Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

To point the moral, Napoleon contrived soon afterwards to bring up huge reinforcements, and then to cross the Danube without opposition. The movement was carefully planned and carried out, and the results were the victory of Wagram, the armistice of Znaim, and the dismemberment of Austria. If, after experiencing a severe defeat, Napoleon could succeed in bringing up the Army of Italy and crossing the Danube without opposition, he could surely have done so at the first attempt. The battle of Aspern is typical of Napoleon’s reckless methods and of his under-estimation of the enemy.

In this campaign of 1809 Napoleon’s fall was nearly anticipated. Had the forty thousand men whom England sent to Walcheren, too late, been despatched a little earlier, under a competent general; had Prussia flung her weight into the scale at the same time, it is hard to see how Napoleon could have recovered himself. Germany was already prepared to revolt, Tyrol was ablaze with insurrection, Wellington was marching into the heart of Spain, Russia was ready to change sides at a moment’s notice. What saved Napoleon was the fact that three of his enemies were timid and incompetent. Chatham could achieve nothing in the Netherlands; Frederick William III. hesitated in Prussia, and Francis of Austria, although Wagram was not in the least a crushing defeat, decided that he could not continue the struggle.

We have already dealt in part with 1812 and 1813. There are mistakes in plenty here, although now they were accentuated by the worst of ill luck. The whole advance into Russia was one gigantic error; not even Napoleon’s tremendous efforts could counter-balance the handicaps which he encountered, and which he ought to have foreseen. As far back as 1807 he had commented bitterly on the horrible Polish roads and on the clinging black mud of that district; he should have realized that it was impossible for him to feed an army five hundred thousand strong by road transport under such conditions. Nevertheless, he nearly succeeded at Smolensk in countering a strategic disadvantage by a tactical victory, in the same manner as he had done twelve years before at Marengo. Even after utter ruin had descended upon him, he contrived by his gigantic labours to raise a new army and to enter afresh into the field in 1813 before his enemies were ready for him. The early movements in the campaign are practically perfect; until after Bautzen he showed all his old brilliancy and skill—negatived this time by the mistakes of subordinates. But from Bautzen onwards we find repeated errors both in policy and in the field. It was a mistake to enter into the armistice of Pleisswitz; it was a mistake not to secure the neutrality of Austria, even if it had cost him the whole Kingdom of Italy; it was a mistake not to accept the Allies’ offers of peace; it was a mistake not to send back Ferdinand to Spain and extricate himself somehow from the tangle of the Peninsular War; it was a mistake to send Oudinot and Ney against Berlin; it was a mistake to try to hold the line of the Elbe; it was a mistake to fight at Leipzig; and, having decided to fight, it was a mistake not to see that there was a satisfactory line of retreat over the Elster.

It is clear that Napoleon was not the man he once was. And yet—and yet he nearly saved the whole situation at Dresden! Three days’ fighting there nearly counter-balanced all the disasters of the previous eighteen months. Smolensk, Bautzen and Dresden—three times he almost made up for all his defeats. The conclusion is forced upon one that all through the years of victory Napoleon was on the verge of defeat, and all through the years of defeat he was on the verge of victory. For twenty years the fate of Europe hung balanced upon a razor edge.

Napoleon’s good luck is very evident; his bad luck was an equally potent factor in his career. On striking a balance and considering what enormous success was his for a time, the resultant inference is unavoidable. He was vastly superior to all the other men of his time; his superiority was such that individual differences between others fade into insignificance when contrasted with the difference between him and anyone else who may be selected for comparison. He was superior not merely in mental capacity, but in all other qualities necessary for success in any sphere of business. His moral courage was enormous; his finesse and rapidity of thought were unequalled. He hardly knew what it was to despair. His adaptability and his fertility of resource were amazing.

In spite of this (or perhaps because of this) it is very easy to detract from any of his achievements. The Code Napoleon, his most enduring monument, was not his own work, nor, of course, can much credit be given to his assistants. Codification of laws is in no way a new idea—it is almost contemporary with laws themselves. Napoleon’s German policy was much the same as that of Louis XIV.; his Italian policy is reminiscent of Charles VIII.’s or even earlier; the germ of his Oriental policy can be found in that of Louis IX.; his Spanish policy was similar to, but more unsuccessful than that of his predecessors. Even the Continental system was only the development of previous schemes to their logical climax. In his Court arrangements Napoleon brought no new idea into play; most of his regulations were elaborated from the ceremony which surrounded the Soleil Monarque, while others were borrowed from the etiquette of the courts of Vienna and Madrid. Any approaching ceremony called for an anxious examination of precedents; if Napoleon could find a parallel far back stamped with the approval of a Valois or an Orléans-Angoulême the matter was settled on the same lines, no matter what inconveniences resulted. Similarly in purely Imperial concerns he was always harking back to Charlemagne or to the Empire of Rome. It is exceedingly probable that his annexation of Spain north of the Ebro in 1812, which excited roars of derision all over Europe because three-quarters of the district was aflame with guerillas who shot on sight any Frenchman they met, was directly inspired by Charlemagne’s action a thousand years before. Charlemagne’s Spanish campaign, even if it added the Spanish March to his dominions, cost him his rearguard and all his Paladins; Napoleon might well have taken warning. The references to Imperial Rome, from the design of his coinage and the plan of the Arc de Triomphe to the “cohorts” of the National Guard and his adoption of Eugène, are too numerous to mention. We even find him going back farther still, and complaining that he could not, like Alexander, announce himself as of divine birth and the son of Jupiter.

In military matters an equally well (or ill) founded charge of unoriginality can be brought against Napoleon’s methods. To those of us who saw a short time ago what changes four years of war wrought in the weapons and tactics employed, it seems amazing that at the end of twenty years of life and death struggles the soldiers were still armed with the smooth bore flintlock musket which had already been in use for a century. Only two important new weapons were evolved, and neither of them attained any great popularity. They were shrapnel shell and military rockets, and the latter, at least, Napoleon never employed. The rifle never attained any popularity with him, although to us it seems obvious that it was the weapon of the future. Fulton offered Napoleon his steamboat invention, and was treated as a wild dreamer—at the very time when Napoleon was most preoccupied with the problem of sending an army across the Channel. As an irresponsible autocrat, Napoleon had boundless opportunities of testing and employing any new invention which might be suggested, but he made no use of them. In this respect he compares unfavourably with his far less gifted nephew. Napoleon III.’s system of “sausages and champagne” certainly finds a parallel in his uncle’s treatment of his troops when not on active service. When Napoleon’s armies returned victorious they were received with fêtes and salutes innumerable; an ignorant observer might well have believed them to be demigods, to whom ceremonies and sacrifices were peculiarly acceptable. The arrangement had a double effect; it is certainly good for an army’s esprit de corps for the men to be considered demigods; and it is certainly useful for an autocrat whose rule is based on his army to have his subjects believe that that army is semi-divine. But for the little personal comforts of his men Napoleon took small notice. They were not relieved of the cumbersome features of their uniforms; even if they were not worried by petty details of pipeclay and brass polish as were the English, they were still forced to wear the horrible stock and tunic which Frederick the Great had set in fashion. The French army slang term “bleu” for recruit has its origin in the fact that the recruits for the old army used to go black and blue in the face owing to the unaccustomed restriction of the Napoleonic stock. The French helmets may have been imposing, but they were terribly uncomfortable to wear. The gain in efficiency resulting from a radical change in these matters must have counter-balanced any possible loss in esprit de corps had Napoleon seen fit to bring this change about.

It is with trembling and delicacy that one approaches the realm in which Napoleon apparently reigns supreme—that of tactics. It is a rash act to say that the winner of sixty battles won them badly. Yet one cannot help making a few cautious comments. When Napoleon attained supreme power the line and the column were almost equally in favour in the French army. The most usual formation in action was the line, backed at intervals by the column. At Marengo this arrangement was largely employed, and was successful. As time went on, however, we find that the line disappeared, its place was taken by additional skirmishers, and the columns became heavier and heavier. The system was altogether vicious; the column is both untrustworthy and expensive. French columns might be successful when pitted against any other columns, but they failed against disciplined infantry formed in line. Every battle and combat fought by the English, from Alexandria and Maida to Vittoria, proved this, but Napoleon and his officers never learnt the lesson. The Emperor’s letters to his generals in Spain give repeated examples of his contempt for the English and Portuguese troops; it was hardly a contempt that was justified. And despite all these warnings, despite (so it is reported) Soult’s and Foy’s pleadings, the first grand attack at Waterloo was made by twenty thousand infantry herded together twenty-four deep. This clumsy mass was easily held up, outflanked and forced back by six thousand English and Hanoverians under Picton. It was not the first example which had been forced upon Napoleon’s notice of the uselessness of the column. At Wagram he had sent Macdonald’s corps, some twenty thousand strong, against the Austrian centre, massed in a gigantic hollow square, which can be considered as forming two columns each about thirty-five deep. Macdonald reached his objective, but by the time he arrived his men were so jostled together, ploughed up by artillery, and generally demoralized that they could effect nothing. One lesson such as this ought to have convinced Napoleon, but it did not. He continued to use columns—and he was beaten at Waterloo. It is frequently urged in his defence that the column was the “natural” formation in the French army, that tradition had grown up around it, so that it was unsafe to meddle with it, that French troops fight better in column than in line, and that his troops were of necessity so raw that they could not be trusted in line. These arguments seem completely nullified by the facts that the line was actually employed early in Napoleon’s career, that both before and after Waterloo French troops fought well in line, and that at Waterloo, at any rate, the French troops were all well-trained, while Picton’s men were largely new recruits.

The employment of cavalry in the Imperial armies might similarly be condemned as extravagant and inefficient. The system of Seidlitz under Frederick the Great was forgotten. Napoleon had uprooted the triumphal memorial erected at Rossbach, and with it it seemed he had uprooted the memory of the charges with which Seidlitz’ hard-welded squadrons had routed the army of France fifty years before. Murat’s famous charges were not pressed home in the hard, utterly logical fashion of Frederick’s cavalry. If the opposing infantry stood firm at the approach of the cavalry, then the latter parted and drifted away down each flank. If (as must be admitted was much more usual) the infantry broke at the sight of the horsemen tearing down on them, then the pursuit was pushed home remorselessly, but never do we find the perfect charge, in few ranks, packed close together and held together like a steel chain, which must overturn everything in its way. Under Napoleon the French cavalry never charged home; at Waterloo we find the great cavalry charges, which Ney directed against the English squares, made at a trot, and the horsemen, swerving from the steel-rimmed, fire-spouting squares, wandering idly about on the flanks, while a few of the more enterprising cut feebly at the bayonets with their sabres. Wellington’s description of them riding about as if they owned the place argues powerfully against their ever having flung themselves upon the bayonet points, as good cavalry should do if sent against unbroken infantry.

In fact, both the French infantry and the French cavalry relied upon the moral effect of their advance rather than upon their capacity for doing damage when they made their charges. It is perfectly true that they were generally successful; Napoleon’s dictum that the moral is to the physical as three to one was borne out in a hundred battles from Arcola to Dresden; but it was found wanting at Vimiero, at Busaco, at Borodino, at Waterloo, everywhere in fact, where the enemy was too stubborn or well-disciplined to flinch from the waving sabres or the grenadiers’ gigantic head-dresses.