Napoleon and his Marshals

A. G. Macdonell

• Publisher: Read & Co. History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473340879
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Napoleonic Wars
• Index: History

This vintage book contains a detailed account of the Napoleonic Wars by A. G. Macdonell. A. G. Macdonell (1895-1941) was a Scottish novelist and journalist. His most famous works include: "The Autobiography of a Cad", arguably amongst the funniest books ever written; "Lords and Masters", a blunt and prescient satire, and "England, Their England" (1933) a classic satirical novel that affectionately explores English urban and rural society. "Napoleon and his Marshals" is widely considered to be one of the best accounts of the Napoleonic Wars ever written and is highly recommended for those with an interest in this chapter of history. Contents include: Contents include: The Army of Italy", "The Old Republicans", "Egypt", "Massena and Suvorov", "The Great Coup", "Marengo", "Making the Grande Armee", "Austerlitz", "Jena and Auserwstadt", "Eylau and Friedland", "The First Triumphs in Spain", "Aspern-Essling and Wagram", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text. First published in 1934.

CHAPTER I

THE ARMY OF ITALY

MODERN warfare dates from the first campaign in which General Bonaparte was in chief command of an army, the French Army of Italy in 1796. The tactics and strategy of the professional soldiers of the pre-Revolution years of the eighteenth century had been cast in a stiff and narrow mould. The Marlborough wars had been, with four classic exceptions, a matter of endless jockeying for position, covered by entrenched lines or based upon the great fortresses of the Low Countries. Condé, and Turenne, and Frederick of Prussia had conformed in general to the accepted theories of marching to and fro with, from time to time, a head-on collision. But the ragged armies of the Sansculottes in 1793 introduced the whirlwind advance upon the enemy, which in absurd, amateurish fashion swept away the professional precisians at Fleurus and Neerwinden and Jemappes, and took as their watchword “Attack, attack, attack.” But in spite of their brilliant successes they were amateurs after all, and it was only their wild exaltation of soul that made them invincible, and when they had won their victories they knew as little how to use and exploit them as Turenne or Luxembourg. All that was changed in 1796. But though men knew that a change had come, very few understood what the change was and how the new magic was worked, either in 1796 or for years afterwards, and of all the fighting-men who watched the new art in the hands of the master, and tried to learn their trade from him, only one appreciated and understood the secret to the extent that he was able to use it himself, and he, Marshal Davout, had only two opportunities in all his twenty years of service.

On March 26th, 1796, the veteran generals of the Army of Italy were sitting at the Army Headquarters at Nice, waiting for the ridiculous little gunner-general whom political intrigue and, many said, petticoat-influence had hoisted into chief command. Schérer, the superseded Commander, was there, waiting to hand over his command to his successor. Schérer was sixty-one, a ripe age for a general in those strenuous days, and he had seen much service in Flanders in ’93 and ’94, but he had neither the energy nor the ability to crack the Austro-Sardinian nut which lay in wedge-form across the Ligurian hills, and he was glad to resign. The three commanders of the divisional groups were there also. Sérurier, once Count Sérurier, was a man of fifty-four. A militia lieutenant at thirteen, an ensign in the regiment of La Beauce at seventeen, he had reached the rank of major after thirty-four laborious years of service when the Revolution broke out. He became an ardent Republican and soon reached the command of a division. Sérurier, in every thought, every word, every movement, was a soldier of the old Royal School. He was slow and brave and precise and cautious. He was a stern disciplinarian but a thoughtful commander. If his men maintained their dressing by the right in column of fours, that was all he asked, and he would reward them by working himself, slowly and methodically, to a standstill in looking after their rations and their billets. On active service he was incessantly making the round of his outposts, examining everything with his own eyes and taking the gloomiest view of everything he saw. No wonder he was incessantly in a fog. The military art had gone past him and left him stranded. There was a perfect example of his notions of warfare in this campaign of ’96. When he was ordered to attack the Piedmontese at Mondovi, he could conjure up no better tactical formation than an assault of three equal and parallel columns, equidistant from each other, in perfect alignment, in perfect step, with himself sword in hand, ten paces in front of the centre column. (Unfortunately for those who were ready to laugh at the honest fellow, the attack was a complete success.) He was honest financially and straightforward morally, and if he had years ago lost all initiative and if he was utterly bewildered by the new rushing tactics, and the lightning marches, and the lamentable neglect of the geometric alignments, and the rest of the principles of war so dear to his heart, nevertheless Sérurier’s solidity, and his sterling, universally recognized, worth of character, and his old-fashioned traditions of service, made a valuable link between the old order and the new. He was a tall, stern, gloomy man with a heavy, stolid face, and a big scar on his lip, and he could never have been mistaken for anything but what he was, a rather stupid soldier.

Augereau, the second in age of the group-commanders, was a very different sort of man. The son of a poor working-mason in the St. Marceau Faubourg of Paris and a German fruit-stall-seller, he remained to the end of his extraordinary life a gamin of the Parisian gutters. His first employment was as a footman to the Marquis de Bassompierre, but he was discharged for seducing the maid of the Marquise. He then got work as a waiter in the Café de Valois, a gambling-house in the Palais Royal, and was discharged for seducing a waitress. Augereau decided thereupon that civil life was altogether too complicated and he enlisted in the cavalry regiment of Burgundy, but was promptly discharged for indiscipline. Soon after, however, his magnificent figure, his huge hawk-nose, his athletic reputation, and his invincible braggadocio, attracted the attention of the Marquis de Poyanne, colonel of carabineers, who enrolled him in his regiment without inquiring too closely into his past. This time young trooper Augereau managed to control himself a little better, and he quickly made his name as an efficient soldier, a boon companion, a ready quarreller, and the best swordsman in all the Royal cavalry.

General Marbot has some stories about him at this period. The famous coloured fencing-master, St. Georges, was sitting in a café one day when Augereau came past. “There goes the best blade in France,” said St. Georges. Immediately the sergeant of a heavy cavalry regiment, who was famous for his truculence and his fencing, challenged Augereau to a duel, and was run through the body for his pains. On another occasion a famous bully of the gendarmes of Lunéville fought Augereau and, before engaging, inquired whether his opponent would prefer to be buried in the town or in the country.

“In the country,” replied Pierre Augereau.

“Very well,” said the gendarme, “we will put you beside the two sergeants I fought yesterday.”

The last thrust of the duel was delivered by Augereau with the words, “You will be buried in the country.”

But the life could not last. A young puppy of an officer struck the redoubtable trooper with his cane on parade. Augereau seized the stick and flicked it away. The lad in a gust of petulance whipped out his sword, but Augereau was the best blade in all the Royal cavalry and he fled to Switzerland on a stolen horse while they buried the young officer with full regimental ceremony.

From Switzerland he went as a traveller in watches and clocks to Constantinople and as far afield as Odessa. There he found a first-class war in progress and he enlisted in the Russian Army, and was present as a sergeant at Suvorov’s capture of Ismail. The Paris street-boy, however, decided that the Russians were little better than savages, and he worked his way north through Poland into Prussia, where his magnificent figure and military experience readily brought him admission into the famous Guards. Unhappily for the new guardsman, a short time after he enlisted Frederick gave instructions that no Frenchman in his army should get reward or promotion. This did not suit Augereau, and he decided to desert. But the penalty for desertion from the Prussian Army was death, and the reward for capturing deserters was very high, so that it was an unusually risky proceeding. Augereau therefore came to the conclusion that if it was to be done at all, it must be done in the grand style, and placing himself at the head of sixty others, he fought his way out of Prussia into Saxony sword in hand. Once across the border he gave up military affairs for a time and earned his living as a dancing-master. He then drifted south again to Athens, where he fell in love with a beautiful Greek girl and eloped with her to Lisbon. But by this time the French Revolution had broken out and he was thrown into jail by the Portuguese Government as a Revolutionary. He might have remained months, or even years, in prison, but his wife managed to board a French merchant ship which had anchored in Lisbon harbour, and implored the captain to take the news to Paris that a Frenchman was unjustly imprisoned. The merchant captain was one of those obscure heroes whose name even has not come down to posterity. Instead of returning to France with the news, he instantly went ashore and announced to the Portuguese Government in a loud voice that unless the prisoner was handed over to him immediately, he would take the responsibility on behalf of the French Republic of declaring war upon the Kingdom of Portugal. The terrified Portuguese immediately gave up Augereau to the gallant captain and the ship sailed triumphantly back to France.

On his return, in 1792, the ex-street-boy joined a volunteer battalion and fought in the Vendée with such distinction that he was unanimously elected chief of the battalion. His promotion to a divisional-commander, via an adjutancy-general in the Pyrenees in ’93, was as quick as was usual in these early days, and it was at about this time that Augereau performed a feat of bravery that was more gallant, and vastly less common, than fifty desperate deeds under fire. He actually stood up against a Representative of the People, one of those terrible, all-powerful plenipotentiaries from Paris, who had come down to accuse General Dagobert, an old officer of the Seven Years’ War, of that deadliest of crimes—Incivisme. Greater men than Augereau had cringed before a Representative of the People, but nothing, neither physical threats nor moral threats, could daunt the huge gutter-snipe, and General Dagobert was saved from the guillotine. (Little good it did poor Dagobert in the end, for he died the following year of fatigue in front of San Miguel in the valley of the Segne, after he had struggled across the Pass of Perdue.)

General Augereau was no ladies’ man, and the vivacious Madame Junot calls him in her Memoirs a blockhead and a cypher, and is shocked by the breadth and profundity of his swearing. He was, in fact, a soldier and nothing else. A buffoon, a brute, and a bonhomme, these three words cover most of his character; and military instinct covers the rest. For whatever can be said against him, he was the best tactician in the Army of Italy. His division was always deployed at the right moment, his attacks were timed for the right moment, and his supports and reserves were always at hand. He maintained order and discipline, he never ceased looking after the welfare of his men, by whom he was adored, and he was a loyal colleague both as a general and, later, as a Marshal. And, like all old soldiers, there was never a moment when he was not on the lookout for something to annex (in the language of the War of 1914–18, to “scrounge”), and there was never a moment, even after a victory, when he was not tired, grumbling, and fed-up. It was characteristic of Augereau that though he was the loudest laugher of all the generals at Nice in 1796 at the imminent arrival of Bonaparte, the gringolat, the hop-o’-my-thumb, yet he was the first to write a soldierly letter of loyalty to his new commander, even though the tough veteran was then thirty-nine and the hop-o’-my-thumb only twenty-seven.

The third of the trio at Nice was André Masséna, the strangest and one of the two ablest (Davout being the other) of all Napoleon’s men. Born at Nice in 1758, he ran away to sea as a cabin-boy at the age of thirteen and made several voyages in the Mediterranean, and even one as far as Cayenne, retired from the sea and enlisted as a private, when seventeen, in the Royal Italian regiment, and quickly rose to be sergeant-instructor and, later, company-sergeant-major. But after fourteen years’ service he became disgusted with the impossibility of further advancement, and in August 1789 Le Sieur Masséna was certified as having served for fourteen years with distinction, and was given his discharge. Retiring to Antibes, he ostensibly set up a dried fruit and provision shop, but actually conducted a thriving trade in contraband over the wooded hills of Savoy into Italy, thus gaining an intimate knowledge of the by-paths and tracks of a country that was so soon to be of terrible importance to the Republic.

But in 1792 the ex-sergeant-major saw that there were better opportunities of fame and fortune, especially fortune, in the new democratic military life than were ever to be found in smuggling, and in that year Masséna, not Le Sieur this time, but le citoyen, was elected to command the second battalion of the Var, and by April, 1795, he was a general commanding the first division of the right wing of the Army of Italy.

André Masséna was a dark thin man, with dark eyes and a long nose (there is no evidence for the story that he was a Jew and that his real name was Manasseh), and he was a very dry, silent, dour man. He very seldom spoke ill of others, and very seldom lost his temper. Off the field of battle, his mind seemed sluggish: on it, he was a blaze of fire, and energy, and brilliant, swift decision. His two overmastering passions were women and money. He was so skilful in his pursuit of the former that a contemporary could write, “He adored all women without ever failing in his regard for his wife,” and he was so able in his pursuit of money that he left forty millions of francs at his death. Masséna and Augereau were lifelong friends from 1796.

These three, then, the stiff old pedant, the swashbuckling gamin, and the silent understander of the human heart, waited at Nice for the hop-o’-my-thumb. The little gunner arrived on March 27th, 1796, bringing with him a handful of friends, only three of whom need be mentioned here, and a carriage full of history-books, and on April 12th the first cannon-shots of the New Warfare were being fired in front of the village of Montenotte.

The three men who came down with Bonaparte to Nice were Alexandre Berthier, a staff-officer, Joachim Murat, a cavalryman, and Marmont, a gunner, and Bonaparte’s oldest friend.

Berthier was the son of a surveying engineer who built the Ministries of War, Marine, and Foreign Affairs at Versailles for Louis XV and was duly rewarded with a patent of nobility, a heritable pension of 12,000 livres, an infantry colonelcy, the Command-in-Chief of the Corps of Surveying Engineers, and the Orders of St. Louis and of St. Michael, all of which vanished at the Revolution. Berthier himself naturally became a military engineer, and went as a captain in 1778 to fight for American Independence with Rochambeau, performed gallantly upon the banks of the Ohio, became a colonel, and returned in time to be made, by Louis XVI, major-general of the National Guard of Versailles. He kept his head and his post during ’89 and ’90, but lost merit with the Revolutionaries by conniving at the escape of the King’s aunts, and it was only his extraordinary aptitude for staff-work—already becoming well known—that kept him in high rank. He was Chief-of-Staff successively to such diverse leaders as the terrorist Ronsin in the Vendée, the brilliant ex-aristo Biron, and the workman Rossignol. The Terror drove him to ground for two years—he was too moderate and prudent for the Terrorists’ liking—and then he mysteriously re-emerged from obscurity as Chief-of-Staff to old Kellermann, the Valmy Kellermann, in the Army of the Alps in ’94.

Alexandre Berthier was an exceptionally ugly little man, with a huge, ungainly head, and movements so clumsy that they were almost pathetic. His hair was frizzy; his great red hands, in which a pencil moved as delicately and as truly over the maps as if it was guided by a touch of thistledown, were made uglier still by the stumps of finger-nails which were bitten and bitten till they bled; and whenever he talked he spluttered and stammered a mass of brusque, egotistical, tactless gaucheries. “If he conceded a request he did it without affability; if he refused, he did it with harshness.”¹ As a staff-officer he was in a class by himself. There has, perhaps, never been a staff-officer in any army to excel Alexandre Berthier. His mind was clear, his grasp of detail apparently illimitable, his capacity for work colossal. It is recorded that on one campaign he went without sleep for thirteen days and nights. An emergency, at whatever hour of the day or night, always seemed to find him fully dressed and ready for work, and he knew at any hour of the twenty-four the name of the commander and the fighting strength of each of the units to which he was sending orders, and the exact position that each of them ought to be occupying. But outside his bureau, away from his maps, Berthier could think of one thing only, and that was his immense, his unbelievable, his God-given luck in being allowed to live on the same planet as the beautiful Madame de Visconti.

Joachim Murat was a very different card. A Gascon of the Gascons, he was born in ’67 at La Bastide, near Cahors, where his father combined the professions of innkeeper and estate-agent to the Talleyrand family. Joachim was in early life designed for the Church ...