The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 4 (of 4)

by William Milligan Sloane

Schwarzenberg's movements during the next three days awakened in Napoleon the suspicion, which he was only too glad to accept as a certainty, that the Austro-Russian army was on the point of retreating into the Vosges or beyond; and on the twentieth he announced his decision of marching farther eastward, past Troyes, toward the frontier forts still in French hands. This idea of a final stand on the confines of France and Germany haunted him to the end, and was the "will-o'-the-wisp" which intermittently tempted him to folly. But for the present its execution was necessarily postponed. That very day news was received within the lines he had established about Arcis that the enemy, far from retreating, was advancing. Soon the French cavalry skirmishers appeared galloping in flight, and were brought to a halt only when the Emperor, with drawn sword, threw himself across their path. A short, sharp struggle ensued—sixteen thousand French with twenty-four thousand five hundred of their foe. It was irregular and indecisive, but Napoleon held his own. The neighboring hamlet of Torcy had also been attacked by the allies, and before their onset the French had at first yielded. But the defenders were rallied, and at nightfall the position was recaptured. This sudden exhibition by Schwarzenberg of what looked like courage puzzled Napoleon; after long deliberation he concluded that the hostile troops were in all probability only a rear-guard covering the enemy's retreat. He was not very far wrong, but far enough to make all the difference to him. The circumstances require a full explanation.

Thanks to Caulaincourt's sturdy persistence, the congress at Châtillon was still sitting, and on the thirteenth the French delegate wrote a last despairing appeal to the Emperor. His messenger was delayed three days by the military operations; but when he arrived, on the sixteenth, Maret wrung from Napoleon concessions which included Antwerp, Mainz, and even Alessandria. In the despatch announcing this, and written on the seventeenth to Caulaincourt, Maret made no reservation except one: that Napoleon intended, after signing the treaty, to secure for himself whatever the military situation at the close of the war might entitle him to retain. The return of the messenger was likewise delayed for three days, and it was the twenty-first before he reached the outskirts of Châtillon. He arrived to find Caulaincourt departing; the second "carte blanche" had arrived too late. With all his skill, the persistent and adroit minister had been unable to protract negotiations longer than the eighteenth. His appeal having brought no immediate response, he had, several days earlier, despatched a faithful warning, and this reached Napoleon at Fère-Champenoise simultaneously with the departure of the messenger for Châtillon. The day previous the Emperor had received bad news from southern France: that Bordeaux had opened its gates to a small detachment of English under Hill, and that the Duke of Angoulême had been cheered by the people as he publicly proclaimed Louis XVIII King of France. Apparently neither this information nor Caulaincourt's warning profoundly impressed Napoleon; he knew his Gascons well, his "carte blanche" he must have believed to be in Châtillon, and it had been in high spirits that he hastened on to Arcis, determined to make the most of the time intervening until the close of negotiations.

When news of Napoleon's advance reached Schwarzenberg's headquarters in Troyes, there had at first been nothing short of panic; the commander himself was on a sick-bed, having entirely succumbed to the hardships of winter warfare. No sooner had he ordered the first backward step than his army had displayed a feverish anxiety for farther retreat. As things were going, it appeared as if the different corps would, for lack of judicious leadership, be permitted to withdraw still farther in such a way as to separate the various divisions ever more widely, and expose them successively to annihilating blows from Napoleon, like those which had overwhelmed the scattered segments of the Silesian army. The Czar and many others immediately perceived the danger. With faculties unnerved by fear, the officers foreboded a repetition with the Bohemian army of Montmirail, Champaubert, and Vauchamps. Rumors filled the air: the peasantry of the Vosges were rising, the Swiss were ready to follow their example; the army must withdraw before it was utterly surrounded and cut off. There was even a report—and so firmly was it believed that it long passed for history—of Alexander's having expressed a desire to reopen the congress.

Schwarzenberg's strange hesitancy in the initial stages of the invasion has been explained. Beyond his natural timidity, it was almost certainly due to Metternich's politics, which displayed a desire to ruin Napoleon's imperial power, but to save France either for the Bourbons or possibly for his Emperor's son-in-law. If the Austrian minister could accomplish this, he could thereby checkmate Prussian ambitions for leadership in Germany. But during the movements of February and March the actions of the Austrian general appear to have been due almost exclusively to cowardice. The papers of Castlereagh, of Metternich, and of Schwarzenberg himself aim to give the impression that during all the events which had occurred since the congress of Prague, everything had been straightforward, and that Austria had no thought of sparing Napoleon or acting otherwise than she did in the end. Yet the indications of the time are quite the other way: the Russians in Schwarzenberg's army were furious, and, as one of them wrote, suspicious "of what we are doing and what we are not doing." Alexander, in this crisis, was deeply concerned, not for peace, but for an orderly, concentrated retreat. With stubborn fatalism, he never doubted the final outcome; and during his stay in Châtillon he had spent his leisure hours in excogitating a careful plan for the grand entry into Paris, whereby the honors were to be his own.

Consequently, when on the nineteenth he hastened to Schwarzenberg's bedside, it was with the object of persuading the Austrian commander to make a stand long enough to secure concentration in retreat. This idea originated with the Russian general Toll, and the place he suggested for concentration was the line between Troyes and Pougy. But the council was terror-stricken, and though willing to heed Alexander's urgent warning, they at first selected a position farther in the rear, on the heights of Trannes. With this the Czar was content, but on second thought such a course appeared to the more daring among the Austrian staff as if it smacked of pusillanimity. Schwarzenberg felt the force of this opinion, and by the influence of some one, probably Radetzky, it was determined, without consulting the Czar, to concentrate near Arcis on the left bank of the Aube, in order to assume the offensive at Plancy. This independent resolution of Schwarzenberg's staff explains the presence of allied troops near Arcis and at Torcy. Alexander was much incensed by the news of the meeting, and declared that Napoleon's real purpose was to hold them while cutting off their connections on the extreme right at Bar and Chaumont. This was in fact a close conjecture. Napoleon, though surprised into action, was naturally confirmed in his surmise that the hostile troops were a retreating rear-guard; and in consequence he had definitely adopted the most desperate scheme of his life—the plan of hurrying toward the Vosges, of summoning the peasantry to rise en masse, and of calling out the garrison troops from the frontier fortresses to reinforce his army and enable him to strike the invaders from behind.

By his retreat to Troyes on February twenty-second, Schwarzenberg had avoided a decisive conflict, saving his own army, and leaving Napoleon to exhaust himself against the army of Silesia; by his decision of March nineteenth he had confirmed Napoleon in the conviction that the allies were overawed, and had thus led his desperate foe into the greatest blunder conceivable—this chimerical scheme of concentrating his slender, scattered force on the confines of France, and leaving open a way for the great army of invaders to march direct on Paris. Of such stuff are contemporary reputations sometimes constructed. But this was not enough: a third time the Austrian general was to stumble on greatness. Napoleon's movements of concentration had thus far met with no resistance, in spite of their temerity; and throughout the nineteenth the enemy's outposts, wherever found, fled incontinently. It appeared a certainty that the allies were abandoning the line of the Seine in order to avoid a blow on their flank. That evening Napoleon began to vacillate, gradually abandoning his notion of an offensive move near Troyes, and deliberating how best to reach Vitry for a further advance toward his eastern fortresses. To avoid any appearance of retreat, he rejected the safer route by way of Fère-Champenoise to Sommesous, and determined to follow the course of the Aube for a while before turning northward to Sommepuis. He might run across the enemy's rear-guard, but he counted on their pusillanimity for the probable retreat of the very last man to Troyes. When Ney and Sebastiani began on the twentieth to push up the south bank of the Aube, they expected no opposition. That very morning Napoleon had announced to his minister of war, "I shall neglect Troyes, and betake myself in all haste to my fortresses."

So far the Emperor had made no exhibition of the temerity about which so much was later to be said. But he had deceived himself and had taken a wild resolution. Moreover, it is amazing that he should have felt a baseless confidence in Blücher's remaining inert. This hallucination is, however, clearly expressed in a despatch to Marmont of the very same date. Yet, nevertheless, the alternative is not left out of consideration, for he ordered that marshal, in case Blücher should resume the offensive, to abandon Paris and hasten to Châlons. This fatal decision was not taken suddenly: the contingency had been mentioned in a letter of February eighth to Joseph, and again from Rheims emphatic injunctions to keep the Empress and the King of Rome from falling into Austrian hands were issued to the same correspondent. "Do not abandon my son," the Emperor pleaded; "and remember that I would rather see him in the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France. The fate of Astyanax, prisoner to the Greeks, has always seemed to me the unhappiest in history." The messenger had been gone but a few hours when word was brought that Blücher had resumed the offensive, and a swift courier was despatched summoning Marmont to Châlons. In this ultimate decision Napoleon showed how cosmopolitan he had grown: he had forgotten, if he had ever understood, the extreme centralization of France; he should have known that, Paris lost, the head of the country was gone, and that the dwarfed limbs could develop little or no national vitality.

This bitter lesson he was soon to learn. On the momentous afternoon of the twentieth, as has been related, about sixteen thousand French confronted nearly twenty-five thousand of the allies in the sharp but indecisive skirmishes before Arcis; the loss of the former was eighteen hundred, that of the allies twenty-seven hundred. In spite of the dimensions which these conflicts had assumed, Napoleon remained firm in the belief that he had to do with his retreating enemy's rear-guard; Schwarzenberg, on the other hand, was convinced that the French had a strength far beyond the reality. During the night both armies were strongly reinforced, and in the early morning Napoleon had twenty-seven thousand five hundred men—quite enough, he believed, to demoralize the retreating Austrians. It was ten o'clock when he ordered the attack, Ney and Sebastiani being directed to the plateau behind the town. What was their surprise and dismay to find Schwarzenberg's entire army, which numbered not less than a hundred thousand, drawn up in battle array on the plain to the eastward, the infantry in three dense columns, cavalry to right and left, with three hundred and seventy pieces of artillery on the central front! The spectacle would have been dazzling to any but a soldier: the bright array of gay accoutrements, the glittering bayonets, the waving banners, and the serried ranks. As it was, the audacious French skirmishers instinctively felt the incapacity of a general who could thus assemble an army as if on purpose to display its numbers and expose it to destruction. Without a thought they began a sort of challenging rencounter with horse-artillery and cavalry.

But the Emperor's hopes were dashed when he learned the truth; with equal numbers he would have been exultant; a battle with odds of four to one he dared not risk. Sebastiani was kept on the heights to mask the retreat which was instantly determined upon, and at half-past one it began. This ruse was so successful, by reason of the alarms and crossings incident to the withdrawal of the French, that the allies were again terror-stricken; even the Czar rejected every suggestion of attack; again force was demoralized by genius. At last, however, scouts brought word that columns of French soldiers were debouching beyond the Aube, and the facts were plain. Even then the paralyzed invaders feared to attack, and it was not until two thirds of Napoleon's force was behind the stream that, after fierce fighting, the French rear was driven from the town. Oudinot's corps was the last to cross the river, and, standing until sappers had destroyed the bridge, it hurried away to follow the main column toward Vitry. The divisions of Gérard and Macdonald joined the march, and there were then forty-five thousand men in line.

While Napoleon was thus neutralizing the efforts of armies and generals by the renown of his name, two of his marshals were finally discredited. Enfeebled as Blücher appeared to be, he was no sooner freed from the awe of Napoleon's proximity than he began to move. On the eighteenth he passed the Aisne, and Marmont, disobeying the explicit instructions of Napoleon to keep open a line of retreat toward Châlons, began to withdraw toward Fismes, where he effected a junction with Mortier. His intention was to keep Blücher from Paris by false manœuvers. Rheims and Épernay at once fell into hostile hands; there was no way left open toward Châlons except the long detour by Château-Thierry and Étoges; and Blücher, it was found, was hurrying to effect a connection with Schwarzenberg. This was an assured checkmate. Meantime Augereau had displayed a similar incapacity. On the eighth he had begun a number of feeble, futile movements intended to prevent the allies from forming their Army of the South. But after a few aimless marches he returned to Lyons, and stood there in idleness until his opponents had completed their organization. On the twentieth the place was assaulted. The French general had twenty-one thousand five hundred men under his immediate command, six thousand eight hundred Catalonian veterans were on their way from Perpignan, and at Chambèry were seven thousand more from the armies of Tuscany and Piedmont. The assailants had thirty-two thousand, mostly raw troops. With a stout heart in its commander, Lyons could have been held until the reinforcements arrived, when the army of the allies would probably have been annihilated. But there was no stout heart in any of the authorities; not a spade had been used to throw up fortifications; the siege-guns ready at Avignon had not been brought up. Augereau, at the very height of the battle, summoned the civil authorities to a consultation, and the unwarlike burghers assented without a murmur to his suggestion of evacuation. The great capital of eastern France was delivered as a prize to those who had not earned it. Had Suchet been substituted for Augereau some weeks earlier, the course of history might have been diverted. But although Napoleon had contemplated such a change, he shrank from disgracing an old servant, and again, as before Leipsic, displayed a kindly spirit destructive to his cause.