How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did Read online

  Speed was of the essence, so it was quick march all the way for the footsoldiers. And very soon they began to die – of typhus and dysentery from infected water, of heat exhaustion and, despite all the wheat and beef, of hunger.

  The reason for these early and unexpected French casualties was that the Russians had begun to play Napoleon at his own game of tactical warfare. What started out as a genuine attempt to avoid a pitched battle for fear of losing the war evolved into a strategy to draw the French deeper and deeper into Russia, stretching their supply lines and allowing the feared Cossacks to pick off isolated units. Apart from one major battle at Borodino on 7 September (the bloodiest day of the whole Napoleonic Wars, resulting in around 40,000 dead, wounded or captured on each side) the Russians avoided direct confrontation.fn5 The retreating Russian army also practised a tactic that at first confused and then began to exasperate the French. Every town that the Grande Armée reached had been systematically emptied of its food supplies and burned to the ground. Napoleon might have contended that an army marches on its stomach, but his rapidly advancing men had no way to replenish their larders.

  Napoleon entered Moscow itself in mid-September proclaiming victory and expecting a delegation from the Czar accepting defeat. In the event he found no one except a few Muscovites who had preferred not to abandon their homes. Any remaining sense of victory was dispelled when, at a secret signal, the city was set ablaze. Napoleon recalled his dismay at seeing ‘mountains of swirling red flames, like huge ocean waves, exploding up into the sky of fire, then sinking into the sea of flames below’.

  The fires burned for a week, destroying 90 per cent of Moscow’s buildings.fn6 To the French it was unthinkable – they would never have burned their beloved Paris, even to save their country. But of course Czar Alexander didn’t really care about Moscow – he was safely installed in his palace 700 kilometres away in St Petersburg.

  ‘If Moscow hadn’t been set on fire,’ Napoleon later confided to his memoirist Emmanuel de Las Cases, ‘Czar Alexander would have been forced to sue for peace.’ The obvious problem was that it had been set on fire. So, faced with the prospect of living through a Russian winter with nowhere to bivouac except charred ruins, and with meagre supplies for his men and horses, Napoleon had no choice but to start marching back in the opposite direction.

  The Empereur dictated to Las Cases that ‘the march from Moscow cannot be called a retreat, because the army was victorious’. But as soon as he left Moscow in mid-October, the flanks and the rear of his ‘victorious’ yet back-tracking army began to be harassed by Russians who picked off whole units of demoralised Frenchmen. With no grass and no fodder, the Grande Armée’s horses started to die. Those that could still stand were slaughtered and eaten. So the cavalry became infantry, the artillery had to abandon its horse-drawn cannons, and all the remaining supply wagons were left by the roadside. In early November, winter set in with a vengeance, and had a perverse effect: the extreme cold caused all the tin buttons on the Grande Armée’s uniforms to crumble into dust. Now the men couldn’t even button up their coats to shut out the biting wind.

  ‘If the great freeze hadn’t set in two weeks earlier than usual, the army would have made it to Smolensk intact,’ Napoleon told Las Cases. ‘We had reason to believe, judging by the temperature records of the previous 20 years, that the thermometer would not drop below freezing in November.’ (Like all defeated generals, Napoleon was highly skilled at hindsight and if onlys.)

  Of the huge army that had crossed into Russia in June, about 200,000 men died there. Napoleon also suffered the loss of around 180,000 prisoners, as well as almost 200,000 deserters who drifted away during the retreat, some of whom were lucky enough to find an unlikely welcome among the Russians. Only 30,000 men made it back to France. It was, as the French say, ‘la Bérézina’.

  In short, even if Napoleon liked to remember his over-ambitious excursion into Russia as a victoire, the result of the campaign was that three years later, he would fight at Waterloo with an army of new recruits and reservists.

  But the most serious consequence for Napoleon himself was even greater – the Russian campaign had proved to his enemies that the great French Emperor was only human after all. He and his Grande Armée could be beaten.

  V

  Arriving back in Paris in a borrowed open carriage (his own had broken an axle after bumping at top speed through Germany), Napoleon was so dirty and unshaven that his servants didn’t recognise him until he marched into his wife’s bedroom, from which all strange men were banned. Clearly desperate to put a good spin on things, Napoleon’s aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l’Empereur.

  True to form, Talleyrand was informing everyone in Paris that this was ‘le commencement de la fin’ – the beginning of the end. But Napoleon, never happier than when planning troop movements on the grand scale, threw his energies into a frantic reorganisation of his armies. He set about raising a new force of over 200,000 recruits to carry on the fight, even paying for uniforms and equipment with his own private gold supply, which was stored in barrels in the basement of the Tuileries Palace.

  Faced with revolts in several of his German puppet states, and the defection of Prussia to the Russian camp, Napoleon knew that it was vital to stay on good terms with Austria. This, he thought, would be easy. After all, in 1810 he had divorced his first wife Josephine and married Marie-Louise, the eldest daughter of Emperor Franz I of Austria. They had a baby son, and to flatter Franz, Napoleon had Marie-Louise write frequent letters home informing the Austrian Emperor that the young prince would one day be crowned King (not Emperor) of France, creating a new Franco-Austrian royal dynasty. Marie-Louise, who was twenty-one years younger than her husband, would be regent of France, and she was already nominally Queen of Italy. Even better, Napoleon would build a new royal palace for his son, a gigantic construction on the hill across the Seine from the Ecole Militaire, a royal residence two-thirds the size of Versailles just on the edge of Paris. What more could the Austrian Emperor ask of his French son-in-law?

  Unfortunately for Napoleon, the Viennese court was under the influence of a dispossessed aristocrat: Clemens Metternich, who was still smarting from the loss of his family’s immense landholdings on the Rhine, which had been seized by the French in 1794. Metternich was now Austria’s Foreign Minister, and relished his revenge, at first promising peace with Napoleon, only to stab him in the back by signing an anti-French treaty with Russia and Prussia. Meanwhile the British had done the same, and diabolically promised a grant of £666,666 to the Prussian army. The European war that would eventually bring about Napoleon’s downfall was now inevitable.

  VI

  As if all these northern developments weren’t depressing enough, there was also bad news from the south: Napoleon’s brother Joseph (nominally King of Spain) had been taken by surprise while dallying with a mistress, and almost shot by a British cavalryman. Joseph is a prime example of the unreliable links in Napoleon’s chain of command who get blamed by Bonapartist historians for allowing disasters to happen. Now Joseph’s army was being chased out of Spain by a relatively little-known English general called Wellington, who would eventually invade Napoleon’s France and capture Toulouse and Bordeaux, where he would be hailed as a liberator by citizens tired of war.

  Napoleon reacted by continuing to build his army, until by the summer of 1813 he had managed to cajole or force 360,000 Frenchmen into uniform. Even so, he began to suffer his first personal defeats of the wars that bore his name. Over three days from 15 to 18 October 1813, Napoleon and his marshals engaged in several pitched battles with the Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes, most notably at Leipzig in Germany. Outnumbered almost two to one there, the French lost about 45,000 dead and wounded and 26,000 prisoners, and were forced to make a dash for France to save themselves.

  French historia
ns often divide campaigns into several battles, thereby giving themselves a longer list of victories (as we will see them do in the days preceding and following Waterloo). Here, though, they do the opposite, referring simply to the ‘Bataille de Leipzig’, presumably so as to limit the number of defeats.

  And Bonapartists are quick to point out that if Leipzig was a defeat, it was not one for Napoleon himself. His enemies avoided confronting him directly, preferring to face up to the sections of his army commanded by his marshals. Every time Napoleon rushed into action, his opponents withdrew. He complained that even Blücher fled instead of fighting: ‘There was no way of getting at him. I hardly fired one or two shots.’ This was an artilleryman’s frustration talking.

  Not only this, when the enemy had attacked, they had copied Napoleon’s tactics, using cannons to smash holes in infantry and cavalry lines before charging into the breach. Thanks to the Prussians’ two-to-one superiority, this was bound to succeed. In a way, Bonapartists can argue, Leipzig was a victory for Napoleonic tactics. Not that the Emperor himself would have gained much solace from this.

  Back in Paris, the treacherous Talleyrand, who once said that ‘speech was given to man so that he could disguise his thoughts’, was making his own thoughts crystal clear. Napoleon was finished, he told everyone. ‘He has nothing more to fight with. He is exhausted. He will crawl under his bed and hide.’

  Talleyrand’s quips were usually bitchy but accurate. (Another of his favourite sayings was: ‘Never speak ill of yourself. Your friends will do it for you.’ Which in his case was understandably accurate.) In this case, though, he got it very wrong. Napoleon was not a man to crawl under a bed, even if, like the bunk in his campaign bivouac, it was set up on a comfortable panther-pattern carpet. This was not 1940, when the French would throw down their arms almost as soon as a German set foot on French soil – Napoleon’s fight to defend his territory was only just beginning.

  VII

  To the French, the word ‘allies’ is a double-edged sword. Triple-edged, even. Of course it calls to mind positive thoughts of the Second World War, in which France ended up as one of the victorious allies. But when used about the Napoleonic Wars, ‘alliés’ is more of a dirty word. It refers to the nations who ganged up on France and eventually ousted Napoleon from power. The scorn the word evokes is all too clear in Jean-Claude Damamme’s book on Waterloo, in which he calls the allied nations of Austria, Russia and Prussia ‘a pretty trio of former losers’. Of course he couldn’t include one of the major allies, Britain, in his insult because the Brits had not been beaten by Napoleon, and never would be.fn7

  Napoleon’s own view of the foreigners threatening his homeland, and his crown, in 1814 is clear from a motivational speech he gave to his Old Guard (not that many of them were old, most of the seasoned campaigners having been left behind in the Russian ice). As they prepared to meet the allied invasion, he told them: ‘Soldiers, we are going to chase these secondary foreign princes from our territory. We don’t want to meddle with the affairs of foreign countries, but woe betide him who meddles in ours.’ Here, he seems to be forgetting his own past incursions into Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Poland and Russia, as well as his plans to invade England and India. Nevertheless, the invaders now began to ‘meddle in his affairs’ with a vengeance.

  The so-called Campagne de France of 1814 is one of the short campaigns the French like to split up into individually named battles, because even though Napoleon ultimately lost the campaign, he did pull off a few victories, despite the fact that his 300,000-odd remaining men were facing a million alliés.

  At Brienne le Château, for example, 200 kilometres south-east of Paris, Napoleon ousted the Russian and Prussian occupiers from the aforementioned chateau, which must have been a sweet victory for him – Brienne was where he had gone to school when he first left Corsica as a nine-year-old military cadet. The fact that the occupiers pulled out in the night after a battle in which losses were equal on both sides (3,000 each), because they wanted to join up with an even bigger allied army a few kilometres away, is of no consequence. History (French history, anyway) lists Brienne as a Napoleonic victory.

  The same goes for another unfamiliar name, la Bataille de Champaubert, fought on 10 February. Here, 90 kilometres north-west of Brienne, around 6,000 French soldiers commanded by Napoleon routed a force of only 4,500 Russians, and captured their general. An almost inconsequential skirmish compared to Napoleon’s great victories at Jena, Austerlitz and Wagram, but it merits an avenue Champaubert in Paris, and in the town itself there is a monument dedicated to ‘les victoires napoléoniennes du 10 février 1814’ – note the plural.

  On 12 February, Napoleon again carried off the day, this time at Château-Thierry, though given the low number of casualties (‘only’ 3,750 out of 50,000 men on the battlefield), by Napoleonic standards it hardly counts as more than a heated argument.

  Over the following month, other French victories followed, at places that are remembered only by the towns concerned (and their tourist offices) – Vauchamps, Mormant, Montereau,fn8 Craonne, Laon. To anyone except a keen Bonapartist, they were all desperate rearguard actions, like a midget slapping the knees of a giant in the boxing ring. All Napoleon was doing was throwing away thousands more young French lives, inflicting bloody but not life-threatening wounds on the allied forces, and infuriating a certain Generalfeldmarschall Blücher, a fierce Prussian septuagenarian with a long memory and a bloodthirsty vengeful streak.

  But if you are a Bonapartist historian, and your hero is about to lose his crown and be exiled for the first time, you need every victory you can get, even if no one else has ever heard of it.

  VIII

  In early 1814, Paris, the capital Napoleon was fighting desperately to defend, was also France’s weakest point. His calls for new recruits fell on deaf ears there, or were drowned out by the babble of defeatist talk. While country peasants were rushing into battle armed only with scythes and pitchforks, hardly any Parisian men signed up to repel the invaders. On the contrary, keen to preserve their wealth and property, rich Parisians – and especially the old aristocracy, who had returned to France in droves when Napoleon offered them an amnesty – were doing their best to make peace with the allies. When he called on the city’s population to man the barricades, the middle classes packed up their jewels and furniture and headed for the country.

  While Napoleon was still in the east trying to harry his opponents into abandoning their advance, Paris signed a capitulation and handed the keys of the city to Czar Alexander, who entered the capital and went to stay with Talleyrand. His Russian troops were greeted with cheers.

  Hearing of the surrender, Napoleon headed for his chateau at Fontainebleau, 70 kilometres south of Paris. But even here, he was surrounded by Parisians. They were his marshals and generals, who remembered the ruins of Moscow all too well and didn’t want Paris to share the same fate. Marshal François-Joseph Lefebvre apparently told the Emperor, ‘It’s time to enjoy a rest. We own titles, houses, land – we don’t want to get ourselves killed for you.’ Hardly the kind of rousing speech Napoleon expected from his soldiers.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, Marshal Auguste Marmont, the man who was supposed to be mounting the defence of Paris, went over to the Austrians, giving up his 16,000 troops as prisoners. (They, incidentally, shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as they surrendered their weapons – though they surrendered them all the same.)

  Napoleon’s senior officers and former comrades-in-arms implored him to abdicate and end the fighting, and finally he gave in and wrote a letter of resignation, referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person: ‘Since the allied powers have proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon is the only obstacle to restoring peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, true to his vow, declares that he renounces, for himself and his descendants, his right to the crowns of France and Italy, and that there is no personal sacrifice, even that of his life, that he is not ready to make in t
he interests of France.’

  Napoleon did actually try to make the ultimate sacrifice, swallowing a poison that had been mixed for him during the Russian campaign. However, while he was saying farewell to his advisers, he vomited it all up, and his terrified doctor refused to give him anything stronger. The palace was full of pistols, muskets, bayonets and swords, but the gunpowder had been removed from Napoleon’s personal pistols, and in any case he preferred poison, the favourite suicide method used in the tragic plays of France’s greatest dramatist, Racine. When his stomach cramps began to subside, Napoleon decided that he was destined to live.

  On 20 April, officers from the Russian, Austrian, Prussian and British armies arrived to attend the Emperor’s official farewell. Napoleon walked out into the courtyard of the Château de Fontainebleau between two lines of his Old Guard in their tall bearskin hats and blue jackets, to make what was meant to be his final speech to his army:

  ‘Soldiers of my Old Guard, I bid you adieu. For the past 20 years I have found you constantly on the paths of honour and glory … With men like you, our cause was not lost, but the war was interminable. There would have been civil war, which would only have brought France more misfortune. I therefore sacrifice all our interests to those of the homeland. I am leaving. You, my friends, must continue to serve France. Its happiness was always my only consideration.’