His thoughts were also elsewhere: he was romantically besotted with his wife, to whom he wrote a letter every day, begging her to join him. But she was otherwise engaged: she had taken a lover, Hippolyte Charles, a small but dashing hussar addicted to drinking and gambling, the polar opposite to the intense, self-disciplined Napoleon. The young general ordered his two most faithful friends, Androche Junot and Joachim Murat, to bring her to him. Of the first he wrote crudely: ‘You must return with Junot, do you hear, my adorable one, he will see you, he will breathe the air of your shrine. Perhaps you will even allow him the unique favour of a kiss on your cheek . . . A kiss on your heart, and then another a little lower, much much lower.’ He also remarked that she had ‘the prettiest little vagina in the world, the Three Isles of Martinique were there’. But she and the handsome Murat made love. Josephine was openly contemptuous of her absent husband. ‘Q’il est drôle, Bonaparte.’
Josephine has usually been blamed for her faithlessness: yet the marriage had been one largely of convenience for her from the beginning. Given that she did not love Napoleon in the first place, it is hardly surprising that she drifted into the arms of other men. She told him she was seriously ill.
He responded by requesting support from Barras, her former lover and the patron of both: ‘I hate all women. I am in despair. My wife has not arrived. She must be detained by some lover in Paris.’ He accused her of preferring her dog to him (which may have been true). The Director ordered her to join him, and she set off with Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who disliked her intensely, her lover Hippolyte, with whom she ostentatiously slept along the journey, and the faithful Junot, whom she teased by openly attempting to seduce him in front of the other travellers. When she arrived at Napoleon’s sumptuous Palazzo Serpelloni, she had to endure the embraces of her husband for two days before he set off for Mantua, where Sérurier had been placed in charge of the siege.
Napoleon had also learnt that Marshal Dagobert Wurmser and a large Austrian army had left the Rhine to engage him. He fumed at the failure of the two northern French commanders to launch an expected offensive along the Rhine and keep the Austrians tied down there. But that was exactly what the Directory had calculated – that Napoleon’s invasion of southern Italy would compel the Austrians to weaken their Rhine armies.
Taking advantage of the six weeks’ interlude before Wurmser’s armies could arrive, Napoleon embarked on his expedition to emasculate the militarily weak Papal States. Arriving in Emilia-Romagna, he easily drove off the papal army of 18,000 men, seizing Bologna, Ferrara and the rich port of Livorno (Leghorn), so denying it to the British as a base, and moved as far down as Florence to intimidate the Tuscans. He travelled 300 miles largely without opposition, helping himself to another colossal fortune, 40 million francs. To fend off an attack on the Papal States, the Pope gave him some of the greatest art treasures in the Vatican, as well as a huge tribute in gold and the port of Ancona on the Adriatic. It was a repeat of the barbarian invasion of ancient Rome, with the treasures of the Italian renaissance instead of classical antiquity as the spoils.
With news of the Austrian armies approaching northern Italy, Napoleon sped back to confront them. They had been marching down the Brenner Pass and crossed the river Adige with 50,000 men in three columns, their objective to relieve Mantua. Napoleon moved quickly to prevent them linking up at Mantua, and fell upon the Austrian right at Lonato with a superior force of 27,000 men to the Austrians’ 21,000. Wurmser tried to reunite his armies, but he was too late: Augereau led the French against him at Castiglione at the beginning of August. Some 25,000 Austrians were killed or wounded and 15,000 taken prisoner, to 5,500 French casualties and 1,400 prisoners. Once again, Napoleon had shown skill, energy and tactical brilliance as well as speed, but Wurmser was not yet defeated. He manoeuvred skilfully to attack the French and marched to relieve Mantua again.
Napoleon, who had captured Roverata and Trent in the north, set off after him and inflicted a victory on points at Bassano on 8 September. But most of the Austrian army survived intact and relieved Mantua two days later, bringing the garrison’s strength up to 23,000 and rendering it virtually impregnable from Napoleon’s army, which for once arrived too late, eight days afterwards. Equally, though, Wurmser’s main army was now bottled up and out of commission.
The British minister in Turin, John Trevor, had written with dismay to Lord Grenville of ‘the torrent of this victorious enemy’. The British watched with alarm the spectacular victories that this new French general was winning as he hurtled his way across northern Italy. This further muddied what was already a dismal strategic scene across Europe as a whole: with the occupation of Leghorn, the French had secured a powerful new Mediterranean base. Meanwhile, the court at Naples, watching the whirlwind action across Italy and seeking to avoid the same fate, was intimidated into neutrality: Britain had lost one of its oldest allies.
Worse still, as the French advance seemed unstoppable, Spain, from a position of favouring neither side, lapsed into ‘hostile neutrality’ against Britain in August 1796. Almost overnight, after the loss of continental Europe, the British were losing control of a second key theatre: the Mediterranean itself. Their presence there was now confined to Corsica, Malta, Minorca and Gibraltar – a handful of outposts. They were not yet at war with Spain, and desperately anxious to avoid it if they could. But the Mediterranean was anything but a British lake.
That incorrigible pair of optimists, the cousins Pitt and Grenville, sought solace elsewhere: perhaps the Prussians would change their minds – but the British were quickly rebuffed and by June it seemed possible that the Prussians would actually join the French. Perhaps the Russians would help: but the British ambassador, Charles Whitworth, was soon grumbling about the Empress’s ‘scandalously evasive conduct’. Perhaps a change would come about in France: but the royalists were now on the defensive and the Directory was more firmly in control than before. The success of the French war effort had redounded to its credit: it was hardly likely to abandon the most successful of its policies, in a country still plagued by shortages and disruption. Napoleon’s plundering was providing a huge and desperately needed flow of money into France.
Only Austria remained. The British poured money in to assist their ally – £100,000 in April, £150,000 in May, £300,000 for July and August, a further £150,000 a month for the rest of the year – although this was well short of Austrian demands. Still, Austria, faced with Napoleon’s aggression in the south, had despatched its biggest Rhine army to meet the new threat across the Dolomites.
Disconcerted, Pitt and Grenville looked to their somewhat pyrrhic gains in the West Indies for consolation, as well as heartening news from the Cape, where the Dutch attempt to regain the Cape Colony had been beaten off; but shortages of ships and men meant the strategy for an attack on the troublesome French island of Mauritius (Île de France) – a staging post for attacks on the traffic to the British East Indies – had to be abandoned.
Pitt seemed close to despair by June 1796. He wrote to Grenville:
I am . . . clear that (unless there happens some unexpected turn in the state of things) any idea of our enabling Austria to act with any effect beyond the present year is out of the question. In this situation it would be inexcusable not to try any chance that can be tried, honourably and safely, to set on some foot some decent plan of pacification; and I can conceive no objection in the mind of any of our colleagues to see whether the arrangement to which you have pointed can be made acceptable both to Austria and Prussia. But though I think it should be tried, I do not flatter myself with much chance of success. On the whole my notion is that most likely, either now or a few months hence, we shall be left to sustain alone the conflict with France and Holland, probably joined by Spain, and perhaps favoured more or less openly by the Northern powers.
With Spain ever closer to joining the French, the British decided in principle to evacuate their outpost of Corsica, which would be untenable and was anyway a co
nstant source of unrest. Britain’s troublesome old ally, and Napoleon’s bête noire, Paoli, had again to be granted safe haven in London. Pitt’s spirits sank to their lowest ebb.
Two morsels of good news reached him at last. The Russian Empress, having dismembered Poland with Prussia, offered to send 60,000 Russian troops to Austria in exchange for a flat payment and a continuing subsidy of £150,000 a month. The British grasped eagerly at this straw, and even offered to hand over Corsica as a warm-water naval base for the Russians. More important, Archduke Charles won an unexpected victory in eastern Bavaria on 24 August. Generals Jourdan and Moreau had divided their armies into three columns with their flanks exposed, and had failed to bottle up Austrian forces into the strongholds of Phillippsburg and Mannheim behind their lines. The Austrians attacked on six key flanks: the French fell back down to Mainz, and Charles triumphed at Wurzburg, pushing the French back across the Rhine again in October.
Pitt exultantly looked forward to the ‘annihilation’ of the French across the Rhine and could see only opportunities arising from the approaching war with Spain to seize its far-flung possessions. Abercromby was despatched to seize Trinidad and Puerto Rico and even possibly send an expedition to Buenos Aires. Manila was thought to be vulnerable. Cadiz could be blockaded.
But at the same time, astonishingly, Pitt sent out peace feelers to France, despatching a senior emissary, Lord Malmesbury, in October: it was further evidence of his lack of clear commitment to the war and of his desire to appease the French, which had been apparent for years before the declaration of war in 1793. He could hardly have chosen a worse time: the French contemptuously rebuffed Malmesbury, while both the Austrians and the Russians, who had not been consulted and had been egged on to a more robust posture towards France by the British, were furious. Grenville, who had left Pitt to be his own foreign minister while he mourned the death of a sister, was appalled and immediately stiffened the British terms.
By the end of the year, however, three further dramatic developments plunged the British into gloom again. The Empress Catherine died, to be succeeded by her suspicious, introspective son, Paul, who had hated his mother and preferred an alliance with Paris to one with London; the French attempted an invasion of Ireland; and Napoleon threw the Austrians on the defensive again.
Fortunately for Pitt the Irish invasion was as much a fiasco as the British Dunkirk expedition had been two years before. On 16 December the French fleet left Brest unopposed – the Channel fleet commander, the undistinguished Lord Bridport, was residing comfortably in Somerset. By the time its destination could be worked out, the French ships, escorting an army of some 20,000 men, had arrived in Bantry Bay. They were escorting Wolfe Tone, a young Protestant from Dublin, who had sought to unite both his own and the Catholic community in a demand for self-government. Luckily for the British, a gale blew up, preventing the French from landing and separating General Hoche, the French army commander, from the main force. The French were driven ignominiously back to Brest.
Meanwhile, Napoleon was on the move again. The Austrian victories on the Rhine made it inevitable that the Austrians would try and reassert their hold on northern Italy. While living it up in Milan amid scenes of ostentatious vulgarity, pawing at his beloved Josephine in public while she cuckolded him with Hippolyte whenever he went away, and permitting his soldiers freely to despoil northern Italy, Napoleon threw his weight around the region, occupying Modena, imposing a French garrison upon Genoa and seeking to intimidate Venice.
But the Austrians were massing again along the Brenner Pass and in November advanced in two columns – one of 28,000 men through Vicenza towards Verona, the other of 18,000 men down the Adige valley towards Trent. The second army mauled a French force outside the city and took it. Napoleon was pushed out of Verona and with only 10,000 men – 14,000 of his men were off sick in the marshy lowlands – his position looked desperate.
On 12 November he suffered his first defeat in the Italian campaign outside Verona. He wrote nervously to the Directory: ‘Perhaps we are on the verge of losing Italy. None of the expected help has arrived. I despair of being able to avoid raising the siege of Mantua, which would have been ours within a week . . . In a few days we will make a last effort. If fortune smiles, Mantua will be taken and with it Italy.’ He was faced by now with no fewer than three Austrian armies, in Verona, Trent and Mantua, each bigger than his own, which might soon join up. Desperately he manoeuvred to outflank Verona and strike from the rear, staging a forced march to the Adige.
At the river crossing at Arcola he unexpectedly found an enemy force of Croats defending the bridge. As at Lodi, Napoleon gambled on a frontal assault across the bridge: to get there he needed to cross a causeway through marshes. This time he led the charge himself, clutching the French flag to give his troops courage. But, as he reported, ‘we had to give up the idea of taking the village by frontal assault’. Halfway across, it seems, while cursing his troops for their cowardice, he had to retreat. He appears to have fallen into the marsh by the causeway under intense enemy fire, and been saved by his brother Louis, although the facts are disputed.
He then seems to have led his men southwards, erecting a pontoon across the marsh and eventually reached firm ground, before attacking the Austrians from the rear. The latter, taken by surprise, fell back, although they could probably have defeated the far less numerous French. Napoleon lost a large number of men – some 4,500 killed or wounded – dwarfed only by the Austrian casualties of 7,000. All of this was far from discreditable to Napoleon, although his frontal attack was probably needlessly costly. But he subsequently elevated it to the status of myth, immortalized in a famous painting by Delacroix.
Napoleon sensibly and typically kept up the pressure after this success, pushing on to encircle the second Austrian army. After a few skirmishes, this was badly mauled at Rouco and the two main Austrian armies, although still largely intact, decided to retreat, having failed to reach Mantua. It had been a triumph more for French aggressiveness against Austrian caution than a great feat of arms or tactics. Napoleon had won by the skin of his teeth. His troops were exhausted and incapable of fighting on.
Chapter 22
KING OF NORTH ITALY
Napoleon’s magnificent progress across northern Italy aroused the suspicions of the Directory: he was still only their servant, a brilliant military commander, but not a political authority in his own right. Saliceti, the Directory’s representative and Napoleon’s old patron and friend, became jealous and started sending unfavourable reports home; Saliceti resented being rebuked by Napoleon for openly selling plunder in the streets.
The anxious Directors sent General Henri Clarke to spy on him. This emissary found Napoleon in a foul mood ‘haggard, the skin clinging to his bones, eyes bright with fever’. Clarke told him that the Directory wanted an armistice. Napoleon angrily objected. After a few encounters, Clarke’s attitude changed. He wrote back to his masters:
Everyone here regards him as a man of genius . . . He is feared, loved and respected in Italy. I believe he is attached to the Republic and without any ambition save to retain the reputation he has won . . . General Bonaparte is not without defects . . . Sometimes he is hard, impatient, abrupt or imperious. Often he demands difficult things in too hasty a manner. He has not been respectful enough towards the government commissioners. When I reproved him for this, he replied that he could not possibly treat otherwise men who were universally scorned for their immorality and incapacity . . . Saliceti has the reputation of being the most shameless rogue in the army and Garrau is inefficient: neither is suitable for the Army of Italy.
After this glowing report the Directors’ fears were partially assuaged. The issue of the armistice was settled by the arrival of a magnificent new Austrian army of 28,000 men under the able General Alvinzi, marching down the Adige valley, while another 17,000 under General Provera were heading for Verona. General Wurmser was determined to relieve Mantua, where 20,000 Austrians were running short
of fuel in the city isolated by marshes and lakes.
With some 9,000 tied down besieging Mantua, another 9,000 sick and a further 4,000 scattered across northern Italy, Napoleon had only 20,000 men. Still, he did not wait for the superior forces of the enemy to take the offensive. Instead he marched forward to the Plateau de Rivoli, which was surrounded by hills commanding the Garda-Verona road and lying between the Adige and Tasso rivers.
At Rivoli a division of 10,000 under the tough, wily General Barthélemy Joubert was under fire between the vastly superior Austrian forces. When Napoleon arrived at one in the morning and watched the hundreds of camp fires of Alvinzi’s army flickering around the plateau, he ordered an immediate attack the following morning against the superior Austrian positions, before the Austrians could descend to the plateau and organize themselves in strength.
The attack ran into serious trouble against the Austrian cavalry and guns, and soon Napoleon’s flank was turned. Just as defeat seemed inevitable, General André Masséna, who had ridden his 8,000 men across snow and ice in a gruelling twenty-mile march, arrived and beat back the flank attackers. Thus reinforced, Napoleon defeated the first Austrian corps and then fell upon another weaker one. A third arrived from the rear, and Napoleon, with characteristic ferocity, turned to attack it – but would probably not have prevailed had not another French force under General Ney reached the plain just after noon.
The Austrians, after more fighting, retreated, leaving 8,000 killed and wounded or captured. After a gruelling all-day march in the open, Napoleon, who had narrowly escaped death several times and lost several horses shot beneath him, had won a classic victory largely through aggression, speed and quick responses which outmanoeuvred his opponents. It was his greatest victory yet.
Even so, he did not rest on his laurels. Knowing of the approach of the second Austrian army under Provera marching to relieve Mantua, he ordered his exhausted, battle-scarred men on a twenty-four-hour march to assemble some thirty miles further on. On 16 January, he was at La Favoeitae. Provera was roundly beaten, losing some 7,000 men and twenty-two guns. Joubert, meanwhile, who had pursued the retreating Austrians from Rivoli with a smaller force, had taken no fewer than 7,000 prisoners.
The War of Wars Page 19