Citizen Emperor (45 page)

Napoleon’s plan was simple, but it rested on two assumptions, neither of which were inevitable: that the allies would leave the Pratzen Heights to attack; and that Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout would arrive during the day to reinforce his right wing. To arrive, Davout had to force his men to march from Vienna, about 140 kilometres away, in forty-eight hours.
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Indeed, so much was dependent on those assumptions that Napoleon did not even bother making contingency plans. It is true that Major-General Franz von Weyrother a senior commander in the Austrian army, was given leeway to devise a plan that saw the allied left flank and centre descend from the heights to join up with the right wing in a kind of pincer movement that aimed to take Napoleon’s army from the rear. Napoleon guessed that this is what the allies might do, but he could not know it. He was therefore taking an awful gamble by evacuating the heights in the hope that the allies would behave as he predicted.

A scene is described in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
in which General Weyrother presented his plan of battle to the assembled commanders, among whom was Kutuzov, asleep. If the scene ever took place, Kutuzov would have known about the plan before it was presented, so the nap, given that he had been marginalized from the decision-making process, may have been nothing more than a silent protest at its inadequacies.
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It proved to be an egotistical gesture; if he had spoken up, it might well have encouraged other officers, Russian or Austrian, to raise objections or point to its flaws. None did, no doubt believing it inappropriate to speak out in the face of the commanding officer’s silence. It would have been better if the allies had remained firmly entrenched on the heights in a secure position to await the French onslaught. That they decided against this may have something to do with their desire to save face and to make up for losses incurred in the early stages of the campaign.

On the eve of battle, Napoleon decided to reconnoitre the enemy positions by the light of their bivouac fires, and ventured into the area between the lines. On returning to camp, one of the grenadiers accompanying him decided to make a makeshift torch of burning straw to light his way. He was soon recognized and followed or preceded by many more soldiers with many more torches. As they held them aloft, they began crying out ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ It is said that there was so much light generated by these thousands of torches that the allied camp believed the French had decided either on a night attack or to break camp.
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Many of his troops would have been aware it was the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation and would have found a release for the tension typical of the night before a great battle, so that there was soon a ‘general conflagration, a movement of enthusiasm’, that may even have taken Napoleon by surprise.
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By all accounts he was visibly touched; when he retired later that night, he is supposed to have said that it was the finest evening of his life.
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In the depths of the night, the torch. The scene has been described so many times that it has become an obligatory anecdote in any account of the battle. There is obviously some truth in the claim that Napoleon had condescended to come down to the level of the common soldier to partake of his bread (or potato as the case may be), since it is mentioned by a number of people.
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But it was also meant as a kind of living allegory in which Napoleon, wandering through the camp, became the light-filled centre who threw back the darkness of the night and unified the troops around his person.

The sun rose that morning over a scene covered in fog. It was to help, rather than hinder, Napoleon’s plans: the French right wing was to feign retreat and to hold the bulk of the allied army, which would descend from the Pratzen Heights in order to attack the retreating French. At the right moment, the French centre and left wing would attack the heights, thereby catching the allies in a pincer movement. By mid-afternoon, this is exactly what happened; the French had occupied the heights and were firing on the enemy below. An attempt by the Russian–Austrian army to extricate itself from the trap turned into a rout. Some of the Russian troops tried to escape across an icy lake. A French officer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Barrès took part in the manoeuvre, throwing the Russians on to the frozen lake.
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According to him, 12,000–15,000 men ran across so that they all broke through the ice at the same time.

Napoleon’s account of this retreat across the ice was grossly exaggerated in the 30th Bulletin, giving the impression that 20,000 Russians drowned after he gave the order for his artillery to fire shells to break up the ice.
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In fact, the marshes were far too shallow for that many to have drowned; possibly only a hundred men died that way.
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Fewer than 2,000 out of 10,000 troops in the 1st Column were listed missing in action by the Russians, many of whom would have been lost before reaching the marshes. As in some of the battles in Italy, Napoleon greatly inflated the number of enemy dead and wounded (at least 15,000 dead in the bulletin when in reality it was closer to 4,000), while minimizing the number of French dead and wounded.
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More interesting is the question why he would want to highlight the drownings on the Satschen marshes, an episode that must have appeared harsh, even to contemporaries used to the brutalities of war. It is possible that the episode was meant to remind people of two similar events in history: one of biblical proportions, the drowning of the Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea; the other more recent, the defeat of the Russians by the Teutonic Knights on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus in 1242. Probably no other event in the battle struck imaginations so deeply, so that it was accepted, repeated and exaggerated in the telling by veterans for years afterwards.

Alexander was isolated from the army on the Pratzen Heights quite early in the day, the rest of which he spent in the rear with his surgeon, two Cossacks and a couple of servants, with no contact and ignorant of how the battle was unfolding. After the battle was over, he was seen riding away with his small entourage, overcome by despair. At one stage, he got off his horse, sat on the wet ground at the foot of a tree, covered his face with a handkerchief and burst into tears. Major Carl Friedrich von Toll, a witness to the scene, attempted to offer a few words of consolation.
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Alexander was not weeping about the carnage, but about the personal humiliation he had just suffered. His English doctor, James Wylie, did what any respectable nineteenth-century doctor would do under the circumstances – he gave the Tsar a few drops of opium in some wine to calm his nerves.
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We have no idea how Francis reacted to the defeat, although he must have been discouraged. When he met Alexander some time during the morning of the next day,
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he informed him that he wished to open negotiations with Napoleon. This kind of surrender was typical on the part of the Austrians. The allies could have continued to fight – a sizeable portion of the army remained intact and reinforcements were on their way – but there was a general lack of will to carry on. The collapse of the Third Coalition was as much about lack of trust and indecision on the part of the Eastern powers (certainly on the part of Prussia’s Frederick William and then, once defeated at Austerlitz, on the part of Alexander), exacerbated by a lack of communication, as it was about Napoleon’s mastery on the field and bullying off. Alexander lacked the determination that he would later gain after seeing the Grande Armée ravage his country in 1812. After Austerlitz, he was hesitant about war, probably overwhelmed by the enormity of the decisions before him.
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Francis was more than ready to agree to an armistice. He met with Napoleon two days after the battle, on 4 December, at a mill between Zaroschitz and Nasedlowitz, but since the mill had been completely ransacked the meeting took place in the open.
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He was, like his Prussian counterpart, not really made to be king. He had the ‘the most pale complexion possible’, always wore the same uniform of white coat, red trousers and black boots, appeared shy and embarrassed when he spoke, and resembled more a member of the bourgeoisie than a king.
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He nevertheless plucked up enough gumption to put all the blame on the English for what had just transpired, those ‘merchants of human flesh’ as he called them. Napoleon was conciliatory. His initial offer to Francis was reasonably moderate; he did not threaten to take any territories away from Austria at this stage. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, he was still unsure where he stood – that is, whether the war would continue. The Prussians could have yet joined the fray, Archduke Charles had reached the Danube, and the Russian army was still largely intact. That is why Napoleon agreed to an armistice so readily. He did not know that Alexander had given up the fight and had decided to return home. He was, moreover, in a rather precarious position that a more ruthless wartime opponent would have exploited: his troops were overextended, exhausted and without any further reserves. If the allies had done their sums, they would have seen that they could still outnumber Napoleon.

Austerlitz helped obliterate the defeat at Trafalgar, which is why news of that battle, which had taken place six weeks previously on 21 October, was not released until after Ulm and Austerlitz.
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Of more significance, Austerlitz was the first imperial victory of any note (more so than Ulm) and the regime made much of it. Over time, it became more than a military victory, part of the Napoleonic legend, even in the Emperor’s lifetime, galvanizing future soldiers, even placating French public opinion anxious about the war and the directions it was taking. Contemporaries, especially those who had fought at Austerlitz, immediately recognized that they had lived through something extraordinary. ‘What a battle,’ exclaimed Commandant Salmon to his wife. ‘Since the world was made nothing like it has happened.’
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As news trickled through to the rest of Europe, Napoleon’s propaganda hit home so that the defeat appeared much worse than it was. The conservative political commentator Joseph de Maistre, writing to King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia, described Austerlitz as the ‘bloodiest [battle] ever recorded in modern history’.
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The expressions he used were ‘rivers of blood’ and ‘piles of bodies’, and he spoke of ‘Horror and indignation’. Worse was to occur in later years, but it is significant that the reaction among Europe’s political elite was laden with foreboding. ‘Roll up the map of Europe,’ Pitt is reputed to have said, ‘it will not be wanted these ten years.’
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And yet, paradoxically, news of the battle, which trickled into Paris on 10 December, does not appear to have produced as great a reaction as the French entry into Vienna.
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There was an attempt to involve the people in victory celebrations – in Paris, for example, the theatres were opened to the public, while in the province some prefects decided to distribute bread and wood to the poor
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– but Paris crowds were notoriously unpredictable. One should not read too much into the simple presence of a crowd, especially if it involved obtaining something for free; a crowd did not necessarily mean overwhelming support for either Napoleon or the regime.
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The Paris prefect of police was obliged to ‘invite’ the inhabitants of that imperial city to illuminate their dwellings.
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When a festival was organized to transfer the numerous enemy flags Napoleon had captured and sent to Paris – this took place on 1 January 1806 – the reaction of the onlookers seems to have been muted. It was obvious to one witness at least that some in the crowd had been paid to attend and to cheer.
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If the sentiments of the war-weary were not as enthusiastic as supporters of the regime might have expected, the fawning of the elite was very much in evidence, especially among Church prelates. In a Te Deum to celebrate the victory, the vicar of the Church of Saint-Merri in Paris declared that the French people, ‘whom God cherishes, is saved, the Lord himself has fought amid the ranks of our valiant warriors’.
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And he went on to describe Napoleon in the most flattering light: ‘He seems, this Hero, similar to the morning star, all the more brilliant because it succeeds the long nights and announces serene days.’ Cardinal Belloy, the Archbishop of Paris, wrote privately to Napoleon to say that he was great in the eyes of the world because his aptitude for the art of war had determined the destiny of Europe, but he was even greater in the eyes of religion because of the homage he had paid God.
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A number of poems, some published in pamphlet form (sometimes in Latin), and even plays, were sent to Napoleon celebrating the victory of Austerlitz.
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