The War of Wars (95 page)

Charles had won an extraordinary victory through sheer hard fighting against an enemy that had gambled and lost. It was Napoleon’s first ever defeat in the field, although he had come close at Friedland and Marengo. The Emperor’s sense of invincibility had been shattered as much through his own foolhardiness as anything else. The thrice beaten Austrian foe had proved his equal at last, at least in one battle. Casualties on both sides were enormous – some 5,000 dead and 20,000 wounded on each.

Princess Louise, daughter of the Emperor Francis, caught the mood of Austrian exultation from the palace at Buda to which she had been
evacuated: ‘My first reaction was to thank God profoundly for granting us such a victory. I wish I could convey to you the delight of Often [Buda] yesterday . . . everybody was laughing! Wherever we went, we were welcomed with cheers and vivas. We saw people get together in little groups, congratulate each other and give thanks for the victory.’

As for Napoleon, he was for the first time plunged into shock, not emerging for thirty-six hours from a nearly catatonic state. Whether this was the vanity of a man who had believed his own propaganda and had simply been astonished to find it untrue, or one who suddenly feared that his empire might unravel, or merely self-anger for the succession of mistakes he had made in battle, is impossible to guess. More important was the question whether it would affect his future behaviour and temper his ambition and self-belief. (The evidence suggests that it did, and indeed marked a turning point.) But he hardly had the luxury of introspection at this moment: the situation was desperate, and he had to rise to the immediate challenge first.

He lamented Lannes’s death, after acute suffering.

There are some wounds to which death itself is preferable. It is at the moment of leaving life that a man clings to it with all his might. Lannes, the bravest of men, Lannes, deprived of his two legs, did not want to die, and said to me that the two surgeons who had treated a Marshal so brutally and with such scant respect ought to be hanged. With his remnant of life he clung to me; he wanted only me, thought only of me. A sort of instinct! For surely he loved his young wife and his children more than he did me; yet he never spoke of them, which was because he expected no help from them. But I was his protector; for him I was some vague and superior power; I was his Providence, and he was imploring . . .

The stakes were now extraordinarily high: the future of Europe was in the balance. If Archduke Charles could make good his advantage and bombard the French out of their forward position on the island of Lobau, he would inflict a decisive defeat. Conversely if Napoleon withdrew, or attempted another attack which failed again, the blow to his prestige would be irreparable: subject peoples in Germany and
elsewhere would rise against him. His enemies at home would close in for the kill. Even if he merely failed to press his offensive, he would be seen as having been checked at last in the east, while his armies were challenged in the west in Spain.

The sullen, occupied people of Vienna had witnessed the terrible battle that had raged by day and night from just a few miles upstream, the lightning of gunfire and the thunder of cannon providing an eerie backdrop to their misery; all of Europe would witness his humiliation. In the event, with that extraordinary courage and indomitability that were his greatest traits, Napoleon snapped out of his self-pity and chose to strike again, this time making sure that the ground was better prepared.

Archduke Charles, meanwhile, did nothing, possibly because he believed the battle had already been won. In spite of his formidable artillery, he halted his artillery assault on the island. Suddenly, he had become cautious, preparing to redeploy his troops to stave off another attack across the Danube, uncertain whether to place them at the water’s edge or further back on the Marchfeld Plain. He was almost certainly right in holding back his infantry: he would have faced the same perils as Napoleon had just faced in reverse, with his men exposed as they crossed and then with their backs to the water.

Napoleon set about reinforcing Lobau and the neighbouring island into an armed camp protected by 130 heavy guns. He built new Bridges to Lobau and across from the island to the north bank. Small bridge-heads were established protected by redoubts and gunboats. Upstream, boats were scuttled to prevent the Austrians floating debris down the river to demolish the Bridges. Meanwhile Eugène de Beauharnais and General MacDonald had at last beaten Archduke John’s retreating army at Raab. Napoleon summoned their 23,000 men to join him. With further reinforcements under Davout and Bernadotte also arriving, Napoleon by the beginning of July had nearly 180,000 men and 500 guns. Archduke Charles’s caution had proved lethal.

On 4 July Napoleon moved. With his usual skill at deception he erected three bridges across from Lobau to Aspern-Essling, as he had on his previous attack, as a decoy, while simultaneously throwing seven
bridges to the east towards the village of Gross Enzerdorf lower down the river. In Napoleon’s favour, there was a thunderstorm and torrential rains which masked the movement of the troops. The Austrians, utterly deceived, prepared to meet them at Aspern-Essling only to discover that at that very moment a massive French army of 150,000 men and 500 guns had crossed to the north bank of the Danube to the east: a bolder commander might have attempted to attack the French as they crossed; but Archduke Charles held back. Napoleon’s forces now outnumbered the Austrians.

At midday the French advanced against the 136,000 Austrian troops and their forty guns. The Austrians were spread out in a giant semicircle centred on the village of Wagram, at the edge of the Marchfeld Plain. The French mustered their main force on the right (the north) with the object of breaking through the Austrian centre: they had ample space for manoeuvre on the extensive plain. At 5 p.m., as light was fading, Napoleon launched his attack for fear that reinforcements expected from Archduke John’s army would soon reach the Austrians. (In fact John’s force had been whittled down to just 12,000 men.)

The French attack went badly: de Beauharnais’s forces were driven in disarray from directly opposite Wagram, while Oudinot’s forces were also forced to withdraw. Davout and Bernadotte, behind these two, found their way blocked, and Bernadotte withdrew from the village of Aberklaa, just west of Wagram, to Napoleon’s spitting fury. He dismissed Bernadotte on the spot (although to general bemusement he never earned out his threats against this vainglorious, often disobedient and mostly incompetent general, perhaps because he feared making an enemy of the still powerful radical Jacobin faction in the army). The much criticized defences of the Archduke Charles had in fact held well against a superior force commanded by Napoleon himself. The fighting died down at 10 p.m., its lurid glow visible to the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Vienna.

Battle was resumed the following morning, not by a French offensive but an Austrian one on two fronts – the main thrust directed at the weakest French southern flank towards Aspern and the Danube, which was commanded by Masséna, and a centre-north offensive aimed at driving the French back to the Danube. Charles’s attacks were
superb, perfectly crafted pincer movements by a general who had chosen his ground carefully from the defensive heights half encircling the wide plain.

When these attacks seemed to be succeeding Napoleon desperately ordered Masséna further south and ordered Davout forward to hold the French centre, supported by the reserve cavalry under General MacDonald, and also by a huge 112-gun battery firing straight into the Austrian centre. Meanwhile Davout began to push back the Austrian left in the north and to encircle Wagram from that direction. However, in the south the French left along the Danube was buckling under Austrian pressure. The battle hung in the balance.

At that moment, Napoleon showed his old inspiration and flair: he ordered MacDonald with one of the earliest ‘giant squares’, some 30,000 men, eight men across and six ranks deep, with the Young Guard behind and some 6,000 cavalry in support, to strike at the Austrian centre. This huge sledgehammer moved upon the Austrian centre. Even so the Austrian line held. But it had been weakened by Davout’s attacks in the north, and Napoleon saw that an opportunity existed to push through between the Austrian centre and left, to which forces had been rushed to resist Davout.

Davout now started to try and break through at this weak point, while Napoleon committed the entire French reserve except a couple of regiments. At this moment, Charles gave the sensible command to withdraw in good order while he still controlled a line of escape to the north, and broke off the engagement. The French were so overstretched that, had Archduke John arrived in time with his depleted forces, the Austrians might have won. As it was, the Austrians withdrew with all their artillery intact and an army of some 80,000 men to fight another day. The French were too exhausted to pursue and would probably have anyway been beaten back.

With more than 300,000 troops in the field, it had been the biggest battle ever fought in Europe, with casualties in proportion – some 35,000 on each side. It was a French victory on points – they had gained the battlefield – but had been anything but overwhelming, partly because the French army was in fact the superior force: the
Austrians’ much derided linear approach had held and even MacDonald’s battering rain had caused it only to buckle, not break.

Charles has been criticized as too cautious a commander: yet it was his boldness in seeking to outflank the French on both sides that had perhaps been fatal: if he had remained on the defensive in the north while in the south he had cut the French off from their means of escape across the Danube, Napoleon might have been finished. As it was the Emperor only just prevailed.

After a few minor further engagements between the two large armies, Charles, instead of rallying his troops, decided to seek an armistice. That was the Austrian way, to compromise after calculating the results of a battle, not to fight to the bitter end. Yet again he had failed to take advantage of a formidable performance in battle for which he had no reason to feel ashamed; the Austrians had fought as well as the French. The myth of Napoleon’s invincibility had been challenged: he had nearly lost against a smaller Austrian force; he had shown himself to be only narrowly more skilled as a general than Charles, talented but no genius. Even the Emperor Francis, who was usually more pacific than Charles, wanted his army to go on fighting, which led to a rift with his brother and the latter’s premature retirement.

The Austrians’ peace overtures were rebuffed, however, by Napoleon’s vengeful demands for Francis to abdicate, to dismiss his ministers and to emasculate his regular army. Francis initially stalled the negotiations in the hope that the British would open a more substantial second front than that in Portugal, or that the Russians would enter the war on Austria’s side. Once again it seemed that Napoleon, although now in possession of Vienna, had overplayed his hand.

Francis had good reason for stalling, as Britain was just about to open up a second front, with an attack on the Scheldt. Unfortunately through, it was an embarrassing disaster. It was called the Walcheren expedition. This was no mere sideshow, like Wellesley’s expedition to the Peninsula: it was supposed to send the French reeling and bring the rest of Europe into renewed combination against her. The leader of the expedition was, in classic politico-dynastic style, the Earl of Chatham, Pitt’s elder brother, a capable politician and administrator. But it did
not help that his sole military experience was to have commanded a brigade in Holland a decade before and to have served as a subaltern in Gibraltar; the real business of war was left to subordinates like General Sir Eyre Coote, a tetchy veteran from India with a decidedly mixed record.

Chatham was a man of great integrity and intelligence, but he was also comparatively old at fifty-two to be a general of the time. Canning, the brilliant but far too clever mainstay of the government, had put him in charge of the expedition to elevate him to a position from which he might be expected to succeed the decrepit Duke of Portland as prime minister. Canning knew he was himself too controversial for the job: but Chatham would be an ideal figurehead and would block Canning’s great rival Castlereagh.

On the naval side, Admiral Sir Richard Strachan had won his spurs by defeating the last squadron that had tried to escape Trafalgar and was energetic, straightforward and short-tempered. He held Chatham in contempt as a political appointee. Both men assumed the attack on the Scheldt would be as much of a walkover as the taking out of the Danish fleet had been years before.

The expedition consisted of some 40,000 men along with 400 transports and 200 escorts, thirty-seven of them ships of the line. It was possibly the greatest expeditionary force Britain had ever assembled, a kind of Napoleonic invasion in reverse: with his puny forces in Portugal, Wellesley could only have looked on in frustrated envy. The objective was: ‘The capture or destruction of the enemy’s ships either building at Antwerp and Flushing or afloat in the Scheldt, the destruction of the arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp, Terneuse and Flushing, the reduction of the island of Walcheren and the rendering, if possible, the Scheldt no longer navigable for ships of war.’

The expedition was an absurdity from the start. It would have achieved little other than a morale-boosting naval victory. It could certainly not have opened up a second front, because there was no real sign of disaffection against Napoleon in the Low Countries, which the highly strung King Louis, through his moderate policies, had effectively won over. The whole thing was in fact designed to be a magnificent showpiece with the objective of destroying more of
Napoleon’s naval capability, which had anyway been effectively emasculated after Aix Roads. It was also intended to impress the Austrians that the British were serious in their desire to open up a second front, but it came too late. In fact, the Battle of Wagram took place ten days before the British embarkation began.