The War of Wars (107 page)

Secondly, the Peninsular War had been a colossal drain on French resources, with anything up to a third of a million soldiers engaged, many of them crack troops that Napoleon could ill afford to spare from his other fronts, particularly in 1812–14. The drain on France’s financial resources was equally acute. It was a deeply unpopular war in France, which had never felt itself threatened by Spain, as it had been by Austria and its eastern enemies. Enforced recruiting drives had been
raised every year for nearly six years, most of them falling upon the peasantry, which had been one of Napoleon’s main bulwarks of support. Undoubtedly this contributed to the Emperor’s growing unpopularity within France itself.

As for Austria, Prussia and Russia, here was further evidence that Napoleon could be beaten by a dogged and skilled commander and that although a fine general, Napoleon possessed no magic touch: both his strategic vision and his political vision could be seriously flawed, as proven by the whole invasion of Spain and Portugal.

It is of course absurd to argue that Napoleon’s eventual defeat became inevitable as a result of the Peninsular War. The Russian campaign was the crucial factor and, even after that, he could conceivably have survived but, taken jointly with the Russian defeat, it was a turning point: neither was fatal on its own. The Peninsular War had a colossal psychological impact in Britain, France, Austria, Germany and Russia and helped to trigger the events that followed with extraordinary rapidity. It was the start: the unravelling of the Napoleonic myth on land – as Nelson had demolished it on sea.

The most extraordinary fact of the Peninsular War is that Napoleon himself took no further part in such a key campaign after his initial four-month intervention in 1808–9. There has never been a satisfactory explanation for this. During the critical year of 1810 he was at war with no other country. This most energetic of generals, who could hardly be drawn away from the front line if there was another battle to be won, stayed aloof from the Peninsular War, only issuing instructions from a distance – at crucial times sending armies to the wrong side of the Peninsula and actually contributing to France’s defeat.

This has been ascribed to his infatuation with his new wife and then infant son. Yet bourgeois tenderness towards his loved ones was not remotely typical of the man; Napoleon was capable of ardour and passion, but not of sentimentality, especially when his interests were at stake. It seems far more likely that Napoleon astutely realized that he had committed the initial blunder of invading, and wanted to steer clear of being personally associated with defeat. This way, he could blame his generals. The invasion of Spain had been hubris in an attempt to add another satrapy to his empire, supposedly a stepping stone to
Africa but in reality just another jewel for the imperial crown. He believed it would be a walkover as the decadent Bourbons and Godoy were in no shape to resist.

Nothing prepared him for the ferocious internal resistance from a people he considered a mere mongrel race, nor for the remarkable success of an initially little-known British general commanding a small force. Wellington made mistakes, certainly, but the bulk of his campaign was one of scientific, forensic brilliance, conducted with an almost Napoleonic ruthlessness.

The great irony of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is that it was one of the few of Napoleon’s apparent acts of aggression that could in fact be justified – although history has long heaped scorn upon the apparent insanity of the venture he undertook. The blame for the war lay squarely with the Russians and the vain, shallow, unstable, youthful Tsar Alexander. The confrontation had long been brewing, with Alexander increasingly impatient of the French Continental System which he decided to flout by resuming importation of British goods. He was being pressed to do this both by his mother, who loathed Bonaparte, and by his equally anti-French army commanders. In December 1810 Alexander issued tariffs on French luxury goods and permitted the importation of British goods via neutral shipping. These included vital supplies, such as corn, wood, iron, tallow and wattle.

By 2 April Napoleon was warning Alexander ominously: ‘The Emperor Alexander is already far from the ideas of Tilsit; every suggestion of war has its origin in Russia. Unless the Emperor turns the current back very promptly, it will certainly carry him away next year in spite of himself, in spite of the interests of France, and of those of Russia; I have so often watched the process that my experience of the past unfolds the future to me. It is all an opera setting with the English pulling the wires.’

Yet Napoleon had offered a little provocation: he gave Bernadotte the post of crown prince of Sweden in succession to Charles XIII, to get the troublesome leader of the Jacobin faction as well as one of his
most useless generals out of the army. The Russians took this as an attempt to encircle them. Napoleon also annexed the Duchy of Oldenburg, although its ruler was married to the Tsar’s sister, Countess Pavlovina, and the Russians had always regarded the territory as part of their own sphere of influence. It was the old story of Napoleon acting as a bully – but this time against a power which had never reconciled itself to his dominance, and whose territory he had never occupied.

When his ambassador, Armand de Caulaincourt, surely one of the greatest and most honest envoys in history, returned from Russia in June 1811, he bluntly attempted to dissuade Napoleon from ever contemplating war with Russia. Alexander had followed events in Spain with fascination, in particular the guerrilla war and the scorched-earth policy. In addition, Caulaincourt attempted to alert Napoleon to the ferocity of the Russian winter. Alexander had said: ‘I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it.’ Napoleon contemptuously called Alexander, whom he had once almost loved, ‘fickle and feeble’.

Napoleon followed this up in August with a furious and premeditated dressing down for the Russian ambassador in Paris, Count Kurakin, in front of witnesses, raging against Alexander’s proposal for a share in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw: ‘Don’t you know that I have 800,000 troops? If you are counting on allies, where are they?’ He threatened to bring 2,000 cannon to besiege Moscow. Revealingly in November he wrote, ‘If Russia will disarm, I am perfectly willing to do the same . . . but she must not show us displeasure on a thing which, as between great powers, always implies war.’ Even at this stage he was far from resigned to the inevitability of war: but he was certainly not going to be seen to yield to Alexander in any way.

Yet the latter was behaving with growing boldness and contempt in a manner that seemed to suggest he was intent on provoking war. The last month of 1811 and the first of 1812 were spent in diplomatic manoeuvring between the two increasingly hostile powers: war became inevitable because Napoleon believed that he would inevitably win, and because the inexperienced Alexander had a quasi-religious faith about the Russian motherland’s ability to repel him. In February Napoleon forced his Prussian subjects to provide
20,000 troops and persuaded his reluctant ally Austria to provide some 30,000.

Meanwhile, however, he invaded Swedish Pomerania early in July, which infuriated his unreliable old comrade-in-arms Bernadotte. Napoleon apparently believed that no Frenchman would wage war on him. Instead Bernadotte reached a secret agreement with Russia to assist Alexander, provided Sweden was permitted to conquer Norway. In May Alexander reached an agreement with his country’s oldest enemy, Turkey, which permitted him to redeploy his southern armies to meet the Napoleonic threat in the north. This took the Emperor entirely by surprise and provoked a fresh outbreak of anger.

Alexander further prodded Napoleon by issuing a set of conditions for rejoining the Continental System at the end of April: he would do so if France evacuated Prussia, provided compensation for the seizure of Oldenburg and created a buffer zone between the two empires. Napoleon regarded these terms an insult, which they were almost certainly intended to be.

Napoleon clumsily sought to make peace overtures to his oldest enemy, Britain, offering to restore both the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns to their thrones. After Britain consulted both countries, the offer was rejected. Instead British diplomats subsidized the Russians and sought to reinforce Alexander’s determination for war.

Napoleon was furiously preparing the greatest army the world had ever seen for a Russian campaign that he now regarded as virtually inevitable. It was to consist of the First Corps commanded by Davout, the Second commanded by Oudinot, the Third commanded by Ney; the Imperial Guard commanded by Napoleon himself; and the cavalry commanded by Murat: all of them would add up to 250,000 men. Along with this would go the corps commanded by Eugène de Beauharnais; the Fifth Corps, consisting largely of Poles under Poniatowski; the Sixth Corps commanded by St Cyr; the Seventh Corps of Saxons commanded by Reynier; and the Eighth Corps of Westphalians and Hessians commanded by Vandamme. Two other massive armies, the Second (150,000 men) and the Third (165,000), were to act as a reserve and protect lines of communication. There was to be another
supporting army commanded by Jérôme Bonaparte. Altogether these amounted to some 675,000 men, of whom 400,000 were actually to enter Russia.

The colossal size of this army was intended to intimidate the Russians out of war, even at this late stage, and to steamroller all before it if hostilities were declared. The army would need 20 million rations of bread, 20 million tons of rice, 2 million bushels of oats to feed its 150,000 horses and 30,000 wagons to carry supplies. There were 1,200 cannon. Napoleon’s headquarters alone would require fifty wagons and 650 horses to transport them, while his senior officers travelled with their wives, servants and ample possessions. Murat brought a group of the best cooks in Paris and Naples and requested sixty horses for his baggage.

Napoleon had most of the supplies landed at the port of Danzig, while he travelled across in great style to the Saxon capital of Dresden. His army resembled a travelling township, or one of those huge caravans of military might and camp-followers that typified the great Moghul armies of India more than a sleek efficient European military machine.

At Dresden he indulged in an orgy of pomp and circumstance that suggested he preferred display to military skill. His entire court travelled in 300 carriages while he occupied the baroque royal palace and filled it with French furniture and luxuries, commanding his puppet rulers from across Europe to come to do him homage. Quite what he sought to achieve with this display is not clear: it certainly did not intimidate Alexander, who had assembled his own court at Vilnius, just seventy-five miles away.

General Philippe-Paul de Ségur, one of Napoleon’s generals whose account remains the most gripping of the whole campaign, wrote:

We were about to reach the extremity of Europe, where never European army had been before! We were about to erect new columns of Hercules. The grandeur of the enterprise, the agitation of co-operating Europe, the imposing spectacle of an army of 400,000 foot and 80,000 horse, so many warlike reports and martial clamours, kindled the minds of veterans themselves. It was impossible
for the coldest to remain unmoved amid the general impulse, to escape from the universal attraction. In conclusion: the composition of the army was good and every good army is desirous of war . . .

Napoleon addressed his troops before the invasion with a ringing declaration:

Soldiers, the second Polish war is commenced. The first was concluded at Friedland and at Tilsit. At Tilsit, Russia swore eternal friendship with France and war with England. She now violates her oaths. She will give no explanation of her capricious conduct until the French eagles have repassed the Rhine, by that means leaving our allies at her mercy. Russia is hurried away by fatality; her destiny must be accomplished. Does she then believe us to be degenerated? Are we not still the soldiers of Austerlitz? She places us between war and dishonour: the choice cannot be in doubt. Let us advance then, let us cross the Niemen and carry the war into her territory! The second Polish war will be as glorious for French arms as the first; but this time, the peace we shall conclude will carry with it its own guarantee; it will put an end to the fatal influence which Russia for the last fifty years has exercised over the affairs of Europe.

His plan was simplicity itself: to draw the Russians into a battle he believed they would fight to defend their borders and inflict a crashing and punishing defeat. He believed the campaign would be over in three weeks – a short sharp shock – which explains why he had taken so long to make his way to the border, wasting the valuable spring and summer months.

The Grande Armée was to march to take Niemen on the frontier with Russia in two main columns: the biggest of 220,000 men under the Emperor himself towards Kouno; and another under Jérôme and de Beauharnais to the south moving towards Grodno and Pilony. Napoleon himself abandoned his comfortable carriage to ride on horseback at dusk and scout the Niemen – until he was suddenly thrown
from his horse, at which he is said to have exclaimed, ‘That is a bad omen. A Roman would recoil.’ (Napoleon was highly superstitious for a man who professed such rationalist scepticism towards traditional religions.)

At night they crossed the river on pontoon bridges to find the opposite bank almost entirely undefended except for a single Cossack officer who appeared completely taken by surprise by their appearance. The crossing was effected on 23 June. Ségur captured the mood of the moment:

Three hundred yards from the river, on the most elevated height, the tent of the Emperor was visible. Around it the hills and valleys were covered with men and horses. As soon as the earth presented to the sun those moving masses, clothed with glittering arms, the signal was given and instantly the multitudes began to file off in three columns towards the bridges. They were seen to take a winding direction as they descended the narrow plain which separated them from the Niemen; to approach it, to reach the three bridges, to compress and prolong their columns in order to cross them; and at last reach that foreign soil which they were about to devastate (and which they were destined to cover with their own dreadful wreckage). So great was their enthusiasm that two divisions of the advanced guard disputed for the honour of being the first to pass and were near coming to blows, some exertions being necessary to quiet them. Napoleon hastened to plant his foot on Russian territory. He took this first step towards his ruin without hesitation. At first, he stationed himself near the bridge, encouraging the soldiers with his looks. The latter all saluted him with their accustomed cries. They appeared, indeed, more animated than he was: whether it was that he felt oppressed by the weight of so great an invasion, or that his enfeebled frame could not support the effect of the excessive heat, or that he was already intimidated by finding nothing to conquer.