the proud republican Lefebvre, who had been Napoleon’s deputy on 18 Brumaire, became the Duke of Danzig.

  As he rebuilt his army and prepared for the campaign, Napoleon’s imperial micro-management continued. On the same day that he heard that Danzig had fallen – upon which news he ordered Clarke to have salutes fired and Te Deums sung in Paris – he asked Lacépède, the chancellor of the Légion d’Honneur, to ‘write a letter to Corporal Bernaudat of the 13th Line enjoining him not to drink more than is good for him. The decoration has been given to him because he is brave; it must not be withdrawn from him just because he likes a bit of wine. Tell him not to get into situations that could debase the decoration he wears.’10 In April 1807, perhaps the quietest month of his entire reign, Napoleon still wrote 443 letters. Staying at Finkenstein Castle with its many fireplaces – ‘as I often get up at night, I love to see an open fire’ – he involved himself in a dispute between the head stage-hand of the Paris Opéra, Boutron, and his deputy, Gromaire, over who had been responsible for dropping the singer Mlle Aubry from a mechanical cloud above the stage, breaking her arm. ‘I always support the underdog,’ Napoleon told Fouché, taking Gromaire’s side from over a thousand miles away.11

  On April 26 the Convention of Ba
rtenstein confirmed that Russia and Prussia would continue the war, that of the Fourth Coalition, and invited Britain, Sweden, Austria and Denmark to join. The first two responded positively, Britain joining in June and sending money as its contribution, while maintaining the naval stranglehold on French trade. Sweden – which had not made peace with Napoleon after the end of the Third Coalition at Austerlitz – sent a small body of troops. Napoleon never forgave King Gustav IV, whom he called ‘a lunatic who should be king of the Petites-Maison [a Paris lunatic asylum] rather than of a brave Scandinavian country’.12

  By late May, Napoleon was ready: Danzig was his, the sick had been sent away from the front, there were enough provisions for eight months. He had 123,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry and 5,000 artillerymen in the field. He set the date of June 10 for his major offensive, but, as in January, Bennigsen moved first, attacking Ney at Guttstadt on June 5. ‘I am very happy to see the enemy wished to avoid our coming to him,’ Napoleon quipped as he left Finkenstein the next day in an open carriage due to the extreme heat.13 That day he put all his corps in motion, as keen as ever for a decisive battle that might end the campaign. Davout, who had already moved two divisions up from Allenstein to threaten the Russian left, deliberately allowed a messenger to be captured carrying the false news that he had 40,000 men in place to fall on the Russian rear, when his whole corps really numbered 28,891. Bennigsen ordered a withdrawal the next day. Meanwhile Soult crossed the River Passarge in strength and pressed back the Russian right.

  On June 8 Napoleon interviewed prisoners-of-war from Bagration’s rearguard, who told him that Bennigsen was marching on Guttstadt. It seemed that he might offer battle there, but instead he retreated to the well-fortified camp of Heilsberg. Napoleon advanced with Murat and Ney in the lead, followed by Lannes and the Imperial Guard, with Mortier a day’s march behind them. Davout was off to the right and Soult on the left; the corps system was working well. Bagration covered Bennigsen’s retreat, destroying bridges and villages behind him as his men marched along the long, dusty roads in the searing heat. Believing that Bennigsen might be heading to Königsberg, on June 9 Napoleon decided to attack what he thought was only the enemy rearguard. In fact it was the entire Russian army of 53,000 men and 150 guns.

  The town of Heilsberg, in a hollow on the left bank of the Alle, was an entrenched operational base used by the Russian army. Several bridges led to a suburb on the right bank. The Russians had built four great redoubts to protect against river crossings, interspersed with flêches (arrowhead-shaped earthworks) where they fought from the early morning of June 10. Napoleon arrived at 3 p.m., furious at the costly way Murat and Soult had conducted the battle, with three more eagles lost. At one stage the fighting swirled so close to Napoleon that Oudinot asked him to leave the area, saying his grenadiers would take him away if he refused. ‘At 10 o’clock the Emperor passed through us,’ recalled the young aide-de-camp Lieutenant Aymar-Olivier de Gonneville, ‘and was saluted by acclamations to which he seemed to pay no attention, appearing gloomy and out of spirits. We learnt later that he had no intention of attacking the Russians so seriously as had been done, and especially had desired not to engage his cavalry. [Murat] had been reprimanded for this, and followed the Emperor with a tolerably sheepish air.’14 The fighting didn’t end until 11 p.m., after which there were disgusting scenes of camp-followers of both sides despoiling the dead and wounded. Dawn rose over a truly desolate battlefield – over 10,000 Frenchmen and as many as 6,000 Russians had been wounded – and as the sun reached its height both armies recoiled from the stench of death.

  Although large amounts of stores and provisions were captured in Heilsberg, Napoleon had set his sights on the far larger provisions of Königsberg. For the Russians to reach Königsberg they needed to re-cross the Alle. Napoleon knew there was a bridge at the small market town of Friedland (present-day Pravdinsk), so he sent Lannes to reconnoitre there, while he split the rest of his army between Murat with 60,000 men – his own cavalry, plus Soult’s and Davout’s corps – who were sent off to capture Königsberg, while he himself took 80,000 men back to Eylau.

  On June 13 Lannes’ advance guard reported a large Russian concentration at Friedland, a mid-sized town nestling in the U-bend of the river, which in accordance with corps doctrine he engaged and then managed to hold in place for a full nine hours as reinforcements arrived. At 3.30 p.m., 3,000 cavalry of the Russian advance guard crossed the Alle and threw the French out of the town. Bennigsen seems to have assumed he could cross the Alle the next day, crush Lannes and then re-cross before Napoleon could arrive from Eylau, which was 15 miles west of Friedland. It was never wise to underestimate Napoleon’s speed, especially when he was marching over ground baked hard by the summer sun.

  The Alle river curves around Friedland, enveloping the town to the south and the east while a lake called the Millstream flanks it to the north. The Alle is deep and fast flowing, its banks over 30 feet high. In front of the town was a broad fertile plain nearly 2 miles wide waist-deep in wheat and rye, abutted by a dense forest, known as Sortlack Wood. The Millstream, which also has steep banks, divides the plain. The belfry of Friedland’s church offers a superb panoramic view of the entire battlefield, and Bennigsen, his staff and his British liaison officer Colonel John Hely-Hutchinson wisely climbed it. But they failed to spot that the three pontoon bridges Bennigsen had put across the river to augment the stone one in the town were too far behind his left flank, and that if the bridges were destroyed or congested, Friedland, in the bend of what is almost an ox-bow lake, would become a gigantic death-trap.

  Between two and three o’clock on the morning of Sunday, June 14 – the anniversary of the battle of Marengo – Oudinot arrived on the plain before the village of Posthenen. A soldier’s soldier, impetuous and formidable, beloved by his men, he survived a total of thirty-four wounds in his career, losing several teeth in the 1805 campaign and about to lose part of an ear.15 The only child of nine to survive into adulthood, he had ten children himself, collected clay pipes, was an amateur painter and spent evenings with Davout on this campaign snuffing out candles with pistol-shots. Oudinot now sent his men into the Sortlack Wood, and heavy skirmishing fire and cannonades developed along the front. When the talented aristocratic cavalry leader General Emmanuel de Grouchy arrived with a division of French dragoons, Lannes, who had by then been joined by the Saxon Light Horse, had enough men to face down some 46,000 Russians until Napoleon arrived.

  Bennigsen sent large bodies of men across the Alle into Friedland, and ordered them to begin fanning out towards Heinrichsdorf, where they could threaten the French rear. Nansouty’s cuirassiers were directed by Lannes towards Heinrichsdorf and drove the leading Russians back. Grouchy then moved up quickly from Posthenen, charged in from the flank and got in among the Russian guns, sabring the unprotected gunners. The by-then-disordered French cavalry were themselves counter-charged, but by 7 a.m. Grouchy had stabilized the French line to the east of Heinrichsdorf.

  In the desultory fighting that followed, the wily, agile Gascon Marshal Lannes was in his element. Covered by an unusually thick line of skirmishers in the tall crops, he continually moved small units of infantry and cavalry up and down and inside and outside the woods, exaggerating the size of his force, for he still only had 9,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry to hold off the six Russian divisions that had crossed the Alle. Fortunately, just as Bennigsen deployed his forces and attacked, Mortier’s corps arrived on the field and drove into Heinrichsdorf just in time to deny it to the Russian infantry. Leaving three battalions of Oudinot’s grenadiers in the village, Dupas deployed to its right. Mortier’s Polish division then came onto the field and General Henri Dombrowski’s three Polish regiments moved into position, supporting the artillery at Posthenen. In terrific fighting in Sortlack Wood, Oudinot’s division effectively sacrificed itself to hold off the Russian infantry. By 10 a.m. Lannes had been joined by General Jean-Antoine Verdier’s division, bringing his total up to 40,000 men.
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  Bennigsen realized that the absent Napoleon – who was galloping to Friedland as fast as he could – was feeding more and more men onto the battlefield against him, and he changed his expectations for the outcome. He now merely hoped to hold his line until the end of the day so that he could effect another escape. Yet nightfall in midsummer falls very late at that latitude and at noon, having galloped on his Arab horse from Eylau with his bodyguard straining to keep up, Napoleon appeared on the battlefield. Oudinot, riding a wounded horse, his uniform torn by bullet holes, made his way over and begged the Emperor: ‘Give me reinforcements and I shall throw the Russians into the river!’ From the hill behind Posthenen, Napoleon immediately spotted Bennigsen’s gross tactical error. The split of the plain caused by the Millstream lake meant that Bennigsen’s left was vulnerable to being pushed up against the river.

  While Napoleon and Oudinot awaited reinforcement, Napoleon allowed a lull in the battle, certain that Bennigsen couldn’t repair the damage even if he had seen it. The men on both sides welcomed the chance to find shade and water. Many were delirious with thirst as they had spent hours ripping saltpetre cartridges off with their teeth on a stifling, cloudless midsummer day that reached 30ºC in the shade. Napoleon sat on a simple wooden chair and ate a lunch of black bread within range of the Russian guns. When his attendants begged him to withdraw, he said: ‘They will dine less comfortably than I will lunch.’16 To those who worried that it was getting late to attack, and that the assault should be postponed to the next day he replied: ‘We won’t catch the enemy making a mistake like this twice.’17 The soldier-diplomat Jacques de Norvins watched Napoleon walking up and down hitting tall weeds with his riding crop and saying to Berthier: ‘Marengo day, victory day!’18 Napoleon was always highly attuned to the propaganda possibilities of anniversaries, as well as being superstitious.