The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  The last was Napoleon’s greatest strength. In his Italian campaigns he pioneered the idea of marching with two or three independent smaller armies to liaise at a single weak point in the enemy line, providing a concentration of overwhelming force where the latter least expected it. With three armies approaching independently, the enemy had no way of telling where they would converge until it was too late to concentrate their own strung-out line. Not surprisingly, this gave the advantage to the attacker, which Napoleon almost invariably was.

  Napoleon also made great use of skirmishers, of which the stuffier commanders disapproved, preferring well-ordered ranks to the appearance of indiscipline which might encourage their men to attack or retreat in confusion – although their impact has perhaps been exaggerated. The French also developed excellent mobile field guns, such as 4-pounders, 8-pounders and 12-pounders (the famed Gribeauval cannon) under Napoleon, whose specialty was artillery, while their adversaries tended to use general fixed artillery behind the lines.

  The Grande Armée was also enormously assisted by its meritocratic regime, which differed from the traditional armies in which aristocrats were officers and poor men were infantry. The army was no longer packed with terrified conscripts but considered itself an elite, lavishly rewarded from the spoils of the countries it plundered. To be a soldier in Napoleonic France was to be part of an upper echelon and was even a good career for the lower classes, accustomed to a life that was nasty, brutish and short.

  This was the great military engine of the war to be unleashed on Europe. It was a colossal force of soldiers who swarmed and plundered the land, living off, murdering and despoiling those outside their ranks. Apparently unstoppable, it was to set the example for more than a century. It has been argued that Napoleon committed his first great error in marching this huge force from west to east across Europe, leaving the British undefeated and a danger behind him. This is absurd. The British, bottled up in their island fortress, presented no immediate continental threat and Napoleon was entirely realistic in reckoning that with their control of the sea, he had no early prospect of defeating them.

  Chapter 50

  AUSTERLITZ

  The march across Europe was to be one of Napoleon’s most formidable military achievements. In some ways his innovative, impetuous and dramatic tactics were a mirror image of Nelson’s at sea – ‘always up and at ‘em’, as the latter had put it, concentrating overwhelming force against a particular weak spot in an old-fashioned defensive line. Napoleon calculated correctly that his enemies would expect his great armies to be slow to cross the continent and to liaise, and would thus walk into a trap sprung by the union of their equally slow-moving armies. So he deployed speed and overwhelming force in one of the greatest marches in history.

  Facing him was a huge continent-wide extension of the ‘line’ principle – a series of smaller armies, each under different commanders and some under different national control, drawn up into a large, vastly over-extended, arc across hundreds of miles of central Europe. In the north there was a 40,000-strong Russian army under General Benigsen seeking to support the Prussian army threatening Hanover and Holland. In the centre was Mack’s 90,000-strong Austrian army (originally commanded by Archduke Ferdinand), which was to liaise with the 55,000-strong Russian force under General Kutuzov coming from the east, as well as General Buxhovden’s army in Bohemia.

  To the south Archduke John commanded 22,000 men in the Tyrol and south of that Archduke Charles, around 100,000 to reinforce northern Italy. Against these Napoleon would field around 350,000 men. The coming clash was to be on a scale never before seen in Europe.

  The most powerful of his adversaries were, of course, the Austrians. It is easy to underestimate just how formidable a force they were under the Habsburgs. These were second only to the Bourbons in longevity, the inheritors of the Holy Roman Empire, occupiers of a still great swathe of eastern Europe, Italy and the Balkans, locked by marriage into a gridlock of subordinate relationships, and long balancing their power with the French Bourbons. This was no decadent or fraying empire like the Spanish or the Ottoman, but a powerful well administered structure, possessed of one of Europe’s two most formidable armies and a vast subject population.

  The last was in fact a great weakness: most of these subjects deeply resented such domination. Both Italians and Germans were not particularly hostile initially to French takeover as a counterweight to the heavy-handed rule of the Austrians. This was a key factor throughout the Napoleonic conflict in Europe; for the French were initially seen as liberators from Austrian oppression – until the predatory actions of the Napoleonic Grande Armée dispelled this illusion, as did Napoleon’s own brand of clannish imperialism. In a sense, the Austrians were burdened with their huge empire of subject peoples, while the French at this stage were not.

  Only later, when the French had established themselves as imperialists and the Austrians had lost most of their vassals, were the roles reversed, with the result that the French were rolled back. But at this stage, as Napoleon’s vast force approached, the general hostility of Austria’s subject peoples to their colonial masters was a huge advantage for the Emperor, with his high-flowing rhetoric of liberation and modernisation, which appealed to chafing, subject elites.

  The Austrian Emperor Francis was cautious, well-meaning and uninspiring. He was a gentle if narrow-minded family man who could chair committees but provide no real leadership: Austrian policy was consequently decided by a collection of senior advisers who fell in and out of favour according to results – as indeed befitted a well-established empire. The Emperor’s inner council consisted of Baron Johann Thugut, his foreign minister, who was committed to war against France, and his former tutor, Count von Colloredo, a hard-headed, highly intelligent man who was deeply religious, somewhat affected in manner and effectively prime minister. A third member of the inner core was Ludwig Coblenzl. The army chiefs were divided up between the Emperor’s three brothers, the amiable Ferdinand, the able Charles and the young and inexperienced John. Charles was the only good soldier among them and had opposed an early Austrian re-entry into the war: instead he had undertaken a major programme of modernization of the Austrian army to meet the French challenge, having learnt the lessons of the previous fighting. That involved field training rather than interminable parade-ground drilling.

  His first priority was to try and reform the gigantic central bureaucracy that ran the army. This made him enemies. Charles created a permanent staff organization, the Quartermaster General Staff, subordinate to the Hoffriegsrat, the military-minded supreme body controlling the army; he also reintroduced conscription. The Austrian army was nominally huge, with around 430,000 men divided into fifty-seven infantry regiments, thirty-two cavalry regiments, seventeen grenadier peasant regiments and three artillery regiments. It was run by the aristocracy subordinate to the court at Vienna. Unlike the French army, the Austrian army had no divisions or corps and was wedded to traditional linear tactics. The Austrian cavalry was second to none, but also a stickler for the old rules, as was the formidable artillery.

  Charles’s attempts at reform soon ran into opposition, and his wise advice to stay out of the war until the army was fully reformed irritated his brother Francis, who gave effective charge to General Karl Mack von Lieberich, a mediocrity, wedded to entirely conventional tactics. There can have been few such disastrous appointments in the history of any army.

  Mack believed in going on to the offensive. He confidently predicted that Napoleon would take sixty-nine days to march the 500 miles across Europe to the Upper Danube and that the Russian army of Kutuzov would arrive to join the Austrians in sixty-four days. Therefore he decided upon an invasion of Bavaria before the two allied armies met up. On 8 September 1805, Mack and Archduke Ferdinand crossed the Inn river at Brautman and marched on Munich. The Bavarians, who were secretly in league with Napoleon against their Austrian oppressors, put up no resistance. Mack rode into Munich triumphantly five days later. Mack�
��s refusal to wait for his Russian reinforcements was incredibly ill-advised. He simply did not believe Napoleon could move in such numbers so fast.

  To the north, however, the French armies based in Hanover and Utrecht marched to meet up at Wurtemberg, while the centre and the southern armies marched on Mannheim and Strasbourg. The French army of 200,000 men had been divided into seven autonomous corps. Napoleon himself was still deceptively in Paris on 23 September, lulling Mack into a sense of false security. The Emperor left to join his units by fast carriage the following day. This colossal force crossed the Rhine in good formation between 27 September and 3 October.

  Meanwhile six cavalry divisions under Joachim Murat and Lannes’ corps marched against the Austrian centre, taking the traditional invasion route through the Black Forest. The French marched at around twenty miles a day, starting out at around four in the morning and retiring to bed early. It was a technique perfected by the French in the American War of Independence, when Rochambeau’s speed astonished and exhausted his American allies under George Washington and resulted in trapping General Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, which decided the fate of the war.

  The pace was punishing: there were soon some 8,000 on the sick list. Even Napoleon was exhausted. A staff officer wrote:

  I had dined with the Emperor and on leaving the table he had gone alone to see the Empress Josephine. A few minutes later he came back hurriedly to the salon and taking me by the arm led me into his room. M. de Rémusat . . . came in at the same time. We were hardly there before the Emperor fell to the ground; he had only time to tell me to shut the door. I tore off his cravat because he appeared to be stifling; he was not sick, but groaned and foamed at the mouth. M. de Rémusat gave him water and I poured eau-de-Cologne over him. He had a kind of convulsion which lasted a quarter of an hour; we put him in an arm-chair; he began to speak, dressed himself again, and swore us to secrecy. Half an hour later he was on the road to Carlsruhe.

  The speed of the advance caught Mack entirely by surprise. Still overconfident, he had proceeded with his army of 24,000 men to occupy the fortress at Ulm in an exposed position on the Danube in western Bavaria on 6 October. The same day the French curved around the Danube to the north and now threatened Mack’s lines of communications. Napoleon’s aim was to divide the Austrian and Russian armies and fall upon each in turn. He could hardly have expected Mack to drop so willingly into the trap by marching blindly on.

  A horrified Mack learnt that the French army was now moving down from the north behind him to cut off his rear. Desperately he tried to break out, sending one part of his army east towards Bohemia, then another north, then another south. Each was blocked and destroyed by superior French forces. Archduke Ferdinand and twelve squadrons escaped on 14 October, and then Mack’s army was completely surrounded. The Russians were nowhere near, with Kutuzov still approaching the Bavarian border some 150 miles to the east.

  On 20 October, like a fly who had flown directly into the centre of the spider’s web, completely surrounded, hopelessly outmanoeuvred and massively outnumbered, Mack surrendered, along with 24,000 men and eighty guns. Only Frederick had escaped. The victory of Ulm had been a brilliant feat of encirclement achieved by the speed, better intelligence and perfectly executed strategy of the French. The wretched Mack was despatched by Napoleon to the Austrian Emperor to urge peace. It was the day before Trafalgar.

  To the south the sensible and cautious Archduke Charles, in his humiliatingly lesser command, decided to avoid action if at all possible. The French army under Masséna attacked across the Adige on 18 October, but Charles had already withdrawn to defensive positions at Caldiero. After three days of bloody and indecisive fighting, Charles withdrew farther into the mountains. Meanwhile Kutuzov’s Russians, anxious not to suffer the same fate as Mack, ignored Emperor Francis’s pleas to defend Vienna and withdrew west along the Danube, which they crossed, inflicting a minor defeat on the French advance force.

  The way was now open to Vienna. Arthur Paget, the British ambassador in the capital, wrote: ‘I don’t know which is most feared, the arrival of the Russians, or their retreat, or that of the French. Everybody who possesses or can have a horse is moving off.’

  The Austrian Emperor decided to evacuate the city and abandon it to the French. The combined forces of Lannes and Murat approached the outskirts of Vienna. There they pretended to local commanders that an armistice had been reached and secured the main bridge across the Danube, which had been mined. Within days Napoleon was sleeping in that most delightful of all Habsburg palaces, the Schönbrunn outside Vienna. His army helped itself to 100,000 muskets and 2,000 cannon from the Austrian arsenal. Beethoven nevertheless went ahead and conducted the orchestra at the premiere of Fidelio in the Theater an de Wien. It was ill-attended, hardly surprising under the circumstances.

  Napoleon meanwhile had learnt of the defeat at Trafalgar, just as he was accomplishing great things in central Europe. In a rage he ordered the news to be suppressed in France for fear it would stir up his enemies behind him. Le Petit Journal published an imaginary list of British ships sunk at Trafalgar, while Le Moniteur wrote of Nelson’s death and how his ship had been captured by the French fleet:

  They boarded the ship at the same moment – Villeneuve flew to the quarter-deck – with the usual generosity of the French, he carried a brace of pistols in his hands, for he knew the admiral had lost his arm, and could not use his sword – he offered one to Nelson: they fought, and at the second fire Nelson fell; he was immediately carried below – Oliva, Gravina, and Villeneuve attended him, with the accustomed French humanity. Meanwhile fifteen ships of the line had struck – four more were obliged to follow their example – another blew up – our victory was now complete.

  Napoleon remarked furiously: ‘I cannot be everywhere,’ and then dismissed the defeat as ‘the loss of a few ships after a battle imprudently fought’. It was at this moment that the British spy, Wright, who had been implicated in the plot against Napoleon, was found with his throat cut with a razor, supposedly in despair at the news from Ulm. Admiral Villeneuve, who was returned to France by the British some months later, was found stabbed six times in a country inn on the way to Paris in another supposed suicide. The Emperor’s wrath against those who failed him was pitiless.

  Nor could he rest on the laurels of Ulm – he had little time to waste. The Tsar himself was on his way to Austria to command his army. Snow delayed his journey, as did a few pleasant days at Weimar, where he met Goethe. In Berlin he had persuaded Frederick William III, ever hesitant, to commit Prussia to join the allied cause with an attack on the Rhineland. There the Tsar and the Kaiser had sworn an oath of friendship across the coffin of Frederick the Great. Kutuzov meanwhile had been reinforced by the Russian Second Army and then the Russian Imperial Guard, as well as Archduke Ferdinand’s Austrian army: there were now some 50,000 Russians and 35,000 Austrians altogether. To the south, just ten days away, the Archdukes Charles and John had joined forces to make up an army of 80,000 men. Napoleon was believed to have no more than 40,000 men. To the overconfident young Tsar, aged just twenty-nine, it seemed that Napoleon had overreached himself.

  The Tsar was an extraordinary personality. Blessed with remarkable good looks of an almost feminine kind, blond curly hair, blue eyes, soft features, tall and elegant, he also possessed great charm which alternated with increasingly violent mood swings of depression and anger that bordered on mania. He was also fanatically religious. Kutuzov urged Alexander to withdraw to the Carpathians which would finally break French lines of communication. Emperor Francis of Austria also urged caution. But Alexander and Prince Bagration, his preferred general, were eager for battle and scoffed at ‘General Dawdler’, as he called Kutuzov.

  Napoleon by this time, after the elation of Ulm had worn off, was growing increasingly alarmed: if the joint Russian-Austrian army escaped to the east, he would become overstretched and unable to follow. There was also a danger that they would link up with the Austri
an army approaching rapidly from the south, or that the latter by itself would cut French lines of communication; and then there was the further fear that the Prussians would at last throw in their lot with the coalition. Moreover Napoleon had had to send part of his army to cover his flanks, and his strength was now down to 70,000 men.

  The Emperor decided on a characteristically bold strategy: to lure the enemy into battle before it had moved out of reach or the strength of the southern army could be brought to bear. He carefully selected his planned field of battle some eighteen miles east of the small town of Brunn alongside the road from Vienna to the north. The town was bordered by that road in the west and another road to the north. To the south were two large bodies of water, Satschan Pond and Meinitz Pond, as well as a large natural barrier of marshes. Bordering the marshes in the centre was a low hill, the Pratzen Heights: to the east was the small village of Austerlitz.

  The position was a natural defensive one, with woods and small valleys in which his troops could hide. All he had to do was entice his enemies to battle.

  He took an extraordinary risk. He withdrew from both Austerlitz and his strong position on the commanding Pratzen Heights, apparently in some disorder at the nearby presence of the coalition armies, and sued for an armistice. On 29 November, at a meeting with a Russian envoy, Count Dolgorovki, he appeared timid and indecisive. Meanwhile he secretly ordered Bernadotte’s First Corps and Davout’s Third Corps to reinforce him by forced marches. The two armies covered the sixty miles from Vienna in some seventy hours. He concentrated his main forces to the north and centre, with Lannes and Murat in the front line. To the south he placed most of Soult’s Fourth Corps, strung out thinly. Concealed to the north were Bernadotte’s First Corps and, to the south, Davout’s Third Corps.