The War of Wars (74 page)

More serious matters required his attention. Towards the end of the month Ney was foraging for fuel close to the winter quarters of the
Russians. Bennigsen decided to strike across the Vistula in an attempt to sever his lines of communication. Napoleon was delighted. He decided to withdraw from the Russian border and spring a trap. However his orders fell into Bennigsen’s hands and the latter withdrew towards Konigsberg, stopping at the village of Eylau, which he defended by placing several regiments in the church and cemetery, while occupying the strategic plateau behind.

Napoleon sent forward his advance guard under Soult and Murat, intending to rally his men for a decisive attack on the Russians. It was bitterly cold. The French succeeded in driving the Russians out of the village on 7 February and prepared to assemble their forces for a decisive push. But Bennigsen himself decided not to wait. For once it was the French who were sluggish and ill-organized, and the enemy who seized the initiative. At daybreak the Russians, who had considerable superiority in artillery, some 400 cannon to 200 French guns, opened up on the French positions; as the guns blazed, some 4,000 men were killed on both sides in a cannonade which continued after night fell on the short winter day, with temperatures falling to minus 20 degrees. It was an unprecedented slaughter by artillery alone. The French hesitated to attack, because they were outnumbered by some 70,000 to 45,000 while Napoleon waited for reinforcements from Davout and Ney. At last, though, the supporting armies arrived and Napoleon ordered his men into an attack on the classic pattern. Davout and Ney were to manoeuvre around the flanks, while Soult would wait to launch a frontal attack: behind him Murat’s cavalry would be held in reserve for a decisive push, with the Imperial Guard behind that.

Napoleon confidently ordered Soult to advance on the centre – only to discover the Russian main force moving towards them. Soult was driven rapidly back and the Russians attacked the French left under Ney, which had not even begun to march. Davout’s division had not yet attacked on the right. Taken by surprise, and fearing that he would lose the field, Napoleon rashly ordered Augereau forward. But a blinding blizzard descended, obstructing the view of both armies, and Augereau’s corps stumbled directly under the Russian guns, which inflicted massive damage. The French line was now broken, and some 6,000 Russians forced their way into Eylau, where Napoleon, who had
taken up his position in the church, narrowly avoided capture. With Augereau’s corps all but destroyed and Soult’s thrown back, it seemed that the French were on the verge of losing the battle.

Desperately, Napoleon ordered Murat’s cavalry forward. Murat then led perhaps the most famous cavalry charge in history, his 11,000 men thundering right into the enemy front line and their guns. This saved the battle for the French. Napoleon’s laconic comment was that this attack was ‘as daring as war had ever seen and covered our cavalry in glory’. Murat lost 1,500 men, but captured the seventy guns that had ravaged Augereau’s forces.

More important still, the ferocity of the attack unnerved Bennigsen, who feared that the French centre was much stronger than it actually was and fatally hesitated to pursue the advantage he had won at midday. This gave time for Davout to encircle the Russians on the right. With his usual skill and ferocity, Davout drove the Russians back and forced them off the higher ground.

The French believed they had victory in their grasp, barely hours after defeat had stared them in the face. But a force of Prussians under General Lestocq, which had managed to evade a corps of 15,000 men under Ney who had been sent to intercept them, fell upon Davout’s unguarded flank and started fighting the French back off the commanding heights at around four o’clock. The French, fighting furiously, fell back, and it seemed the Russians were carrying the day once again.

As darkness fell, at around 7 p.m. Ney’s men, who had blundered about in the blizzards, finally arrived to reinforce Davout and halted the Russian advance. With darkness, snow and plummeting temperatures enveloping the battlefield, Bennigsen held a council of war and overruled his generals, who wanted to fight to the death: he decided to withdraw while he had the advantage.

It is impossible to conclude who would have prevailed if the fighting had gone into a third day. The French had clearly lost – some 20,000 men to the Russian tally of around 10,000 and 2,500 prisoners taken. Yet the Russian tactics of withdrawing in good order allowed Napoleon to claim victory, lying that he had lost only around 2,000 dead and 5,000 wounded. But even he admitted: ‘We had a great battle
yesterday; victory is mine, but my losses are very heavy; the enemy’s losses, which were heavier, do not console me. The great distance at which I find myself makes my losses even more acutely felt.’

Ney remarked as he toured the battlefield: ‘What a massacre. And without result.’ The surgeon-general of the
Grande Armée
, Percy, described the scene:

Never was so small a space covered with so many corpses. Everywhere the snow was stained with blood. The snow which had fallen and which was still falling began to hide the bodies from the grieving glances of passers-by. The bodies were heaped up wherever there were small groups of firs behind which the Russians had fought. Thousands of guns, helmets and breastplates were scattered on the road or in the fields. On the slope of a hill, which the enemy had obviously chosen to protect themselves, there were groups of a hundred bloody bodies; horses, maimed but still alive, waited to fall in their turn from hunger, on the heaps of bodies. We had hardly crossed one battlefield when we found another, all of them strewn with bodies.

In spite of Napoleon’s gloss, it was his first significant tactical defeat. Of the first three great pitched battles under his command he had won the first, Austerlitz, devastatingly; the second, Jena-Aurstadt more by good fortune than by skill, and he had lost the third at Eylau however much he tried to persuade himself it was a victory.

He and his troops returned to winter quarters – the Russians reoccupying the field of Eylau, which by now was full of frozen bodies. Gloomily he wrote to Joseph in Naples:

The staff, colonels, officers, have not undressed in two months, some not in four; I, myself have gone two weeks without getting out of my boots; we are in the midst of snow and mud, without wine, without brandy, without bread, eating potatoes and meat, making long marches and countermarches, without any kind of luxury, and fighting with bayonets and grapeshot; the wounded are often compelled to go fifty leagues in open sleighs. Therefore it is a
pretty poor joke to compare us with the army of Naples, making war in a lovely country, where one can get wine, oil, bread, cloth, sheets, social life, and even women. After having destroyed the Prussian monarchy, we are fighting against what is left of the Prussians, against the Russians, the Kalmucks, the Cossacks, the northern tribes that long ago invaded the Roman Empire. We are making war in the strictest sense of that term. In the midst of these great fatigues we have all been more or less sick. As for myself I have never been stronger, and have become fatter.

It had been a major setback and exaggerated accounts of the disaster started to circulate in the salons of Paris. The myth of Napoleon’s invincibility had been badly dented. The invincible
Grande Armée
had been outfought, outmanoeuvred, outgunned, slaughtered in their thousands and very nearly routed by a plodding Russian army equipped with obsolescent conventional tactics. Worse, Napoleon had tried to fight on ground of his own choosing, had been ambushed and forced to fight on the enemy’s terms – even though by the end of the battle he enjoyed considerable superiority in numbers.

He was now plunged into the bitter realization that Russia was one of his most dangerous enemies, the power that threatened his hold on Europe: in a sense he was right, for Russia, unlike Austria and Prussia which were essentially defeated, was an aggressive nation with as many ambitions as France. From the defeat at Eylau dawned the realization that he could not hope to beat Russia and must instead seek peace. But he could hardly now abandon his position without risking a Russian counter-attack, the possible loss of Prussia and even his own throne, as all of Europe would fall upon him after barely one and a half years of unbroken triumph.

Paradoxically, defeat had the effect of making him even more determined than victory. He immediately sought to avoid further disaster by strengthening his depleted army. Through colossal conscription drives that drained and disrupted the French people as well as subject nations, Napoleon increased his total manpower to 600,000 men altogether; the
Grande Armée
in Poland and its supporters in Germany comprised two-thirds of this. Six new divisions had been
enlisted – two in Poland, two in Germany, and two in Italy, as well as 100,000 men in Saxony and Baden.

Napoleon himself dallied in great comfort with Marie Walewska in the castle of Finkenstein – ‘a splendid castle with chimneys in all the rooms, which was a very pleasant thing’. To the unhappy Josephine who was deeply suspicious and trying to rally support for him as the rumour of his defeat reached Paris, he wrote:

Dear friend: Your letter has caused me pain. There is no occasion for you to die; you are well, and have no reasonable cause for worry. You must give up all idea of a journey this summer; it is not possible. I am as anxious to see you as you are to see me, and even to lead a quiet life. I know how to do other things than wage war, but duty must come first. All my life I have sacrificed everything, my repose, my interests, my happiness, to my destiny . . . I have your letter. I don’t know what you mean by ladies who correspond with me. I love only my little Josephine, good, sulky, capricious, who can quarrel gracefully, as she does everything else, for she is always fascinating except when she is jealous, and then she becomes a little devil.

While he reassembled his forces, renewed his strength and made love to Marie Walewska, he ordered his troops to Danzig, which surrendered after an old-fashioned siege on the classic style, lasting three months on 27 May, furnishing Napoleon with badly needed supplies. The 20,000 or so French besiegers marched to reinforce the Emperor, who was showing signs of the old cockiness, writing to the despairing Talleyrand:

General Gardanne wishes to proceed to Persia. Maret will draw up his credentials and instructions. They turn on [the following] points: Investigate the resources of Persia from the military point of view, studying particularly the obstacles that would have to be overcome by a French army of 40,000 men marching to India with the help of the Persian and Turkish governments. Deal with Persia in regard to England by urging her to prevent the passage of English despatches
and messages, and to hamper the trade of the East India Company in every way possible.

In summer 1807, Napoleon decided to resume the offensive. He pushed forward in a renewed effort to cut the Russian army off from its base at Konigsberg, entering Russian forward positions at Heilsberg on 10 June in a frontal attack of the crudest kind which cost him some 11,000 men to the Russian’s 8,000, although he did force Bennigsen to withdraw.

This was now the third battle against the Russians in which the French had been bloodied. Bennigsen decided to march down the east side of the Alle river. Napoleon tried to forestall this by sending lancers down with a vanguard on the opposite bank to the village of Friedland. On 13 June Bennigsen ordered four pontoon bridges to be built over the river and sent 10,000 men across to trap the French, who by now had been reinforced by some 9,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry. As the Russians continued reinforcing their position to some 60,000 men, attacking the French but not in force, Napoleon decided to move swiftly.

He had not planned the battle: as late as 13 June he had written to Lannes. ‘My staff officer . . . does not give me sufficient information to judge if it is the enemy’s army that is debouching at Friedland or only a detachment.’ But the Emperor recalled that the next day was the anniversary of the Battle of Marengo, and declared exultantly: ‘I am going to drub the Russians, just as I drubbed the Austrians.’ He brought massive reinforcements forward to trap the unsuspecting Russians with their backs to the river and just four pontoon bridges behind them. Lannes held out valiantly during the night under a massive artillery barrage before dawn on 14 June. By 9.30 a.m. the French had been reinforced to some 40,000 troops against the Russians’ 60,000.

By 4 p.m. Napoleon himself had arrived with the main French army, and some 80,000 French soldiers were attacking the Russians. Napoleon ordered an advance from the south, where the Russians were at their weakest. Bennigsen’s cavalry counter-attacked. Marshal Victor, an old comrade-in-arms of Napoleon from Toulon days, moved up his
corps and thirty cannon, and decimated the Russian cavalry and the retreating infantry. Bennigsen charged against the French centre, but was repulsed, and then against the south once again, before retiring to the north, abandoning Friedland and losing three out of his four pontoon bridges.

The French had adopted a new tactic: massive artillery attack followed by a huge infantry assault. The Russians succeeded in escaping with part of their army intact, across the fourth pontoon bridge in the north. But the defeat was decisive: some 30,000 Russian casualties compared with the French 10,000. The Russians had simply been trapped with their backs to the river by a superior force and although they had fought bravely, had no chance of prevailing.

For Napoleon, Friedland had been a victory of opportunity. With his usual quick reactions he had immediately taken advantage of a huge mistake by his enemy and pressed forward. It was also a desperately needed victory: military success was Napoleon’s entire
raison d’etre
. He was as aware as anyone that the price of military failure would be his overthrow in Paris. His country and empire were being drained of resources, facing perpetual economic crises and being badly mismanaged by his family and cronies. He must either deliver military triumphs or lose power.