Gunther was married to Eugenia (Jean) Jaeger from 1952 to 1967. After their divorce, he married Ruth Gillah (Joy May) Smith in 1969, and brought up her children from her first marriage, Judith Goris (née Herron), Laura Allman (née Herron) and Georgia Jones (née Herron), as his own. Ruth died tragically in 1992. Gunther married Eleanor Hancock in Melbourne in April 1995.
THE
EMPEROR’S
LAST VICTORY
CHAPTER ONE
The War of 1809
THE COMING OF THE WAR
Although the Austrian Habsburg rulers had always been reluctant to entrust the fate of their monarchy to the fortunes of war, from 1792 onward their army provided the largest force in the three coalitions raised against the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon, carrying the main burden of fighting on land. Yet though defeated three times in a row – in 1797, 1802 and 1805 – on each occasion Austria was able to recover and fight again.1 Each war cost the Habsburg monarchy territory and population and further damaged its weak treasury, but its defeat in 1805, above all its rout at Austerlitz in December that year, following a campaign of only three months during which its military establishment, as well as that of its Russian ally, was revealed as incompetent, was the most galling. Under the subsequent Treaty of Pressburg of 26 December 1805, the monarchy forfeited its last possessions in Italy – Venetia, Istria and Dalmatia – to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, and was forced to accord royal status to Napoleon’s south German allies, the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg. In addition Bavaria was awarded the Tyrol and Vorarlberg. Altogether the Emperor Francis lost over 2.5 million of his 24 million subjects and one-sixth of his revenues. Austria also had to pay a war indemnity of 40 million francs.
To reinforce his control of Germany, Napoleon turned it into a puppet state, the sixteen-member Confederation of the Rhine, the Rheinbund. It consisted of the major French satellites in Germany – Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden – as well as most of the lesser German principalities in west and south Germany. Napoleon took the title of Protector of the Confederation. In 1807, Saxony was also made a member of the Confederation, and its ruler elevated to royal status. All members of the Confederation were obliged to introduce conscription and reorganize their forces on the French pattern as well as to furnish substantial contingents – 70,000 men in all – for Napoleon’s armies when required. Its creation also marked the effective end of the Holy Roman Empire. Under pressure from Napoleon, on 6 August 1806 the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, from 1804 also the self-proclaimed Emperor Francis I of Austria, resigned the venerable crown of the Holy Roman Empire.
Hardly surprisingly, the Treaty of Pressburg was bitterly resented in Vienna’s governing circles. By 1808 a war faction had formed, determined to avenge the defeats of Ulm and Austerlitz at the earliest opportunity. It included the beautiful young empress, Maria Ludovica, the foreign minister, Philip von Stadion, Archdukes Ferdinand and John and a substantial number of senior officers and officials. They were supported by a cheering section of German exiles in Austria – Heinrich von Stein, Friedrich von Gentz and others – who loudly claimed that if Austria struck at France, the Germans would rise in large numbers to regain their freedom. Even Archduke Charles, the emperor’s brother, otherwise deeply cautious about Austria’s military potential, recognized the necessity of renewing the war, though only once a major overhaul of the Austrian military establishment had been put in hand. Yet even Charles drew the line at the kind of parallel reforms of state and society that would be needed if Austria were to match France militarily. Popular mobilization and the creation of an offensive strategic culture on the French model, which aimed at the rapid annihilation of the enemy, were anathema to all Austrians, not just the most obviously reactionary. This was not merely a matter of instinct, ingrained though it was. The complex political system of the multi-national Austrian empire required the kind of delicate balancing that discouraged fundamental change. To the extent that Charles was a reformer at all, it was in the spirit of the Enlightenment rather than that of the aggressively modernizing Napoleon. As has been observed by Peter Paret, ‘A service whose most influential reformer was a conservative contending against soundly entrenched reactionaries could never become fully reconciled to the techniques and activity demanded of modern war’.2
EMPEROR FRANCIS AND ARCHDUKE CHARLES
Archduke Charles’s cautious strategic concepts, as well as his differences with his imperial brother, dated back to the War of the First Coalition of 1792–7. Having rapidly risen to command in south Germany, in 1796 the young Charles had managed to divide and then defeat two French armies, Jourdan’s and Moreau’s, which had penetrated deep into Germany, driving them back across the Rhine.
Widely acclaimed as the ‘saviour of Germany’, the following year he was hastily appointed to stabilize the southern front where the army of General Bonaparte was moving into Styria to menace Vienna. After visiting Vienna, where much to the emperor’s annoyance he urged peace, Charles arrived at the front in early March 1797. Here he found that his troops had lost the will to fight. ‘Neither pleas, nor rewards, nor threats,’ Charles wrote to Francis, ‘were of any use to halt the fleeing rabble.’ He warned that he could not hold even the best positions with such ‘infamous troops’ and that ‘if this army is defeated, there is no salvation’.3 Only peace, he concluded, could save the Habsburg monarchy. Neither then nor later would Charles stake everything on a decisive battle. As Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian commentator on war, observed, the archduke lacked ‘enterprise and the hunger for victory’.4 As always, his objective was to preserve the army, for Charles the ultimate guarantor of the Habsburg dynasty.
On 8 April 1797 French forward elements entered Leoben in Styria, only three days’ march from Vienna. The day before, Vienna had proposed a five-day truce. This was agreed on the 18th. Peace negotiations duly followed. Charles, however, was ordered to return to his command in Germany and not to leave his headquarters without express permission. Like all Habsburg emperors since the days of Wallenstein, Francis was suspicious of the political ambitions of his senior commanders; further, after the 1797 campaign he resented the archduke’s fame. Charles may have been a cautious strategist, haunted, even overawed by Bonaparte, but, subjected to constant political interference, his efforts to reform the Austrian Army, just as much as his command in the field, were hampered from the start.5 The emperor remained determined to deny Charles political influence and was frequently swayed by advisors averse to the fundamental reforms proposed by the archduke. In 1797, he therefore sent his personal representative, MG Merveldt, to negotiate with the French. Under the subsequent Treaty of Campo Formio, agreed in October, Austria ceded the Austrian Netherlands and Lombardy to France, accepted French rule on the left bank of the Rhine and recognized the French satellite republics in Italy. In return, Austria received Venice and its mainland territory.
The Treaty of Campo Formio lasted only eighteen months. Great Britain had never been party to it and in the spring of 1799, managed to form a Second Coalition comprising itself, the Ottoman Empire, Naples, Russia and Austria. But it was a tenuous alliance at best. The war aims of the participants were at odds, and the Russian Army, the only considerable land force, was geographically remote. Furthermore there were justified doubts about the stability of Tsar Paul I. Austria hesitated to declare itself openly. In the end, worried by intelligence about the alliances and disturbed by Austrian and Russian troop movements, France moved first. French troops crossed the Rhine on 1 March 1799 and a formal declaration of war followed on the 17th.
Initially, with Napoleon absent in Egypt, the Second Coalition was victorious. Austrian and Russian armies were successful in Italy and Germany. In Germany, where Charles had been given command, the French were driven back to the Rhine. Once again, however, he was troubled by political interference from Vienna. After a short leave to restore his always precarious health – the archduke was epileptic – intriguing in Vienna saw him replace
d by Archduke Joseph, the palatine of Hungary, but before this could be done Charles recovered and requested to retain his position.6 On 4 May, Francis replied that he had decided to retain him as commander, but also ordered that his chief-of-staff should make a daily report, ‘of all events, troop movements, etc.’ to Vienna.7 Clearly, relations between the brothers had not improved. Equally clearly, this tension was again among the major causes of the Austrian military failures that followed.
Charles, always sensitive and suspicious and now not consulted on major troop dispositions and grand strategy, achieved little in the summer and autumn of that year, failing to destroy the weaker French armies facing him, his attempts to cooperate with the Russian corps continually hampered by interference from Vienna. In the end, the offended Russians withdrew from the war, while in October Charles, at the end of his nervous energy, requested his brother to relieve him, claiming that, ‘I shall be sick if I am forced to continue soldiering’.8 But Francis delayed naming a successor until March 1800, by which point the strategic situation had changed drastically. Napoleon had returned from Egypt and in November had led the overthrow of a weak and corrupt French government. In December 1799, with the title of first consul, he had become the head of a new regime. Under his direction, the French crossed the Alps in May the following year and defeated the Austrian army in Italy at Marengo, forcing it to retreat into Venetia. In December, a second French offensive under Moreau defeated the Austrians in southern Germany. Vienna was compelled to accept an armistice and in February 1801 to agree peace terms at Lunéville, confirming the Treaty of Campo Formio.
Defeat again demonstrated the shortcomings of the Austrian military system. Charles, his reputation intact, was entrusted with extensive powers to implement reform.9 Again, he at once ran up against opposition. By necessity his plans involved political as well as military matters, precisely what the emperor and his advisors had long sought to prevent.
Therefore, at the very moment Napoleon was creating an even more efficient military establishment in France – his authority clearly enhanced by his self-coronation as emperor in 1804 – Charles’s attempts to do the same in Austria were being persistently undermined. In 1804, after the Emperor Francis had concluded alliances with Russia and Great Britain, both of which Charles opposed, the archduke’s position was further weakened with the appointment of the incompetent General Mack as the de facto commander of the main Austrian army, now poised to invade Bavaria. Charles was left in command only of a weak and ill-supplied army in Italy.
The War of the Third Coalition proved another disaster for Austria. Mack’s advance into Bavaria in September 1805 ended with his army being surrounded and cut off from the slowly moving Russians at Ulm in October. Before the month was over, he was forced to capitulate. Napoleon entered Vienna and pursued the combined Austro-Russians into Moravia where, on 2 December 1805, he destroyed them at Austerlitz. The battle ended the war and forced the emperor into the humiliations of the Treaty of Pressburg (see here).
In 1806, with Mack disgraced, the Emperor Francis reluctantly authorized Charles, who had escaped involvement in the debacle of Austerlitz, to resume his military reforms. Once again, there were differences between the Austrian emperor, egged on by advisors anxious to renew the fight with France, and his brother.10 Charles was convinced that a long period of peace was required to repair the damages of repeated defeat and to reform the army; he also maintained that little trust could be placed in an alliance with Great Britain. As early as 1804 he had submitted a memorandum pointing out that Britain was unlikely to commit a powerful land force on the continent and that, ‘Apart from Marlborough no Englishman has ever believed that control of the seas could be achieved by fighting on the Danube’.11
But by 1808 it was clear that the war party in Vienna would prevail. In 1806 Napoleon had further extended his conquests in central Europe, destroying the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt. The following summer, he had met Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit on the Baltic. Between them, they redrew the political map of central and eastern Europe. Prussia was stripped of its western lands, which passed to Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, while its holdings in Poland were re-created as a further French client state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Russia gained a small area of Poland, around Belostok. The Tsar also reluctantly (and secretly) agreed to join Napoleon’s attempted economic blockade of Great Britain, the Continental System, an attempt to shut down all continental commerce with Britain. Napoleon now stood at the zenith of his power, dominating Europe from the Pyrenees to the Russian frontier. Only Britain remained defiant.
Implementing the Continental System taxed even Napoleon, however. In the end, Russia’s refusal to agree to it would prove his downfall. But for now, the problem was Portugal, a long-standing ally and trading partner of Britain. In October 1807 Napoleon had bullied the weak and divided Spanish government into allowing a French army to cross its territory to occupy Lisbon. With French troops already in Spain, the temptation to add the country to his burgeoning list of conquests was irresistible. As further French troops poured into Spain, in May 1808 Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, unceremoniously deposing King Carlos IV. Spain may have been backward in most respects, but it remained a land of fierce if quixotic patriotism. By the summer much of the country had broken into active revolt against the French invaders. Almost at once, Britain intervened, seeing the Spanish uprising as the opportunity it had long sought to deploy its land forces against Napoleon.
The dismay which the fall of yet another of Europe’s monarchs generated in Austria naturally strengthened the demands of the war faction. Even Charles, though conscious that his reforms of the army were far from complete, accepted that war was inevitable, not least as the cost to Austria of maintaining its enlarged army was becoming unsustainable. In June 1808, he reluctantly agreed to the establishment of the Landwehr, a militia organization championed by Archduke John, this despite initially dismissing it as politically unreliable and militarily useless. It would, he argued, create the illusion that Austria disposed ‘… of large forces and [would] induce a false sense of security’. None the less, the Landwehr was to enrol all males between the ages of 18 and 45 in Bohemia and the hereditary Habsburg lands, in essence the German-speaking areas. Hungary, however, refused to participate, while in Galicia, where the Poles were suspected of sympathy with Napoleon, the measure was not introduced at all. In theory, 250,000 men would be raised, though in the event this number was never reached. The Landwehr was to be divided into ‘normal’ and volunteer units, administered by three directorates each headed by a member of the imperial family. Bohemia was assigned to Archduke Ferdinand d’Este; Upper and Lower Austria to Maximilian d’Este; and Inner Austria to Archduke John. Its combat capabilities were dubious. Described as ‘sedentary troops’ and originally limited to the defence of its home province, their equipment and training remained indifferent and their arms constituted a mix of outdated muskets. Commanded and trained by officers recalled from the retired list, the Landwehr was to train on Sundays and attend an annual three-week camp. Except for picked ‘volunteer’ units the bulk of the force showed little fighting spirit.
THE DECISION FOR WAR
Despite the growing risk of further war with Austria, evident among much else from the overtures it was making to Prussia and Britain to form a further coalition, Napoleon determined to deal first with Spain. After meeting Tsar Alexander at Erfurt in September, where he was promised that Russia would keep Austria in check, he transferred 200,000 men of his Grande Armée from Germany to Spain, where in November he assumed personal command. The Imperial Guard, three corps from Germany, together with two Italian, one Polish and one German division, raised the Army of Spain to 305,0000 men. These rapidly defeated the remaining Spanish regulars and scattered the irregulars. In December, Napoleon entered Madrid. But on 17 January 1809, worried about reports from Paris and Vienna, Napoleon left Spain and returned to Paris on the 23rd to take command of t
he French and allied forces in Germany to meet the Austrian threat.
In fact the Austrians had now already formally decided to commit themselves to a further war at a conference held on the night of 23 December (and reaffirmed by a Crown Council on 8 February 1809). In part, the decision stemmed from the recommendations of Prince Metternich, the Austrian ambassador in Paris. Napoleon, claimed Metternich, had lost the support of the French population, was over-stretched in Spain and would be able to muster no more than 206,000 men for a further Austrian campaign, 78,000 of them unreliable German troops from the Confederation of the Rhine and 21,000 of them equally unreliable Polish troops from the Duchy of Warsaw. He also asserted that Russia, a nominal French ally, would remain neutral. With Austria able to call on an army 400,000 strong, its position seemed unassailable. As events would show, he was right only about Russia.
The initial preparations for the war did little to inspire confidence. For one thing, despite accepting the position of supreme commander of all Austria’s field armies on 12 February, Archduke Charles was a great deal less than sanguine about Austria’s prospects of defeating Napoleon. Later, he would claim that he had not supported the decision to go to war.12 Preparations on the diplomatic front were equally discouraging. Though reports of Russian troop concentrations on the Galician frontiers were rightly discounted, in March, thoroughly cowed by Napoleon, Prussia repudiated a provisional undertaking for an alliance with Austria. Only Britain, which had promised financial support and a diversionary effort in north Germany, held out much prospect of genuine help.
The Emperor's Last Victory Page 2