The War of Wars (118 page)

Not just his energy returned but seemingly his skill. For he was now fighting to defend his own terrain of France, in the manner he was best equipped to do: in nearly absolute command of a small army capable of manoeuvring quickly and unpredictably to strike in front, from the flanks, behind and all around his enemies. It was his first Italian campaign all over again: the great military streetfighter was himself again. He was much less proficient as a commander in the great set-piece battles, which his legion of admirers proclaimed was his real genius – with the notable exception of Austerlitz. But he was the master of military manoeuvre with a small compact army weaving circles around its opponents. He was superb in adversity, when all seemed hopeless.

It was his singular bad luck that the principal opposing general was no parade-ground preener but a tough, wily old warrior addicted to war, seizing with both hands his last chance to bring his career and his life to a glorious close. It resembled the famous Wild West confrontation between the veteran Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Blücher’s reflexes were not so fast nor his capacity for surprise and deception so great as his adversary’s. But the old rogue looked to his own shrewdness
and his ability to muster superior forces while avoiding Napoleon’s sudden thrusts. It was the penultimate confrontation of Napoleon’s life, a duel of wits that testified to the superb military skills of both men.

Napoleon once summed up his own military philosophy simply: ‘The art of war does not require complicated manoeuvres; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder how it is that generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever. The most difficult thing is to guess the enemy’s plan, to sift the truth from all the reports that come in. The rest merely requires common sense; it’s like a boxing-match, the more you punch, the better it is. It is also necessary to read the map well.’ Blücher’s philosophy was even more rudimentary – ‘vorwarts’, but also backwards when necessary, as his campaign now showed. It was the duel between a bloodied leader of a pack of hounds and an alert fox fighting for its life on its own territory.

The rest of the pack consisted of no fewer than five major components. The northern army was under Bennigsen and Bernadotte with their target the Low Countries, approaching to besiege Hamburg, defended by the superb Davout, and Magdeburg: both Holland and Belgium were almost in revolt, with Amsterdam having risen. The next force further south was to support this: under the Prussian General von Bülow, it was intended to link up with a force sent from Britain under Sir Thomas Graham with the intention of sweeping the Low Countries free of the French.

Further south would come the two main allied thrusts from the east: Blücher would lead the central one of 100,000 men across the Rhine; while Schwarzenberg with the main army would come up from the south-east with around 200,000 men on Napoleon’s flank as he engaged Blücher. These would be supported by the Austrian troops now fighting in Italy. Finally, Wellington with his immaculate command of military tactics was now steadily advancing in southern France. Altogether there would be 400,000 allied troops to engage Napoleon’s army.

The Austrian aim was so to overwhelm the French with sheer numbers that Napoleon would be forced to come to terms without further bloodshed; they believed the British could be persuaded
privately to support this view, which was not shared by the Prussians and Russians who wanted to inflict total defeat in revenge for the conquest of their capitals. Against these forces, Napoleon deployed 70,000 men to protect Paris and 40,000 more as his fighting forces against the approaching combination of allies.

The flaw in the allied strategy was to overlook the fact that Napoleon was essentially a fighting machine: he had lost all grand stratagems or statesmanlike vision – if indeed he ever possessed any – and believed that with his small army he could still outwit his far larger pursuing forces and drive them to the negotiating table on his terms. He was too realistic to believe he could actually defeat the allies. At first the progress of this lightning war of incredibly quick manoeuvres, marches, battles and defences seemed to justify him: he retained the initiative as long as he could keep the much larger allied forces apart.

The two main southern and eastern prongs advanced at the end of January, Schwarzenberg slowly to the Languedoc plateau, where he halted on Metternich’s instructions, Blücher crossing the Meuse, penetrating seventy miles into French territory. On 24 January Blücher fought a first battle with the French vanguard, which ended in a stalemate with high casualties. Napoleon returned to the area the following day, supported by Ney and Marmont. He tried to work his way around the Prussians’ rear. But Blücher had retreated to Brienne. He and Gneisenau were nearly captured and had to leave hastily when Napoleon’s small army surprised them and dealt them a bloody nose, leaving 4,000 Prussian casualties. In fierce winter blizzards, Napoleon pushed the bulk of Blücher’s army down the road to La Rothière.

However Schwarzenberg, who was only fifty miles away, was able to detach some 50,000 men of his large army to reinforce Blücher, and Napoleon blundered into this much larger force in blinding snow, losing some 5,000 casualties as well as a hundred guns. On the road back to Troyes, which he reached on 3 February, he lost a further 4,000 through desertion. The allies had lost some 6,000 men as well, but could much better afford them.

Intoxicated by the victory, Blücher and Schwarzenberg, who could not keep so large an army supplied in winter, separated again, Blücher moving along the Marne and Schwarzenberg up the Seine. Blücher was supremely confident that French resistance was all but over. ‘The road to Paris is free,’ he declared. ‘I do not believe that Napoleon will engage in another battle.’ The Prussians made a forced march along the
road to Paris, but Napoleon suddenly veered north and in four days won four separate engagements which cost Blücher some 16,000 men and nearly resulted in his being captured or trampled to death at Vauchamps. Napoleon was satisfied: he had skilfully avoided and then damaged a much larger army.

He could now switch his attention to Schwarzenberg’s army, which was threatening Paris from the south. He marched his men fifty miles in thirty-five hours and inflicted serious losses on the enemy in engagements at Mormant, Valjouan and Montereau; at these clashes he inflicted a further 6,000 casualties for the loss of 2,000 of his own men. On 21 February he won a further victory. He sought to trap his retreating enemy at Troyes, but learnt that Schwarzenberg’s army had linked up with Blücher to provide a force of some 100,000, compared to Napoleon’s 70,000 or so.

The allies withdrew at Napoleon’s approach, Blücher moving to join up with Bulow in the north, Schwarzenberg moving south to Langres. Napoleon had thus won seven battles in eight days and forced two much larger armies to retreat. As usual, success went to his head. When he was offered a return to the 1792 boundaries by the allies, he delayed and the moment for peace was soon past.

Blücher, perhaps encouraged by the news that Britain would pay £5 million to subsidize the war, resumed the move towards Paris. Napoleon promptly marched towards him, but Blücher was too quick, crossing to the north bank of the Marne and liaising with the smaller army of General von Bülow to swell his force to 100,000 men. Troyes had fallen to the south. On 7 March Napoleon caught up with Blücher at Craonne, where Ney perhaps foolishly staged an impetuous frontal attack, which resulted in 5,000 casualties on both sides before the combined Prussian-Russian army withdrew. Napoleon scented victory: Blücher’s army repeatedly got away, but the latter was under intense pressure, with indiscipline spreading among his men.

Napoleon’s renewed cockiness caused him contemptuously to dismiss further allied peace proposals. The Emperor’s judgement was being warped by his domination of the field, even though he could still not secure decisive victories. He wrote to Caulaincourt: ‘I am so moved at
the sight of the infamous proposal that you send me, that I feel dishonoured at merely being in such a position that such a proposal can be made. I will send you my instructions from Troyes or Châtillon; but I think I had almost sooner lose Paris than see such propositions made to the French people. You are always talking about the Bourbons – I had sooner see the Bourbons back in France, with reasonable conditions, than such infamous proposals as you have transmitted!’

Meanwhile he cherished hopes that the hitherto inanimate French peasantry would rise up in a Spanish-style insurrection against the allied troops as they helped themselves to food and laid waste to the land in the depths of the French winter: ‘The enemy’s soldiers are behaving horribly everywhere. All the inhabitants are fleeing to the woods. There are no peasants left in the villages. The enemy consume everything, take all the horses, all the cattle, all the clothing and rags of the peasants; they strike everybody, men and women, and commit a great number of rapes. I hope soon to draw my people from this miserable state and from this truly horrible suffering. The enemy should think of this twice, for Frenchmen are not patient; they are courageous by nature, and I expect to see them forming themselves into free companies.’ He was in the throes of self-delusion.

Chasing after Blücher, he considered his adversary all but defeated. But the old man suddenly decided to make a stand at Laon, where a steep hill 330 feet high rose abruptly out of the surrounding countryside. It was protected by two villages at its foot, and by marshes and woods to the south, while it commanded flat countryside to the north. Blücher had tired of fleeing and he was reinforced by Bulow’s troops in defence of the town itself, covered the hill with snipers and put two battalions each into the villages below. His main corps was stationed on either side and a reserve of two Prussian corps was hidden behind the hill.

On 9 March Napoleon’s 37,000-strong army arrived in thick fog from the south-west and the south-east. Blücher, who was exhausted and ill, took up a position on the side of the hill, believing Napoleon’s army to be 100,000 strong and expecting the main attack to come from the east, where it was in fact only 10,000 strong. When the fog cleared in the late morning, as one Prussian observer commented from the same vantage point as Blücher:

It was not one continued battle, but different corps of the enemy as they came in sight were attacked, and engagements were taking place at several points distinct from each other at the same time. . . . A mass of cavalry tried to hew a road into the middle of them; but they were not to be broken; they waved every way, and curved and bent, but always drew closer again into a dense mass as if they had been one single living body. It was a grand, a wonderful sight! . . . The generals themselves viewed the spectacle with amazement; Gneisenau was loud in his delight.

A cannonball nearly injured Blücher in his exposed position.

At around four Napoleon, unusually hesitant, ordered a major attack but discovered that the boggy ground behind the woods prevented the cavalry and artillery from softening up the Austrian position. As dusk approached, Blücher realized the weakness of the French column in the east and ordered Yorck forward in a major assault. The column’s commander, the usually talented General Marmont, had left for a sleep in a nearby building, and his men panicked and, in the face of the allied attack, fled back along the road by which they had come. Marmont lost 3,500 men and nearly all his officers.

Blücher, delighted, ordered Yorck on a flanking march to the east to cut off the rest of Napoleon’s main force. The following morning, however, the Prussian commander was nearly paralysed by an inflammation of the eyes and command passed to his chief of staff, General Gneisenau. However brilliant a planner and military reformer, Gneisenau was indifferent and cautious as a field commander and he feared Napoleon’s reputation. He cancelled the flanking move, preferring to stay on the defensive, fearing that Napoleon’s army was far stronger than it indeed was.

Napoleon staged a dawn attack against the heavily fortified hill which was easily repulsed before finally deciding to withdraw that evening, having suffered losses of around 7,000 men compared to the Prussian-Russian ones of 2,000. It had been a defeat on points for the French, who had failed to take the hill or destroy Blücher’s army, but Napoleon had still escaped being completely overwhelmed by a force nearly three times the size of his own – as would probably have occurred if Blücher had continued with his flanking movement.

The Emperor swiftly got in his retaliation, striking at an unprotected enemy force near Rheims and inflicting 6,000 casualties to 700 French ones. Napoleon veered south to attack Schwarzenberg’s bigger but more dispersed army, which appeared to retreat and then suddenly stopped to face him at Arcis-sur-Aube. The French initially drove the Austrians out of the village, but were massively attacked and Napoleon was nearly killed when a shell exploded under his horse: he lamented that he had not been killed on the battlefield. ‘During the fight at Arcissur-Aube I did all I could to meet with a glorious end defending the soil of our country inch by inch. I exposed myself continuously. Bullets rained all around me; my clothes were full of them; but not one touched me. I am condemned to live!’

The following day the French found that the entire army of Bohemia had arrived, and they had to retreat under fire; they had lost 3,000 men to the allies’ 4,000, but had also given up possession of the battlefield. Seemingly irrepressible, Napoleon suddenly surged forward eastward to St Didier behind the allied armies, threatening their supply lines. But the allies, believing that Paris was on the brink of rising up against Napoleon, took no notice and marched straight to the city, three marches ahead. He raced desperately to intercept them.

The 120,000-strong allied army overwhelmed Marmont’s forces just outside the capital, and then again in a skirmish at the gates of the city overlooked by Montmartre, where Napoleon’s dismayed brothers Jérôme and Lucien watched before they made their getaway. With the third sibling, Joseph, having done nothing to defend the city, Marmont signed the capitulation of Paris on 30 March. The Empress Marie Louise and the infant King of Rome had already left the city. Napoleon marched furiously to Fontainebleau only to learn of the surrender. ‘It is the first time I have heard of a population of 300,000 that cannot survive for three months,’ he fumed. He believed that after only a few days scarcity of supplies would have driven the allies back from outside the city, although this seems unlikely.