Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

Many critics have inveighed against Napoleon’s decision to take the initiative into his own hands and to carry the war into the enemy’s camp by his invasion of Belgium, but there is hardly one who can find any fault with the plan of invasion once it had been decided upon. The chief fault-finder, indeed, is Wellington, who, to his dying day, maintained that the movement should have been commenced through Mons, against the English right, and not through Charleroi, against their left. However, Wellington’s opinion on this matter does not carry as much weight as it might, because the Iron Duke was guilty of several serious mistakes during the campaign, and was only too anxious to draw any red herring that offered across their trail, especially as these mistakes were nearly all committed while he was under the impression that Napoleon’s ultimate objective was his right and not his centre. The whole weight of later opinion is in favour of Napoleon’s plan.

Napoleon decided, then, to invade Belgium via Charleroi, to interpose between the Prussian and the Anglo-Allied armies and defeat them in detail. The fact that he had only 130,000 men against 120,000 Prussians and 100,000 English and Allies does not seem to have caused him any grave apprehension. The greatest handicap under which he suffered was the absence of Berthier and Davout; both staff work and the higher commands suffered because of this, for Soult had no aptitude for the task of Chief of Staff, and Ney and Grouchy had no skill either in higher strategy or in the handling of large numbers of men. Nevertheless, the initial movements, without the interference of the enemy, were carried out with brilliant success; the 130,000 men available were assembled on the Sambre without either Blücher or Wellington having any suspicion as to the storm that was gathering. Next day the advance across the Sambre was ordered, and the storm burst.

The two vitally important factors for success were extreme simplicity of movement and the utmost secrecy of design. But these were rendered impossible at the very moment of the opening of the campaign. First, a general of division, as soon as he was over the river, deserted to the Prussians and disclosed the very considerable information of which he was possessed, and secondly the officer bearing orders to Vandamme to advance met with an accident and broke his leg. This held up both Vandamme’s corps and the one behind it, Lobau’s, and delayed the advance after the movement had become known for six valuable hours. All chance of surprising the Prussians in their cantonments was now lost, but for all that the plan of campaign was so perfect that on the next day the English and Prussians could only bring slightly superior numbers to bear on the French force. At Ligny the Prussians were beaten; at Quatre Bras the English were held back. Ney’s and d’Erlon’s mistakes on this day have already been described. Had Ney acted with all possible diligence, or had d’Erlon used his wits, either a completely crushing victory over the Prussians or a nearly equally satisfactory success over the English could have been obtained. Even both were possible. But Napoleon’s chance was spoiled owing to the inefficiency of his subordinates. Soult, Ney and d’Erlon were all equally to blame.

The next point is more mysterious. After Ligny was fought and won, it was clearly to Napoleon’s advantage to follow up his success without a moment’s delay. No other general had ever been so remorseless in hunting down a beaten enemy, and in wringing every possible advantage from his victory. But at Digny Napoleon paused. No order for an advance was issued. For twelve hours paralysis descended upon the Imperial army. The Prussians struggled out of harm’s way, and crawled painfully by by-roads to Wavre to keep in touch with the English. The cavalry reconnaissances which were sent out later the next morning to find the Prussian army did their work badly, and left Napoleon convinced that they had fallen back on Liège and not on Wavre. It was the delay, however, and not the faulty scouting, which proved most disastrous. Like Napoleon’s return to Dresden in 1813, it has never been explained. Some historians say that he was struck down by an attack of the same nameless illness which had overcome him at Borodino, at Moscow, at Dresden and at Leipzig. In this case it is the only possible explanation. For four or five hours Napoleon must have suffered from a complete lapse of his faculties. Those four or five hours were sufficient to ruin the Empire. Napoleon was left completely in the dark as to the moral, strength and position of the Prussians, and consequently he detached Grouchy with ambiguous orders in pursuit, gave him a force too small for decisive operations and yet much too large for mere observation, and sent him by a route which precluded him either from assisting the main body or from interfering seriously with the operations of the Prussians. Grouchy might possibly have done both if only he had possessed vast insight, vast skill and vast determination, but he did not; he was merely ordinary. So Wellington turned to bay at Waterloo; the Prussians assailed Napoleon’s flank, and the day ended in despair and disaster.

Thus, on looking back through the years of defeat, 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815, we find that there were a great number of occasions when Napoleon might have gained a success which would have counter-balanced the previous reverses. At Smolensk he might have gained another Friedland; at Borodino he might still have snatched some slight triumph out of the Moscow campaign. At Bautzen he came within an ace of destroying the Russian and Prussian armies, at Dresden he nearly captured the whole Austrian army and the two most powerful autocrats of Europe. The surrender of Soissons just saved the Prussians in 1814. In 1815 he might have shattered either or both of the armies opposed to him. It is not too much to say that with the good luck which had attended him during his earlier campaigns not only might he not have been forced to abdicate in 1814, but he might have enjoyed his continental ascendancy for a very considerable additional length of time.

Beside these undoubted possibilities there are others not as firmly based. Marbot tells a story that on the eve of Leipzig, while at the head of his Chasseurs, he saw a party of horsemen moving about in the darkness a short distance ahead. For various reasons he refrained from attacking—to discover later that the hostile force had consisted of the King of Prussia, the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and their staffs. A resolute charge by Marbot would have brought back as prisoners all the brains and authority of the opposing army. The Spanish victory at Pavia, when Francis the First lost “everything except honour,” would have been a poor success in comparison. We have, however, only Marbot’s word for this incident, and Marbot is distinctly untrustworthy. Edward III.’s army was not the only one which used the long bow.

It is more to the purpose to consider Dupont’s surrender at Baylen. When Dupont was sent out from Madrid to conquer Andalusia, there was only one Spanish field army in being, and that was the one he was to attack. As it happened, his nerve failed him, he frittered away weeks of valuable time, and finally he was hemmed in and forced to surrender rather feebly. The news of the disaster spread like wildfire over the Peninsula. Moncey was repulsed from Valencia; Catalonia broke into insurrection and hemmed Duhesme into Barcelona. Galicia and Aragon began to arm. The Peninsular War was soon fully developed; it was to absorb the energies of an army of three hundred thousand men for five years; it was to shed the blood of half a million Frenchmen; it was to encourage first Austria, then Russia, to rebel against the Napoleonic domination, and it was only to end when the British flag waved over Bordeaux and Toulouse. Had Lannes or some other really capable officer been in command of Dupont’s twenty thousand men, the Army of Andalusia might have been thoroughly beaten and the Peninsula overawed, for Baylen was the battle which destroyed the French army’s reputation for invincibility. Had not the Spaniards been victorious there, there would not have been an opportunity for the simultaneous call to arms which set all Spain in an inextinguishable blaze; isolated outbreaks might naturally have occurred, but the long respite given to the Spaniards during the summer of 1808, while Madrid was evacuated, would not have taken place to give the Peninsula its opportunity for arming and organizing. Baylen is as great a turning-point in Napoleonic history as even Bautzen or Leipzig—and but for Dupont history might have turned in another direction.

Instances such as this might be multiplied indefinitely, from Marmont at El Bodin (where he hesitated when half the British army was in his power) to Jourdan in his retreat to Vittoria; from Jerome’s mismanagement of Westphalia to Ney at Dennewitz; but it is useless to continue. It is obvious that Napoleon’s military set-backs were due very largely, not to his own failings, but to the incapacity of his subordinates. Napoleon made mistakes, enormous ones, sometimes (a few will be considered in the next chapter), but none of them as utterly fatal as those of the other generals. And yet these other generals were quite good generals as far as generals go—they were far and away superior to Schwartzenberg and Wittgenstein, for instance. Only Wellington and perhaps Blücher can be compared to them. The only moral to be drawn is that nothing human and fallible could sustain the vast Empire any longer; the dead weight of the whole was such that the least flaw in any of the pillars meant the progressive collapse of the entire fabric.

This conclusion enables us to approach a definite decision as to “what might have been.” It is unnecessary to argue as to whether the English Cabinet would have survived a defeat at Waterloo, or whether Francis would have made peace if he had been captured at Dresden. The result eventually would have been the same. There was only one Napoleon, and the Empire was too big for him to govern. Sooner or later something would go wrong, and the disturbance would increase in geometrical progression, and with a violence directly proportionate to the length of time during which the repressive force had been in action. It was inevitable that the Empire should fall, although as it happened the fall was accelerated by a series of unfortunate incidents. Victor Hugo meant the same thing when he said “God was bored with Napoleon”; and Napoleon himself had occasional glimpses of the same inevitable result—as witness the occasion when he said, “After me, my son will be lucky if he has a few thousand francs a year.”

Thus, if Napoleon by good fortune had reestablished his Empire in 1813, and taken advantage (just as he did in 1810) of peace in the east to reconquer Spain in the south, even then he would not long have retained his throne. The persistent enmity of England would have continued to injure him, and to seek out some weak spot for the decisive blow. Even if Ferdinand had been sent back to Spain, and French prestige survived such a reverse, there would have still remained various avenues of attack. England was suffering severely, but France was suffering more. Perhaps the patience of the French would have become exhausted, and some trivial revolt in Paris would have driven Napoleon into exile. A very similar thing happened in 1830, and the house of Orleans was always anxiously awaiting some such chance. There could hardly have arisen a Napoleonic Legend in that event. To the French mind Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little would have been the same person, instead of uncle and nephew.