Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

Napoleon’s domination of Europe from 1805 onwards depended entirely upon his military supremacy; nobody would dream of saying that he would have received the homage of the Confederation of the Rhine, the submission of Prussia and the co-operation of Austria simply because of the force of his personality, if that personality had not also been supported by the menace of four hundred battalions. Consequently Napoleon’s policy could not be questioned so long as his army was invincible, and mistakes of policy could be rapidly erased by a victory in the field. Similarly a military error was of far more importance than a political one; if the Bonapartes had never met with a defeat in battle their line would still inevitably hold the throne of France, with a ring of subject countries round them. It is therefore of the first importance to inquire into the failure of the army; the other failures are merely secondary. Thus if anyone says that he has just quitted a certain building for three reasons, one of them being that he was thrown out, the other two reasons are of secondary importance.

Various dates have been assigned to the commencement of the decline of Napoleon’s military ascendancy, and the very fact that this is so proves how difficult it is to be dogmatic on the subject. Napoleon lost battles in 1807, and he won battles in 1813—and 1814 and 1815 for the matter of that. The quality of the material at his disposal certainly grew more and more inferior as time went on, but it is easy to make too much of this point, for Napoleon was never defeated except by superior numbers. However, the first time he met with serious disaster was, undoubtedly, in the campaign of 1812. The catastrophe has been described times without number; what has not so often been mentioned is the nearness of Napoleon’s approach to another triumph.

A Napoleonic army never took the field without the full expectation of losing half its numbers through hardship, as distinct from the action of the enemy. This was the price it paid for its rapidity of marching and its freedom from a rigid dependence upon its base. If Napoleon led half a million men to attack Russia, he expected to lose a quarter of a million before he was in a position to gain a decisive success; he certainly lost the quarter million, and he certainly gained a success, but the losses continued and the success was not decisive. And yet on several occasions it appeared as if a new Austerlitz or a new Friedland were at hand.

The irony of the situation lies in the fact that in 1812 Napoleon took much more extensive measures to ensure that losses due to poverty of supplies would be minimized than he did in any other campaign. He organized an elaborate Intendance, with vast trains of wagons, and he collected enormous depôts of stores wherever possible. The system broke down almost at once, partly on account of the inexperience of the commissariat staff, partly because of torrential rains which ruined the roads as soon as the army started, and partly because the army and train were so huge that they had already absorbed every available horse in Europe, so that losses (which necessarily increased with the distance marched from the depôts) could not be replaced at all. This threw additional work on the surviving horses, thereby increasing the wastage, so that the Intendance went to pieces at a rate increasing by geometrical progression. Before very long the Grand Army was once more dependent entirely on the country through which it marched, and the numbers were vast and Lithuania and White Russia were miserably poor. It was a combination of circumstances apparently almost justifying the Russian boast that God was on their side.

Yet matters were not progressing any too well for the Russians. Their field army was hopelessly divided; one portion, from the Danube, could not be expected for months, while of the other two parts one was almost in the clutches of the French, and the two together were hopelessly inferior in numbers to the forces at Napoleon’s disposal. The tide of war came surging back across Russia; the Russians were marching desperately to escape from the trap; the French were pursuing equally desperately in the hope of closing the last avenue of escape. The balance wavered, but at length turned in favour of the Czar. The roads were mere mud tracks, churned by the Russians into quagmires, and the French were delayed. Jerome Bonaparte was not as insistent on speed as he might have been, and at last, after fierce rearguard fighting, Bagration escaped from the snare laid for him. A little more—ever so little!—and Smolensk might have been another Ulm.

The two main Russian armies were now combined, and, a hundred and twenty thousand strong, with a numerous cavalry, they were able to sweep the country bare before the French advance. Had the French movements round Smolensk been successful, the Russians would have had only half these numbers, and they would probably have been panic-stricken in addition; the French advance would have been proportionately easier and less expensive. In fact, it is difficult to see how Russia could have continued the war, for Alexander’s nerve would have been shaken, the war party would have received a severe rebuff, and altogether an entirely different atmosphere would have arisen. The Russians fell slowly back towards Moscow, the French, starving and disease-ridden, toiled painfully after them. Barclay de Tolly was relieved from his command in consequence of his inaction, and Kutusoff, the disciple of the great Suvaroff, took his place. A battle was fought at Borodino. For Napoleon, it was the first victory which did not give him huge captures of prisoners and the prompt and abject submission of his enemies; for the Russians it seemed as good as a victory, for they had met the great conqueror en rase campagne, and had escaped.

Yet they should not have done. The late Lord Wolseley declares that Napoleon’s plan of attack at Borodino “could not be more perfectly conceived or better elaborated,” and he goes on to say that it was a sudden attack of illness which prevented Napoleon from controlling the battle when it reached its height, and from sending adequate supports to Ney at the crucial moment. This is the first mention we find of the mysterious illness on which a large number of writers lay so much stress; in the next campaign we shall find a much more important example. But whether Napoleon was ill or not, a little better luck for Ney or Davout would certainly have brought about important results. The destruction of Kutusoff’s army would have had a great effect on the rest of the campaign, even if it had not appalled Alexander into making peace.

The next mistake of the Emperor’s was in staying too long at Moscow; during the five weeks he spent there his own army became demoralized, the Russians had time to rally and to bring up the Army of the Danube, and winter closed down on the countryside. When at last Napoleon decided to retreat Kutusoff was able at Malo-Jaroslavetz to bar the way to Kaluga, and to force him to go back through the pillaged districts through which he had come; this could mean nothing less than the destruction of his army, and, as everyone knows, the Grand Army was destroyed. It is needless here to tell once more the tale of the Beresina and Krasnoi; the interest of “what might have been” ceases with the battle of Malo-Jaroslavetz.

The points to be remembered are that during the fighting round Smolensk Napoleon was within a hairbreadth of an overwhelming victory; at Borodino he might have gained a satisfactory victory; a prompt retreat from Moscow would at least have minimized disaster; a success at Malo-Jaroslavetz would have saved part of the army, while the check which was actually experienced here was due to the accumulated effects of the earlier bad luck. In a military sense the campaign of 1812 was not merely justifiable but it was very nearly justified. A little—a very little more thrown into the scale would have saved his Empire for Napoleon and set him on a higher throne than ever before.

The campaign of 1813 was in this sense even more striking. It was waged with untrained, immature forces, for the most part against overwhelming odds, but during the course of the fighting Napoleon was not once, but many times, within an ace of successes more splendid than Austerlitz. The actions of the Allies seemed to portend failure for them from the start. Although Prussia joined Russia as soon as the extent of the French disaster became known; although there was nothing to bar their way except a few thousand starving survivors of the Grand Army; although all Germany was in a ferment, and the French domination of the Rhenish Confederation was tottering, the Russians advanced with pitiful caution and delay. Napoleon had returned to Paris, had raised, organized, equipped and set in motion a new army of a quarter of a million men by the time the Russians reached the Elbe. Almost before the Russian commander-in-chief, Wittgenstein, knew what was happening, Napoleon had rushed back at the head of his new army, had won the battle of Lützen, had reconquered Saxony, and had flung the Allied army back across the Oder.