Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

Grouchy’s military career had been in every way honourable throughout his life. He had ridden bravely to destruction at the head of his dragoons during Murat’s charge at Eylau. He had fought magnificently at Friedland and elsewhere. The only other time when he had been in independent command, and when he did display genuine dilatoriness was many years before when he had found himself in command owing to the loss of Hoche on the French expedition to Bantry Bay in 1796. Grouchy’s courage failed him then, and he withdrew at the very time when his landing would have set Ireland in an inextinguishable blaze. For a series of quite strictly correct actions at Waterloo Grouchy has gone down to history as a fool and a humbug, but he was neither—to any great extent.

During the Waterloo campaign there was certainly one example of a general being overwhelmed by his sense of responsibility. Up to the moment of execution not one of Napoleon’s plans of attack had been more brilliantly conceived or better arranged. A hundred and twenty thousand men were assembled at the crossings of the Sambre by Charleroi without the enemy gathering more than a hint as to what was in the air; in fact the Allies’ Intelligence completely lost sight of Gérard’s corps of sixteen thousand men. From this point, however, the arrangements rapidly grew worse and worse. Bad staff work caused delays at the crossing of the Sambre; Ney’s unexpected appointment to the command of the left wing was disturbing, in that he was without a staff and his sudden elevation annoyed d’Erlon and Reille, his subordinate corps commanders. Zieten’s stubborn rearguard actions held up the French columns for a considerable time; and finally a sort of universal misunderstanding led to everyone being more or less in the dark as to the need for a determined and immediate attack. Ney, goaded by repeated orders, at last attacked at Quatre Bras quite six hours later than he should have done, and even then he had only half his force in hand. The other half, under d’Erlon, was making its way towards him, when it was caught up by an aide-de-camp of Napoleon’s, who was bearing a message to Ney requesting him to send help to the Emperor at Ligny. The aide-de-camp, on his own responsibility, sent d’Erlon marching over towards Ligny instead of to Quatre Bras, and went on to inform Ney of his action. Ney was furious. Every moment the British army in front of him was being reinforced, and he was now being steadily pushed back. He saw defeat close upon him, and he sent off a frantic order to d’Erlon to retrace his steps and march on Quatre Bras. The order reached d’Erlon at the crisis of the battle of Ligny. For hours a fierce and sanguinary battle had raged there, and at the crucial moment d’Erlon had appeared, like a god from a machine, with twenty thousand men on the Prussian flank. Napoleon sent him urgent orders to attack, but the officier d’ordonnance returned disconsolate. D’Erlon had just received Ney’s order and had marched back towards Quatre Bras, where he arrived just as darkness fell, two hours too late. His sense of responsibility did not permit him to disregard the orders of his immediate superior, although it had lain in his power, by disregarding them, to have dealt the Prussian army a blow from which it could hardly have recovered. The attack d’Erlon should have made was later made by six thousand weary men who had fought all day long, and naturally did not have the immense success d’Erlon might have achieved.

Drouet, Comte d’Erlon, had built himself up during twenty campaigns a reputation as a skilful and hard-fighting officer. He was neither a poltroon nor congenitally weak-minded; what was the matter with him was that he had fought twenty campaigns under Napoleon. The brilliance of the Emperor and the implicit, blind obedience he demanded had weakened d’Erlon’s initiative past all reckoning. It is interesting to compare d’Erlon’s action at Ligny with Lannes’ at Friedland, or with the daring of the subordinate Prussian officers at Mars-la-Tour and at Gravelotte in 1870.

And yet one cannot help but think, on reading military history, that the Lannes and the Davouts of this world are astonishingly few when compared with the d’Erlons and the Duponts. Military history is a history of blunders, fortunate or unfortunate. Men are found everywhere in control of the lives and destinies of ten, twenty, a hundred thousand men, and completely unable even to expend them in an efficient manner. On reading of the fumbling campaigns of Schwartzenberg, of Carlo Alberto, of Napoleon III., or even of wars waged more recently still, and of which we ourselves have had experience, one cannot help feeling overwhelming pity at the thought of the wretched men—every one of them as full of life as you or I—who were called upon to lay down everything at the call of duty or patriotism—and to lay down everything uselessly. The argument against war which appeals most to those who may have to take part in it is not so much that it is expensive or that it costs lives, but that it is so blightingly inefficient. To die because one’s country is in need, that is one thing; but to die because one’s commanding officer has bad dreams, is quite another matter.

But the armies of Napoleon were at least free from a horrible slur which has been cast upon other armies. We cannot find anywhere any hint that the officers did not do all their duty as far as they visualized it. On going into action the men did not shout “Les epaulettes en avant” as did the army of the Second Empire at Solferino. No officer of Napoleon’s ever wasted his men’s lives to gratify his own pride, in the way that English marines died at Trafalgar. It was said with pride of an officer of Marlborough’s that he always said, “Come on” not “Go on” to his men. The same could be said of every one of the higher officers of the army of the First Empire. The hundreds of volumes of memoirs written by Napoleon’s men teem with examples (grudgingly given, in some cases) of valour, but there is hardly one case where an Imperial officer is accused of cowardice, or even of shirking. The officers bore exactly the same hardships as did the men, and the friendship and trust which existed between the rank and file and the commissioned officers of the army of the First Empire has never been excelled in any other army in history.

A simple calculation at any Napoleonic battle will show that the number of generals killed is proportionate to that of the privates, while of the twenty-four Marshals of the Empire who fought after the inauguration, three—Lannes, Bessières and Poniatowski—were killed in action, and all the others were wounded at various times. Napoleon himself, as is well known, was wounded during the fighting round Ratisbon in 1809, and Duroc, his trusted Grand Marshal of the Palace, was struck down at his side by a stray cannon shot at Bautzen in 1813, and died an hour later in horrible agony.

The facts about the Imperial army are curiously contradictory. The men were devoted to Napoleon, but their devotion did not hold them together in moments of panic. The officers were experienced in all the details of war, but for all their experience they lost touch with the Prussian army during the vital period following Ligny. Napoleon had laid down as essential various rules of strategy—but he departed from them during the autumn campaign of 1813. Nothing seems consistent or satisfactory during the whole period.

Yet there are hundreds upon hundreds of incidents of which one cannot read without a thrill. Cambronne at Waterloo replying with a curse when called upon to surrender in the face of certain destruction; the Red Lancers of the Guard gaining the Somo Sierra in the teeth of a tempest of cannon shot; the conscripts of 1814, in sabots and blouses, facing undaunted the savage enemy cavalry at Champaubert; Ney rallying the rearguard during the retreat from Moscow; Kellermann charging an army at Quatre Bras; the engineers dying gladly to save the army at the Beresina; all these incidents are worthy to be remembered with pride, and almost blot out the memory of the hideous ferocity of these selfsame men in Spain, in Germany and in Russia.

It is the fate of the Emperor and the Grand Army to be equally at the mercy of the panegyrics of the admirer and the insults of anyone who chooses to inveigh against them.