The War of Wars (69 page)

Napoleon remarked furiously: ‘I cannot be everywhere,’ and then dismissed the defeat as ‘the loss of a few ships after a battle imprudently fought’. It was at this moment that the British spy, Wright, who had been implicated in the plot against Napoleon, was found with his throat cut with a razor, supposedly in despair at the news from Ulm. Admiral Villeneuve, who was returned to France by the British some
months later, was found stabbed six times in a country inn on the way to Paris in another supposed suicide. The Emperor’s wrath against those who failed him was pitiless.

Nor could he rest on the laurels of Ulm – he had little time to waste. The Tsar himself was on his way to Austria to command his army. Snow delayed his journey, as did a few pleasant days at Weimar, where he met Goethe. In Berlin he had persuaded Frederick William III, ever hesitant, to commit Prussia to join the allied cause with an attack on the Rhineland. There the Tsar and the Kaiser had sworn an oath of friendship across the coffin of Frederick the Great. Kutuzov meanwhile had been reinforced by the Russian Second Army and then the Russian Imperial Guard, as well as Archduke Ferdinand’s Austrian army: there were now some 50,000 Russians and 35,000 Austrians altogether. To the south, just ten days away, the Archdukes Charles and John had joined forces to make up an army of 80,000 men. Napoleon was believed to have no more than 40,000 men. To the overconfident young Tsar, aged just twenty-nine, it seemed that Napoleon had overreached himself.

The Tsar was an extraordinary personality. Blessed with remarkable good looks of an almost feminine kind, blond curly hair, blue eyes, soft features, tall and elegant, he also possessed great charm which alternated with increasingly violent mood swings of depression and anger that bordered on mania. He was also fanatically religious. Kutuzov urged Alexander to withdraw to the Carpathians which would finally break French lines of communication. Emperor Francis of Austria also urged caution. But Alexander and Prince Bagration, his preferred general, were eager for battle and scoffed at ‘General Dawdler’, as he called Kutuzov.

Napoleon by this time, after the elation of Ulm had worn off, was growing increasingly alarmed: if the joint Russian-Austrian army escaped to the east, he would become overstretched and unable to follow. There was also a danger that they would link up with the Austrian army approaching rapidly from the south, or that the latter by itself would cut French lines of communication; and then there was the further fear that the Prussians would at last throw in their lot with the coalition. Moreover Napoleon had had to send part of his army to cover his flanks, and his strength was now down to 70,000 men.

The Emperor decided on a characteristically bold strategy: to lure the enemy into battle before it had moved out of reach or the strength of the southern army could be brought to bear. He carefully selected his planned field of battle some eighteen miles east of the small town of Brunn alongside the road from Vienna to the north. The town was bordered by that road in the west and another road to the north. To the south were two large bodies of water, Satschan Pond and Meinitz Pond, as well as a large natural barrier of marshes. Bordering the marshes in the centre was a low hill, the Pratzen Heights: to the east was the small village of Austerlitz.

The position was a natural defensive one, with woods and small valleys in which his troops could hide. All he had to do was entice his enemies to battle.

He took an extraordinary risk. He withdrew from both Austerlitz and his strong position on the commanding Pratzen Heights, apparently in some disorder at the nearby presence of the coalition armies, and sued for an armistice. On 29 November, at a meeting with a Russian envoy, Count Dolgorovki, he appeared timid and indecisive. Meanwhile he secretly ordered Bernadotte’s First Corps and Davout’s Third Corps to reinforce him by forced marches. The two armies covered the sixty miles from Vienna in some seventy hours. He concentrated his main forces to the north and centre, with Lannes and Murat in the front line. To the south he placed most of Soult’s Fourth Corps, strung out thinly. Concealed to the north were Bernadotte’s First Corps and, to the south, Davout’s Third Corps.

On 1 December the combined Russia and Austrian armies marched forward to occupy the abandoned Pratzen Heights, seemingly the key to the battle, from which they could gaze down contemptuously on the French forces below. There they held a council of war, during which Kutuzov slept ostentatiously, saying that his advice had been ignored. They decided to attack through the weakened French southern flank and attempt to cut Napoleon off from his supply line along the road to Vienna, thus encircling his army. They had taken the bait.

Napoleon was unusually animated at dinner that evening. An eyewitness described the scene at 9 p.m.

[The Emperor] decided to go the round of the bivouacs on foot and incognito; he was nearly at once recognized. It would be impossible to describe the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they saw him. In an instant blazing torches of straw were raised on a thousand poles, and 80,000 men were standing and acclaiming their Emperor, some for the anniversary of his coronation, others saying that the army would present the Emperor with a bouquet on the following day. An old grenadier came up to him and said: ‘Sire, keep out of the firing, I promise you in the name of the grenadiers, that you need not fight otherwise than as a spectator, for we will bring you the standards.’ When the Emperor returned to his own bivouac, a straw shanty without a roof that the grenadiers had built for him, he said: ‘This is the most glorious night of my life; but I regret that so many of these brave fellows will be lost. They really are my children.’

He also had luck on his side: a thick fog enveloped the lakeside in the early hours of the morning, which helped further to conceal Davout’s and Bernadotte’s arrival, as well as Soult’s cavalry behind the main lines: the shallow valleys of the terrain helped further to hide the French. To the allies it seemed the French were heavily outnumbered, in inferior positions and demoralized, almost on the verge of retreat.

The allies decided on a two-pronged attack: Bagration was to strike in the north against Lannes’s Fifth Corps; and Buxhovden, commanding a second Russian army, was to lead the main attack with 45,000 men against Soult’s apparently weakened forces in the south; the Russians and Austrians, thus lulled by a sense of false security, took the immense risk of moving off the Pratzen Heights in a southerly direction.

At around 4 a.m., the attack began, with the Russians and Austrians being checked in the north, but making steady progress against the French in the south across difficult terrain which was also bounded by the marsh and the shallow lakes, potential death traps in the freezing conditions. After some four hours of fighting, the coalition troops in the south suddenly came up against 7,000 fresh soldiers commanded by Davout and were blocked.

At this moment Napoleon ordered Murat’s cavalry to attack the Russian cavalry which had been left occupying the Pratzen Heights: a
colossal cavalry engagement involving some 10,000 men ensued. Napoleon waited until just after nine, when the sun had more or less cleared the mists, to order Soult’s two divisions in waiting to move. In a disciplined and steady march the infantry ascended the gentle incline of the heights against the by now much reduced allied army at its weakest point – the centre.

Kutuzov, seeing what was happening, ordered reinforcements to the weakened centre, but it was too late: the allies were being pushed back. Bernadotte’s concealed corps was also now ordered into the fray. The Russians turned desperately to counter-attack. The Russian Imperial Guard, headed by the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, bravely dashed into the centre, but the Austrians, retiring in confusion, got in their way and they were forced back at around one o’clock.

By now the French commanded the heights and were in a position to turn the tables, threatening to cut off the bulk of the Russian army to the south, which was caught between the heights and the ponds. French artillery was brought to bear on the trapped army, blowing holes in the shallow ice below. Both Napoleon and Alexander later suggested that thousands of Russians fell through the ice to a freezing death in the waters of the ponds – the one to rub in the extent of his triumph, the other seeking to blame natural causes for his defeat. Yet when the ponds were drained a few days later only two or three bodies were found, along with 150 dead horses and thirty cannon. Most of the Russian soldiers fled across the narrow strip of land between the ponds: the ice was too thin to bear them.

As the retreat turned into a rout, only Bagration’s forces in the north retired in good order. By the end of the day, however, the French were too exhausted to give chase. It was nevertheless an overwhelming victory. Some 11,000 Russians and 4,000 Austrians had been killed and 12,000 taken prisoner along with 180 guns. Only 1,300 French soldiers had been killed and some 7,000 wounded, along with the loss of around 600 prisoners.

It had been a textbook victory, secured by Napoleon’s skill in deceiving the enemy, in positioning his troops, in making perfect use of the features of the battlefield and in ordering the various corps into battle with split-second timing. Essentially, through concealing most of
his troops and feinting a retreat from the strategic centre ground on the obverse side of a hill, he had lured the enemy into a trap – a trick which was later to be used time and again by his most dangerous enemy, the Duke of Wellington.

The remarkable mobility of his troops had also overcome the static and predictable linear attack of his opponents. And once again he had shown his ability to mass overwhelming force where it could be used to devastating effect: he had cut the enemy line in two by the simple device of slicing straight through their weakened centre. Finally the battle was a rare masterpiece of precision, command and control – his orders were executed rapidly and faultlessly, his generals operating with just the right degree of co-ordination and independence as in some flawlessly executed field manoeuvre rather than in battle.

Never were Napoleon’s military skills more in evidence than at Austerlitz. Of all his battles, it was the most flawless, the most perfect, the most inspired – as Napoleon probably himself thought, although he had a habit of trying to inflate his achievements on much less impressive occasions. The Russians retreated at speed to Poland while the Austrian Emperor sued immediately for peace. In the Battle of the Three Emperors, the greatest engagement that had ever yet been fought in Europe, two had been comprehensively routed.

Napoleon spent the cold night out in the open among his dead, and then the following one in comfort. In his words: ‘The battle of Austerlitz is the most splendid of all I have fought. I have fought thirty battles of the same sort, but none in which the victory was so decisive, and so little in doubt. The infantry of the guard was not sent into action – the men were weeping with rage. Tonight I am lying in a bed, in the beautiful castle of Count Kaunitz, and I have changed my shirt, which I hadn’t done for a week past. I shall get two or three hours’ sleep.’

Archduke Charles arrived at the head of his Italian armies to insist on the need for peace and to dismiss his enemies at court as ‘obscure quacks gathered round the monarchy’s deathbed’. Both Colloredo and Coblenz were dismissed. Napoleon spent Christmas at the Schonbrunn and also met the Archduke, his most formidable Austrian adversary.

At the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 26 December, Francis and the
Austrians were utterly humiliated. Venice, as well as Dalmatia and Istria, was ceded to the Kingdom of Italy. Sweden and the Tyrol were granted to Napoleon’s allies, the electors of Wurttemberg and Bavaria. Austria was forced to pay 40 million francs to the French.

Napoleon had also secured a buffer zone of German states. Murat was given charge of the Grand Duchy of Berg and Berthier that of Neuchâtel. The King of Prussia hastened to make peace and broke off relations with Britain, being rewarded with the electorate of Hanover.

The French Emperor now engaged in dynastic policies on a megalomaniacal scale, aping royal lines that had taken centuries to build, awarding whole countries as baubles to his singularly untalented and ill-equipped family. For this former Jacobin, supporter of Robespierre and ‘meritocrat’, it was grotesque.

To his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, admittedly the only talented member of the clan, he awarded Bavaria by marrying him off to the beautiful Augusta, daughter of the King. To his dim, timorous, head-in-the clouds elder brother Joseph he gave the Kingdom of Naples. There was a small detail to fill in: first it had to be captured. Joseph and Masséna marched on the kingdom with 40,000 men, forcing the crass King Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina to flee to Sicily once again. The ‘Batavian Republic’ was abolished and the new Kingdom of Holland was awarded to his younger brother Louis, a nervous, but essentially well-meaning man without an ounce of administrative ability but who was sensitive to the needs of his subjects – as Napoleon discovered to his cost.

Thus the extraordinary vulgarity of Napoleon’s nature fused in a kind of mania: the distribution of the spoils of Corsican brigandage on a pan-European scale to members of his own family.

If Napoleon had followed his triumph at Austerlitz with an attempt to put in place a lasting settlement in Europe based on French domination, and had also shown moderation in his treatments of his defeated foes, the Austrians and their allies, he might have laid the foundations for lasting peace and indeed his own survival, for Britain had no wish to prolong a war in which it was isolated. Instead he trampled on his defeated foes in an unprecedented display of
triumphalism, which was guaranteed to nourish hatred and feelings of revenge at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly Napoleon’s recently acquired subject peoples were uncertain what to make of their new masters at first: they preached freedom and equality and might be an improvement upon their stiff-backed Austrian predecessors. But such hopes were soon dashed.