The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Chapter 86

  THE GREAT CHASE

  The two main southern and eastern prongs advanced at the end of January, Schwarzenberg slowly to the Languedoc plateau, where he halted on Metternich’s instructions, Blücher crossing the Meuse, penetrating seventy miles into French territory. On 24 January Blücher fought a first battle with the French vanguard, which ended in a stalemate with high casualties. Napoleon returned to the area the following day, supported by Ney and Marmont. He tried to work his way around the Prussians’ rear. But Blücher had retreated to Brienne. He and Gneisenau were nearly captured and had to leave hastily when Napoleon’s small army surprised them and dealt them a bloody nose, leaving 4,000 Prussian casualties. In fierce winter blizzards, Napoleon pushed the bulk of Blücher’s army down the road to La Rothière.

  However Schwarzenberg, who was only fifty miles away, was able to detach some 50,000 men of his large army to reinforce Blücher, and Napoleon blundered into this much larger force in blinding snow, losing some 5,000 casualties as well as a hundred guns. On the road back to Troyes, which he reached on 3 February, he lost a further 4,000 through desertion. The allies had lost some 6,000 men as well, but could much better afford them.

  Intoxicated by the victory, Blücher and Schwarzenberg, who could not keep so large an army supplied in winter, separated again, Blücher moving along the Marne and Schwarzenberg up the Seine. Blücher was supremely confident that French resistance was all but over. ‘The road to Paris is free,’ he declared. ‘I do not believe that Napoleon will engage in another battle.’ The Prussians made a forced march along the road to Paris, but Napoleon suddenly veered north and in four days won four separate engagements which cost Blücher some 16,000 men and nearly resulted in his being captured or trampled to death at Vauchamps. Napoleon was satisfied: he had skilfully avoided and then damaged a much larger army.

  He could now switch his attention to Schwarzenberg’s army, which was threatening Paris from the south. He marched his men fifty miles in thirty-five hours and inflicted serious losses on the enemy in engagements at Mormant, Valjouan and Montereau; at these clashes he inflicted a further 6,000 casualties for the loss of 2,000 of his own men. On 21 February he won a further victory. He sought to trap his retreating enemy at Troyes, but learnt that Schwarzenberg’s army had linked up with Blücher to provide a force of some 100,000, compared to Napoleon’s 70,000 or so.

  The allies withdrew at Napoleon’s approach, Blücher moving to join up with Bulow in the north, Schwarzenberg moving south to Langres. Napoleon had thus won seven battles in eight days and forced two much larger armies to retreat. As usual, success went to his head. When he was offered a return to the 1792 boundaries by the allies, he delayed and the moment for peace was soon past.

  Blücher, perhaps encouraged by the news that Britain would pay £5 million to subsidize the war, resumed the move towards Paris. Napoleon promptly marched towards him, but Blücher was too quick, crossing to the north bank of the Marne and liaising with the smaller army of General von Bülow to swell his force to 100,000 men. Troyes had fallen to the south. On 7 March Napoleon caught up with Blücher at Craonne, where Ney perhaps foolishly staged an impetuous frontal attack, which resulted in 5,000 casualties on both sides before the combined Prussian-Russian army withdrew. Napoleon scented victory: Blücher’s army repeatedly got away, but the latter was under intense pressure, with indiscipline spreading among his men.

  Napoleon’s renewed cockiness caused him contemptuously to dismiss further allied peace proposals. The Emperor’s judgement was being warped by his domination of the field, even though he could still not secure decisive victories. He wrote to Caulaincourt: ‘I am so moved at the sight of the infamous proposal that you send me, that I feel dishonoured at merely being in such a position that such a proposal can be made. I will send you my instructions from Troyes or Châtillon; but I think I had almost sooner lose Paris than see such propositions made to the French people. You are always talking about the Bourbons – I had sooner see the Bourbons back in France, with reasonable conditions, than such infamous proposals as you have transmitted!’

  Meanwhile he cherished hopes that the hitherto inanimate French peasantry would rise up in a Spanish-style insurrection against the allied troops as they helped themselves to food and laid waste to the land in the depths of the French winter: ‘The enemy’s soldiers are behaving horribly everywhere. All the inhabitants are fleeing to the woods. There are no peasants left in the villages. The enemy consume everything, take all the horses, all the cattle, all the clothing and rags of the peasants; they strike everybody, men and women, and commit a great number of rapes. I hope soon to draw my people from this miserable state and from this truly horrible suffering. The enemy should think of this twice, for Frenchmen are not patient; they are courageous by nature, and I expect to see them forming themselves into free companies.’ He was in the throes of self-delusion.

  Chasing after Blücher, he considered his adversary all but defeated. But the old man suddenly decided to make a stand at Laon, where a steep hill 330 feet high rose abruptly out of the surrounding countryside. It was protected by two villages at its foot, and by marshes and woods to the south, while it commanded flat countryside to the north. Blücher had tired of fleeing and he was reinforced by Bulow’s troops in defence of the town itself, covered the hill with snipers and put two battalions each into the villages below. His main corps was stationed on either side and a reserve of two Prussian corps was hidden behind the hill.

  On 9 March Napoleon’s 37,000-strong army arrived in thick fog from the south-west and the south-east. Blücher, who was exhausted and ill, took up a position on the side of the hill, believing Napoleon’s army to be 100,000 strong and expecting the main attack to come from the east, where it was in fact only 10,000 strong. When the fog cleared in the late morning, as one Prussian observer commented from the same vantage point as Blücher:

  It was not one continued battle, but different corps of the enemy as they came in sight were attacked, and engagements were taking place at several points distinct from each other at the same time. . . . A mass of cavalry tried to hew a road into the middle of them; but they were not to be broken; they waved every way, and curved and bent, but always drew closer again into a dense mass as if they had been one single living body. It was a grand, a wonderful sight! . . . The generals themselves viewed the spectacle with amazement; Gneisenau was loud in his delight.

  A cannonball nearly injured Blücher in his exposed position.

  At around four Napoleon, unusually hesitant, ordered a major attack but discovered that the boggy ground behind the woods prevented the cavalry and artillery from softening up the Austrian position. As dusk approached, Blücher realized the weakness of the French column in the east and ordered Yorck forward in a major assault. The column’s commander, the usually talented General Marmont, had left for a sleep in a nearby building, and his men panicked and, in the face of the allied attack, fled back along the road by which they had come. Marmont lost 3,500 men and nearly all his officers.

  Blücher, delighted, ordered Yorck on a flanking march to the east to cut off the rest of Napoleon’s main force. The following morning, however, the Prussian commander was nearly paralysed by an inflammation of the eyes and command passed to his chief of staff, General Gneisenau. However brilliant a planner and military reformer, Gneisenau was indifferent and cautious as a field commander and he feared Napoleon’s reputation. He cancelled the flanking move, preferring to stay on the defensive, fearing that Napoleon’s army was far stronger than it indeed was.

  Napoleon staged a dawn attack against the heavily fortified hill which was easily repulsed before finally deciding to withdraw that evening, having suffered losses of around 7,000 men compared to the Prussian-Russian ones of 2,000. It had been a defeat on points for the French, who had failed to take the hill or destroy Blücher’s army, but Napoleon had still escaped being completely overwhelmed by a force nearly three times the size of his own –
as would probably have occurred if Blücher had continued with his flanking movement.

  The Emperor swiftly got in his retaliation, striking at an unprotected enemy force near Rheims and inflicting 6,000 casualties to 700 French ones. Napoleon veered south to attack Schwarzenberg’s bigger but more dispersed army, which appeared to retreat and then suddenly stopped to face him at Arcis-sur-Aube. The French initially drove the Austrians out of the village, but were massively attacked and Napoleon was nearly killed when a shell exploded under his horse: he lamented that he had not been killed on the battlefield. ‘During the fight at Arcissur-Aube I did all I could to meet with a glorious end defending the soil of our country inch by inch. I exposed myself continuously. Bullets rained all around me; my clothes were full of them; but not one touched me. I am condemned to live!’

  The following day the French found that the entire army of Bohemia had arrived, and they had to retreat under fire; they had lost 3,000 men to the allies’ 4,000, but had also given up possession of the battlefield. Seemingly irrepressible, Napoleon suddenly surged forward eastward to St Didier behind the allied armies, threatening their supply lines. But the allies, believing that Paris was on the brink of rising up against Napoleon, took no notice and marched straight to the city, three marches ahead. He raced desperately to intercept them.

  The 120,000-strong allied army overwhelmed Marmont’s forces just outside the capital, and then again in a skirmish at the gates of the city overlooked by Montmartre, where Napoleon’s dismayed brothers Jérôme and Lucien watched before they made their getaway. With the third sibling, Joseph, having done nothing to defend the city, Marmont signed the capitulation of Paris on 30 March. The Empress Marie Louise and the infant King of Rome had already left the city. Napoleon marched furiously to Fontainebleau only to learn of the surrender. ‘It is the first time I have heard of a population of 300,000 that cannot survive for three months,’ he fumed. He believed that after only a few days scarcity of supplies would have driven the allies back from outside the city, although this seems unlikely.

  Talleyrand emerged from the shadows to lead a provisional government on 1 April and to welcome the Tsar Alexander and the King of Prussia, Frederick William, into the city. For both monarchs it was a moment to savour: the former had burned his beautiful city of Moscow in a grim attempt to drive the French back just over six months before, while nearly all of the latter’s country had been occupied by the French for some six years.

  Talleyrand entertained them at the Opera, where they were received rapturously by the same population that had once cheered the guillotining of monarchs and then welcomed Napoleon’s triumphs: their concern now was to prevent a massive bloodletting in revenge. In Fontainebleau an incredulous Napoleon, still at the head of 60,000 men, declared he would attack the enemy in Paris, to cries of ‘To Paris, To Paris!’ from his men. ‘We will go and prove to them that the French nation is mistress of her own soil; that if we have long been masters among others, we will always be so here, and that we are able to defend our colours, our independence, and the integrity of our country.’

  Some ninety miles away in Orléans his faithful, sweet Austrian Empress, whom he had named as Regent of France, issued a proclamation to the French people: ‘Frenchmen, fortunes of war having put the capital in foreign hands, the Emperor, hastening to succour it, is at the head of his armies, so often victorious . . . Remain faithful to your vows, listen to the voice of a princess entrusted to your loyal support who glories in being a Frenchwoman and sharing the destinies of the sovereign you have yourselves chosen . . . The right and person of my son are under your protection.’ It was touching and pathetic.

  Ney, his most fearless commander and Berthier, his faithful chief of staff, now had the disagreeable task of telling Napoleon that his army would not march. ‘The army will obey me,’ insisted Napoleon. ‘The army will obey its chief,’ replied Ney.

  Napoleon realized that the great adventure that had started with the shabby coup d’état at Brumaire eleven years before – or perhaps with his first military action in helping to recapture Toulon in 1795 – was over. He issued a proclamation on 4 April: ‘The Allied powers having announced that the Emperor Napoleon is the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, mindful of his engagements, declares that he is ready to descend from the throne, to give up France and even life itself for the good of the country, inseparable from the rights of his son, those of the regency of the Empress, and the maintenance of the laws of the Empire.’

  Marie Louise desperately wanted to join him at Fontainebleau, so close to Orléans, but was partly dissuaded and partly kidnapped by a squadron of her father’s troops and forced to join the Austrian Emperor at Rambouillet. Defiantly she wrote to her beloved Napoleon: ‘By now you will know that they made me leave Orléans and that orders have been given to stop me from joining you and even by resort to force if necessary. Be on your guard, my dearest, they are out to fool us. I am worried to death for you, but I shall take a firm line with my father. I shall say that I am absolutely set on joining you, and nobody is going to prevent me from doing that.’

  Napoleon penned a note to Marie Louise, saying he loved her ‘more than anything in the world’ and during the night of 13 April he attempted to take poison. Caulaincourt was summoned to find him convulsed in agony. After four hours he began to recover: he had apparently taken a dose he had been given two years before in case of capture by Russian partisans: it had failed to work.

  On 16 April an English officer, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, perhaps the first to meet him since 1803, gave this description of the deposed Emperor at Fontainebleau. ‘I saw before me a short, active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell. He was dressed in an old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red top boots, unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely upon his upper lip and breast.’ The fight was not quite yet over: for Eugène de Beauharnais still held out in Italy, a stepson as faithful to his master as his second wife had been.

  De Beauharnais had prepared a spirited rearguard that confirmed the abilities he had shown on the Russian retreat. He had refused allied calls to make him King of Italy, pulling back to the Adige river with 50,000 men as his line of defence against the Austrians, who numbered some 70,000. When Murat, with 50,000 men, declared war on him from the south, he pulled back to a line of defence along the Mincio and the Po rivers. There he fought and won three battles. During the most remarkable, both sides simultaneously attacked in fog, crossing the Mincio at different points to engage the enemy, and finding themselves in trouble on the reverse side. De Beauharnais had the best of the battle of the Mincio, taking 2,500 prisoners.

  Napoleon ordered his stepson to bring his troops to his defence in France. But de Beauharnais refused, pointing out that they were mainly Italians who would desert if asked to fight in France. The British now joined the fight in Italy under Lord William Bentinck who early in March landed with 6,000 British and Sicilian troops at Leghorn. They became the forerunners of Italian independence and unity by calling upon the people to rise up against Eugène and form a free nation.

  Bentinck immediately quarrelled with Murat and threatened to march on Naples and overthrow him. Castlereagh ordered him to desist and Bentinck settled for occupying the port of Genoa, while Murat moved north to attack his wife’s step-nephew. De Beauharnais, who had already gone into action against Murat, with mixed results, prepared to do so again, but news arrived of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. This had been signed on 11 April. The allies, at the Tsar’s urging, had decided to send Napoleon to exile on the island of Elba: Corsica and Sardinia were considered too large, Corfu too remote. The other members of the Bonaparte claim were to be given pensions. De Beauharnais’s hopes of becoming Italy’s new King were dashed by the Austrians, who had stirred up riots against him in Italy. He agreed to step down and departed for Munich in Bavaria, then to Paris, t
o be at his mother Josephine’s bedside when she died in May. Two years later he was given the small Dutchy of Leuchtenberg by the King of Bavaria but presided over it only another seven years, dying peacefully at forty-three after the strain of so much campaigning.

  Napoleon meanwhile left for Elba on 20 April in fourteen carriages escorted by sixty Polish cavalry, travelling to Lyons and the Rhone valley, a hotbed of royalist sentiment. At Avignon a mob stopped his coach and tried to lynch him. Napoleon uncharacteristically showed his fear and went on his way disguised as a servant, insisting on travelling aboard a British ship for greater safety. Once on the island he continued obsessively to rule its 12,000 inhabitants as though they were an empire, issuing decrees and reforming the administration. Unfortunately, he had little money and after a few months’ ‘activity and restless perseverance’, in the words of Campbell, the British commissioner who guaranteed his safety, he began to keep to his small house, where his faithful mother Letizia and sister Pauline joined him to while away the time playing cards. He snubbed Maria Walewska, however, who sought to join him.

  Napoleon soon ran out of money – he had taken four million francs to Elba and had been promised two million more by the new French government, which never came. He feared he would soon not be able to afford his bodyguards and might be assassinated or transferred to the Azores. (Fouché said that Napoleon in Elba was to France what Vesuvius was to Naples.) Above all, he learnt with satisfaction of the rapid disillusion that followed the arrival of France’s desperately uncharismatic new King.