The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Archduke Charles, meanwhile, did nothing, possibly because he believed the battle had already been won. In spite of his formidable artillery, he halted his artillery assault on the island. Suddenly, he had become cautious, preparing to redeploy his troops to stave off another attack across the Danube, uncertain whether to place them at the water’s edge or further back on the Marchfeld Plain. He was almost certainly right in holding back his infantry: he would have faced the same perils as Napoleon had just faced in reverse, with his men exposed as they crossed and then with their backs to the water.

  Napoleon set about reinforcing Lobau and the neighbouring island into an armed camp protected by 130 heavy guns. He built new Bridges to Lobau and across from the island to the north bank. Small bridge-heads were established protected by redoubts and gunboats. Upstream, boats were scuttled to prevent the Austrians floating debris down the river to demolish the Bridges. Meanwhile Eugène de Beauharnais and General MacDonald had at last beaten Archduke John’s retreating army at Raab. Napoleon summoned their 23,000 men to join him. With further reinforcements under Davout and Bernadotte also arriving, Napoleon by the beginning of July had nearly 180,000 men and 500 guns. Archduke Charles’s caution had proved lethal.

  On 4 July Napoleon moved. With his usual skill at deception he erected three bridges across from Lobau to Aspern-Essling, as he had on his previous attack, as a decoy, while simultaneously throwing seven bridges to the east towards the village of Gross Enzerdorf lower down the river. In Napoleon’s favour, there was a thunderstorm and torrential rains which masked the movement of the troops. The Austrians, utterly deceived, prepared to meet them at Aspern-Essling only to discover that at that very moment a massive French army of 150,000 men and 500 guns had crossed to the north bank of the Danube to the east: a bolder commander might have attempted to attack the French as they crossed; but Archduke Charles held back. Napoleon’s forces now outnumbered the Austrians.

  At midday the French advanced against the 136,000 Austrian troops and their forty guns. The Austrians were spread out in a giant semicircle centred on the village of Wagram, at the edge of the Marchfeld Plain. The French mustered their main force on the right (the north) with the object of breaking through the Austrian centre: they had ample space for manoeuvre on the extensive plain. At 5 p.m., as light was fading, Napoleon launched his attack for fear that reinforcements expected from Archduke John’s army would soon reach the Austrians. (In fact John’s force had been whittled down to just 12,000 men.)

  The French attack went badly: de Beauharnais’s forces were driven in disarray from directly opposite Wagram, while Oudinot’s forces were also forced to withdraw. Davout and Bernadotte, behind these two, found their way blocked, and Bernadotte withdrew from the village of Aberklaa, just west of Wagram, to Napoleon’s spitting fury. He dismissed Bernadotte on the spot (although to general bemusement he never earned out his threats against this vainglorious, often disobedient and mostly incompetent general, perhaps because he feared making an enemy of the still powerful radical Jacobin faction in the army). The much criticized defences of the Archduke Charles had in fact held well against a superior force commanded by Napoleon himself. The fighting died down at 10 p.m., its lurid glow visible to the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Vienna.

  Battle was resumed the following morning, not by a French offensive but an Austrian one on two fronts – the main thrust directed at the weakest French southern flank towards Aspern and the Danube, which was commanded by Masséna, and a centre-north offensive aimed at driving the French back to the Danube. Charles’s attacks were superb, perfectly crafted pincer movements by a general who had chosen his ground carefully from the defensive heights half encircling the wide plain.

  When these attacks seemed to be succeeding Napoleon desperately ordered Masséna further south and ordered Davout forward to hold the French centre, supported by the reserve cavalry under General MacDonald, and also by a huge 112-gun battery firing straight into the Austrian centre. Meanwhile Davout began to push back the Austrian left in the north and to encircle Wagram from that direction. However, in the south the French left along the Danube was buckling under Austrian pressure. The battle hung in the balance.

  At that moment, Napoleon showed his old inspiration and flair: he ordered MacDonald with one of the earliest ‘giant squares’, some 30,000 men, eight men across and six ranks deep, with the Young Guard behind and some 6,000 cavalry in support, to strike at the Austrian centre. This huge sledgehammer moved upon the Austrian centre. Even so the Austrian line held. But it had been weakened by Davout’s attacks in the north, and Napoleon saw that an opportunity existed to push through between the Austrian centre and left, to which forces had been rushed to resist Davout.

  Davout now started to try and break through at this weak point, while Napoleon committed the entire French reserve except a couple of regiments. At this moment, Charles gave the sensible command to withdraw in good order while he still controlled a line of escape to the north, and broke off the engagement. The French were so overstretched that, had Archduke John arrived in time with his depleted forces, the Austrians might have won. As it was, the Austrians withdrew with all their artillery intact and an army of some 80,000 men to fight another day. The French were too exhausted to pursue and would probably have anyway been beaten back.

  With more than 300,000 troops in the field, it had been the biggest battle ever fought in Europe, with casualties in proportion – some 35,000 on each side. It was a French victory on points – they had gained the battlefield – but had been anything but overwhelming, partly because the French army was in fact the superior force: the Austrians’ much derided linear approach had held and even MacDonald’s battering rain had caused it only to buckle, not break.

  Charles has been criticized as too cautious a commander: yet it was his boldness in seeking to outflank the French on both sides that had perhaps been fatal: if he had remained on the defensive in the north while in the south he had cut the French off from their means of escape across the Danube, Napoleon might have been finished. As it was the Emperor only just prevailed.

  After a few minor further engagements between the two large armies, Charles, instead of rallying his troops, decided to seek an armistice. That was the Austrian way, to compromise after calculating the results of a battle, not to fight to the bitter end. Yet again he had failed to take advantage of a formidable performance in battle for which he had no reason to feel ashamed; the Austrians had fought as well as the French. The myth of Napoleon’s invincibility had been challenged: he had nearly lost against a smaller Austrian force; he had shown himself to be only narrowly more skilled as a general than Charles, talented but no genius. Even the Emperor Francis, who was usually more pacific than Charles, wanted his army to go on fighting, which led to a rift with his brother and the latter’s premature retirement.

  The Austrians’ peace overtures were rebuffed, however, by Napoleon’s vengeful demands for Francis to abdicate, to dismiss his ministers and to emasculate his regular army. Francis initially stalled the negotiations in the hope that the British would open a more substantial second front than that in Portugal, or that the Russians would enter the war on Austria’s side. Once again it seemed that Napoleon, although now in possession of Vienna, had overplayed his hand.

  Francis had good reason for stalling, as Britain was just about to open up a second front, with an attack on the Scheldt. Unfortunately through, it was an embarrassing disaster. It was called the Walcheren expedition. This was no mere sideshow, like Wellesley’s expedition to the Peninsula: it was supposed to send the French reeling and bring the rest of Europe into renewed combination against her. The leader of the expedition was, in classic politico-dynastic style, the Earl of Chatham, Pitt’s elder brother, a capable politician and administrator. But it did not help that his sole military experience was to have commanded a brigade in Holland a decade before and to have served as a subaltern in Gibraltar; the real business of war was left to subordinates li
ke General Sir Eyre Coote, a tetchy veteran from India with a decidedly mixed record.

  Chatham was a man of great integrity and intelligence, but he was also comparatively old at fifty-two to be a general of the time. Canning, the brilliant but far too clever mainstay of the government, had put him in charge of the expedition to elevate him to a position from which he might be expected to succeed the decrepit Duke of Portland as prime minister. Canning knew he was himself too controversial for the job: but Chatham would be an ideal figurehead and would block Canning’s great rival Castlereagh.

  On the naval side, Admiral Sir Richard Strachan had won his spurs by defeating the last squadron that had tried to escape Trafalgar and was energetic, straightforward and short-tempered. He held Chatham in contempt as a political appointee. Both men assumed the attack on the Scheldt would be as much of a walkover as the taking out of the Danish fleet had been years before.

  The expedition consisted of some 40,000 men along with 400 transports and 200 escorts, thirty-seven of them ships of the line. It was possibly the greatest expeditionary force Britain had ever assembled, a kind of Napoleonic invasion in reverse: with his puny forces in Portugal, Wellesley could only have looked on in frustrated envy. The objective was: ‘The capture or destruction of the enemy’s ships either building at Antwerp and Flushing or afloat in the Scheldt, the destruction of the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp, Terneuse and Flushing, the reduction of the island of Walcheren and the rendering, if possible, the Scheldt no longer navigable for ships of war.’

  The expedition was an absurdity from the start. It would have achieved little other than a morale-boosting naval victory. It could certainly not have opened up a second front, because there was no real sign of disaffection against Napoleon in the Low Countries, which the highly strung King Louis, through his moderate policies, had effectively won over. The whole thing was in fact designed to be a magnificent showpiece with the objective of destroying more of Napoleon’s naval capability, which had anyway been effectively emasculated after Aix Roads. It was also intended to impress the Austrians that the British were serious in their desire to open up a second front, but it came too late. In fact, the Battle of Wagram took place ten days before the British embarkation began.

  On 28 July the armada left Kent and had reached Holland by the evening. The Scheldt estuary was divided in two by three big islands: the most navigable entrance was the West Scheldt, which would open the way up to the city of Antwerp. To enter this it was necessary to take the Dutch forts on Kadzand on the south side of the Wielengen Channel leading to the West Scheldt and then strike north at Flushing. The first goal was to land 5,000 troops to take the Kadzand.

  Unfortunately, a gale drove the British into the entrance to the East Scheldt to the north. Even so, some 12,000 troops under Coote were disembarked at Veere to march across the island of Flushing at the entrance of the estuary and take the town of Flushing. They had to take two towns in the middle of the island before they got there. By now Flushing had been reinforced.

  Meanwhile a force of British troops, supposed to take Kadzand on the other side of the Channel, had not yet done so. These almost incredibly leisurely proceedings took place as the French, caught entirely by surprise with only 1,500 men to defend the main river entrance to Antwerp, dug in and sent frantic messages to Paris. There, in Napoleon’s absence in Austria, the devious police chief Fouché was effectively in charge and brushed aside the minister of war to put Bernadotte, who was in disgrace after his performance at Wagram, in charge of proceedings. Both Fouché and Bernadotte to some extent represented the old revolutionary Jacobin faction, and hated Napoleon. This was clearly an attempt to show that France could defend itself and survive without the Emperor.

  Bernadotte arrived in time to reinforce Louis Napoleon, who had around 12,000 troops in Antwerp. The momentum was being lost by the British; by the end of August there were 26,000 French troops in Antwerp. Chatham meanwhile had settled down in agreeable quarters at Middelbourg on the island of Walcheren. One officer observed: ‘God knows! Everything goes on at headquarters as if they were at the Horse Guards; you must signify what you want, you must call between certain hours, send up your name and wait your turn.’

  At last on 13 August the British opened fire on Flushing. It was a devastating broadside, in which virtually the whole town was set alight and 600 civilians were killed. As soon as the British entered on 18 August, the 6,000-strong French garrison surrendered. It was a repeat, without even the dash, of the attack on Copenhagen.

  The British had suffered some 700 casualties. They proceeded, with great deliberation, to Batz, just off the point where the estuary narrowed to give access to Antwerp. While they waited for the order to advance, malaria, in that low-lying marsh, exacerbated by the French opening the sluices so that it would flood, attacked the troops, along with dysentery caused by salt meat and fat.

  While the leisurely Chatham and the more impatient Strachan tried to decide which was the most suitable route for attack, they observed the reinforcement of Antwerp. Chatham, realistically, decided that an attack was out of the question and at the end of August ordered an evacuation to England. Some 3,000 had died and the rest, 11,000 of them seriously ill, were shipped to hospitals in Kent. Chatham had at least shown the good sense to cut his losses. But thousands had died and nothing had been gained. A doggerel of that time ran:

  Lord Chatham, with his sword half-drawn,

  Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan.

  Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em,

  Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.

  As a result of the fiasco, Portland’s sickly government at last fell, to be replaced by a mediocrity, Spencer Perceval, and Francis was eventually forced to accede to most of Napoleon’s terms. Francis was allowed to stay on as Emperor. But Napoleon, after his near-miss, was in an angry mood: the Austrian empire was shorn of its share of Poland and all of its remaining lands down the Dalmatian coast, as well as Croatia and most of Slovenia. Bavaria’s pro-French puppet regime was given Salzburg, Berchtesgaden and a slice of Upper Austria. Part of eastern Galicia was given to the Russians as a prize for staying out of the war. The Austrian army was to be reduced to 150,000 men, the militia disbanded, reparations of some 85 millions francs were to be paid, and Austria was ordered to join the Continental System.

  Chapter 64

  RULER OF ALL HE SURVEYED

  Napoleon seemed to recover all his bounce and self-confidence after Wagram. In spite of the narrowness of victory, and his first ever defeat at Aspern-Eylau, he behaved as though the Austrian campaign had been one of his greatest achievements. Once again he had not understood that by treating the Austrians vengefully he had made another war inevitable. Much less had he realized that the Austrians had regained their self-respect during the Wagram campaign. Like a man who has suddenly peered over the edge – as he had at Aspern-Essling – and then saved himself, he behaved with an exuberance that had suddenly found its release. This expressed itself in a number of ways: an extraordinary attack on the Pope; a new bossiness towards his proconsular brothers; and the final decision to divorce Josephine.

  Napoleon’s hubris was never more on public display than in the autumn of 1809 when he believed he had finally confounded all his enemies. Napoleon’s relations with the saintly but clever Pope Pius VII had long been deteriorating. He wrote to his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais:

  My son, I perceive by his Holiness’ letter, which he certainly never wrote himself, that I am threatened. I would not tolerate this from any other Pope. What does Pius VII wish to do when he denounces me to Christendom? Put an interdict on my throne? Excommunicate me? Does he imagine that their muskets will drop from my soldiers’ fingers? Or is it to place a dagger in my people’s hands to assassinate me? . . . I shall doubtless hear that the Holy Father intends to apply the scissors to my head and to lock me up in a monastery! . . . The present Pope has too much power; priests are not made to rule; let them follow the example of St
Peter, St Paul, and the holy Apostles.

  The Pope had been chafing at certain aspects of his Concordat with France and had taken the provocative step of refusing to apply the Continental System to his territories. Privately the Vatican was urging Austria to reignite its war with France. In response Napoleon had ordered a French occupation of the Papal States in 1808, which took place without resistance. Now the States were formally annexed. The Pope issued a bull of excommunication against whoever attacked the Holy See ‘whatever their honours or dignities’ – a transparent reference to Napoleon. The Emperor’s reaction was that ‘the bull of excommunication is so ridiculous a document that one may as well take no notice of it’. Napoleon was not prepared to put up with insolence, as he saw it, from the Pope who was his subject as a temporal ruler – indeed had no business to be a ruler himself or to meddle in temporal affairs.

  Yet he did not want to offend the church, for which he had a healthy respect because of its hold over the spiritual loyalties of half the citizens of his empire. As he had once written:

  Never throw oil, but throw water, on the passions of men; scatter prejudices, and firmly strive against the false priests who have degraded religion by making it the tool of the ambition of the powerful and of kings. The morality of the Gospel is that of equality, and hence it is most favourable to the republican government which is now to be that of your country. Experience has undeceived the French, and has convinced them that the Catholic religion is better adapted than any other to diverse forms of government, and is particularly favourable to republican institutions. I myself am a philosopher, and I know that, in every society whatsoever, no man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and whither he is going. Simple reason cannot guide you in this matter; without religion one walks continually in darkness; and the Catholic religion alone gives to man certain and infallible information concerning his origin and his latter end.