The War of Wars (24 page)

By now the young general had fallen completely in love. (Some of his biographers were to assert that a later paramour, Marie Walewska, was Napoleon’s only true love: this is quite untrue. Napoleon was utterly and embarrassingly besotted by Josephine at first, although she not by him, and only her later appalling behaviour eventually caused him to cool.)

She, at the age of thirty-two, six years his senior, was much more detached. She told a friend: ‘You are going to ask, “Do I love him?” Well . . . no. “Do you feel aversion to him?” No. What I feel is tepidness: it annoys me, in fact religious people find it the most tiresome state of all.’ Barras, who was growing tired of Josephine, was delighted to palm her off on his uncouth young protégé. Bonaparte’s mother, Letizia, was, however, horrified at his rejection of the faithful young Désirée for this older divorced and sexually insatiable adventuress. Josephine moreover was virtually penniless, for Martinique, where her family estates lay, was in British hands.

They were, on the face of it, an odd couple. All kind of psycho-sexual theories have been advanced for what Napoleon saw in Josephine. Yet, given their status at the time, it was not a particularly unusual match. Josephine was a hardened woman of fading charms with two dependent children. Neither of her two most recent lovers – Hoche and Barras – was prepared to marry her. She needed money and security.

Napoleon, another outsider to France, was a naïve, romantic and sexually inexperienced young man with a glittering career ahead of him which compensated for his sallow looks and lack of charm, although his intelligence and energy were obvious. Having spent most of his life in the provinces, he was captivated by this highly sophisticated member of Paris’s most elegant set, regarding her as a passport to social acceptance. When it became clear that his patron, Barras, also favoured the match, Napoleon knew this would be useful in his career. (Joseph once accused him of merely using Josephine to get his command in Italy – which was a grotesquely unjust accusation, as Napoleon’s almost embarrassing devotion to her was to reveal.) Napoleon, short and unattractive was until recently a nobody who had had little success with women. Here was one that was attractive, highly sexed, immensely assured and cosmopolitan, kind, maternal and patient with all his quirks, sudden tempers and bursts of energy and, in her own way, not unlike him – two opportunistic outsiders on the make.

It was a marriage of passion and convenience on his side, although one only of convenience on hers. They were two survivors in the
penumbra of the highly uncertain world of post-revolutionary Paris, both from dubious backgrounds, both uncertain what the future would hold. She is said to have slept with Barras on the night before her marriage on 9 March 1796. Napoleon trumped this by arriving three hours late for the wedding. Two days later Napoleon unromantically bid his wife goodbye and was on his way to take up his command of the army of Italy.

Désirée wrote to him a letter of anguish.

You have made me so unhappy, and I am weak enough to forgive you! You married! Poor Désirée must no longer love you or think of you? . . . My one consolation is that you will know how steadfast I am . . . I have nothing more to hope for but death. Life is a torment to me, since I may no longer dedicate it to you . . . You married! I cannot grasp the thought – it kills me. Never shall I belong to another. . . And I had so hoped soon to be the happiest of women, your wife! Your marriage has shattered my happiness . . . All the same I wish you the greatest joy and blessing in your marriage. May the woman you have chosen make you as happy as I had intended to make you and as happy as you deserve to be. In the midst of your present happiness do not quite forget poor Eugénie, and be sorry for her fate.

Bonaparte’s new appointment owed less to Barras’s favour, whether or not extracted by Josephine, than to the hard-headed military calculations of France’s military chief, Carnot. Faced with the danger of a renewed Austrian attack across the Rhine which had so unsettled the French in October, he decided to launch a flanking movement. The French army was still a colossal 240,000 strong. Carnot decided to send 70,000 men under the redoubtable Jourdan to recapture the fortress of Mainz; another 70,000 would advance along the Danube valley. And Napoleon, whose old hare-brained schemes for an attack on Italy had now come of age, would be in charge of 100,000 to attack the complacent Austrian forces sheltering beneath the Alps in the Po valley.

These offensives would take the French well beyond the national borders specified by the early revolutionaries. But they were necessary
to destroy the Austrian army once and for all. They would provide enormous opportunities for plunder – particularly in the wealthy Po valley, which would provide subsistence for the expensive French army; they would allow French revolutionary ideals to be exported; they would weaken France’s chief adversary, Austria; and they would also rally the French, increasingly weary of shortages and the incompetence of their government, behind the patriotic cause.

The seeds of French expansion into the non-French part of Europe were thus sown not by Napoleon but by his predecessors in the Directory. ‘Greater France’ was not a Napoleonic invention, however much he would later boast it was, but a matter of French national policy long before he became France’s ruler: at this stage he was a mere general, doing the bidding of his political masters. In Britain his name still barely registered even in official circles.

Pitt, unusually gloomy, mused in the New Year of 1796 on the ‘sad reverse of fortune, when the spirit of our allies was broken, our troops discomfited, our territories wrested from us, and all our hopes disconcerted’. The Austrians along with the Portuguese and the Neapolitan court, were Britain’s last allies in the fighting in central Europe; and now the French were girding themselves up to strike a decisive blow against them. Like most observers, Pitt expected the big battle to be fought along the Rhine – as indeed did the French.

They had not reckoned, however, with the extraordinary military skills of the new young commander of the Army of Italy. All his qualities were now to go on display in a dazzling show of military pyrotechnics over the next few weeks that were to leave his enemies reeling and the strategic map of Europe decisively redrawn. Napoleon arrived in Antibes, where he met with his chief of staff, a great brute of a man, Louis Berthier, who was nevertheless a skilled veteran and able organizer. At Nice the slight, short, boyish-looking Napoleon with his fevered energy and torrent of words impressed his older and more sceptical principal commanders – the laconic veteran Sérurier, the ferocious adventurer Augereau, and the tall and angular André Masséna. The French Army of the South was only 37,000 strong, ill-fed, ill-clothed and mutinous.

Napoleon decided to order a probing expedition along the coast to Genoa, the obvious route from which the 52,000-strong Austrians and their Piedmontese allies could expect an attack. He asked the Genoese whether he might cross their territory, and the information was duly passed on to the Austrians. A small force under La Harpe was sent to Voltri, along the coast fifteen miles short of Genoa. The Austrian commander, General Beaulieu, promptly descended with a substantial force from his headquarters in the foothills of the Alps to give chase.

Napoleon meanwhile marched into the Cadibona-Carcara gap, a pass to the north, with his main force and ordered La Harpe to retreat. Blocking the northern end of the pass, so that the Piedmontese could not reinforce the Austrians, he lured the Austrians pursuing La Harpe
into the gap and then fell upon them with a superior force of 16,000 men on 12 April at Montenotte. The Austrians were surprised and routed, losing 1,000 casualties and 2,500 prisoners. It was the young general’s first significant military victory in Italy.

He promptly wheeled about and marched his main force up the gap to face the Piedmontese. These were divided between the towns of Ceva and Millesimo. He left Sérurier to distract the force at Ceva and marched with the main army of 16,000 men to Millesimo, overpowering and capturing the 10,000 Piedmontese troops, which put up little resistance. Augereau was sent to help reinforce the French attack on Ceva, while Napoleon himself with a superior force moved quickly to overpower the 6,000 Austrians at Dego and then surprise another such force of Austrians being hurried to reinforce Ceva.

All this took place within the space of four days, with Napoleon marching and countermarching up and down the steep mountain valleys and winding roads, often at night to prevent his enemies concentrating their forces. The dispersed Austrian and Piedmontese armies scarcely knew what hit them: they were unused to such speed of attack and movement. The bemused Austrians retreated to their headquarters at Pavia, a medieval town with a spectacular
certosa
(closed monastery) while the Piedmontese retreated behind the natural barrier of the river Tanaro, to the north-west, to protect their capital of Turin.

Napoleon rested briefly before crossing the river and defeating the Piedmontese near Vico and occupying the substantial town of Mondovi. The Piedmontese retired to the Villa Stura near the village of Cherasco: the way was now open to the stately city of Turin, just thirty miles away. King Victor Amadeus, startled by the suddenness of the French advance and the scale of the defeats, sent envoys to meet Napoleon. Napoleon issued an ultimatum. Threatening to occupy the substantial town of Cuneo, he offered to spare Turin if his men were granted the provisions they needed. He declared that he was not despoiling the Italians, but liberating them from the Austrian yoke. He boasted:

Hannibal merely crossed the Alps, we turned their flanks . . . Tomorrow I shall march against Beaulieu, force him to cross the
Po, cross myself immediately after and seize the whole of Lombardy: within a month I hope to be on the mountains of the Tyrol, in touch with the Army of the Rhine, and to carry the war in concert into Bavaria . . . Soldiers! In fifteen days you have gained six victories, taken twenty-one colours and 55 pieces of artillery, seized several fortresses and conquered the richest parts of Piedmont. You have taken 15,000 prisoners and killed and wounded more than 10,000 . . . The hungry soldiers are committing excesses that make one blush to be human. The capture of Ceva and Mondovi may give us the means to put this right, and I am going to make some terrible examples. I will restore order or I will give up the command of these brigands.

‘Peoples of Italy!’ he announced in a printed proclamation, ‘The French army is come to break your chains . . . We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs. We wage war with generous hearts, and turn ourselves only against the tyrants who seek to enslave us.’ The envoys agreed to his terms.

He resumed the march across very different territory to the narrow valleys of the southern Alps – the vast, almost perfectly level flatlands of the Po valley, which were hugely fertile, but also at that time riddled with swamps and the diseases and mosquitoes that infested them, although the weather at this time of year was still pleasantly temperate.

He bypassed the Austrian stronghold at Pavia, choosing to cross the river at Piacenza. There he found it to be 300 yards wide. He sent 900 men across in boats under Austrian fire to secure the opposite bank, and then ferried his army over in two days. He marched on Milan, soon reaching the bridge at Lodi, where the Austrians had a substantial force of some 12,000 men. The bridge was a rudimentary wooden structure just twelve feet wide and 200 yards long, and was overlooked by Austrian guns in a well-defended fortress.

Napoleon decided on an act of madness in such a militarily impossible situation: a frontal attack under the guns. But first he despatched his cavalry to cross lower down and attack the Austrians on their flank. Goading his infantry on with volleys of sarcasm, he
thundered down on his white horse from the town square to the bridge and, with the French drums beating ‘La Marseillaise’, urged his men past him as he waved his sword. They marched forward under intense enemy fire along the narrow bridge, soldiers toppling in scores into the water as they were hit, only for others to take their place.

Several jumped into the water as they approached the opposite bank to avoid the murderous Austrian shot. A few soldiers made the opposite bank, some along the bridge, some from the water. The Austrian cavalry charged to cut them down. The French were on the verge of being routed: it had all been the madness of an inexperienced young commander.

At last the French cavalry, which had spent hours finding a suitable ford, came galloping up from the flank and attacked the Austrian gunners in the fort. As the withering Austrian fire from above ceased, the French infantry surged forward along that narrow causeway of death, overwhelming the Austrian cavalry and infantry on the opposite bank. At last the Austrians gave way, leaving more than 300 dead to the 200 French lives they had taken. Some 1,700 prisoners were seized. It had been a staggering victory, owing more to sheer determination, recklessness and luck than careful planning or skill.

Milan, which dominated the fertile Po valley and all of northern Italy, was now Napoleon’s for the taking. His triumphant army moved north into the city, with its imposing Sforza fortress and soaring, spiky, white gothic cathedral, and he took up residence in the old palace which the Austrian Archduke had abandoned. In the space of just three weeks he had broken across the supposedly impregnable barrier of the lower Alps and captured half of the richest region in Italy.

He had done more than that: he had proved himself as a military commander. The keys to his success as a young leader had been his feverish energy, in mustering and manoeuvring his armies with pinpoint precision across the hills and plains, deceiving, outflanking and ambushing his enemies, more a guerrilla chieftain than a conventional commander, routing the traditionalist Austrians through the sheer unexpectedness of his tactics, seizing the offensive from the beginning and placing a superior enemy army on the defensive.