With his key subordinates and staff his methods were equally efficacious. Napoleon appears to have believed that the way to force the maximum effort out of his officers was to keep them in a state of mental alertness bordering on nervous anxiety. Normally his mood was fair and just, but nobody could ever be sure that one of those redoubtable rages (which Napoleon could apparently summon at will) or one of his equally feared fits of severity was not just around the corner. He rationed his smiles and jokes and had few favorites. He often played his subordinates off against one another, adopting the strategy of “divide and rule.” Similarly, he kept everybody on their toes by issuing sudden orders without any warning; instant execution was taken for granted—no excuses were ever entertained. Little notice was given of impending moves of headquarters, and Napoleon expected everybody to be on the road within thirty minutes of his giving the word. Even Berthier, who was permitted more familiarity than anybody else, was at times driven to near-despair by his master’s endless demands, criticisms and shifting moods. On one occasion in 1812, the chief of staff was found by Las Casas in tears: “I am being killed by hard work,” lamented the disconsolate Berthier. “A mere soldier is happier than I.”39 On another, the hapless Alexandre found himself seized by the throat while his master battered his head mercilessly against a stone wall. Napoleon’s tantrums were not to be taken lightly.
After returning from the day’s ride, Napoleon settled down to his desk again to read the latest news and sign more orders, granting interviews or dictating replies as necessary. For further information he drew upon his invaluable carnets, the reports of Savary’s spies and the résumés prepared by Berthier. His perspiring secretaries found it difficult to keep up with the speed of the Emperor’s dictation as Napoleon paced up and down the room or tent, his racing mind devising complicated memoranda and timetables without the least sign of effort. Meals were haphazard affairs; a frugal luncheon was normally taken in the saddle or with the officer of a unit under visitation, and the timing of the evening meal was rarely consistent. However, the Emperor expected food to be ready for him at a moment’s notice, and the Imperial cooks accordingly often found themselves preparing and discarding endless meals, awaiting their master’s pleasure. Had not Duroc’s parsimonious eye been so strict, the surplus food would have found many welcoming mouths, but under the severe regimen of the Grand Marshal of the Palace every chicken was listed and had to be accounted for.
The Emperor rarely dined alone. He usually sat down with Berthier or, in his absence, with Caulaincourt or Duroc; distinguished personages visiting headquarters were invariably summoned to share the Imperial table. His servants recall that Napoleon ate fast—twenty minutes being the average time for a meal—and as often as not in silence; he ate little and drank even less, but was partial to an occasional glass of his favorite Chambertin. Relaxation was rare, but sometimes the Emperor would play an uproarious game of pontoon or whist, cheating like mad and consequently always emerging the winner. Even Emperors and geniuses have their foibles.
Under normal conditions, after a final conference with Bacler d’Albe the Emperor retired to his camp bed about eight or nine o’clock to take four or five hours sleep, the faithful Roustam sleeping across his door. Even then, however, the harassed Household could hardly relax. At any moment an imperious voice might be heard calling for a secretary or an aide to take dictation, and woe betide any individual who was away from his post, even momentarily, when the Imperial summons came at any hour of day or night. Nervous breakdowns were not unknown phenomena among the personnel of the Imperial entourage; the strain of serving a genius was both exacting and ceaseless.
One of Napoleon’s famous cocked hats
The Emperor’s camp bed; the color of the drapes is green
From the recorded recollections of his harassed associates, it is obvious that activity was the most obvious characteristic of the Emperor, both in the field and out of it. His famous letter to Josephine, dictated during the crisis of the Jena campaign in 1806, well illustrates the type of life the Emperor was wont to lead. “I am today at Gera, my dearest love, and things are going very well, quite as I hoped they would…. My health remains excellent, and I have put on weight since my departure. Yet I travel from twenty to twenty-five leagues each day, on horseback, in my carriage, etc., I retire to rest at eight o’clock and rise at midnight. I sometimes imagine that you will not have yet retired to bed. Ever thine.”40 He was never particular about the conditions of his quarters; sometimes he was quartered in a castle, sometimes in a ruined barn, “with mud up to our knees.”41 On the eve of battle he would habitually bivouac in the midst of his Guard, the servants setting up the five blue and white tents (anteroom, study, bedroom, chief of staff’s office and officers’ mess tent); the lesser officials would compete for places around the huge bonfire which was often lit in front of the Emperor’s quarters.
We have now completed our description of the Grande Armée, its staff and the daily life of the all-seeing and all-commanding genius who presided over every aspect of its operation in the field. The time has come to turn to the Campaign of 1805, and see the French war machine in devastating action.
Napoleon’s carnets were brought up to date by his staff daily and completely renewed every fortnight. Those referring to military affairs were organized as follows: each regiment would be allocated a page, subdivided into columns, on which were entered the names of the commanding officer, the major, the senior officers, a list of engagements, the position of the depot, a list of casualties, of those presently in hospital, of recruits under training and the areas from which these were drawn. Other notebooks held the record of every officer in the army, giving his period of service, campaigns, distinctions, awards, promotion, pay. Napoleon was nothing if not methodical and thorough, as these carnets show.
PART SEVEN
From the Rhine to the Danube
NAPOLEON’S DESTRUCTION OF THE THIRD COALITION
INTRODUCTION THE EVE OF AUSTERLITZ
C
’EST L’ANNIVERSAIRE! VIVE L’EMPEREUR!” The cold early morning air rang to the sound of cheering as unit after unit of La Grande Armée flocked from their campfires to greet their leader. It was one of those rare, spontaneous demonstrations of soldierly trust and affection which warm the heart of any general. The Emperor was visibly affected as he moved from bivouac to bivouac amid the burning brands of twisted straw held aloft by the soldiers to light his way. “Look how happy he is!” exclaimed Sergeant Coignet of the 96th Regiment of Grenadiers of the Guard as he passed by. “He looked very touched,” recorded another eyewitness, and “moved his hand in a characteristic gesture as if to say ‘Thank you.’”1 As the procession passed through an artillery bivouac the Emperor gruffly warned the impromptu torchbearers to keep well away from the ammunition caissons; he had no wish to see a fireworks display added to the general celebrations. At times the enthusiasm of the troops threatened to get out of hand, and the escorting staff officers and aides-decamp were forced to form a ring round their master.
Away across the valley on the Pratzen Heights, Russian sentinels called their officers to report the unusual degree of activity in the French camp; a hurried staff conference was convened at the village of Blasowitz to discuss the possibility of a French night attack or alternatively an attempted evacuation, but little by little the commotion died away, and by 2:30
A.M. all was quiet again except for the occasional exchange of musket shots by over-excited picquets in the vicinity of Tellnitz.
As the Emperor lay back on his bed of straw to snatch a few hours more sleep, he was heard to murmur, “It has been the finest evening of my life.”2 A few hours away lay the “struggle of the Three Emperors,” or, as it is more commonly known, the Battle of Austerlitz. The date was December 2, 1805.
The flag-bedecked streets of Paris en fête seemed an age away from the frost-coated fields of Moravia, but in point of time exactly one year separated them. On December 2, 1804, a gorgeously arr
ayed Napoleon had ridden in splendor through cheering crowds to the cathedral of Notre Dame, there to crown himself Emperor of the French in the presence of Pope Pius VII, the Bonaparte family, and the newly created grandees of the land. It was all a far cry from the austere days of the Republic, certain “old grumblers” of the newly-created Imperial Guard pointed out as they took down the revolutionary emblems from their bearskins and replaced them with the eagle badges; but then, much water had flown under the Seine bridges since 1792, and no doubt le Tondu* deserved the royal honors more than any man alive.
Twelve months later the Emperor and his grenadiers were again together, but the occasion could hardly have been more contrasting. At four in the morning the first bugles began to sound reveille; the day was come, and with it the moment of supreme testing for the Grande Armée and its master.
However, we are anticipating events, and must return to the early months of 1805 to trace the origins of this celebrated action.
Literally, “The shorn one”—a nickname bestowed on Bonaparte by his Guard.
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PLANS AND PREPARATIONS
Throughout the spring and summer months of 1805, the Allied governments and staffs had been busily concerting plans for the coming offensive which would restore Europe to the territorial balance of 1789, or so they hoped. In due course, after much discussion, the following scheme of operations gradually emerged. The Aulic Council was insistent, for reasons of Austrian prestige, that the main imperialist effort should be made in the North Italian theater, and to that end the Archduke Charles was allocated 95,000 men and ordered to prepare for a crossing of the River Adige with Mantua, Peschiera and Milan as his initial objectives. In conjunction with this advance in Italy, the Archduke John was to secure the Tyrol with 23,000 troops and operate as a link between his brothers, Charles and Ferdinand. The latter, with the able Quartermaster-General Mack as his chief of staff and mentor, was under orders to advance into Bavaria with an initial force of 70,000 men to discourage the Elector of that country from overeager cooperation with the French, and at the same time to cover Kutusov’s and Bennigsen’s approach from the east. After being joined by two Russian armies, the Archduke would hand over command to the Emperor Francis for a combined drive through the Black Forest, Swabia and Franconia toward Strasbourg. The Tsar had promised that Kutusov should arrive on Bavarian soil by October 20 with 35,000 troops, closely followed by Buxhowden’s army (40,000). Meanwhile, a third Russian army, some 20,000 strong, under the command of Marshal Bennigsen, would move on Franconia by way of Bohemia, charged with the duty of keeping a wary eye on recalcitrant Prussia to the north. In addition to these major dispositions, the Austrians decided to detach independent corps to serve with the Swedes in Pomerania and with the British in Naples, but these were regarded as purely subsidiary offensives, designed to distract the attention of the French and to encourage the dissipation of their resources.
This comprehensive plan of operations was riddled with inconsistencies and blatant errors which Napoleon was not to be slow in exploiting. The Aulic Council, drawing on the bitter experiences of 1796 and 1800, were basing their whole strategy on the assumption that Napoleon would inevitably make his main effort in the Italian theater once more, although the present siting of the French army along the Channel coast should have ruled out such an assessment. A second error was the inexcusable failure of the Austrian staff to make proper allowance for the ten days’ difference between their calendar and that of the Russians (who still calculated dates after the ancient Julian system). In the event, therefore, Kutusov could hardly arrive on the River Inn on the scheduled Austrian date, and this miscalculation was to ruin the balance of the entire Allied scheme.* In any case, the Austrians were planning to enter active operations prematurely. In the third place, the Austrian army in the Tyrol was unnecessarily large for a purely liaison role, and constituted a great waste of good troops who might have been far better employed in mounting diversionary attacks against Switzerland. A further blatant weakness in the Allied arrangements lay in the defective chains of high command; on the Russian side, Kutusov was instructed by his master, the Tsar, to obey instructions issued by the Austrian Emperor or the archdukes, but not by any other Austrian general. Even more crippling, as it proved, was the dual system of command set up in the Austrian Army of Germany. The Archduke Ferdinand was nominal commander in chief in the Danube theater (until he relinquished control to the Emperor), but Francis had greater faith in the abilities of General Mack and ordered Ferdinand to obey his own chief of staff’s directives. As a direct result, this chaotic muddle led to violent clashes of opinion and personality on several critical occasions in the first phase of the Campaign of 1805; delay, dissension and doubt were the only predictable products of such a system, and fatal they were to prove.
Once the decision to postpone the descent on England had been finally taken, Napoleon put into operation a new plan of campaign based on a careful appreciation of known enemy strengths and probable intentions. The French armies could expect attack from four possible directions. Two could be discounted as insignificant; an Anglo-Swedish onslaught against Hanover from Pomerania, or an Allied descent on Naples, would have little effect on the major issues of the war, and in the former case such an attack might even persuade Prussia to throw in her lot with the French. The remaining two lines of attack were, however, potentially more serious. The able Archduke Charles might succeed in dominating North Italy and even invade southern France; and secondly, most dangerous of all, the armament on the Danube could constitute a threat to Alsace if properly handled, and, once the Russian armies had come up, the Allied strength in this theater would be impressive.
The Emperor’s solution to this strategical problem was typical. The French would strike first and seize the initiative on the Danube front, straining every nerve to eliminate Ferdinand and Mack before the Russians could make their presence felt, and thereafter inflict a crushing defeat on Alexander I’s advancing forces. In broad outline, the French plan bore some resemblance to the original strategies of 1796 and 1800; at the outset of both of those campaigns General Bonaparte, as he then was, had envisaged the Danube as the key theater, and only the force of adverse circumstances turned the subsidiary Italian theater into the crucial area of operations on each occasion. This truth the Aulic Council failed to appreciate, confusing French expediency for French intention. In 1805, however, Napoleon was at last in a position to compel his subordinates to perform their allotted roles; there would be no more General Moreaus to compromise his plans. An integrated French army of unparalleled efficiency stood ready to execute his every order.
In outline, the Emperor’s plan was simple enough. French troops totaling 210,000 were to be formed into a new formation, La Grande Armée, and launched along the roads to the Danube by the fastest and most direct routes, assimilating on the way 25,000 Bavarian allies. Wheeling southward from the Rhine, the army would envelop General Mack’s exposed army if the Austrians were unwise enough to maintain their march toward the Black Forest under the provocation of Murat’s feint attack in that region. Lastly, it would be the turn of the Russian armies, and before December was out the two largest members of the Third Coalition should have been taught a lesson which it would take more than Pitt’s gold to obliterate from their memories. The decisive offensive in Germany would be supported by three other French forces: Massena was to tie down the Archduke Charles with 50,000 troops in the Italian theater, while General Gouvion St. Cyr marched on Naples with 20,000 men to hinder any Allied descent in that distant area. Meanwhile General Brune would be left at Boulogne with 30,000 troops to guard against the possibility of a British descent.
Much staff work of a brilliant nature was necessary to transform this grand design into a feasible project. Murat and Bertrand carried out discreet reconnaissances of the whole area between the Tyrol and River Main, while Savary, Napoleon’s chief of the planning staff, made detailed road surveys of the area between the Rhine and the Da
nube. In due course, the mature plan emerged, the Emperor marking off the necessary daily marching distances on a largescale map with his pair of dividers. The left wing of the Grande Armée, moving from Hanover and Utrecht, was to rendezvous in Württemberg; the center and right—comprising the troops from the Channel coast—were to mass along the Middle Rhine at Mannheim, Spire, Lauterbourg and Strasbourg. When all was ready, the army would move over the river, and while Murat and the cavalry made strong diversionary threats towards the Black Forest to distract Mack’s attention, seven corps d’armée would sweep through Germany toward a general rendezvous on the Danube, the axis of advance running between the towns of Pforzheim and Donauwörth. Once this concentration was safely accomplished, and Augereau’s VIIth Corps had come up from Brest to dominate the area between the Rhine and Upper Danube, Napoleon planned to cross the broad river and seize the city of Augsburg to serve as a new center of operations, cutting Mack’s main lines of communication. The definitive orders which set the army in motion were issued by Imperial Headquarters on August 26.
This plan of campaign bears certain resemblances to the basic schemes underlying the maneuvers of Lodi, Bassano, Arcola and Stradella, but the scale of the enterprise was immeasurably larger than on any previous occasion; instead of a handful of divisions, no less than seven corps were directly involved. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before; in the mid-seventeenth-century, the great Marshal Turenne had ruled that bold strategic movements could be undertaken by armies of up to 50,000 men, and in 1704 the Duke of Marlborough had successfully marched an aggregate total of 40,000 troops from the Netherlands to the Danube, but Napoleon’s scheme involved moving more than five times that number with consequently far greater time and distance problems and immeasurably increased logistical difficulties to surmount.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 49