The War of Wars (25 page)

He had taken advantage of the way the Austrians had divided their
forces into dominant positions at key strongpoints, while he himself would divide his forces to strike at weak points, then bring them together again to attack strong points. At Lodi he had demonstrated superb leadership and bravery in the face of seemingly impossible odds, although the attack had been reckless in the extreme and was won largely by luck. He had shown himself a fine soldier, although one yet to prove himself in a major set-piece battle.

The ease of his victories also reflects on the quality of the officers and troops opposing him. The Piedmontese were not effective fighters at that stage, while the Austrians in northern Italy had grown idle with the ease of garrisoning and were accustomed to conventional tactics of position, garrisons and lines – not to the speedy and unexpected attacks of a young energetic commander possessed of hungry republican troops who scorned the niceties and social conventions of aristocratic warfare in the eighteenth century.

Moreover Napoleon was no stickler in respect of property: one of the main incentives for his impressed men – another was the fear of execution dating back to Robespierre’s day for those that failed to perform well – was plunder and the promise of being fed and clothed properly. Napoleon and his lieutenants turned a blind eye to looting. The wealth of Milan lay prostrate before Napoleon’s half-starved, ragged army.

But the self-important young man now resident in the ducal palace, who had ludicrously compared his skilful but by no means epic achievement to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, was in for a shock. To his masters in Paris he was still no more than a promising young general. They ordered him to report to the distinguished General Kellermann, the sixty-one-year-old veteran who had won the Battle of Valmy in 1792. Kellermann was to take charge of the campaigns against the Austrians in northern Italy, and Napoleon was to lead a lesser campaign against two Austrian allies further down the Italian peninsula, Tuscany and the Papal States, although ones which promised rich pickings.

Napoleon, who saw himself (as he wrote later) no longer ‘as a mere general, but as a man called upon to influence the destiny of a people . . . a superior man . . . nobody has had a greater concept than mine’,
had been brought brutally down to earth. He wrote furiously back: ‘Kellermann would command the army as well as myself; for no one could be more convinced than I am that our victories are due to the courage and dash of the army; but I think that to give Kellermann and myself joint command in Italy would mean ruining everything.’

At this threat to resign in pique, the Directory grudgingly gave way, providing Napoleon with a valuable lesson that he could get his way by sheer self-assertion. They agreed to let him remain in command, but insisted he must not move into the Tyrol to confront the large Austrian armies there, but go south to defeat the Pope – there was a strong atheist tendency in the French government – and ‘cause the tiara of the self-styled head of the universal church to totter’.

Once again, the initiative to move into central Italy came not from Napoleon but from his bosses in revolutionary France. This command could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as defensive, arising from the need to defeat the Austrian empire. The motivation was aggression and plunder, pure and simple, the first move towards the territorial acquisition of a French empire in Europe. The vast wealth and awesome artistic treasures of the Pope seemed to Paris to be there for the taking: these would ease the cost of supporting France’s immense armies, serve as a further distraction for the restless French people, and enormously enrich the rulers of France themselves.

Napoleon himself, while paying lip service to revolutionary ideas and his mission in liberating Italy from Austrian rule, was equally fixated on the prospect of plunder for its own sake and, more understandably, to pay his army and thereby ensure its loyalty to himself, as French soldiers were used to being paid late if at all. Before Lodi Napoleon had already requested from Paris ‘a few reputable artists to take charge of choosing and transporting all the beautiful things we shall see fit to send to Paris’ – something he knew would please his masters.

To pay off his army, he levied 2 million livres from Milan – a colossal sum – and then imposed a further tax upon the citizens of northern Italy for the Directory. By July he had raised a staggering 60 million francs. Most of this came from the wealthier citizens, but these passed much of the burden on to the poorer classes. He installed a puppet
government in Milan, replacing the old aristocrats with middle-class nominees, and forced Parma and Modena to pay a large tribute in order to be spared occupation by his irresistible army. These were the tactics of the Aztecs or any other such predatory conquerors. He urged the creation of a North Italian Republic under his rule, while continuing to reiterate his promise to liberate the Milanese.

Not that the Milanese were fooled. When he departed to fight Beaulieu’s remaining army, the city and neighbouring Pavia immediately rose up in insurrection against the French. Napoleon hastily returned to Pavia, crushed the uprising there, led the massacre of the 300-strong military garrison, and laid the town open to rape and pillage by his men. It was a second appalling display of his almost Asiatic ruthlessness and contempt for human life, in particular when angered – this in one of the most beautiful and historic cultural centres in Italy. The Milanese shuddered and promptly surrendered without a fight. Napoleon turned his attention to the only major city in the Po valley still holding out against him, Mantua, and laid siege to the city on 4 June.

His thoughts were also elsewhere: he was romantically besotted with his wife, to whom he wrote a letter every day, begging her to join him. But she was otherwise engaged: she had taken a lover, Hippolyte Charles, a small but dashing hussar addicted to drinking and gambling, the polar opposite to the intense, self-disciplined Napoleon. The young general ordered his two most faithful friends, Androche Junot and Joachim Murat, to bring her to him. Of the first he wrote crudely: ‘You must return with Junot, do you hear, my adorable one, he will see you, he will breathe the air of your shrine. Perhaps you will even allow him the unique favour of a kiss on your cheek . . . A kiss on your heart, and then another a little lower, much
much lower
.’ He also remarked that she had ‘the prettiest little vagina in the world, the Three Isles of Martinique were there’. But she and the handsome Murat made love. Josephine was openly contemptuous of her absent husband. ‘
Q’il est drôle, Bonaparte
.’

Josephine has usually been blamed for her faithlessness: yet the marriage had been one largely of convenience for her from the beginning. Given that she did not love Napoleon in the first place,
it is hardly surprising that she drifted into the arms of other men. She told him she was seriously ill.

He responded by requesting support from Barras, her former lover and the patron of both: ‘I hate all women. I am in despair. My wife has not arrived. She must be detained by some lover in Paris.’ He accused her of preferring her dog to him (which may have been true). The Director ordered her to join him, and she set off with Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who disliked her intensely, her lover Hippolyte, with whom she ostentatiously slept along the journey, and the faithful Junot, whom she teased by openly attempting to seduce him in front of the other travellers. When she arrived at Napoleon’s sumptuous Palazzo Serpelloni, she had to endure the embraces of her husband for two days before he set off for Mantua, where Sérurier had been placed in charge of the siege.

Napoleon had also learnt that Marshal Dagobert Wurmser and a large Austrian army had left the Rhine to engage him. He fumed at the failure of the two northern French commanders to launch an expected offensive along the Rhine and keep the Austrians tied down there. But that was exactly what the Directory had calculated – that Napoleon’s invasion of southern Italy would compel the Austrians to weaken their Rhine armies.

Taking advantage of the six weeks’ interlude before Wurmser’s armies could arrive, Napoleon embarked on his expedition to emasculate the militarily weak Papal States. Arriving in Emilia-Romagna, he easily drove off the papal army of 18,000 men, seizing Bologna, Ferrara and the rich port of Livorno (Leghorn), so denying it to the British as a base, and moved as far down as Florence to intimidate the Tuscans. He travelled 300 miles largely without opposition, helping himself to another colossal fortune, 40 million francs. To fend off an attack on the Papal States, the Pope gave him some of the greatest art treasures in the Vatican, as well as a huge tribute in gold and the port of Ancona on the Adriatic. It was a repeat of the barbarian invasion of ancient Rome, with the treasures of the Italian renaissance instead of classical antiquity as the spoils.

With news of the Austrian armies approaching northern Italy, Napoleon sped back to confront them. They had been marching
down the Brenner Pass and crossed the river Adige with 50,000 men in three columns, their objective to relieve Mantua. Napoleon moved quickly to prevent them linking up at Mantua, and fell upon the Austrian right at Lonato with a superior force of 27,000 men to the Austrians’ 21,000. Wurmser tried to reunite his armies, but he was too late: Augereau led the French against him at Castiglione at the beginning of August. Some 25,000 Austrians were killed or wounded and 15,000 taken prisoner, to 5,500 French casualties and 1,400 prisoners. Once again, Napoleon had shown skill, energy and tactical brilliance as well as speed, but Wurmser was not yet defeated. He manoeuvred skilfully to attack the French and marched to relieve Mantua again.

Napoleon, who had captured Roverata and Trent in the north, set off after him and inflicted a victory on points at Bassano on 8 September. But most of the Austrian army survived intact and relieved Mantua two days later, bringing the garrison’s strength up to 23,000 and rendering it virtually impregnable from Napoleon’s army, which for once arrived too late, eight days afterwards. Equally, though, Wurmser’s main army was now bottled up and out of commission.

The British minister in Turin, John Trevor, had written with dismay to Lord Grenville of ‘the torrent of this victorious enemy’. The British watched with alarm the spectacular victories that this new French general was winning as he hurtled his way across northern Italy. This further muddied what was already a dismal strategic scene across Europe as a whole: with the occupation of Leghorn, the French had secured a powerful new Mediterranean base. Meanwhile, the court at Naples, watching the whirlwind action across Italy and seeking to avoid the same fate, was intimidated into neutrality: Britain had lost one of its oldest allies.

Worse still, as the French advance seemed unstoppable, Spain, from a position of favouring neither side, lapsed into ‘hostile neutrality’ against Britain in August 1796. Almost overnight, after the loss of continental Europe, the British were losing control of a second key theatre: the Mediterranean itself. Their presence there was now confined to Corsica, Malta, Minorca and Gibraltar – a handful of outposts. They were not yet at war with Spain, and desperately anxious
to avoid it if they could. But the Mediterranean was anything but a British lake.

That incorrigible pair of optimists, the cousins Pitt and Grenville, sought solace elsewhere: perhaps the Prussians would change their minds – but the British were quickly rebuffed and by June it seemed possible that the Prussians would actually join the French. Perhaps the Russians would help: but the British ambassador, Charles Whitworth, was soon grumbling about the Empress’s ‘scandalously evasive conduct’. Perhaps a change would come about in France: but the royalists were now on the defensive and the Directory was more firmly in control than before. The success of the French war effort had redounded to its credit: it was hardly likely to abandon the most successful of its policies, in a country still plagued by shortages and disruption. Napoleon’s plundering was providing a huge and desperately needed flow of money into France.

Only Austria remained. The British poured money in to assist their ally – £100,000 in April, £150,000 in May, £300,000 for July and August, a further £150,000 a month for the rest of the year – although this was well short of Austrian demands. Still, Austria, faced with Napoleon’s aggression in the south, had despatched its biggest Rhine army to meet the new threat across the Dolomites.

Disconcerted, Pitt and Grenville looked to their somewhat pyrrhic gains in the West Indies for consolation, as well as heartening news from the Cape, where the Dutch attempt to regain the Cape Colony had been beaten off; but shortages of ships and men meant the strategy for an attack on the troublesome French island of Mauritius (Île de France) – a staging post for attacks on the traffic to the British East Indies – had to be abandoned.

Pitt seemed close to despair by June 1796. He wrote to Grenville:

I am . . . clear that (unless there happens some unexpected turn in the state of things) any idea of our enabling Austria to act with any effect beyond the present year is out of the question. In this situation it would be inexcusable not to try any chance that can be tried, honourably and safely, to set on some foot some decent plan of pacification; and I can conceive no objection in the mind of any of
our colleagues to see whether the arrangement to which you have pointed can be made acceptable both to Austria and Prussia. But though I think it should be tried, I do not flatter myself with much chance of success. On the whole my notion is that most likely, either now or a few months hence, we shall be left to sustain alone the conflict with France and Holland, probably joined by Spain, and perhaps favoured more or less openly by the Northern powers.

With Spain ever closer to joining the French, the British decided in principle to evacuate their outpost of Corsica, which would be untenable and was anyway a constant source of unrest. Britain’s troublesome old ally, and Napoleon’s
bête noire,
Paoli, had again to be granted safe haven in London. Pitt’s spirits sank to their lowest ebb.