The War of Wars (115 page)

The Emperor now embarked on a frenzy of propaganda and activity that showed he was anything but the spent force his enemies assumed. He despatched a letter of typical vainglory to the Emperor Francis of Austria.

Every time I met the Russian army I defeated it. My Guard was not once engaged, never fired a shot, nor did it lose a man in the presence of the enemy. It is true that between the 7th and the 16th of November 30,000 of my cavalry and artillery horses died; I abandoned several thousand wagons for lack of horses. In that frightful storm of frost, our men could not stand bivouacking; many wandered off to seek houses for shelter; there was no cavalry left to protect them. Cossacks picked up several thousands. As for France, I could not be more satisfied with her: men, horses, money, everything is offered me. My finances are in good order. I shall therefore make no advances looking to peace.

He volleyed orders at his generals, notably Berthier:

On hearing of the treachery of General Yorck I immediately decided to issue an address to the nation, which will be out tomorrow, and to raise an extraordinary levy. I have formed a corps of observation of the Elbe which is concentrating at Hamburg, and will have a strength of 60 battalions; I have given the command to General Lauriston. I have formed a corps of observation in Italy,
which is concentrating at Verona, and that will have a strength of 40 battalions; I have given the command to General Bertrand. I have formed a first corps of observation of the Army of the Rhine, of 60 battalions, commanded by the Duke of Ragusa, whose headquarters will be at Mainz. I shall form a second corps of observation of the Rhine, which will also have 60 battalions. I am calling to the colours 100,000 conscripts left over from 1810, so that we shall have men of over 21 years of age. The conscription of 1814 will give us 150,000 men, and will be levied some time in February.

He attacked his sister Caroline for Murat’s abandonment of the French army in Russia. ‘The King left the army on the 16th. Your husband is very brave on the battlefield, but weaker than a woman or a monk when out of sight of the enemy. He has no moral courage. He has been frightened; he has never for one moment been in danger of losing what he can only hold from me and with me. Show him the absurdity of his conduct. I can still forgive him the harm he has done me.’

He also decided to seek support from the Pope, whom he had previously treated so badly, and offered a new Concordat. He wrote ingratiatingly to Pius VII:

Holy Father:

I hasten to send one of the officers of my household to express all my gratification at what the bishop of Nantes has told me of the satisfactory condition of Your Holiness’ health; for I had been for a moment alarmed this summer on hearing that Your Holiness had been seriously indisposed. The new residence of Your Holiness will give us an opportunity for meeting, and I have it much at heart to declare that, notwithstanding all that has passed, I have always maintained the same sentiments of friendship for Your Holiness. Perhaps we can now reach a settlement of all those questions that divide State and Church. I, on my side, am altogether disposed that way, so that it will depend entirely on Your Holiness.

The Pope, however, quickly repudiated the new Concordat, driving Napoleon to fresh fury, arresting and expropriating priests.

Napoleon’s main concern was the re-creation of his power base, a fresh French army to replace the one all but destroyed during the Russian campaign. He set himself a target of recruiting 650,000 new soldiers in 1813. He would raise only 140,000 of them in France: soldiers, gendarmes, national guardsmen were conscripted into the new army, along with peasant sons, many of whom now sought desperately to evade conscription by giving themselves injuries or entering into false marriages, as it had become apparent that soldiery, far from entry into an elite as of old, was a probable death sentence.

By early 1813 he had raised an army of some 350,000, many of whom were just youths in their upper teens. But he had stirred up huge personal resentment among the French peasantry, from which most of the conscripts were drawn; and the taxes needed to maintain his army had fallen on the shoulders of his chief supporters, the propertied classes: in addition the richer families were also expected to raise troops. Discontent with Napoleon within France reached new heights.

Napoleon’s new army thus consisted largely of raw recruits officered by men with no experience of war. He also had very few horses, most of them having perished in Russia. Nevertheless the sheer frenzy of his activity in the first few months of 1813, as he sought to recover from the Russian disaster, must excite admiration.

Napoleon soon believed he had managed to turn the tide in his favour, and there was little reason to think yet that he was mistaken. Less admirable were the wider implications: for Napoleonic France had become a kind of perpetual war machine, capable of keeping its balance only in a state of national emergency, mobilizing, plundering other nations, fighting war after war. If war should cease, the whole edifice of repression, colossal military expenditures and subject peoples would come crashing down. A defeat like the Russian one called for a redoubled effort, in case the logic of perpetual warfare and Napoleon’s own military skills were called into judgement by the French.

The most alarming international development was that the Prussians began to follow the lead given by the rogue General Yorck. After Frederick William had escaped from Berlin he called for his people to raise an army and on 28 February he signed a convention with Russia.
The Kaiser had learnt some lessons from his terrible defeat at Napoleon’s hands and the years of servitude. He abolished serfdom.

An astonishing revolution had also taken place in the Prussian army as the legacy of Frederick the Great, once so innovatory, now a dead hand holding back its modernization, was buried. It had been reduced to just 42,000 men at the time of Tilsit, with only twenty-two of its most able generals remaining out of the old total of 142. Mixed brigades were introduced to make the army more flexible. A school was set up for elite staff officers. The chief of staff was now to be as powerful a figure as the commanding general. In addition, the Prussians were suddenly able to mobilize an army of 80,000. Ingeniously, they had maintained secret regiments on the quiet and recruited new soldiers for the day when they would return to the field.

The genius behind the Prussian resurgence was August von Gneisenau, a man of humble origins who had adopted his name from a local castle and had fought with the British during the American War of Independence. He had fought at Jena, then in 1807 joined the Military Reorganization Commission. He was something of a political radical in his own country advocating political and social change wedded to a new sense of nationalism: he even urged an insurrection to set up a constitutional government. He masterminded the new Prussian military doctrine of flexibility.

He joined in a remarkable partnership with the greatest Prussian field general of the age, Gebhart von Blücher, a veteran seventy-two-year-old springing from gentry stock in eastern Germany. The latter had distinguished himself in the earliest campaigns against the French revolutionary government. At the Battle of Auerstadt, Blücher had performed magnificently, having his horse shot from under him several times. One of the last defenders of beaten Prussia in 1807, he was captured, then exchanged for the distinguished French General Victor, who had been captured by the Prussians. He urged continuing resistance to Napoleon, but plunged into depression when Frederick William refused to do so. Nevertheless he secretly trained Prussian troops in defiance of the agreement with Napoleon.

Thus within three months of Napoleon’s retreat, as he had anticipated, his enemies were beginning to mass. The 80,000 Prussians were
supported by the Swedish army of some 25,000 men, under the renegade Bernadotte. In addition more than 100,000 Russians had entered Prussia. Thus a formidable force of more than 200,000 men had suddenly arisen to face de Beauharnais’s defeated and demoralized remnants from Russia, who were steadily beaten back all the way first from the border, then to Dresden.

De Beauharnais put up a fine fight, as was to be expected. He lamented: ‘The Italians are dying like flies . . . How happy should we be to see our homes one day! It is my sole ambition now. I search no more for glory. It costs too dear.’ He had withdrawn first to the Oder and then to the Elbe, abandoning Berlin. At Magdeburg he stopped and fought around Mockern in early April, before withdrawing behind the Saale river. At last, however, French luck was beginning to improve. The supreme Russian commander, Kutuzov, died on 28 April in Silesia. This left command of the Russo-Prussian forces to Wittgenstein and Blücher, although Alexander was constantly attempting to interfere with the operations of the former.

Napoleon had regained his old self-confidence. In April he led a huge counter-offensive with an army of 250,000 men altogether, many of them new recruits. He displayed a renewed aggressive spirit. He lunged forward into the Prussian heartland towards Dresden. His strategy was to retake Berlin and relieve Danzig, thus rescuing the 150,000 French troops bottled up along the Vistula. The German minor princes still supported him.

On 1 May the now united armies of Napoleon and de Beauharnais delivered a first blow at Weissenfeld and then at Grossgorchen. The following day they won the bigger battle of Lutzen where the French artillery, seventy-strong, pinned the enemy down, permitting the infantry to attack in force; a crushing victory was secured which, however, Napoleon was unable to follow up because of a shortage of cavalry: some 20,000 casualties were inflicted on either side. De Beauharnais was able to pursue the Russians to Colditz, where he routed the forces under General Mikhail Miloradovich.

Napoleon integrated the two armies under his command and sent his valiant stepson down to prepare Italy’s defences. The Russians and the Prussians withdrew across the Elbe to Bautzen where they were reinforced by 13,000 men under Barclay de Tolly. Napoleon planned a frontal attack with steady reinforcements, while Ney headed a flanking movement from the south. On 20 May the battle started and the French soon gained control of the centre, taking Bautzen; but Ney, incredibly brave though he was, was no tactician. He had veered away from the main battlefield, disobeying orders, failing to trap the allied
army and instead got bogged down in fighting around the village of Preititz.

Napoleon nevertheless drove the enemy from the main positions, again with the loss of some 30,000 men on each side, and the Russians and Prussians withdrew again. In the pursuit Napoleon’s closest friend Duroc was killed. The allies were now in hopeless disarray: Wittgenstein, who was blamed for the defeat at Bautzen, had been replaced by Barclay de Tolly; the Russians and the Prussians were squabbling bitterly. But Napoleon’s army was also in difficulties: nearly 100,000 of its raw recruits had fallen sick or deserted, in addition to those that had been lost in battle.

On 2 June the two sides agreed to an armistice, which the neutral Austrians were to referee. But Napoleon was not deceived:

This armistice arrests the tide of my victories. I decided to accept it for two reasons: my lack of cavalry, which prevents my dealing heavy blows, and the hostile attitude of Austria. That court, in the most friendly, tender, I might almost say sentimental terms, actually presumes to force me, for fear of the army it has concentrated at Prague, to give up Dalmatia and Istria, and even what lies beyond the Isonzo. It demands, further, the left bank of the Inn, and Salzburg, and even one half of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, leaving the other half to Prussia and Russia. And these benefits are to be secured by the mere display of 100,000 men and without actual hostilities. If possible I shall delay till September, and then strike hard. We must gain time. To gain time without making Austria hostile we must stick to our text of the last six months, that we can do anything provided Austria is our ally.

With two albeit partial victories under his belt, Napoleon had regained his self-confidence. He had been confronted before in Europe by the combination of Britain, Austria and Russia; and then by Britain, Prussia and Russia; but he had never been faced by four enemies at once. He was desperately anxious that Austria should not join his enemies at this moment. His marriage to Marie Louise, who was now besotted with him, was the cornerstone of his alliance with Austria. But that empire’s
foreign policy was now in the hands of a supremely able cynic, Prince Metternich, who, wedded to the old order of Europe and despising Bonaparte, had already made up his mind. Napoleon could perhaps have saved the situation if he had displayed true humility – ‘
reculer pour mieux sauter
.’ But pride got the better of him as usual: a fine general, he was always an appalling politician.

At the Mercolini Palace in Dresden he met Metternich in a famous encounter which lasted nearly nine hours on 26 June. According to Metternich Napoleon insisted: ‘My reign will not outlast the day when I have ceased to be strong and therefore to be feared . . . I know how to die . . . But I shall never cede one inch of territory. Your sovereigns, who were born on the throne, can allow themselves to be beaten twenty times and will always return to their capitals. But I cannot do that – I am a self-made soldier.’

Napoleon’s version was scarcely less provoking:

‘Ah! There you are, Metternich! Welcome! But if you wanted peace why didn’t you come to see me sooner? We have already lost a month, and your mediation is so tardy that it looks hostile. So it’s war you want! You shall have it; I give you rendezvous in Vienna! I win two victories, my defeated enemies are just realising their situation, and all of a sudden you slip into our midst, offering me an armistice, mediation, offering them your alliance, complicating everything. Without your pernicious intervention peace would have been signed by now between me and the allies. You must admit that from the moment Austria assumed the position of mediator you were no longer on my side, no longer impartial, but my enemy. Today your 200,000 men are ready, over there, behind the screen of the Bohemian mountains. And because you think you are in a position to dictate terms, you now approach me. Very well, let us negotiate, I consent. What is it you want?’