The War of Wars (26 page)

Two morsels of good news reached him at last. The Russian Empress, having dismembered Poland with Prussia, offered to send 60,000 Russian troops to Austria in exchange for a flat payment and a continuing subsidy of £150,000 a month. The British grasped eagerly at this straw, and even offered to hand over Corsica as a warm-water naval base for the Russians. More important, Archduke Charles won an unexpected victory in eastern Bavaria on 24 August. Generals Jourdan and Moreau had divided their armies into three columns with their flanks exposed, and had failed to bottle up Austrian forces into the strongholds of Phillippsburg and Mannheim behind their lines. The Austrians attacked on six key flanks: the French fell back down to Mainz, and Charles triumphed at Wurzburg, pushing the French back across the Rhine again in October.

Pitt exultantly looked forward to the ‘annihilation’ of the French across the Rhine and could see only opportunities arising from the approaching war with Spain to seize its far-flung possessions. Abercromby was despatched to seize Trinidad and Puerto Rico and even possibly send an expedition to Buenos Aires. Manila was thought to be vulnerable. Cadiz could be blockaded.

But at the same time, astonishingly, Pitt sent out peace feelers to France, despatching a senior emissary, Lord Malmesbury, in October: it was further evidence of his lack of clear commitment to the war and of his desire to appease the French, which had been apparent for years
before the declaration of war in 1793. He could hardly have chosen a worse time: the French contemptuously rebuffed Malmesbury, while both the Austrians and the Russians, who had not been consulted and had been egged on to a more robust posture towards France by the British, were furious. Grenville, who had left Pitt to be his own foreign minister while he mourned the death of a sister, was appalled and immediately stiffened the British terms.

By the end of the year, however, three further dramatic developments plunged the British into gloom again. The Empress Catherine died, to be succeeded by her suspicious, introspective son, Paul, who had hated his mother and preferred an alliance with Paris to one with London; the French attempted an invasion of Ireland; and Napoleon threw the Austrians on the defensive again.

Fortunately for Pitt the Irish invasion was as much a fiasco as the British Dunkirk expedition had been two years before. On 16 December the French fleet left Brest unopposed – the Channel fleet commander, the undistinguished Lord Bridport, was residing comfortably in Somerset. By the time its destination could be worked out, the French ships, escorting an army of some 20,000 men, had arrived in Bantry Bay. They were escorting Wolfe Tone, a young Protestant from Dublin, who had sought to unite both his own and the Catholic community in a demand for self-government. Luckily for the British, a gale blew up, preventing the French from landing and separating General Hoche, the French army commander, from the main force. The French were driven ignominiously back to Brest.

Meanwhile, Napoleon was on the move again. The Austrian victories on the Rhine made it inevitable that the Austrians would try and reassert their hold on northern Italy. While living it up in Milan amid scenes of ostentatious vulgarity, pawing at his beloved Josephine in public while she cuckolded him with Hippolyte whenever he went away, and permitting his soldiers freely to despoil northern Italy, Napoleon threw his weight around the region, occupying Modena, imposing a French garrison upon Genoa and seeking to intimidate Venice.

But the Austrians were massing again along the Brenner Pass and in November advanced in two columns – one of 28,000 men through
Vicenza towards Verona, the other of 18,000 men down the Adige valley towards Trent. The second army mauled a French force outside the city and took it. Napoleon was pushed out of Verona and with only 10,000 men – 14,000 of his men were off sick in the marshy lowlands – his position looked desperate.

On 12 November he suffered his first defeat in the Italian campaign outside Verona. He wrote nervously to the Directory: ‘Perhaps we are on the verge of losing Italy. None of the expected help has arrived. I despair of being able to avoid raising the siege of Mantua, which would have been ours within a week . . . In a few days we will make a last effort. If fortune smiles, Mantua will be taken and with it Italy.’ He was faced by now with no fewer than three Austrian armies, in Verona, Trent and Mantua, each bigger than his own, which might soon join up. Desperately he manoeuvred to outflank Verona and strike from the rear, staging a forced march to the Adige.

At the river crossing at Arcola he unexpectedly found an enemy force of Croats defending the bridge. As at Lodi, Napoleon gambled on a frontal assault across the bridge: to get there he needed to cross a causeway through marshes. This time he led the charge himself, clutching the French flag to give his troops courage. But, as he reported, ‘we had to give up the idea of taking the village by frontal assault’. Halfway across, it seems, while cursing his troops for their cowardice, he had to retreat. He appears to have fallen into the marsh by the causeway under intense enemy fire, and been saved by his brother Louis, although the facts are disputed.

He then seems to have led his men southwards, erecting a pontoon across the marsh and eventually reached firm ground, before attacking the Austrians from the rear. The latter, taken by surprise, fell back, although they could probably have defeated the far less numerous French. Napoleon lost a large number of men – some 4,500 killed or wounded – dwarfed only by the Austrian casualties of 7,000. All of this was far from discreditable to Napoleon, although his frontal attack was probably needlessly costly. But he subsequently elevated it to the status of myth, immortalized in a famous painting by Delacroix.

Napoleon sensibly and typically kept up the pressure after this success, pushing on to encircle the second Austrian army. After a
few skirmishes, this was badly mauled at Rouco and the two main Austrian armies, although still largely intact, decided to retreat, having failed to reach Mantua. It had been a triumph more for French aggressiveness against Austrian caution than a great feat of arms or tactics. Napoleon had won by the skin of his teeth. His troops were exhausted and incapable of fighting on.

Napoleon’s magnificent progress across northern Italy aroused the suspicions of the Directory: he was still only their servant, a brilliant military commander, but not a political authority in his own right. Saliceti, the Directory’s representative and Napoleon’s old patron and friend, became jealous and started sending unfavourable reports home; Saliceti resented being rebuked by Napoleon for openly selling plunder in the streets.

The anxious Directors sent General Henri Clarke to spy on him. This emissary found Napoleon in a foul mood ‘haggard, the skin clinging to his bones, eyes bright with fever’. Clarke told him that the Directory wanted an armistice. Napoleon angrily objected. After a few encounters, Clarke’s attitude changed. He wrote back to his masters:

Everyone here regards him as a man of genius . . . He is feared, loved and respected in Italy. I believe he is attached to the Republic and without any ambition save to retain the reputation he has won . . . General Bonaparte is not without defects . . . Sometimes he is hard, impatient, abrupt or imperious. Often he demands difficult things in too hasty a manner. He has not been respectful enough towards the government commissioners. When I reproved him for this, he replied that he could not possibly treat otherwise men who were universally scorned for their immorality and incapacity . . . Saliceti has the reputation of being the most shameless rogue in the army and Garrau is inefficient: neither is suitable for the Army of Italy.

After this glowing report the Directors’ fears were partially assuaged. The issue of the armistice was settled by the arrival of a magnificent new Austrian army of 28,000 men under the able General Alvinzi, marching down the Adige valley, while another 17,000 under General Provera were heading for Verona. General Wurmser was determined to relieve Mantua, where 20,000 Austrians were running short of fuel in the city isolated by marshes and lakes.

With some 9,000 tied down besieging Mantua, another 9,000 sick and a further 4,000 scattered across northern Italy, Napoleon had only 20,000 men. Still, he did not wait for the superior forces of the enemy to take the offensive. Instead he marched forward to the Plateau de Rivoli, which was surrounded by hills commanding the Garda-Verona road and lying between the Adige and Tasso rivers.

At Rivoli a division of 10,000 under the tough, wily General Barthélemy Joubert was under fire between the vastly superior Austrian forces. When Napoleon arrived at one in the morning and watched the hundreds of camp fires of Alvinzi’s army flickering around the plateau, he ordered an immediate attack the following morning against the superior Austrian positions, before the Austrians could descend to the plateau and organize themselves in strength.

The attack ran into serious trouble against the Austrian cavalry and guns, and soon Napoleon’s flank was turned. Just as defeat seemed inevitable, General André Masséna, who had ridden his 8,000 men across snow and ice in a gruelling twenty-mile march, arrived and beat back the flank attackers. Thus reinforced, Napoleon defeated the first Austrian corps and then fell upon another weaker one. A third arrived from the rear, and Napoleon, with characteristic ferocity, turned to attack it – but would probably not have prevailed had not another French force under General Ney reached the plain just after noon.

The Austrians, after more fighting, retreated, leaving 8,000 killed and wounded or captured. After a gruelling all-day march in the open, Napoleon, who had narrowly escaped death several times and lost several horses shot beneath him, had won a classic victory largely through aggression, speed and quick responses which outmanoeuvred his opponents. It was his greatest victory yet.

Even so, he did not rest on his laurels. Knowing of the approach of
the second Austrian army under Provera marching to relieve Mantua, he ordered his exhausted, battle-scarred men on a twenty-four-hour march to assemble some thirty miles further on. On 16 January, he was at La Favoeitae. Provera was roundly beaten, losing some 7,000 men and twenty-two guns. Joubert, meanwhile, who had pursued the retreating Austrians from Rivoli with a smaller force, had taken no fewer than 7,000 prisoners.

Wurmser, whose men in Mantua were now starving and had been denied any hope of relief, sued for peace, claiming he still had twelve months’ worth of provisions. Napoleon was disposed to be generous and even promised Wurmser, a renegade Frenchman whom the Directory had ordered to be shot, that he could return to Vienna. On 2 February the French marched victoriously into Mantua without a fight.

The Directory ordered Napoleon south, to punish the Pope for continuing to side with the Austrians. This proved all too easy: a series of papal towns fell without a struggle, including Bologna, Rimini and Macerata, and he was delighted to take Ancona, the second most important Adriatic port after Venice. The Pope sued for peace and under the Treaty of Tolentino ceded Bologna, Ferrara and Romagna to the French, as well as paying Napoleon 30 million francs.

One of the Directors, the atheist La Revellière, demanded that the Pope be deposed. But Napoleon realized that this sixty-nine-year-old posed no threat, and feared igniting a religious war. The Pope, he argued, stabilized central Italy and prevented its seizure by the Kingdom of Naples under Queen Maria Carolina, Marie Antoinette’s sister. He assured La Revellière that the Papal States would fall to pieces by themselves, while similarly reassuring Pius VI that he had no intention of retaining them.

He then galloped back a hundred miles to the north to prepare the final blow against Austria in March. In order to achieve this, the Directory reinforced his army to 80,000 men and sent him, as counterbalances, Generals Bernadotte and Delmas. The former, a highly competent Gascon officer who had worked his way up the ranks to become a general at the age of just thirty-one, was a passionate Jacobin and close friend of St Just. Tall, good-looking, vain and
endowed with a fiery temper, he was fond of duelling at the slightest insult. Bernadotte’s prickliness and vainglory had earned him a bad reputation, but he was undoubtedly a competent commander and an impressive figure. His problem was that, like Hoche, he did not owe his prominence to Napoleon, but regarded himself as a superior and rival to Napoleon, who was vastly the better soldier. He deeply resented taking orders from Napoleon: ‘Over there I saw a man of twenty-six or twenty-seven who wants to appear fifty. It bodes no good for the Republic . . . I see it all. Bonaparte is jealous of me and wants to disgrace me. I have no resource left but to blow my brains out.’ Worse still, Bernadotte was married to Napoleon’s childhood sweetheart, Désirée, who deeply resented having been dumped for Josephine.

Napoleon’s offensive against Austria with his reinforced and reinvigorated army was perfectly executed. He sent the capable Jourdan up the Brenner Pass to cut off the 15,000 Austrians still stranded in the Dolomites and to prevent a flanking attack by the Rhine Army. He personally commanded four divisions coming up from Bassano on 10 March and easily defeated a smaller force under the legendary Austrian Archduke Charles at Tagliamento before taking Klagenforth on 29 March.

The French army under Moreau along the Rhine, which was supposed to launch a simultaneous offensive, made no move, and Napoleon decided he could not take Vienna alone. He marched on Leoben, some seventy-five miles from the Austrian capital, and sent forward an advance to Semmering, just outside Vienna, to intimidate the court. He was fearful of over-extending his lines. This intimidation had the desired effect: the royal court hurriedly evacuated Vienna for Hungary. Napoleon threatened the Austrians with attack from two directions – although he had no way of ensuring that Moreau would do his part, possibly because the Directory was wary of enhancing his reputation through giving him such a project.

Napoleon drew up a peace treaty with the Austrians, although he had no authority to reach one. The treaty, like the one reached with the Pope, was relatively generous. Austria would be allowed to retain Istria, Dalmatia and Friuli, but it was to recognize that Belgium belonged to France, and to cede the lonian Islands as well as the left
bank of the Rhine, while recognizing Napoleon’s new Cisalpine Republic in Italy. Most controversially, Napoleon offered to capture Venice and deliver it up to the Austrians. This combination of threats and bribes was enough for the Austrian court, which agreed to these terms on 18 April.