The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 4 (of 4)
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Title: The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 4 (of 4)
Author: William Milligan Sloane
Release date: January 3, 2011 [eBook #34838]
Language: English
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[Illustration: From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co.
EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE
By Pierre Paul Prod'hon.]
THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
BY
WILLIAM MILLIGAN SLOANE
PH.D., L.H.D., LL.D.
_Professor of History in Columbia University_
Revised and Enlarged
With Portraits
VOLUME IV
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1916
Copyright, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1910
BY
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1910_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER Page
I. The Last Imperial Victory............................... 1
II. Politics and Strategy.................................. 11
III. The End of the Grand Army.............................. 23
IV. The Frankfort Proposals................................ 37
V. The Invasion of France................................. 47
VI. Napoleon's Supreme Effort.............................. 59
VII. The Great Captain at Bay............................... 71
VIII. The Struggles of Exhaustion............................ 84
IX. The Beginning of the End.............................. 101
X. The Fall of Paris..................................... 111
XI. Napoleon's First Abdication........................... 123
XII. The Emperor of Elba................................... 137
XIII. Napoleon the Liberator................................ 151
XIV. The Dynasties Implacable.............................. 164
XV. Ligny and Quatre Bras................................. 175
XVI. The Eve of Waterloo................................... 189
XVII. Waterloo.............................................. 199
XVIII. The Surrender......................................... 212
XIX. St. Helena............................................ 224
XX. Soldier, Statesman, Despot............................ 247
XXI. Napoleon and the United States........................ 268
XXII. Napoleon's Place in History........................... 285
Historical Sources.................................... 303
General Bibliography.................................. 307
Index................................................. 355
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Empress Marie Louise _Frontispiece_
Facing Page
Napoleon in 1813................................................. 50
Napoleon, Francois Charles Joseph, Prince Imperial;
King of Rome; Duke of Reichstadt............................... 98
Map of the Field of Operations in 1814.......................... 104
The King of Rome................................................ 148
Map of the Campaign of 1815..................................... 194
Napoleon, Francois Charles Joseph, Duke of Reichstadt,
etc., etc., son of Napoleon Bonaparte......................... 200
Napoleon sleeping by Las Cases on board the _Bellerophon_....... 224
Napoleon at St. Helena.......................................... 230
Napoleon I...................................................... 274
LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
CHAPTER I
THE LAST IMPERIAL VICTORY[1]
[Footnote 1: References: Pierron: Napoleon, de Dresde a
Leipzig. Pelet: Des principales operations de la campagne de
1813. York von Wartenburg: Precis militaire de la campagne de
1813 en Allemagne. Clement: Campagne de 1813. Luedtke: Die
strategische Bedeutung der Schlacht bei Dresden. Sorel:
L'Europe et la revolution francaise, Vol. VIII.]
Napoleon's Prospects -- The Preparations and Plans of the
Coalition -- Cross-purposes of the Combatants -- Condition of
Napoleon's Mind -- Strength and Weakness of the Allies -- Renewal
of Hostilities -- The Feint in Silesia -- Napoleon at Dresden --
First Day's Fighting -- The Victory Won on the Second Day.
[Sidenote: 1813]
In later years Napoleon confessed that during the interval between the
first and second Saxon campaigns he had been outwitted. His
antagonists had, in his own language, "changed for the better"; at
least they secured the war they so earnestly desired under conditions
vastly more favorable to themselves than to their opponent. Both
parties had been arming with might and main during the prolonged
truce, but each member of the dynastic coalition now had the backing
of a growing national enthusiasm, while Napoleon had to deal with
waning zeal and an exhausted people. Thus, then, at the opening of the
second campaign in Saxony, the allies had four hundred and thirty-five
thousand men, and Napoleon but three hundred and fifty thousand. With
this inferiority, it behooved the Emperor to use all his strategic
powers, and he did so with a brilliancy never surpassed by him.
Choosing the Elbe as his natural defensive line, Hamburg stood almost
impregnable at one end, flanked to the southward by Magdeburg,
Wittenberg, and Torgau, three mighty fortresses. Dresden, which was
necessarily the focal point, was intrenched and palisaded for the
protection of the army which was to be its main bulwark. Davout and
Oudinot, with seventy thousand men, were to threaten Berlin, and,
thereby drawing off as many as possible of the enemy, liberate the
garrisons of Stettin and Kuestrin; they were then to beleaguer Spandau,
push the foe across the Oder, and stand ready to fall on the flank of
the coalition army. Napoleon himself, with the remaining two hundred
and eighty thousand, was to await the onset of the combined Russian,
Prussian, and Austrian forces.
The allies now had in their camp two mighty strategists--Jomini, the
well-known Swiss adventurer and military historian, and Moreau, who
had returned from the United States. The former, pleading that he had
lost a merited promotion by Berthier's ill-will, and that as a
foreigner he had the right of choice, had gone over to the enemies of
his employer; the latter, yielding to the specious pleas of his silly
and ambitious wife that he might fight Napoleon without fighting
France, had taken service with the Czar. The arrow which penetrated
Napoleon's vitals was indeed feathered from his own pinions, since
these two, with another of Napoleon's pupils--Bernadotte, the Crown
Prince of Sweden--were virtually the council of war. Two of them, the
latter and Moreau, saw the specter of French sovereignty beckoning
them on. They dreamed of the chief magistracy in some shape,
imperial, monarchical, consular, or presidential, and were more
devoted to their personal interests than to those of the coalition. In
the service of their ambition was formed the plan by which not only
was Napoleon overwhelmed, but the fields of France were drenched with
blood. Under their advice, three great armies were arrayed: that of
the North, in Brandenburg, was composed of Prussians, Swedes, and a
few Russians, its generals being Buelow, Bernadotte, and Tchernicheff;
that of the East was the Prusso-Russian army in Silesia, now under
Bluecher, that astounding young cavalryman of seventy, and
Wittgenstein; finally, that of the South was the new Austrian force
under Schwarzenberg, with an adjunct force of Russian troops under
Barclay, and the Russian guard under the Grand Duke Constantine. Buelow
was in and near Berlin with about a hundred and fifty-six thousand
men; Bluecher had ninety-five thousand, and, having violated the
armistice, was on August fourteenth already within the neutral zone at
Striegau, before Breslau; the Austro-Russian force of almost two
hundred and fifty thousand was in northern Bohemia, near Melnik;
Bennigsen was in Poland building up a strong reserve. Schwarzenberg,
though commander of the main army, was reduced to virtual impotence by
the presence at his headquarters of all the sovereigns and of Moreau.
Divided counsels spring from diverse interests; there was at the
outset a pitiful caution and inefficiency on the part of the allies,
while at Napoleon's headquarters there was unity of design at least.
Both contestants were apparently under serious misapprehensions. The
allies certainly were, because Francis believed that, as so often
before, Napoleon's goal would be Vienna. The plan adopted by them was
therefore very simple: each division of the allied army was to stand
expectant; if assailed it was to yield, draw on the French columns,
and expose their flank or rear to the attacks of the other two allied
armies; then by superior force the invaders were to be surrounded. The
allies divined, or believed they divined, that Napoleon would hold his
guard in reserve, throw it behind any portion of his line opposite
which they were vulnerable, break through, and defeat them in
detachments. Their idea was keen, and displayed a thorough grasp both
of the principles on which their opponent had hitherto acted and of
his normal character. But nevertheless they were deceived. Napoleon
discarded all his old principles, and behaved most abnormally. In his
conduct there are evidences of a curious self-deception, and his
decisions contradicted his language. Perpetually minimizing in
conversation the disparity between the two forces, and sometimes even
asserting his own superiority, he nevertheless almost for the first
time assumed the defensive. This unheard-of course may have been due
to misapprehension and exaggeration, but it produced for the moment a
powerful moral effect on his generals, who, without exception, had
hitherto been clamorous for peace, and likewise upon his new boy
recruits; both classes began to have a realizing sense that they were
now fighting, not for aggression, but for life. If the Emperor had any
such confidence as he expressed, it must have been due to the fact
that boys had fought like veterans at Luetzen and Bautzen, and that at
last there were cavalry and artillery in fair proportion. Possibly,
likewise, he may have been desperate; fully aware that he was about to
cast the dice for a last stake, he may have been at once braggart and
timid. If he should win in a common defensive battle, he believed, as
his subsequent conduct goes to show, that he was safe indefinitely;
and if he lost--the vision must have been too dreadful, enough to
distract the sanest mind: an exhausted treasury, an exhausted nation,
an empty throne, vanished hopes, ruin!
Yet at the time no one remarked any trace of nervousness in Napoleon.
Long afterward the traitorous Marmont, whose name, like that of
Moreau, was to be execrated by succeeding generations of honorable
Frenchmen, recalled that the Emperor had contemptuously designated the
enemy as a rabble, and that he had likewise overestimated the
strategic value of Berlin. The malignant annalist asserted, too, that
Napoleon's motive was personal spite against Prussia. It has also been
studiously emphasized by others that the "children" of Napoleon's army
were perishing like flowers under an untimely frost, forty thousand
French and German boys being in the hospitals; that corruption was
rife in every department of administration; and that the soldiers' pay
was shamefully in arrears. An eye-witness saw Peyrusse, the paymaster,
to whom Napoleon had just handed four thousand francs for a monument
to Duroc, coolly pocket a quarter of the sum, with the remark that
such was the custom. He would be rash indeed who dared to assert that
there was no basis for this criticism. It is true that the
instructions to Davout and Oudinot made light of Buelow's army, and
that Berlin had vastly less strategic value than those instructions
seemed to indicate. But, on the other hand, both generals and men were
sadly in need of self-reliance, and to see their capitals occupied or
endangered had still a tremendous moral effect upon dynastic
sovereigns. As to the defects in his army, Napoleon could not have
been blind; but in all these directions matters had been nearly, if
not quite, as bad in 1809, and a victory had set them all in order.
What nervousness there was existed rather among the allies. Never
before in her history, not even under the great Frederick, had Prussia
possessed such an army; the Austrians were well drilled and well
equipped; the Russians were of fair quality, numerous, and with the
reserves from Poland would be a powerful army in themselves. Yet in
spite of their strength, the allies were not really able. Austria was
the head, but her commander, Schwarzenberg, was not even mediocre, and
among her generals there was only one who was first-rate, namely,
Radetzky. Frederick William and Alexander were of incongruous natures;
their alliance was artificial, and in such plans as they evolved there
was an indefiniteness which left to the generals in their respective
forces a large margin for independence. The latter were quick to take
advantage of the chance, and this fact accounts for the generally lame
and feeble beginning of hostilities.
For example, it was through Bluecher's wilfulness that the moral
advantage lay with Napoleon in the opening of the struggle. On July
ninth Bernadotte, Frederick William, and the Czar had met at
Trachenberg to lay out a plan of campaign. In this conference, which
first opened Napoleon's eyes to the determination of the allies,
Bluecher had secured for himself an independent command. The accession
of Austria rendered the agreement of Trachenberg null, but Bluecher did
not abandon his ambition. Impatient of orders or good faith, he broke
into the neutral zone at Striegau on August fourteenth, apparently
without any very definite plan. Napoleon, hearing that forty thousand
Russians from this army were marching toward Bohemia, advanced from
Dresden on August fifteenth, to be within reach of the passes of the
Iser Mountains on the Upper Elbe, and halted at Zittau as a central
point, where he could easily collect about a hundred and eighty
thousand men, and whence, according to circumstances, he could either
strike Bluecher, cut off the Russians, or return to Dresden in case of
need. That city was to be held by Saint-Cyr. On August twentieth
Bluecher reached the banks of the Bober at Bunzlau; owing to Napoleon's
nice calculation, Ney, Marmont, Lauriston, and Macdonald were
assembled on the other side to check the advance, he himself being at
Lauban with the guard. Had Bluecher stood, the Russo-Prussians would
have been annihilated, for their inferiority was as two to one. But
the headstrong general did not stand; on the contrary, retreating by
preconcerted arrangement behind the Deichsel, he led his antagonist to
the false conclusion that he lacked confidence in his army.
Napoleon was not generally over-credulous, but this mistake was
probably engendered in his mind by the steady stream of uneasy reports
he was receiving from his own generals. On the twenty-third he wrote
to Maret that his division commanders seemed to have no self-reliance
except in his presence; "the enemy's strength seems great to them
wherever I am not." Marmont was the chief offender, having severely
criticized a plan of operations which would require one or more of the
marshals to act independently in Brandenburg or Silesia or both,
expressing the fear that on the day when the Emperor believed himself
to have won a decisive battle he would discover that he had lost two.
Seventeen years of campaigning had apparently turned the great
generals of Napoleon's army into puppets, capable of acting only on
their leader's impulse. Whatever the cause, Napoleon was set in his
idea, and pressed on in pursuit. On the twenty-second Bluecher was
beyond the Katzbach, with the French van close behind, when word
arrived at Napoleon's headquarters that the Austro-Russians had
entered Saxony and were menacing Dresden. How alert and sane the
Emperor was, how thoroughly he foresaw every contingency, appears
from the minute directions he wrote for Macdonald, who was left to
block the road for Bluecher into Saxony, while Lauriston was to
outflank and shut off the perfervid veteran from both Berlin and
Zittau.
These instructions having been written, Napoleon at first contemplated
crossing the Elbe above Dresden to take Schwarzenberg on the flank and
rear in the passes of the Ore Mountains. This would not only cut off
the Austrian general from the Saxon capital, but prevent his swerving
to the left for an advance on Leipsic. But finding that his enemy was
moving swiftly, the Emperor resolved to meet him before Dresden. It
would never do to lose his ally's capital at the outset, or to suffer
defeat at the very head of his defensive line. Giving orders,
therefore, for the corps of Marmont, Vandamme, and Victor, together
with Latour-Maubourg's cavalry and the guard, to wheel, he hastened
back to reinforce Saint-Cyr at Dresden. On the twenty-fifth, as he
passed Bautzen, he learned that Oudinot had been defeated at Luckau;
but he gave no heed to the report, and next day reached Dresden at
nine in the morning. An hour later the guard came up, having performed
the almost incredible feat of marching seventy-six miles in three
days. Vandamme, with forty thousand men, had arrived at Pirna, a few
miles above, and Saint-Cyr was drawing in behind the temporary
fortifications of the city itself.
The enemy, too, was at hand, but he had no plan. In a council of war
held by him the same morning there was protracted debate, and finally
Moreau's advice to advance in six columns was taken. He refused "to
fight against his country," but explained that the French could never
be conquered in mass, and that if one assailing column were crushed,
the rest could still push on. This long deliberation cost the allies
their opportunity; for at four in the afternoon, when they attacked,
the mass of the French army had crossed the Elbe and had thus
completed the garrison of the city. For two hours the fighting was
fierce and stubborn; from three different sides Russians, Austrians,
and Prussians each made substantial gains; at six Napoleon determined
to make a general sally and throw in his guard. With fine promptness.
Mortier, at the head of two divisions of the young guard, attacked the
Russians, and, fighting until midnight, drove them beyond the hamlet
of Striefen. Saint-Cyr dislodged the Prussians, and pushed them to
Strehla; while Ney, with two divisions of the young guard, threw a
portion of the Austrians into Plauen, and Murat, with two divisions of
infantry and Latour-Maubourg's cavalry, cleared the suburb
Friedrichstadt of the rest. Napoleon, alert and ubiquitous, then made
his usual round, and knew when he retired to rest in the royal palace
that with seventy thousand men, or rather boys, he had repulsed a
hundred and fifty thousand of his foe. His inspiriting personal work
might be calculated as worth eighty thousand of his opponents' best
men. That night both Marmont and Victor, with their corps, entered the
city; and Vandamme in the early dawn began to bombard Pirna, thus
threatening the allies' connection with Bohemia and drawing away
forces from them to hold that outpost.
The second day's fighting was more disastrous to the allies than the
first. The morning opened in a tempest, but at six both sides were
arrayed. On the French right were Victor and Latour-Maubourg; then
Marmont; then the old guard and Ney with two divisions of the young
guard; next Saint-Cyr, with Mortier on the left. Opposite stood
Russians, Prussians, and Austrians, in the same relative positions, on
higher ground, encircling the French all the way westward and around
by the south to Plauen; but between their center and left was reserved
a gap for Klenau's Austrians, who were coming up from Tharandt in the
blinding storm, and were overdue. At seven began the artillery fire of
the young guard; but before long it ceased for an instant, since the
gunners found the enemy's line too high for the elevation of their
guns. "Continue," came swiftly the Emperor's order; "we must occupy
the attention of the enemy on that spot." The ruse succeeded, and the
gap was left open; at ten Murat dashed through it, and turning
westward, killed or captured all who composed the enemy's extreme
left. The garrison of Pirna then retreated toward Peterswald.
Elsewhere the French merely held their own. Napoleon lounged all day
in a curious apathy before his camp-fire, his condition being
apparently due to the incipient stages of a digestive disorder. Early
in the afternoon Schwarzenberg heard of Murat's great charge, but he
held firm until at five the flight from Pirna was announced, when he
abandoned the conflict. By six Napoleon was aware that the battle was
over, and, mounting his horse, he trotted listlessly to the palace,
his old gray overcoat and hood streaming with rain.
CHAPTER II
POLITICS AND STRATEGY[2]
[Footnote 2: References: Luckwaldt: Oesterreich und die
Anfaenge des Befreiungskrieges von 1813: Vom Abschluss der
Allianz mit Frankreich, bis zum Eintritt in die Koalition.
Aster: Die Kriegsereignisse zwischen Peterswalde, Pirna,
Koenigstein und Priesten im August, 1813, und die Schlacht bei
Kulm. Wagner: Die Tage v. Dresden u. Kulm. Heft: Der
Waffenstillstand und die Schlacht bei Gross-Beeren nebst fuenf
Beilagen.]
Napoleon's Conduct after Dresden -- Military Considerations
Overruled by Political Schemes -- Probable Explanation of
Napoleon's Failure -- Prussian Victories at Grossbeeren and on
the Katzbach -- Vandamme Overwhelmed at Kulm -- Napoleon's
Responsibility -- Political Considerations again Ascendant -- The
System of "Hither and Thither" -- The Battle of Dennewitz -- Its
Disastrous Consequences -- Napoleon's Vacillation -- Strategy
Thwarted by Diplomacy.
Throughout the night after the victory at Dresden, Napoleon believed
that the enemy would return again to battle on the morrow. This is
conclusively shown by the notes which he made for Berthier during the
evening. These were based on the stated hypothesis that the enemy was
not really in retreat, but would on the morrow by a great battle
strive to retrieve his failure. But the Emperor was altogether
mistaken. To be sure, the council of the disheartened allies debated
far into the small hours whether an advantageous stand could not still
be made on the heights of Dippoldiswalde, but the decision was adverse
because the coalition army was sadly shattered, having lost a third of
its numbers. Crippled on its left and threatened on its rear, it
began next morning to retreat in fair order toward the Ore Mountains,
and so continued until it became known that Vandamme was directly in
the path, when a large proportion of the troops literally took to the
hills, and retreat became flight. Then first, at four in the
afternoon, Napoleon began to realize what had actually occurred. And
what did he do? Having ridden almost to Pirna before taking measures
of any kind to reap the fruits of victory, he there issued orders for
the single corps of Vandamme, slightly reinforced, to begin the
pursuit! Thereupon, leaving directions for Mortier to hold Pirna, he
entered a carriage and drove quietly back to Dresden!
These are the almost incredible facts: no terrific onslaught after the
first night, no well-ordered pursuit after the second, a mere pretense
of seizing the advantage on the third day! In fact, Napoleon, having
set his plan in operation at the very beginning of the battle, sank,
to all outward appearances, into a state of lassitude, the only sign
of alert interest he displayed throughout the conflict being shown
when he was told that Moreau had been mortally wounded. The cause may
have been physical or it may have been moral, but it was probably a
political miscalculation. If we may believe Captain Coignet, the talk
of the staff on the night of the twenty-seventh revealed a perfect
knowledge of the enemy's rout; they knew that the retreat of their
opponents had been precipitate, and they had credible information of
disordered bands seen hurrying through byways or rushing headlong
through mountain defiles. Yet for all this, they were thoroughly
discontented, and the burden of their conversation was execration of
the Emperor. "He's a -------- who will ruin us all," was the repeated
malediction. If we may believe Napoleon himself, he had a violent
attack of vomiting near Pirna, and was compelled to leave everything
on that fateful day to others. This is possible, but unlikely; the day
before, though listless, he was well enough to chat and take snuff as
he stood in a redoubt observing the course of events through his
field-glass; the day after he was perfectly well, and exercised
unusual self-control when tidings of serious import were brought from
the north. The sequel goes to show that neither his own sickness nor
the bad temper of the army sufficiently accounts for Napoleon's
unmilitary conduct on the twenty-eighth; it appears, on the contrary,
as if he refrained of set purpose from annihilating the Austrian army
in order to reknit the Austrian alliance and destroy the coalition.
This he never was willing to admit; but no man likes to confess
himself a dupe.
Had Oudinot and Macdonald succeeded in their offensive operations
against Berlin, and had Napoleon himself done nothing more than hold
Dresden, a place which we must remember he considered from the outset
as a defensive point, it would have sufficed, in order to obtain the
most favorable terms of peace, to throw back the main army of the
coalition, humiliated and dispirited, through Bohemia to Prague. But,
as we have repeatedly seen, long service under the Empire had
destroyed all initiative in the French marshals: in Spain one mighty
general after another had been brought low; those who were serving in
Germany seemed stricken with the same palsy. It is true that in the
days of their greatness they had commanded choice troops, and that now
the flower of the army was reserved for the Emperor; but it is
likewise true that then they had fought for wealth, advancement, and
power. Now they yearned to enjoy their gains, and were embittered
because Napoleon had not accepted Austria's terms of mediation until
it was too late. Moreover, Bernadotte, one of their opponents, had
been trained in their own school, and was fighting for a crown. To
Bluecher, untamed and untrustworthy in temper, had been given in the
person of Gneisenau an efficient check on all headlong impulses, and
Buelow was a commander far above mediocrity. Such considerations go far
to account for three disasters--those, namely, of Grossbeeren,
Katzbach, and Kulm--which made it insufficient for Napoleon to hold
Dresden and throw back the main army of the allies, and which thwarted
all his strategy, military and political.
The first of these affairs was scarcely a defeat. Oudinot, advancing
with seventy thousand men by way of Wittenberg to seize Berlin, found
himself confronted by Bernadotte with eighty thousand. The latter,
with his eye on the crown of France, naturally feared to defeat a
French army; at first he thought of retreating across the Spree and
abandoning the Prussian capital. But the Prussians were outraged at
the possibility of such conduct, and the schemer was convinced that a
show of resistance was imperative. On August twenty-second a few
skirmishes occurred, and the next day Buelow, disobeying his orders,
brought on a pitched battle at Grossbeeren, which was waged, with
varying success, until nightfall left the village in French hands.
Oudinot, however, discouraged alike by the superior force of the
enemy, by the obstinate courage of the Prussians, and by the dismal
weather, lost heart, and retreated to Wittenberg. The heavy rains
prevented an effective pursuit, but the Prussians followed as far as
Treuenbrietzen. On August twenty-first, Bluecher, aware of the
circumstances which kept Napoleon at Dresden, had finally determined
to attack Macdonald. The French marshal, by a strange coincidence,
almost simultaneously abandoned the defensive position he had been
ordered to hold, and advanced to give battle. It was therefore a mere
chance when on the twenty-fifth the two armies came together, amid
rain and fog, at the Katzbach. After a bitter struggle the French were
routed with frightful loss. A terrific rain-storm set in, and the
whole country was turned into a marsh. For five days Bluecher continued
the pursuit, until he reached Naumburg, on the right bank of the
Queiss, where he halted, having captured eighteen thousand prisoners
and a hundred and three guns.
To these misfortunes the affair at Kulm was a fitting climax. No worse
leader for a delicate independent movement could have been selected
than the reckless Vandamme. He was so rash, conceited, and brutish
that Napoleon once exclaimed in sheer desperation: "If there were two
Vandammes in my army, nothing could be done until one had killed the
other." As might have been expected, the headlong general far
outstripped the columns of Marmont, Saint-Cyr, and Murat, which had
been tardily sent to support him. Descending without circumspection
into the plain of Kulm, he found himself, on the twenty-ninth,
confronted by the Russian guard; and next morning, when attacked by
them in superior force, he was compelled to retreat through a mountain
defile toward Peterswald, whence he had come. At the mouth of the
gorge he was unexpectedly met by the Prussian corps of Kleist. Each
side thought the other moving to cut it off. They therefore rushed one
upon the other in despair, with no other hope than that of breaking
through to rejoin their respective armies. The shock was terrible, and
for a time the confusion seemed inextricable. But the Russians soon
came up, and Vandamme, with seven thousand men, was captured, the loss
in slain and wounded being about five thousand. Saint-Cyr, Marmont,
and Murat halted and held the mountain passes.
This was the climax of disaster in Napoleon's great strategic plan. In
no way responsible for Grossbeeren, nor for Macdonald's defeat on the
Katzbach, he was culpable both for the selection of Vandamme and for
failure to support him in the pursuit of Schwarzenberg. At St. Helena
the Emperor strove in three ways to account for the crash under which
he was buried after Dresden: by the sickness which made him unable to
give attention to the situation, by the inundation which rendered
Macdonald helpless at the crossing of the Bober, and by the arrival of
a notification from the King of Bavaria that, after a certain date, he
too would join the coalition. This was not history, but an appeal to
public sentiment, carefully calculated for untrained readers.
The fact was that at Dresden the gradual transformation of the
strategist into the politician, which had long been going on, was
complete. The latter misapprehended the moment for diplomatic
negotiations, conceiving the former's victory to have been
determinative, when in reality it was rendered partial and contingent
by failure to follow it up. Great as Napoleon was in other respects,
he was supremely great as a strategist; it is therefore his
psychological development and decline in this respect which are
essential to the determination of the moment in which he became
bankrupt in ability. This instant was that of course in which his
strategic failures became no longer intermittent, but regular; and
after Dresden such was the case. As to conception and tactics there
never was a failure--the year 1814 is the wonder-year of his
theoretical genius; but after Dresden there is continuous failure in
the practical combination of concept and means, in other words, of
strategic mastery. This contention as to the clouding of Napoleon's
vision by the interference of political and military considerations
is proved by his next step. Hitherto his basal principle had been to
mass all his force for a determinative blow, his combinations all
turning about hostile armies and their annihilation, or at least about
producing situations which would make annihilation possible. Now he
was concerned, not with armies, but with capital cities. Claiming that
to extend his line toward Prague would weaken it, in order to resume a
strong defensive he chose the old plan of an advance to Berlin, and
Ney was sent to supersede Oudinot, Schwarzenberg being left to
recuperate unmolested. The inchoate idea of political victory which
turned him back from Pirna was fully developed; by a blow at Berlin
and a general northward movement he could not merely punish Prussia,
but alarm Russia, separate the latter's army from that of the other
allies, and then plead with Austria his consideration in not invading
her territories. In spite of all that has been written to the
contrary, there was some strength in this idea, unworthy as it was of
the author's strategic ability. Ney was to advance immediately, while
he himself pressed on to Hoyerswerda, where he hoped to establish
connections for a common advance.
Such a concentration would have been possible if for a fortnight
Macdonald had been able to hold Bluecher, and Murat had succeeded in
checking Schwarzenberg. But the news of Macdonald's plight compelled
Napoleon to march first toward Bautzen, in order to prevent Bluecher
from annihilating the army in Silesia. Exasperated by this unexpected
diversion, the Emperor started in a reckless, embittered temper. On
September fifth it became evident that Bluecher would not stand, and
Napoleon prepared to wheel in the direction of Berlin; but the orders
were almost immediately recalled, for news arrived that Schwarzenberg
was marching to Dresden. At once Napoleon returned to the Saxon
capital. By September tenth he had drawn in his forces, ready for a
second defense of the city; but learning that sixty thousand Austrians
had been sent over the Elbe to take on its flank any French army sent
after Bluecher, he ordered the young guard to Bautzen for the
reinforcement of Macdonald. Thereupon Schwarzenberg, on the
fourteenth, made a feint to advance. On the fifteenth Napoleon replied
by a countermove on Pirna, where pontoons were thrown over the river
to establish connection with Macdonald. On the sixteenth Napoleon
reconnoitered, on the seventeenth there was a skirmish, and on the
eighteenth there were again a push and counterpush. These movements
convinced Napoleon that Schwarzenberg was really on the defensive, and
he returned to Dresden, determined to let feint and counter-feint, the
"system of hither and thither," as he called it, go on until the
golden opportunity for a crushing blow should be offered. Bluecher
meantime had turned again on Macdonald, who was now on the heights of
Fischbach with Poniatowski on his right. Mortier was again at Pirna;
Victor, Saint-Cyr, and Lobau were guarding the mountain passes from
Bohemia.
This was virtually the situation of a month previous to the battle.
Schwarzenberg might feel that he had prevented the invasion of
Austria; Napoleon, that he had regained his strong defensive. While
the victory of Dresden had gone for nothing, yet this situation was
nevertheless a double triumph for Napoleon. Ney, in obedience to
orders, had advanced on the fifth. Bernadotte lay at Jueterbog, his
right being westerly at Dennewitz, under Tauenzien. Bertrand was to
make a demonstration on the sixth against the latter, so that behind
this movement the rest of the army should pass by unnoticed. But Ney
started three hours late, so that the skirmish between Tauenzien and
Bertrand lasted long enough to give the alarm to Buelow, who hurried
in, attacked Reynier's division, and turned the affair into a general
engagement. At first the advantage was with the Prussians; then Ney,
at an opportune moment, began to throw in Oudinot's corps--a move
which seemed likely to decide the struggle in favor of the French. But
Borstell, who had been Buelow's lieutenant at Grossbeeren, brought up
his men in disobedience to Bernadotte's orders, and threw them into
the thickest of the conflict. Hitherto the Saxons had been fighting
gallantly on the French side; soon they began to waver, and now,
falling back, they took up many of Oudinot's men in their flight. The
Prussians poured into the gap left by the Saxons, and when Bernadotte
came up with his Swedes and Russians the battle was over. Ney was
driven into Torgau, with a loss of fifteen thousand men, besides
eighty guns and four hundred train-wagons. The Prussians lost about
nine thousand killed and wounded.
This affair concentrated into one movement the moral effects of all
the minor defeats, an influence which far outweighed the importance
of Dresden. The French still fought superbly in Napoleon's presence,
but only then, for they were heartily sick of the war. Nor was this
all: the Bavarians and Saxons were coming to feel that their
obligations to France had been fully discharged. They were infected
with the same national spirit which made heroes of the Prussians.
These, to be sure, were defending their homes and firesides; but
seeing the great French generals successively defeated, and that
largely by their own efforts, they were animated to fresh exertions
by their victories; even the reserves and the home guard displayed
the heroism of veterans. On September seventh Ney wrote to Napoleon:
"Your left flank is exhausted--take heed; I think it is time to
leave the Elbe and withdraw to the Saale"; and his opinion was that
of all the division commanders. Throughout the country-side
partizans were seizing the supply-trains; Davout had found his Dutch
and Flemings to be mediocre soldiers, unfit at crucial moments to
take the offensive; the army had shrunk to about two hundred and
fifty thousand men all told; straggling was increasing, and the
country was virtually devastated. To this last fact the plain
people, sufferers as they were, remained in their larger patriotism
amazingly indifferent: the "hither-and-thither" system tickled their
fancy, and they dubbed Napoleon the "Bautzen Messenger-boy."
Uneasiness pervaded every French encampment; on the other side
timidity was replaced by courage, dissension by unity.
This transformation of German society seemed further to entangle the
political threads which had already debased the quality of Napoleon's
strategy. Technically no fault can be found with his prompt changes of
plan to meet emergencies, or with the details of movements which led
to his prolonged inaction. Yet, largely considered, the result was
disastrous. The great medical specialist refrains from the immediate
treatment of a sickly organ until the general health is sufficiently
recuperated to assure success; the medicaster makes a direct attack on
evident disease. Napoleon conceived a great general plan for
concentrating about Dresden to recuperate his forces; but when Bluecher
prepared to advance he grew impatient, saw only his immediate trouble,
and ordered Macdonald to make a grand dash. Driving in the hostile
outposts to Foerstgen, he then spent a whole day hesitating whether to
go on or to turn westward and disperse another detachment of his
ubiquitous foe, which, as he heard from Ney, had bridged the Elbe at
the mouth of the Black Elster. It was the twenty-third before he
turned back to do neither, but to secure needed rest on the left bank
of the Elbe. But if Napoleon's own definition of a truly great man be
accurate,--namely, one who can command the situations he creates,--he
was himself no longer great. The enemy not only had bridges over the
Elbe at the mouth of the Elster, but at Acken and Rosslau. The left
bank was as untenable for the French as the right, and it was of stern
necessity that the various detachments of the army were called in to
hold a line far westward, to the north of Leipsic. Oudinot, restored
to partial favor, was left to keep the rear at Dresden with part of
the young guard. On October first it was learned that Schwarzenberg
was manoeuvering on the left to surround the invaders if possible
by the south, and that Bluecher, with like aim, was moving to the
north. It was evident that the allies had formed a great resolution,
and Napoleon confessed to Marmont that his "game of chess was becoming
confused."
The fact was, the Emperor's diplomacy had far outstripped the
general's strategy. It was blazoned abroad that on September
twenty-seventh a hundred and sixty thousand new conscripts from the
class of 1815, with a hundred and twenty thousand from the arrears of
the seven previous classes, would be assembled at the military depots
in France. Boys like these had won Luetzen, Bautzen, and Dresden, and a
large minority would be able-bodied men, late in maturing, perhaps,
but strong. With this preliminary blare of trumpets, a letter for the
Emperor Francis was sent to General Bubna. The bearer was instructed
to say that Napoleon would make great sacrifices both for Austria and
Prussia if only he could get a hearing. It was too late: already, on
September ninth, the three powers had concluded an offensive and
defensive alliance for the purpose of liberating the Rhenish princes,
of making sovereign and independent the states of southern and
western Germany, and of restoring both Prussia and Austria to their
limits of 1805. This was the treaty which beguiled Bavaria from the
French alliance, and made the German contingents in the French armies,
the Saxons among the rest, wild for emancipation from a hated service.
It explained the notification previously received from the King of
Bavaria, who, in return for the recognition of his complete autonomy,
formally joined the coalition on October eighth, with an army of
thirty-six thousand men. How much of all this the French spies and
emissaries made known to Napoleon does not appear. One thing only is
certain, that Napoleon's flag of truce was sent back with his message
undelivered. This ominous fact had to be considered in connection with
the movements of the enemy. They had learned one of Napoleon's own
secrets. In a bulletin of 1805 are the words: "It rains hard, but that
does not stop the march of the grand army." In 1806 he boasted
concerning Prussia: "While people are deliberating, the French army is
marching." In 1813, while he himself was vacillating, his foes were
stirring. On October third, Bluecher, having accomplished a superb
strategic march, drove Bertrand to Bitterfeld, and stood before
Kemberg, west of the Elbe, with sixty-four thousand men; Bernadotte,
with eighty thousand, was crossing at Acken and Rosslau; and
Schwarzenberg, with a hundred and seventy thousand, was already south
of Leipsic; Bennigsen, with fifty thousand reserves, had reached
Teplitz. The enemy would clearly concentrate at Leipsic and cut off
Napoleon's base unless he retreated. But it was October fifth before
the bitter resolution to do so was taken, and then the movement began
under compulsion. Murat was sent, with three infantry corps and one of
cavalry, to hold Schwarzenberg until the necessary manoeuvers could
be completed.
CHAPTER III
THE END OF THE GRAND ARMY[3]
[Footnote 3: References: Wuttke: Die Voelkerschlacht bei
Leipzig. Aster: Die Schlachten bei Leipzig. Also see works of
Hofmann, Naumann, and Doerr.]
Plans for Conducting the Retreat -- Napoleon's Health --
Bluecher's Brilliant Idea -- Napoleon under Compulsion -- His
Skilful Concentration -- The Battle-field around Leipsic -- The
Attack -- Results of the First Day's Fighting -- Attempt to
Negotiate -- Napoleon's Apathy -- The Positions of the Third Day
-- The Grand Army Defeated -- The Disaster at the Elster Bridge
-- Dissolution of the Grand Army.
But how should the retreat be conducted? Napoleon's habit of reducing
his thoughts to writing for the sake of clearness remained strong upon
him to the last, and in the painstaking notes which he made with
regard to this important move he outlined two alternatives: to
garrison Dresden with two corps, send three to reconnoiter about
Chemnitz, and then march, with five and the guard, to attack
Schwarzenberg; or else to strengthen Murat, place him between
Schwarzenberg and Leipsic, and then advance to drive Bernadotte and
Bluecher behind the Elbe. But in winter the frozen Elbe with its flat
shores would be no rampart. Both plans were abandoned, and on the
seventh orders were issued for a retreat behind the Saale, the
precipitous banks of which were a natural fortification. Behind this
line of defense he could rest in safety during the winter, with his
right at Erfurt and his left at Magdeburg. Dresden must, he
concluded, be evacuated. This would deprive the allies of the easy
refuge behind the Saxon and Bohemian mountains which they had sought
at every onset, but it might leave them complete masters of Saxony. To
avoid this he must take one of three courses: either halt behind the
Mulde for one blow at the armies of the North and of Silesia, or join
Murat for a decisive battle with the Austrian general, or else
concentrate at Leipsic, and meet the onset of the united allies, now
much stronger than he was.
The night of the seventh was spent in indecision as to any one or all
of these ideas, but in active preparation for the actual movements of
the retreat, however it should be conducted; any contingency might be
met or a resolve taken when the necessity arose. During that night the
Emperor took two warm baths. The habit of drinking strong coffee to
prevent drowsiness had induced attacks of nervousness, and these were
not diminished by his load of care. To allay these and other ailments,
he had had recourse for some time to frequent tepid baths. Much has
been written about a mysterious malady which had been steadily
increasing, but the burden of testimony from the Emperor's closest
associates at this time indicates that in the main he had enjoyed
excellent health throughout the second Saxon campaign. He was, on the
whole, calm and self-reliant, exhibiting signs of profound emotion
only in connection with important decisions. He was certainly capable
of clear insight and of severe application in a crisis; he could still
endure exhausting physical exertion, and rode without discomfort,
sitting his horse in the same stiff, awkward manner as of old. There
were certainly intervals of self-indulgence and of lassitude, of
excessive emotion and depressing self-examination, which seemed to
require the offset of a physical stimulus; but on the whole there do
not appear to have been such sharp attacks of illness, or even of
morbid depression, as amount to providential interference; natural
causes, complex but not inexplicable, sufficiently account for the
subsequent disasters.
For instance, considerations of personal friendship having in earlier
days often led him to unwise decisions, a like cause may be said to
have brought on his coming disaster. It was the affection of the Saxon
king for his beautiful capital which at the very last instant, on
October eighth, induced Napoleon to cast all his well-weighed scheme
to the winds, and--fatal decision!--leave Saint-Cyr and Lobau, with
three corps, in Dresden. A decisive battle was imminent; the commander
was untrue to his maxim that every division should be under the
colors. But with or without his full force, the master-strategist was
outwitted: the expected meeting did not take place as he finally
reckoned. On the tenth his headquarters were at Dueben, and his
divisions well forward on the Elbe, ready for Bernadotte and Bluecher;
but there was no foe. Both these generals had been disconcerted by the
unexpected swiftness of the French movements; the former actually
contemplated recrossing the river to avoid a pitched battle with those
whom he hoped before long to secure as his subjects. But the
enthusiastic old Prussian shamed his ally into action, persuading him
at least to march south from Acken, effect a junction with the army of
Silesia, and cross the Saale to threaten Napoleon from the rear. This
was a brilliant and daring plan, for if successful both armies might
possibly unite with Schwarzenberg's; but even if unsuccessful in that,
they would at least reproduce the situation in Silesia, and reduce the
French to the "hither-and-thither" system, which, rendering a decisive
battle impossible, had thwarted the Napoleonic strategy.
Napoleon spent a weary day of waiting in Dueben, yawning and
scribbling, but keeping his geographer and secretary in readiness. It
was said at the time, and has since been repeated, that throughout
this portion of the campaign Napoleon was not recognizable as himself:
that he ruminated long when he should have been active; that he
consulted when he should have given orders; that he was no longer
ubiquitous as of old, but sluggish, and rooted to one spot. But it is
hard to see what he left undone, his judgment being mistaken as it
was. When rumors of Bernadotte's movements began to arrive, he
dismissed the idea suggested by them as preposterous; when finally, on
the twelfth, he heard that Bluecher was actually advancing to Halle,
and no possible doubt remained, he gave instant orders for a march on
Leipsic. Critics have suggested that again delay had been his ruin;
but this is not true. An advance over the Elbe toward Berlin in search
of the enemy would merely have enabled Bluecher and Bernadotte to join
forces sooner, and have rendered their union with Schwarzenberg
easier. No stricture is just but one: that Napoleon, knowing how
impossible it was to obtain such exact information as he seemed
determined to have, should have divined the enemy's plan, and acted
sooner. The accurate information necessary for such foresight was not
obtainable; in fact, it seldom is, and some allowance may be made if
the general lingered before rushing into the "tube of a funnel," as
Marmont expressed it. On the morning of the thirteenth, while the
final arrangements for marching to Leipsic were making, came the news
of Bavaria's defection. It spread throughout the army like wildfire,
but its effect was less than might be imagined, and it served for the
priming of a bulletin, issued on the fifteenth, announcing the
approaching battle.
On the fifteenth, Murat, who had been steadily withdrawing before the
allied army of the South, was overtaken at Wachau by Schwarzenberg's
van. He fought all day with magnificent courage, and successfully,
hurling the hostile cavalry skirmishers back on the main column.
Within sound of his guns, Napoleon was reconnoitering his chosen
battle-field in and about Leipsic; and when, after nightfall, the
brothers-in-law met, the necessary arrangements were virtually
complete. Those who were present at the council thought the Emperor
inexplicably calm and composed--they said indifferent or stolid. But
he had reasons to be confident rather than desperate, for by a touch
of his old energy he had concentrated more swiftly than his foe,
having a hundred and seventy thousand men in array. Reynier, with
fourteen thousand more, was near; if Saint-Cyr and Lobau, with their
thirty thousand, had been present instead of sitting idly in Dresden,
the French would actually have outnumbered any army the coalition
could have assembled for battle. The allies could hope at best to
produce two hundred thousand men; Bernadotte was still near Merseburg;
Bluecher, though coming in from Halle, was not within striking
distance. In spite of his vacillation and final failure to evacuate
Dresden, Napoleon had an excellent fighting chance.
The city of Leipsic, engirdled by numerous villages, lies in a low
plain watered by the Parthe, Pleisse, and Elster, the last of which to
the westward has several arms, with swampy banks. Across these runs
the highway to Frankfort, elevated on a dike, and spanning the deep,
central stream of the Elster by a single bridge. Eastward by Connewitz
the land is higher, there being considerable swells, and even hills,
to the south and southeast. This rolling country was that chosen by
Napoleon for the main battle against Schwarzenberg; Marmont was
stationed north of the city, near Moeckern, to observe Bluecher;
Bernadotte, the cautious, was still at Oppin with his Swedes. On the
evening of the fifteenth, his dispositions being complete, Napoleon
made the tour of all his posts. At dusk three white rockets were seen
to rise in the southern sky; they were promptly answered by four red
ones in the north. These were probably signals between Schwarzenberg
and Bluecher. Napoleon's watch-fire was kindled behind the old guard,
between Reudnitz and Crottendorf.
The battle began early next morning. Napoleon waited until nine, and
then advanced at the head of his guards to Liebertwolkwitz, near
Wachau, on the right bank of the Pleisse, where the decisive struggle
was sure to occur, since the mass of the enemy, under Barclay, with
Wittgenstein as second in command, had attacked in four columns at
that point. Between the Pleisse and the Elster, near Connewitz, stood
Poniatowski, opposed to Schwarzenberg and Meerveldt; westward of the
Elster, near Lindenau, stood Bertrand, covering the single line of
retreat, the Frankfort highway, and his antagonist was Gyulay. Thus
there were four divisions in the mighty conflict, which began by an
onset of the allies along the entire front. The main engagement was
stubborn and bloody, the allies attacking with little skill, but great
bravery. Until near midday Napoleon more than held his own. Victor at
Wachau, and Lauriston at Liebertwolkwitz, had each successfully
resisted six desperate assaults; between them were massed the
artillery, a hundred and fifty guns, under Drouot, and behind, all the
cavalry except that of Sebastiani. The great artillery captain was
about to give the last splendid exhibition of what his arm can do
under favorable circumstances--that is, when strongly posted in the
right position and powerfully supported by cavalry. He intended, with
an awful shock and swift pursuit, to break through the enemy's center
at Gueldengossa and surround his right. So great was his genius for
combinations that while the allies were that moment using three
hundred and twenty-five thousand effective men all told to his two
hundred and fourteen thousand, yet in the decisive spot he had
actually concentrated a hundred and fifteen thousand to their hundred
and fourteen thousand. This was because Schwarzenberg, having
attempted to outflank the French, was floundering to no avail in the
swampy meadows between the Pleisse and the Elster, and was no longer a
factor in the contest.
When, at midday, all was in readiness and the order was given, the
artillery fire was so rapid that the successive shots were heard, not
separately, but in a long, sullen note. By two, Victor and Oudinot on
the right, with Mortier and Macdonald on the left, were well forward
of Gueldengossa, but the place itself still held out. At three the
cavalry, under Murat, Latour-Maubourg, and Kellermann, were sped
direct upon it. With awful effort they broke through, and the bells of
Leipsic began to ring in triumph--prematurely. The Czar had
peremptorily summoned from Schwarzenberg's command the Austro-Russian
reserve, and at four these, with the Cossack guard, charged the French
cavalry, hurling them back to Markkleeberg. Nightfall found Victor
again at Wachau, and Macdonald holding Liebertwolkwitz. Simultaneously
with the great charge of the allies Meerveldt had dashed out from
Connewitz toward Doelitz, but his force was nearly annihilated, and he
himself was captured. At Moeckern, Marmont, after gallant work with
inferior numbers, had been beaten on his left, and then compelled for
safety to draw in his right. While he still held Gohlis and
Eutritzsch, the mass of his army had been thrown back into Leipsic.
Throughout the day Bertrand made a gallant and successful resistance
to superior numbers, and drove that portion of the allied forces
opposed to him away from Lindenau as far as Plagwitz. At nightfall
three blank shots announced the cessation of hostilities all around.
In the face of superior numbers, the French had not lost a single
important position, and whatever military science had been displayed
was all theirs; Bluecher made the solitary advance move of the allies,
the seizure of Moeckern by York's corps; Schwarzenberg had been
literally mired in his attempt to outflank his enemy, and but for
Alexander's peremptory recall of the reserves destined for the same
task, the day would have been one of irretrievable disaster to the
coalition. Yet Napoleon knew that he was lost unless he could retreat.
Clearly he had expected a triumph, for in the city nothing was ready,
and over the Elster was but one crossing, the solitary bridge on the
Frankfort road. The seventeenth was the first day of the week; both
sides were exhausted, and the Emperor of the French seems to have felt
that at all hazards he must gain time. During the previous night long
consultations had been held, and the French divisions to the south had
been slightly compacted. In the morning Meerveldt, the captured
Austrian general, the same man who after Austerlitz had solicited and
obtained on the part of Francis an interview from Napoleon, was
paroled, and sent into his own lines to ask an armistice, together
with the intervention of Francis on the terms of Prague: renunciation
of Poland and Illyria by Napoleon, the absolute independence of
Holland, of the Hanse towns, of Spain, and of a united Italy. When we
remember that England was paymaster to the coalition, and was fighting
for her influence in Holland, and that Austria's ambition was for
predominance in a disunited Italy, we feel that apparently Napoleon
wanted time rather than hoped for a successful plea to his
father-in-law.
This would be the inevitable conclusion except for the fact that he
withdrew quietly to his tent and there remained; the resourceful
general was completely apathetic, being either over-confident in his
diplomatic mission or stunned by calamity. The day passed without
incident except a momentary attack on Marmont, and the arrival of
Bernadotte, who had been spurred to movement by a hint from Gneisenau
concerning the terms on which Great Britain was to pay her subsidies.
It was asserted at the time that Napoleon gave orders early in the
morning for building numerous bridges over the western streams. If so,
they were not executed, only a single flimsy structure being built,
and that on the road leading from the town, not on the lines westward
from his positions in the suburbs. His subordinates should have acted
in so serious a matter even without orders; but, like the drivers of
trains which run at lightning speed, they had, after years of
high-pressure service, lost their nerve. Marmont asserts that even
Napoleon was nerveless. "We were occupied," he wrote, "in restoring
order among our troops; we should either have commenced our retreat,
or at least have prepared the means to commence it at nightfall. But a
certain carelessness on the part of Napoleon, which it is impossible
to explain and difficult to describe, filled the cup of our sorrows."
Considering who wrote these words, they must be taken with allowance;
but they indicate a truth, that in his decadence this hitherto
many-sided man could not be both general and emperor. No answer from
Francis was received; the allies agreed on this course, and
determined, according to their agreement with England, not to cease
fighting till the last French soldier was over the Rhine. It was
midnight when Napoleon finally drew in his posts and gave preliminary
orders to dispose his troops in readiness either to fight or to
retreat.
When day dawned on October eighteenth the French army occupied an
entirely new position: the right wing, under Murat, lying between
Connewitz and Doelitz; the center at Probstheida in a salient angle;
the left, under Ney, with front toward the north between Paunsdorf and
Gohlis. Within this arc, and close about the city, stood all the
well-tried corps, infantry, artillery, and cavalry, under their
various leaders of renown--Poniatowski, Augereau, Victor, Drouot,
Kellermann, Oudinot, Latour-Maubourg, Macdonald, Marmont, Reynier, and
Souham; Napoleon was on a hillock at Thonberg, with the old guard in
reserve. His chief concern was the line of retreat, which was still
open when, at seven, the fighting began. Schwarzenberg, with the left,
could get no farther than Connewitz. Bennigsen, with the right,
started to feel Bernadotte and complete the investment. Neither was
entirely successful, but Marmont withdrew from before Bluecher, and Ney
from before Bernadotte and Bennigsen, in order to avoid being
surrounded; so that the two French armies were united before nightfall
on the western outskirts of the town, where Bertrand had routed
Gyulay, and had kept open the all-important line of retreat, over
which, since noon, trains of wagons had been passing. But magnificent
as was the work of all these doughty champions on both sides, it was
far surpassed in the center, where during the entire day, under
Napoleon's eye, advance and resistance had been desperate. Men fell
like grass before the scythe, and surging lines of their comrades
moved on from behind. Such were the numbers and such the carnage that
men have compared the conflict to that of the nations at Armageddon.
At Victor's stand, near Probstheida, the fighting was fiercer than the
fiercest. The allied troops charged with fixed bayonets, rank after
rank, column following on column; cannon roared while grape-shot and
shells sped to meet the assailants; men said the air was full of human
limbs; ten times Russians and Prussians came on, only to be ten times
driven back. The very soil on which the assailants trod was human
flesh. Hour after hour the slaughter continued. Occasionally the
French attempted a rally, but only to be thrown back by musket fire
and cavalry charge. It was the same at Stoetteritz, where no one seemed
to pause for breath. Woe to him who fell in fatigue: he was soon but
another corpse in the piles over which new reinforcements came on to
the assault or countercharge. At last there was scarcely a semblance
of order; in hand-to-hand conflict men shouted, struggled, wrestled,
thrust, advanced, and withdrew, and in neither combatants nor
onlookers was there any sense of reality. By dusk the heated cannon
were almost useless, the muskets entirely so, and, as darkness came
down, the survivors fell asleep where they stood, riders in their
saddles, horses in their tracks. Napoleon learned that thirty-five
thousand Saxons on the left had gone over to the enemy, and some one
of his staff handing him a wooden chair, he dropped into it and sank
into a stupor almost as he touched it. For half an hour he sat in
oblivion, while in the thickening darkness the marshals and generals
gathered about the watch-fires, and stood with sullen mien to abide
his awakening. The moon came slowly up, Napoleon awoke, orders were
given to complete the dispositions for retreat already taken, and,
there being nothing left to do, the Emperor, with inscrutable
emotions, passed inside the walls of Leipsic to take shelter in an inn
on the creaking sign-board of which were depicted the arms of Prussia!
Throughout the night French troops streamed over the stone bridge
across the Elster; in the early morning the enemy began to advance,
and ever-increasing numbers hurried away to gain the single avenue of
retreat. Until midday Napoleon wandered aimlessly about the inner
town, giving unimportant commands to stem the ever-growing confusion
and disorder. Haggard, and with his clothing in disarray, he was not
recognized by his own men, being sometimes rudely jostled. After an
affecting farewell to the King of Saxony, in which his unhappy ally
was instructed to make the best terms he could for himself, the
Emperor finally fell into the throng and moved with it toward
Lindenau. Halting near the Elster, a French general began to seek
information from the roughly clad onlooker who, without a suite or
even a single attendant, stood apparently indifferent, softly
whistling, "Malbrook s'en va t'en guerre." Of course the officer
started as he recognized the Emperor, but the conquered sovereign took
no notice. Bystanders thought his heart was turned to stone. Still the
rush of retreat went on, successfully also, in spite of some
confusion, until at two some one blundered. By the incredible mistake
of a French subaltern, as is now proven, the permanent Elster bridge
was blown up, and the temporary one had long since fallen. Almost
simultaneously with this irreparable disaster the allies had stormed
the city, and the French rear-guard came thundering on, hoping to find
safety in flight. Plunging into the deep stream, many, like
Poniatowski, were drowned; some, like the wounded Macdonald, swam
safely across. The scene was heartrending as horses, riders, and
footmen rolled senseless in the dark flood, while others scrambled
over their writhing forms in mad despair. Reynier and Lauriston, with
twenty thousand men, were captured, the King of Saxony was sent a
prisoner to Berlin, and Stein prepared to govern his domains by
commission from the allies. By ten in the evening Bertrand was in
possession of Weissenfels; Oudinot wheeled at Lindenau, and held the
unready pursuers in check.
Next morning, the twentieth, Napoleon was alert and active; retreat
began again, but only in tolerable order. Although he could not
control the great attendant rabble of camp-followers and stragglers,
he had nevertheless about a hundred and twenty thousand men under his
standards; as many more, and those his finest veterans, were besieged
and held in the fortresses of the Elbe, Oder, and Vistula by local
militia. These places, he knew, would no longer be tenable; in fact,
they began to surrender almost immediately, and the survivors of
Leipsic were soon in a desperate plight from hunger and fatigue. Yet
the commander gave no sign of sensibility. "'T was thus he left
Russia," said the surly men in the ranks. Hunger-typhus appeared, and
spread with awful rapidity; the country swarmed with partizans; the
columns of the allies were behind and on each flank; fifty-six
thousand Bavarians were approaching from Ansbach, under Wrede; at
Erfurt all the Saxons and Bavarians still remaining under the French
eagles marched away. The only foreign troops who kept true were those
who had no country and no refuge, the unhappy Poles, who, though
disappointed in their hopes, were yet faithful to him whom they
wrongly believed to have been their sincere friend. Though stricken by
all his woes, the Emperor was undaunted; the retreat from Germany was
indeed perilous, but it was marked by splendid courage and unsurpassed
skill. At Koesen and at Eisenach the allies were outwitted, and at
Hanau, on the twenty-ninth, the Bavarians were overwhelmed in a
pitched fight by an exhibition of personal pluck and calmness on
Napoleon's part paralleled only by his similar conduct at Krasnoi in
the previous year. At the head of less than six thousand men, he held
in check nearly fifty thousand until the rest of his columns came up,
when he fell with the old fire upon a hostile line posted with the
river Kinzig in its rear, and not only disorganized it utterly, but
inflicted on it a loss of ten thousand men, more than double the
number which fell in his own ranks. But in spite of this brilliant
success, the ravages of disease continued, and only seventy thousand
men of the imperial army crossed the Rhine to Mainz. Soon the houses
of that city were packed, and the streets were strewn with victims of
the terrible hunger-typhus. They died by hundreds, and corpses lay for
days unburied; before the plague was stayed thousands found an
inglorious grave.
CHAPTER IV
THE FRANKFORT PROPOSALS[4]
[Footnote 4: References: Fain: Manuscrit de 1814. Rothenburg:
Die Schlacht bei Leipzig im Jahre 1813.]
Importance of the Battle of Leipsic -- Decline of Napoleon's
Powers -- His Gentler Side -- Disintegration of Napoleon's Empire
-- The Coalition and the Sentiment of Nationality -- Reasons for
the Parley at Frankfort -- Insincerity of the Proposal --
Napoleon and France -- The Revolution and the Empire -- Hollow
Diplomacy.
The battle of Leipsic is one of the most important in general history.
Apparently it was only the offset to Austerlitz, as the Beresina had
been to Friedland. In reality it was far more, because it gave the
hegemony of continental Europe to Prussia. French imperialism in its
death-throes wiped out the score of royal France against the
Hapsburgs; Austria was not yet banished from central Europe to the
lower courses of the Danube, but, what was much the same thing,
Prussia was launched upon her career of military aggrandizement. Three
dynasties seemed in that battle to have celebrated a joint triumph; as
a matter of fact, the free national spirit of Germany, having narrowly
escaped being smothered by Napoleonic imperialism, had chosen a
national dynasty as its refuge. The conflict is well designated by
German historians as "the battle of the nations," but the language has
a different sense from that which is generally attributed to it. The
seeds of Italian unity had been sown, but they were not yet to
germinate. The battle of Leipsic seemed to check them, yet it was the
process there begun under which they sprang up and bore fruit. France
was destined to become for a time the sport of an antiquated dynastic
system. The liberties which men of English blood had been painfully
developing for a century she sought to seize in an instant; she was to
see them still elude her grasp for sixty years, until her democratic
life, having assumed consistency, should find expression in
institutions essentially and peculiarly her own. Though the conquering
monarchs believed that revolutionary liberalism had been quenched at
Leipsic, its ultimate triumph was really assured, since it was
consigned to its natural guardianship, that of national commonwealths.
The imperial agglomeration of races and nationalities was altogether
amorphous and had been found impossible; that form of union was not
again attempted after Leipsic, while another--that, namely, of
constitutional organic nationalities--was made operative. The
successive stages of advance are marked by 1813, 1848, and 1870.
The Saxon campaigns display the completion of the process in which the
great strategist, stifled by political anxieties, became the creature
of circumstances both as general and statesman. The Russian campaign
was nicely calculated, but its proportions and aim were those of the
Oriental theocrat, not of the prosaic European soldier. With the aid
of the railroad and the electric telegraph, they might possibly have
been wrought into a workable problem, but that does not excuse the
errors of premature and misplaced ambition. The Saxon campaigns,
again, are marked by a boldness of design and a skill in combination
characteristic of the best strategy; but again the proportions are
monstrous, and, what is worse, the execution is intermittent and
feeble. As in Russia, the war organism was insufficient for the
numbers and distances involved, while the subordinates of every grade,
though supple instruments, seemed mercenary, self-seeking, and
destitute of devotion. Bonaparte had ruled men's hearts by his use of
a cause, securing devotion to it and to himself by rude bonhomie, by
success, and by sufficient rewards; Napoleon, on the other hand,
quenched devotion by a lavishness which sated the greediest, and lost
the affections of his associates by the demands of his gigantic plans.
As the world-conqueror felt the foundations of his greatness
quivering, he became less callous and more human. Early in 1813 he
said: "I have a sympathetic heart, like another, but since earliest
childhood I have accustomed myself to keep that string silent, and now
it is altogether dumb." His judgment of himself was mistaken:
throughout the entire season he was strangely and exceptionally moved
by the horrors of war; his purse was ever open for the suffering; he
released the King of Saxony from his entangling engagements; in spite
of his hard-set expression on the retreat from Leipsic, he forbade his
men to fire the suburbs of the city in order to retard the pursuit of
their foes, and before he left Mainz for St. Cloud he showed the
deepest concern, and put forth the strongest effort, in behalf of the
dying soldiery.
The immediate effects of Leipsic were the full display of that
national spirit which had been refined, if not created, in the fires
of Napoleon's imperious career. An Austrian army under Hiller drove
Eugene over the Adige. The Italians, not unsusceptible to the power in
the air, felt their humiliation, and, turning on their imperial King
in bitter hate, determined, under the influence of feelings most
powerfully expressed by Alfieri, that they would emulate northern
Europe. But though they had for years been subject to the new
influences, enjoying the equal administration of the Code Napoleon,
and freed from the interference of petty local tyrants, they were
neither united nor enlightened in sufficient degree. After an outburst
of hatred to France, they were crushed by their old despots, and the
land relapsed into the direst confusion. The Confederation of the
Rhine was, however, resolved into its elements: the Mecklenburgs
reasserted their independence; King Jerome fled to France; Wuertemberg,
Hesse-Darmstadt, and Baden followed Bavaria's example; Cassel,
Brunswick, Hanover, and Oldenburg were craftily restored to their
former rulers before Stein's bureau could establish an administration.
Holland recalled the Prince of Orange, Spain rose to support
Wellington, and Soult was not merely driven over the Pyrenees--he was
defeated on French soil, and shut up in Bayonne.
Even the three monarchs, as they sedately moved across Germany with
their exhausted and battered armies, were aware of nationality as a
controlling force in the future. In a direct movement on Paris they
could, as Ney said, "have marked out their days in advance," but they
halted at Frankfort for a parley. There were several reasons why they
should pause. They had seen France rise in her might; they did not
care to assist at the spectacle again. Moreover, the coalition had
accomplished its task and earned its pay; not a Frenchman, except real
or virtual prisoners, was left east of the Rhine. From that point the
interests of the three monarchs were divergent. As Gentz, the Austrian
statesman, said, "The war for the emancipation of states bids fair to
become one for the emancipation of the people." Alexander, Frederick
William, and Francis were each and all anxious for the future of
absolutism, but otherwise there was mutual distrust. Austria was
suspicious of Prussia, and desired immediate peace. In the restoration
of Holland under English auspices, Russia saw the perpetuation of
British maritime and commercial supremacy, to the disadvantage of her
Oriental aspirations, and the old Russian party demanded peace. On the
other hand, Alexander wished to avenge Napoleon's march to Moscow by
an advance to Paris; and though Frederick William distrusted what he
called the Czar's Jacobinism, his own soldiers, thirsting for further
revenge, also desired to prosecute the war; even the most enlightened
Prussian statesmen believed that nothing short of a complete cataclysm
in France could shake Napoleon's hold on that people and destroy his
power. Offsetting these conflicting tendencies against one another,
Metternich was able to secure military inaction for a time, while the
coalition formulated a series of proposals calculated to woo the
French people, and thus to bring Napoleon at once to terms.
Ostensibly the Frankfort proposals, adopted on November ninth, were
only a slight advance on the ultimatum of Prague: Austria was to have
enough Italian territory to secure her preponderance in that
peninsula; France was to keep Savoy, with Nice; the rest of Italy was
to be independent. Holland and Spain liberated, France was to have her
"natural" boundaries, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the ocean, and the
Rhine. Napoleon was to retain a slight preponderance in Germany, and
the hope was held out that in a congress to settle details for a
general pacification, Great Britain, content with the "maritime
rights" which had caused the war, would hand back the captured French
colonies. The various ministers present at Frankfort assented to these
proposals for Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia
respectively; but Alexander and Frederick William were dissatisfied
with them, and when Castlereagh heard them, he was as furious as his
cold blood would permit at the thought of France retaining control of
the Netherlands, Antwerp being the commercial key to central Europe.
Such a humor in three of the high contracting parties makes it
doubtful whether the Frankfort proposals had any reality, and this
doubt is further increased by the circumstances of the so-called
negotiation. St. Aignan, the French envoy to the Saxon duchies, had in
violation of international law and courtesy been seized at Gotha and
held as a prisoner. He was now set free and instructed to urge upon
Napoleon the necessity of an immediate settlement. To his
brother-in-law, the pacific Caulaincourt, who was soon to displace
Maret as minister of foreign affairs, he was to hand a private and
personal letter from Metternich. In the course of this epistle the
writer expresses his conviction that any effort to conclude a peace
would come to nothing. Not only, therefore, were the pretended
negotiations entirely destitute of form, they were prejudged from the
outset. Still further, the allies refused what Napoleon had granted
after Bautzen, an armistice, and insisted that hostilities were to
proceed during negotiation. All possible doubt as to the sincerity of
the proposals is turned into assurance by Metternich's admission in
his memoirs that they were intended to divorce Napoleon from the
French nation, and in particular to work on the feelings of the army.
He says that neither Alexander nor Frederick William would have
assented to them had they not been convinced that Napoleon would
"never in the world of his own accord" resolve to accept them. Yet the
world has long believed that Napoleon, as he himself expressed it,
lost his crown for Antwerp; that had he believed the honeyed words of
the Austrian minister, and opened negotiations on an indefinite basis
without delay, he might have kept France with its revolutionary
boundaries intact for himself and his dynasty, and by the sacrifice of
his imperial ambitions have retained for her, if not preponderance, at
least importance in the councils of Europe.
Neither Napoleon nor the French nation was deceived; a peace made
under such circumstances could result only in a dishonorable tutelage
to the allied sovereigns. France abhorred the dynasties and all their
works, believing that dynastic rule could never mean anything except
absolutism and feudalism. The experiment of popular sovereignty
wielded by a democracy had been a failure; but the liberal French,
like men of the same intelligence throughout Europe, did not, for all
that, lose faith in popular sovereignty; they knew there must be some
channel for its exercise. Outside of France, as in it, the most
enlightened opinion of the time regarded Napoleon as the savior of
society. The Queen of Saxony bitterly reproached Metternich for having
deserted Napoleon's "sacred cause." This was because the Emperor of
the French seemed to have used the people's power for the people's
good. His giant arm alone could wield the popular majesty. It is said
that the great mass of the French nation, on hearing of the Frankfort
proposals, groaned and laughed by turns. Being profoundly, devotedly
imperialist and therefore idealistic, they were outraged at the
thought of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs, or Hohenzollerns, the very
incarnations of German feudality, as leaders of the new Europe. It
seemed the irony of fate that civil and political rights on the basis,
not of privilege, but of manhood, the prize for which the world had
been turned upside down, should be intrusted to such keepers. Welded
into a homogeneous nationality themselves, the French could not
understand that the inchoate nationalities in other states had as yet
nothing but dynastic forms of expression, or foresee that during a
century to come the old dynasties would find safety only in adapting
royalty to national needs.
Napoleon seems to have been fully aware of French sentiment. In
addition, he understood that not merely for this sufficient reason
could he never be king of France in name or fact, but also that,
having elsewhere harried and humiliated both peoples and dynasties in
the name of revolutionary ideals, the masses had found him out, and
were as much embittered as their rulers, believing him to be a
charlatan using dazzling principles as a cloak for personal ambition.
In May, 1813, the Emperor Francis, anxious to salve the lacerated
pride of the Hapsburgs, produced a bundle of papers purporting to
prove that the Bonapartes had once been ruling princes at Treviso. "My
nobility," was Napoleon's stinging reply, "dates only from Marengo."
He well knew that when the battle should be fought that would undo
Marengo, his nobility would end. In other words, without solid French
support he was nothing, and that support he was fully aware he could
never have as king of France. If the influence of what France
improperly believed to be solely the French Revolution were to be
confined to her boundaries, revolutionary or otherwise, not only was
Napoleon's prestige destroyed, but along with it would go French
leadership in Europe. An imperial throne there must be, exerting
French influence far abroad. What happened at Paris, therefore, may be
regarded as a counter-feint to Metternich's effort at securing an
advantageous peace from the French nation when it should have
renounced Napoleon. It was merely an attempt to collect the remaining
national strength, not now for aggressive warfare, but for the
expulsion of hated invaders.
Having received no formulated proposition for acceptance or rejection,
and desiring to force one, the Emperor of the French virtually
disregarded the letter of Metternich's communication, and sent a
carefully considered message to the allies. Making no mention in this
of the terms brought by St. Aignan, he suggested Caulaincourt as
plenipotentiary to an international congress, which should meet
somewhere on the Rhine, say at Mannheim. Further, he declared that his
object had always been the independence of all the nations, "from the
continental as well as from the maritime point of view." This
communication reached Frankfort on November sixteenth, and, whether
wilfully or not, was misinterpreted to mean that the writer would
persist in questioning England's maritime rights. Thereupon Metternich
replied by accepting Mannheim as the place for the proposed
conference, and promised to communicate the language of Napoleon's
letter to his co-allies. How far these co-allies were from a sincere
desire for peace is proven by their next step, taken almost on the
date of Metternich's reply. A proclamation was widely posted in the
cities of France, which stated, in a cant borrowed from Napoleon's own
practice, that the allies desired France "to be great, strong, and
prosperous"; they were making war, it was asserted, not "on France,
but on that preponderance which Napoleon had too long exercised, to
the misfortune of Europe and of France herself, to which they
guaranteed in advance an extent of territory such as she never had
under her kings." Napoleon's riposte was to despatch a swarm of trusty
emissaries throughout France in order to compose all quarrels of the
people with the government, to strengthen popular devotion in every
possible way--in short, to counteract the possible effects of this
call. The messengers found public opinion thoroughly imperial, but
profoundly embittered against Maret as the supposed instigator of
disastrous wars. Maret was transferred to the department of state, and
the pacific Caulaincourt was made minister of foreign affairs. On
December second, at the earliest possible moment, the new minister
addressed a note to Metternich, accepting the terms of the "general
and summary basis." This, said the despatch, would involve great
sacrifices; but Napoleon would feel no regret if only by a similar
abnegation England would provide the means for a general, honorable
peace. Metternich replied that nothing now stood in the way of
convening a congress, and that he would notify England to send a
plenipotentiary. There, however, the matter ended, and Metternich's
record of those Frankfort days scarcely notices the subject, so
interested is he in the squabbles of the sovereigns over the opening
of a new campaign. It was the end of the year when they reached an
agreement.
CHAPTER V
THE INVASION OF FRANCE[5]
[Footnote 5: Correspondance, Vol. XVII. Memoires du roi
Joseph. Beauchamp: Histoire des campagnes de 1814 et 1815.
Danitz: Geschichte d. Feldzugs v. 1814. Danilewsky: Der
Feldzug in Frankreich. Houssaye: 1814.]
Amazing Schemes of Napoleon for New Levies -- Attitude of the
People toward the Empire -- The Disaffected Elements --
Napoleon's Armament -- Activity of the Imperialists -- Release of
Ferdinand and the Pope -- Napoleon's Farewell to Paris -- His
Strategic Plan -- France against Europe -- The Conduct of
Bernadotte -- Murat's Defection -- Conflicting Interests of the
Allies -- Positions of the Opponents at the Outbreak of
Hostilities.
[Sidenote: 1813-14]
What happened in France between the first days of November, 1813, when
Napoleon reached St. Cloud, and the close of the year, is so
incredible that it scarcely seems to belong in the pages of sober
history. Of five hundred and seventy-five thousand Frenchmen, strictly
excluding Germans and Poles, who had been sent to war during 1812 and
1813, about three hundred thousand were prisoners or shut up in
distant garrisons, and a hundred and seventy-five thousand were dead
or missing; therefore a hundred thousand or thereabouts remained under
arms and ready for active service. By various decrees of the Emperor
and the senate, nine hundred and thirty-six thousand more were called
to arms: a hundred and sixty thousand from the classes between 1804
and 1814, whether they had once served or not; a hundred and sixty
thousand from the class of 1815; a hundred and seventy-six thousand
five hundred were to be enrolled in the regular national guard, and a
hundred and forty thousand in a home guard; finally, in a
comprehensive sweep from all the classes between 1804 and 1814
inclusive, every possible man was to be drawn. This, it was estimated,
would produce three hundred thousand more.
It is easy to exaggerate the significance of these enormous figures,
for to the layman they would seem to mean that every male capable of
bearing arms was to be taken. But this was far from being the case;
contrary to the general impression, the population of France had been
and was steadily increasing. In spite of all the butcheries of foreign
and civil wars, the number of inhabitants was growing at the rate of
half a million yearly, and the country could probably have furnished
three times the number called out. Moreover, less than a third of the
nine hundred and thirty-six thousand were ever organized, and not more
than an eighth of them fought. This disproportion between plan and
fulfilment was due partly to official incapacity or worse, partly to a
popular resistance which was not due to disaffection. It speaks
volumes for the state of the country that even the hated flying
columns, with their thorough procedure, could not find the men,
especially the fathers, husbands, and only sons, who were the solitary
supports of many families. The fields were tilled by the spades of
women and children, for there were neither horses to draw nor men to
hold the plows. Government pawn-shops were gorged, and the government
storehouses were bursting with manufactured wares for which there was
no market; government securities were worth less than half their face,
the currency had disappeared, and usury was rampant. Yet it seems
certain that four fifths of the people associated none of these
miseries with Napoleonic empire. The generation which had grown to
maturity under Napoleon saw only one side of his activities: the
majestic public works he had inaugurated, the glories of France and
the splendors of empire during the intervals of peace, the exhaustion
and abasement of her foes in a long series of splendid campaigns--all
this they associated with the imperial rule, and desired what they
supposed was a simple thing, the Empire and peace.
The other fifth was, however, thoroughly aroused. When the legislature
convened on December nineteenth, and the diplomatic correspondence was
so cleverly arranged and presented as to make the allies appear
implacable, an address to the throne was passed, amid thunderous
applause and by a large majority, which virtually called for a return
to constitutional government as the price of additional war supplies.
In sober moments even the most ardent liberals were ashamed, feeling
that this was not an opportune moment for disorganizing such
administration as there was by calls for the reform of the
constitution. Only one question was imperative, the awful
responsibility they had for the national identity. The general public
was so outraged by the spectacle that the deputies reconsidered their
action, and by a vote of two hundred and fifty-four to two hundred and
twenty-three struck out the obnoxious clause. But this did not appease
Napoleon, who made no attempt to conceal his rage, and prorogued the
chamber in scorn. His support was ample in the almost universal
conviction that at such a moment there was no time for parleying about
abstract questions of political rights; but every cavilling deputy had
some friends at home, and in a crisis where the very existence of
France was jeopardized there were agitations by the reactionary
radicals. The royalists kept silent then, and for months later,
contenting themselves with biting innuendos or witty double meanings;
drinking, for instance, to "the Emperor's last victory," when the
newspapers announced "the last victory of the Emperor."
The first conscription from the classes of 1808-1814 was thoroughly
successful, the second attempt to glean from them was an utter
failure; the effort to forestall the draft of 1815 met with
resistance, and was abandoned. It was impossible to organize the home
guards and reserves, for they rebelled or escaped, and local danger
had to be averted by local volunteers who were designated as
"sedentary" because they could not be ordered away. By the end of
January not more than twenty thousand men had been secured for general
service from all classes other than the first--at least that was
approximately the number in the various camps of instruction. In order
to arm and equip the recruits, Napoleon had recourse to his private
treasure, drawing fifty-five million francs from the vaults of the
Tuileries for that purpose. The remaining ten were transferred at
intervals to Blois. But all his treasure could not buy what did not
exist. The best military stores were in the heart of Europe; the
French arsenals could afford only antiquated and almost useless
supplies. The recruits were armed, some with shot-guns and knives,
some with old muskets, the use of which they did not know; they were
for the most part without uniforms, and wore bonnets, blouses, and
sabots. There were not half enough horses for the scanty artillery and
cavalry. Worse than all, there was no time for instruction in the
manual and tactics. On one occasion a boy conscript was found standing
inactive under a fierce musketry fire; with artless intrepidity he
remarked that he believed he could aim as well as anybody if he only
knew how to load his gun!
[Illustration: NAPOLEON IN 1813
From a painting by Aimable-Louis-Claude Pagnest.]
The disaffected, though few, were powerful and active, suborning the
prefects and civic authorities by every device, issuing proclamations
which promised anything and everything, and procuring plans of
fortified places for the allies. Talleyrand began to utter oracular
innuendos about the vindictiveness of the allies, the desertion of
Murat, the sack of Paris, and various half-truths more dangerous even
than lies. The air was so full of rumors that, although there was no
widespread revolutionary movement, there were now and then serious
panics; the town of Chaumont surrendered to a solitary Wuertemberg
horseman. But when the populace of the country at large began to
wonder who the coming Bourbon might be, and what he would take back
from the present possessors of royal and ecclesiastical estates, they
were staggered. People in the cities heard with some satisfaction the
strains of the "Marseillaise," which by order of imperial agents were
once again ground out around the streets by the hand-organs. Napoleon
walked the avenues of Paris without escort, and was wildly cheered;
the Empress and her little son were produced on public occasions with
dramatic success, and popular wit dubbed the boy conscripts by the
name of "Marie Louises." The little men showed a grim determination
and eventually a sublime courage, but they never could acquire the
veteran steadfastness which wins battles. Journals, theaters,
music-halls, and public balls were all managed in the interest of
imperial patriotism; imperial tyranny dealt ruthlessly with suspicious
characters. Yet the imperialists had their doubts, and many, like
Savary, threw an anchor to windward by storing treasure at distant
points, and sending their families to safe retreats. On the whole, the
balance of public opinion at the opening of 1814 was overwhelmingly
imperialist both in the cities and in the country. Men ardently
desired peace, but they wanted it with honor and under the Empire.
That the Empire desired peace seemed to be proved by steps for the
release of its two most important prisoners, the King of Spain and the
Pope. Wellington thought that if the former had been despatched
directly into his kingdom on December eighth, the day on which the
conditions between himself and the Emperor were signed, England would
have found the further conduct of the war impossible. Talleyrand,
already deep in royalist plots, must have been of the same opinion,
for he did not advise haste, but craftily suggested to his prisoner
that the provisional government of Spain might refuse to accept him as
king unless the treaty of release had been previously ratified by the
Cortes. Accordingly it was referred to them, and, since the liberals
desired the assent to their new constitution of a king not under
duress, by their influence it was rejected. It was not until March,
1814, that Ferdinand was unconditionally released, and this delay
proved fatal to Napoleon's interests in Spain. The liberals could no
longer fight for free institutions, because it was then clear that the
dynastic conservatism of Europe was to win a temporary victory. In
about six months King Ferdinand undid the progressive work of six
years, and Spain relapsed into absolutism and ecclesiasticism, with
all their attendant evils. Nevertheless, France interpreted the
conduct of the Emperor as indicating an earnest desire for peace, and
this feeling had been strengthened by the absolutely unconditional
release of the Pope on January twenty-second. This apparently gracious
concession was effective among the masses, who did not know, as the
Emperor did, that the allies were already on French soil.
The very next day Napoleon performed his last official act, which was
one of great courage both physical and moral. The national guard in
Paris had been reorganized, but its leaders had never been thoroughly
loyal, many of them being royalists, some radical republicans, and the
disaffection of both classes had been heightened by recent events. But
the officers were nevertheless summoned to the Tuileries; the risk was
doubled by the fact that they came armed. Drawn up in the vast chamber
known as that of the marshals, they stood expectant; the great doors
were thrown open, and there entered the Emperor, accompanied only by
his consort and their child in the arms of his governess, Mme. de
Montesquiou. Napoleon announced simply that he was about to put
himself at the head of his army, hoping, by the aid of God and the
valor of his troops, to drive the enemy beyond the frontiers. There
was silence. Then, taking in one hand that of the Empress, and leading
forward his child by the other, he continued, "I intrust the Empress
and the King of Rome to the courage of the national guard." Still
silence. After a moment, with suppressed emotion, he concluded, "My
wife and my son." No generous-hearted Frenchman could withstand such
an appeal; breaking ranks by a spontaneous impulse, the listeners
started forward in a mass, and shook the very walls with their cry,
"Long live the Emperor!" Many shed tears, and felt, as they withdrew
in respectful silence, a new sense of devotion welling up in their
hearts. On the eve of his departure, the Emperor received a numerously
signed address from the very men whose loyalty he had hitherto had
just reason to suspect.
It was four in the morning of January twenty-fifth when Napoleon left
for Chalons. From that moment he was no longer Emperor. During the
long winter nights just past he had wrought with an intensity and a
feverish activity which he had never surpassed, sparing neither
himself nor others, displaying no consideration for prejudice or
honest opposition, calling on every Frenchman to sacrifice everything
for France, to which, as he vehemently asserted, he himself was more
necessary than she to him. If he had come honestly to believe what
millions of others believed, it was little wonder; he had thenceforth
but one aim--to prove that he was, as of yore, the first general of
France, the only one able to save the country in an hour when all her
glories were falling in wreck about her. His strategic plans, immense
and intricate as was his task, were complete and excellent. The first
was intended to prevent invasion by way of Liege, the most direct line
and that which Prussia preferred. The second, which was partly
defensive, was the one eventually used against the clumsy form of
advance actually chosen by the invaders. Of the two, the former was
the more brilliant, but the second was almost as clever. By it the
Rhine bank was divided into three parts for purposes of defense.
Macdonald was stationed at Cologne to protect the lower course;
Marmont was to guard the central stretch, and they two divided between
them the remnants of the army which had been swept out of Germany;
Victor was stationed on the upper course to command the garrisons of
the great frontier fortifications and strengthen himself by the new
levies; Bertrand remained as a sort of rear post on the right bank of
the river at Kastel, opposite Mainz. All told, these generals had at
first only fifty thousand men.
The allies no sooner obtained possession of central Europe than they
outdid its recent master in every species of exaction. The countries
which had formed the Confederacy of the Rhine were compelled almost to
double the number of the contingents they had raised for France, and
to organize every fencible man into either the first or second line of
reserves, called by the old feudal terms of ban and arriere-ban. At
the same time the allies demanded and obtained new subsidies both of
money and arms from Great Britain. In the three armies of Austria,
Prussia, and Russia, as they stood on the Rhine, there were ready by
January first about two hundred and eighty-five thousand men. By the
end of February the army-lists of France, excluding the national
guards, displayed a total of six hundred and fifty thousand men; the
coalition, including England, had registered nearly a million.
Deducting forty per cent. as ample to cover all shortcomings, we may
say that France, with three hundred and ninety thousand in the ranks,
men and boys, faced Europe with six hundred thousand full-grown men.
These figures include the French armies of Catalonia, of the Pyrenees,
of Italy, and of the Netherlands, together with the garrisons in all
the strong places then held by France on both sides of the Rhine; they
also include the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian reserves, with the
national armies of Holland, Spain, and Italy.
Aside from the centrifugal forces inherent in the coalition, there was
one which threatened its disintegration: the erratic character of the
great Gascon who represented Sweden. Bernadotte's first care, after
the battle of Leipsic, was to move north and secure the long-coveted
prize of Norway. Ever mindful of the hint about a French crown, which
Alexander had thrown out as still another bait at Abo, he gave as his
parting admonition the transparent advice that the coming campaign
should be confined to a frontier invasion of France, and at Hamburg he
actually offered Davout, as the price of surrender, a safe return for
himself and his army to their native land! This was too much;
Alexander was furious, and the schemer was peremptorily ordered to
leave a sufficient investing force before the city and return with the
rest of his army to the lower Rhine. There he was suffered to remain
in idleness, the task assigned to him being that of watching the
Netherlands; two of his best corps were withdrawn from him and
assigned to Bluecher.
Nor was Napoleon free from his thorn in the flesh. In a bulletin
published by him after the retreat from Moscow was a passage which
implied some censure of Murat for his lack of stability. This both the
King of Naples and his spouse bitterly resented, the latter roundly
abusing her brother in their correspondence. This was an excellent
pretext for desertion when the general crash appeared imminent, and at
Erfurt the dashing and gallant, but weak and testy, monarch decamped.
Hastening south, he entered at once into alliance with Austria, and
then, putting himself at the head of eighty thousand Neapolitans, set
out for Rome, waging a terrific warfare of proclamations. Eugene,
too,--and this was an elemental disaster,--was virtually checkmated by
the defection of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, which opened
the Tyrol to the allies. All Italy was consequently lost. Augereau,
whose feeble loyalty to Napoleon was already at the vanishing-point,
had been appointed to take forty thousand conscripts, collect any
straggling soldiers he could find in southeastern France, and keep
open the door out of Italy for some or all of Eugene's veterans, with
whose assistance it was hoped the marshal could form an army for the
defense of the Vosges Mountains. But Eugene, having fought the
indecisive battle of Roverbello, and finding himself in a sorry plight
from both the military and political points of view, could send no
reinforcements until April, when finally he concluded an armistice
releasing his army. Augereau therefore found himself opposite Bubna at
Geneva with an ineffective force, and with very little heart to wield
what he had. This ended Napoleon's grand scheme for uniting the forces
of Italy, Naples, Switzerland, and France.
Prussia was now the ablest as well as the bitterest of Napoleon's
foes, Stein, Bluecher, Gneisenau, and their friends aiming at nothing
short of annihilating the Napoleonic power. This was, no doubt, due in
part to a thirst for revenge; but in the main it was due to the
longing for such a leadership in Germany as would spread abroad the
new doctrines of liberal and constitutional monarchy, in order to
restrain Austria's ever-increasing influence. The councils of the
allies presented an amusing spectacle. The Prussians urged an
immediate advance by the best line for invasion, that, namely, from
Liege and Brussels; but the Austrians, except Radetzky, drew back,
fearing Prussia almost equally with France. The Czar held the balance,
but his scales were very sensitive, inclining often toward Prussia,
but settling in the end to a compromise suggested by Schwarzenberg and
Metternich. Having imitated Napoleon in his practice of war
requisitions, the allies now determined to imitate him in contempt for
international law, and to violate Swiss neutrality. The plan which
they adopted was to throw their main army into France by way of Basel,
and thus turn the line of frowning fortresses behind the Rhine, as
well as the Vosges Mountains. Bluecher was to cross the middle Rhine,
and Buelow, with thirty thousand men, was to cooeperate with the English
troops under Graham in the Netherlands. The whole scheme was
unmilitary, but it exactly suited Metternich, who, having on January
thirteenth first learned of Bernadotte's understanding with the Czar
about the crown of France, was very uneasy. Both he and Schwarzenberg
desired to end the war on the frontier, if possible; Prussia's power
and Alexander's ambitions for European preponderance were far more
dangerous to Austria than a Napoleonic empire confined to France.
Bluecher, leaving twenty-eight thousand men before Mainz, crossed the
Saar on January ninth with forty-seven thousand; Schwarzenberg, with
the main army arrayed in four columns, two hundred and nine thousand
strong, crossed the Rhine at or near Basel and moved toward Langres.
The thin, straggling French columns began to retreat concentrically
toward Chalons on the Marne. At the opening of the second stage in the
campaign Bluecher had invested the Mosel fortresses, and was advancing,
with less than thirty thousand men, toward Arcis on the Aube;
Schwarzenberg was in and about Langres; and the French were
concentrated on a line from Vitry-le-Francois to St. Dizier. Napoleon
reached Chalons on the twenty-sixth, having left Joseph to represent
him in Paris. The wily strategist, feeble as was his strength, had
momentarily secured the advantage over his unwieldy foe, having wedged
himself between the invading armies, and being quite strong enough,
with the forty thousand soldiers in his ranks, to cope with Bluecher.
CHAPTER VI
NAPOLEON'S SUPREME EFFORT[6]
[Footnote 6: References: Fournier, Der Congress von
Chatillon. Die Politik im Kriege von 1814. Eine historische
Studie. Koch, Memoires p. s. a l'histoire de la campagne de
1814. Sorel, L'Europe et la revolution francaise, Vol. VIII.]
The Fertility of Genius -- The Battles of Brienne and La Rothiere
-- The French Retreat -- Victory at Champaubert -- Victory at
Montmirail -- Victory at Vauchamps -- Success Engenders Delusion
-- Insincerity of the Allies -- Their Clashing Interests -- The
Congress of Chatillon -- Napoleon's Procrastination -- French
Victory and French Diplomacy.
[Sidenote: 1814]
The year 1814 is the most astonishing of Napoleon's military life. He
first conceived a plan for combining the resources of Italy,
Switzerland, Naples, and France. This failed by Augereau's sloth and
Murat's ingratitude. Nothing daunted, the fertile brain then outlined
schemes for meeting the quick advance of the allies through the
Netherlands, for defending the Rhine frontier, and for a levy _en
masse_ of the French people to hurl back invasion under the walls of
Paris. After taking the field, the daring of his conceptions, the
rapidity of his movements, the surprises he prepared for his enemy,
the support he wrung from an exhausted land, the devotion he received
from a panting, ill-clothed army at bay--all are so remarkable that by
contrast the allies appear to be a lumbering, stupid mass. With
another antagonist they would have appeared in a very different light;
Gneisenau's clear head, Bluecher's daring, Radetzky's good sense and
courage, together with the valor of the forces at their back, would
have won the goal far more easily with an ordinary, or even an
extraordinary, combatant in Napoleon's plight. The Emperor of the
French had not merely a prestige worth a hundred thousand men, as he
was fond of reckoning: he had an activity of mind and body, a
reservoir of resources, which made his single blade cover the whole
circumference of defense like the whirling spokes of a fiery wheel.
After a skirmish for the possession of St. Dizier, the campaign opened
at Brienne, where Bluecher, hurrying to gain touch with the main army
of the allies, was caught on January twenty-ninth. The conflict
probably did not recall to Napoleon his mock conflicts when a
schoolboy near the same spot. The terrific struggle began late in the
afternoon, and lasted in full fury until midnight, when the Prussian
general, narrowly escaping capture, abandoned the town and hurried
toward Trannes. Thoroughly beaten, he needed not touch alone, but
actual union with the Austrians, and this he gained near Bar on the
Aube, whence Schwarzenberg was passing on toward Auxerre. Ignorant of
this success, Napoleon now drew up his line with its center at La
Rothiere, hoping in the first place to hold the bridge over the Aube
at Lesmont, and thus secure the moral effect of his victory at
Brienne, and in the second to bring on another engagement with
Bluecher, whom he believed to be still isolated. Marmont was at
Montierender, Mortier was summoned from before Troyes. This stand of
Napoleon's was a desperate attempt to overawe the allied sovereigns,
for strategically it was fatal, since in the case of either victory or
defeat the French army was in danger of being outflanked by
Schwarzenberg's advance, and thus cut off from Paris. On February
first, Bluecher, reinforced by twelve thousand of the Russian guard,
attacked. The battle lasted, with fluctuating success for the allies,
during two days, and at its close Napoleon safely retreated over the
Aube to make another stand at Troyes. The various conflicts were
terrific; in the end Bluecher lost six thousand dead and wounded, the
French about four thousand. The odds against the latter were never
less than two to one, sometimes more. Had the allies first thrown
their full strength into the contest, and had they then followed up
their victory by a well-organized pursuit, the campaign would have
ended there. As it was, they paused, permitted a disorganized, feeble
enemy to escape, and gained nothing from the bloody conflict except an
ill-founded self-confidence. Bluecher wrote on the evening of the
battle that they would be in Paris within eight days. To General
Reynier, who was to be liberated by an exchange of prisoners, the Czar
said: "We shall be in Paris before you." A council of war was called
which decided for an advance on the French capital in two columns; to
Bluecher, as the conqueror of La Rothiere, was assigned the shortest
line, that down the Marne.
For several days the allied lines moved onward, slowly, widely
scattered, and carelessly. Napoleon was as calm and undaunted as if he
had been the victor. Retreating on the defensive with careful
deliberation, he strengthened his forces by well-chosen periods of
rest, and by hurrying in reinforcements from the various depots about
and beyond Paris. On the afternoon of February ninth, when leaving
Nogent for Sezanne, he wrote to his brother Joseph, whom he had left
to represent his interests at Paris, that he could now reckon, all
told, on between sixty and seventy thousand men, including engineers
and artillery; that he estimated the Silesian army under Bluecher at
forty-five thousand, and the main army under Schwarzenberg at a
hundred and fifty thousand, including Bubna and the Cossacks. "If I
gain a victory over the Silesian army, and put it out of account for
some days, I can turn against Schwarzenberg, reckoning on the
reinforcements you will send, with from seventy to eighty thousand
men, and I think he cannot oppose me at once with more than from a
hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty thousand. If I find myself too
weak to attack, I shall be at least strong enough to hold him in check
for a fortnight or three weeks, and this would give me the opportunity
for new combinations." To hold Schwarzenberg temporarily, Oudinot with
twenty-five thousand men was stationed on the line from Provins to
Sens, and Victor with fourteen thousand was sent to Nogent. The
Emperor himself, with the old guard, about eight thousand strong, with
Ney and Marmont each commanding six thousand infantry, and with ten
thousand cavalry under Nansouty and Doumerc, set out from Sezanne to
try his fortunes with Bluecher.
This was the last of Napoleon's great strategic schemes which was
destined to be crowned with success. It had but a single drawback.
While Napoleon was still the boldest man in war that ever lived, as at
St. Helena he declared himself to be, his marshals were uneasy and
depressed; Marmont, in this moment of infinite chance, as it seemed to
him, fell into a panic. The marshal's fears were not justified, for
his Emperor's daring was not foolhardy. It was calculated on the
myriad chances of his enemy's opportunity and his enemy's ability, and
in this case it was perfectly calculated. Bluecher, in spite of
Gneisenau's continuous warnings, was over-confident. Having dispersed
his detachments more than ever, he had for two days been moving
swiftly in the hope of cutting off Macdonald by a dashing feat of
arms. In his haste he had not taken up two Russian corps which had
been separated from his main line, but on the contrary he had left
them so far out that they were beyond support. By a blunder of the
Czar's, reinforcements which had been promised were still a long
distance in the rear. Schwarzenberg's movements were marked by an
over-confident deliberation as characteristic of him as overhaste was
of Bluecher. Accordingly when on the tenth Marmont advanced from
Sezanne, he found the corps of Olsusieff, about forty-five hundred
strong, virtually isolated at Champaubert. His own numbers were
slightly superior, and with a swift rush he annihilated the unready
Russians. Napoleon was beside himself with joy, and began to talk of
the Vistula once more; but he stopped when he saw how sour the visages
of Marmont and the other marshals grew at the very mention of such an
idea. Nevertheless, if the process begun at Champaubert could be
continued, victory and ultimate recovery of something more than French
empire were assured. He therefore hurried Nansouty and Macdonald on
toward Montmirail for a second stroke of the same kind.
The affair at Montmirail was more of a battle than that at
Champaubert, for Bluecher had been able to gather in the divisions of
Sacken, York, Kleist, and Kapzewitch. The battle opened about an hour
before noon on the eleventh by a fierce artillery fire from the
French, behind which Napoleon manoeuvered so as to concentrate his own
force against the Russians, and separate them from York with his
Prussians. At two o'clock Napoleon attacked the Russians, Mortier
engaging the Prussians separately. The plan succeeded, and by
nightfall the enemy was in full retreat for Chateau-Thierry, where was
the nearest bridge over the Marne. Napoleon had hoped that Macdonald
would arrive from La Ferte-sous-Jouarre in time to seize the bridge,
cut off the retreat, and make the victory decisive. But in spite of
heroic exertion, that marshal could not or did not move with
sufficient rapidity over the heavy dirt roads. The flying allies
sacked the town with awful cruelty, and destroyed the bridge without
any molestation except from the inhabitants, who wreaked their
vengeance on numerous stragglers. On the thirteenth the French
occupied the place, repaired the bridge, and crossed to the right
bank. Next morning Marmont started in pursuit of Bluecher.
Somewhat flushed by such success, Napoleon deliberated whether he
should not now turn and attack Schwarzenberg. The Emperor thought
these victories might give pause to a mediocre Austrian, ever mindful
of the terrific blows his country had received once and again from
France. He was mistaken; Schwarzenberg had moved, though slowly, yet
steadily forward. On the twelfth Victor abandoned the bridge at
Nogent, and Napoleon sent Macdonald with twelve thousand men to join
Victor at Montereau. Early on the fourteenth came news that Bluecher
had driven Marmont back to Fromentieres. By noon Napoleon had effected
a junction with this marshal near Etoges, making a famous and
successful flank march over a marshy country, a manoeuver which is
justly considered worthy of his great genius. Advancing then to the
neighborhood of Vauchamps, his infantry attacked in front, while the
cavalry, under Grouchy, outflanked the enemy's line and fell on the
rear. Bluecher was apparently doomed, for he had only three regiments
of cavalry, and while facing one powerful enemy he would be forced to
break the ranks of another in order to open a line of retreat. He
solved the problem, but at enormous cost. Forming his troops into a
line of solid squares, one stood to support the artillery and receive
the onset in front, while the others dashed at Grouchy's horsemen,
each square standing and retreating behind the next alternately as the
bloody retreat went on. At last the butchery ceased, and Bluecher fled
to Bergeres. The French pursued only as far as Etoges. Napoleon had
hoped to follow all the way to Chalons, annihilate what was left of
Bluecher's army, and then to return and throw himself on Schwarzenberg.
He was arrested by the news that the Seine valley, as far as
Montereau, was in the hands of the Austro-Russians; that Oudinot and
Victor had been driven back to Nangis; in short, that Paris was
seriously menaced.
It was long asserted that in the three actions just recorded the
French far outnumbered their opponents, and that Napoleon's
generalship was consequently inferior to his high average. The
sufficient answer to this is in the facts now universally accepted. At
Champaubert there were four thousand eight hundred and fifty French
against four thousand seven hundred Russians; at Montmirail there were
twenty-two thousand seven hundred Russians and Prussians against
twelve thousand eight hundred French; and in the third engagement,
near Etoges, Bluecher had twenty-one thousand five hundred to ten
thousand three hundred. It is therefore natural to compare these three
victories with those at Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego. But they were
far greater. At forty-four Napoleon displayed exactly the same
boldness, steadfastness, and skill which he had displayed in youth;
but in addition he overcame the stolid enmity of winter, of variable
weather, of roads almost impassable, of swampy fields that were almost
impassable by reason of overflowing ditches and half-frozen morasses.
He overcame, too, the resisting power created by his own example; for
here were the choicest soldiers of the Continent, commanded by men
inured for eighteen years to the hardships, the shifts, the rapidity
of warfare as he himself had taught the art. Momentarily Napoleon
seems to have wondered whether allied and co-allied Europe had learned
nothing in half a generation, and whether an army twice and a half
larger than his own, under veteran generals, was to withdraw again
behind the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder, perhaps the Vistula. It is hard
to believe that he dreamed such dreams as we read the prosaic,
scientific, hard common sense of his military correspondence between
January twenty-sixth and February fourteenth. Yet there is certainly
an appearance of self-deception and vacillation in his political and
diplomatic plans, due apparently to the intoxication of success, as
when he spoke of the Vistula to Marmont after Champaubert.
The innermost thoughts of Metternich, and of the diplomats associated
with him, are very hard to fathom. For two generations the world
believed that after Leipsic, Napoleon, in his sanguine conceit,
rejected offer after offer from the allies, and finally perished
utterly because of a folly which made him believe he could recover his
predominance. There is now every reason to believe the contrary, and
to suppose that Napoleon clearly understood the situation. The war was
one of extermination on the part of the allies; in the interest of
their dynasties they intended not only to destroy Napoleon, but also
thereby to root out the ideas for which he was supposed to stand. By
the light of recent memoirs, especially those of Metternich himself,
we seem forced to the conclusion that in all the offers after Leipsic
there was, if anything, far less of reality and sincerity than in
those between the armistice of Poischwitz and the battle. When
Castlereagh arrived at the allied headquarters early in January, 1814,
he found them established in Basel. Schwarzenberg had found no
difficulty in crossing Switzerland. Geneva surrendered its keys
without a struggle, and generally the Swiss seemed indifferent to the
violation of their neutrality. As the advance continued, it appeared
that the French were equally apathetic. Bubna was driven from before
Lyons by Augereau, but Dijon surrendered to a squad of cavalrymen
which, at the request of the conscientious mayor, made a show of force
to oblige him. It was not difficult under such circumstances for the
sovereigns and their ministers to convince themselves that any peace
with Napoleon would be nothing but a "ridiculous armistice," and that
the Emperor of the French must, in any case, be utterly overthrown.
In response to the Frankfort proposals, the pacific Caulaincourt had
promptly arrived to conduct negotiations. The invaders had almost at
once suggested that they must abandon the Frankfort proposals, and
confine France to her royal limits; that is, refuse her Belgium with
the great port of Antwerp. So far they were agreed, but there the
unanimity ceased. The Czar desired first to conquer France, and then
leave her to choose her own government; he intended to take the whole
of Poland, and give Alsace to Francis in return for Galicia, thus
checking Austria by both Prussia and France, so that he could work his
will in the Orient. Metternich wished the old balance of power, and
had determined on the restoration of the Bourbons. Francis was writing
to his daughter that he would never separate her cause and that of her
son from France. The Prussian king and ministers desired only such an
arrangement as would secure to their country what she had regained.
Stein and his associates wished the utter humiliation of their foe.
Castlereagh spoke with the authority of a paymaster; he was determined
to keep the Netherlands from falling under French influence, to
restore the Bourbons, and to establish so nice an equilibrium in
Europe that Great Britain would be unhampered elsewhere in the world.
There was to be no mention of colonial restitution or neutral rights.
Being a second-rate statesman, he was much influenced by Metternich,
and the two sought to form an impossible alliance between
constitutional liberty and feudal absolutism.
A so-called congress was opened at Chatillon on February fifth.[7] It
must be remembered that the treaty of Reichenbach was still a secret.
That agreement was the reality behind the congress of Prague, the
Frankfort proposals, and the meeting at Mannheim. None of those
gatherings consequently was serious; that at Chatillon was even less
so. The memoirs of Metternich explain all the facts: Swiss neutrality
was violated by Austrian influence in order to restore the
aristocratic constitution of Bern and the ascendancy of that canton;
Alexander, posing still as a liberal, was angry at this violation of
international law, and forbade the restoration of Vaud to its old
master. Schwarzenberg's deliberate movements were due primarily to
timidity, but they stood in good stead Metternich's desire to restore
the Bourbons. It has been asserted, and there is much probability in
the conjecture, that not only the plan adopted for invading France,
but the slowness of the Austrians in advancing toward Langres, toward
Troyes, across into the Seine valley, together with the spurious
activity they displayed before Montereau, Sens, and Fontainebleau, was
part of a scheme to wear out but not to exhaust France, and then
compel her to take back her dynastic rulers. Bluecher, who wanted glory
and revenge, and the Prussian liberals, who desired so to crush France
that Prussia might be free to slough off her militarism and build up
a constitutional government, were alike furious at being chained to
the frontier. All these cross-purposes and bitterness were mirrored in
the ostentatious proceedings of the congress of Chatillon. Napoleon,
either divining the facts, or, more probably, informed by spies,
seemed indifferent, and refused at first to give full powers to
Caulaincourt; finally the marshals, terrified at the prospect of
indefinite war opened by the unlucky mention of the Vistula, made
their influence so felt that the Emperor yielded.
[Footnote 7: Fournier: Der Congress von Chatillon.]
Maret's name was long held up to detestation as the instigator of
Napoleon's procrastinating policy at Dresden, the line of conduct
which seemed to have made it possible for Austria to join the
coalition. Among the papers of that minister is an account of his
relations with Napoleon during the congress at Chatillon, which
displays the evident motive of an attempt to prove how pacific his
nature really was. He declares that after the defeat at La Rothiere,
Caulaincourt wrote a panic-stricken letter demanding full authority to
treat. Maret handed it to the Emperor, beseeching him to yield.
Napoleon seemed scarcely to heed, but indicated a passage in
Montesquieu's "Grandeur and Fall of the Romans," which he happened to
be reading: "I know nothing more magnanimous than the resolution taken
by a monarch who ruled in our time, to bury himself under the ruins of
the throne rather than to accept proposals which a king may not
entertain. He had a soul too lofty to descend lower than his
misfortunes had hurled him." "But I, sire," rejoined the secretary--"I
know something more magnanimous--to cast aside your glory in order to
close the abyss into which France would fall along with you." "Well,
then, gentlemen, make your peace," came the reply. "Let Caulaincourt
make it; let him sign everything necessary to obtain it. I can
support the disgrace, but do not expect me to dictate my own
humiliation." Maret informed Caulaincourt, but the latter recoiled
before the responsibility, and asked for particular instructions. The
Emperor persistently refused, but wrote giving the minister "carte
blanche" to take any measure which would save the capital. Again
Caulaincourt begged for details, and again Napoleon refused,
persisting until Bertrand joined his supplications to those of Maret,
whereupon he consented to abandon Belgium, and even the left bank of
the Rhine.
The formal despatch containing these concessions was to be signed next
morning, on February eighth, but in the interval came news of
Bluecher's movements. Maret found the Emperor buried in the study of
his map. "I have an entirely different matter in hand," was the
greeting; "I am at present occupied in dealing Bluecher a blow in the
eye." The signature was indefinitely postponed. On the tenth Alexander
suspended the congress on the plea of Caulaincourt's refusal to state
his own or accept the offered terms. Then followed the three
victories, and Napoleon, on the night of the twelfth, wrote to
Chatillon demanding the Frankfort proposals. Caulaincourt urgently
besought the allies for an armistice, and begged Napoleon to be less
exacting. Prussia and Austria were eager for the armistice, but
Alexander obstinately refused to reopen the congress until the
eighteenth, when everything seemed changed, and all the allies really
desired peace. Caulaincourt, warned by Napoleon's letter of the
twelfth, refused to treat without full instructions, and as he had
none he began to procrastinate. In the end he bore the blame for not
having used the carte blanche when he had it in order to save his
country, for subsequently he had no opportunity.
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT CAPTAIN AT BAY[8]
[Footnote 8: References: Houssaye: 1814. Jensen: Napoleons
Feldzug, 1814. Weil: La campagne de 1814, d'apres les
documents des archives imperiales et royales de la guerre a
Vienne. La cavalerie des armees alliees pendant la campagne
de 1814.]
Victor's Failure at Montereau -- Schwarzenberg's Ruse -- The
French Advance and the Austrian Retreat -- Napoleon's Effort to
Divide the Coalition -- Vain Negotiations -- The Treaty of
Chaumont -- Bluecher's Narrow Escape -- The Prussians Defeated at
Craonne -- Napoleon's Determination to Fight -- His Misfortunes
at Laon -- Dissensions at Bluecher's Headquarters -- Napoleon at
Soissons -- Rheims Recaptured -- Another Phase in Napoleon's
Eclipse.
The eagerness of the Prussians and the Austrians to grant an armistice
was at first due to the belief that Caulaincourt's request was a
confession of exhaustion; the Czar's assent to reopening the congress
on the eighteenth was wrung from him by the military operations
between the fourteenth and that date. Convinced that Paris was
menaced, Napoleon left Marmont to hold Bluecher, and starting for La
Ferte-sous-Jouarre on the fifteenth, covered fifty miles with his army
in a marvelous march of thirty-six hours, arriving on the evening of
the sixteenth with his men comparatively fresh. Next morning the
French began to advance, and the Austrians to withdraw toward the
Seine. Victor was to seize Montereau that same day and hold the
bridge. Compelled to drive an Austrian corps out of Valjouan, the
marshal did not reach his goal until six or seven in the evening, and
finding it beset by the Crown Prince of Wuertemberg with fourteen
thousand Germans, he merely drove in the outposts and then halted for
the night. His ardor was far from intense, and though, like Macdonald
at Chateau-Thierry, he might feel that he had done all that could be
demanded, yet he lost the opportunity of annihilating a considerable
portion of the enemy's force. Simultaneously Macdonald had now
advanced until he stood before Bray, while Oudinot on the left was
before Provins. Thus far Napoleon's advance had been a front movement
to cover Paris, but that same day, the seventeenth, he drove
Wittgenstein from Nangis, and then expected by a rush over the bridge
at Montereau to prevent Schwarzenberg from extending his flank to
Fontainebleau, a move which would surround the French right. As a
matter of fact, strange riders speaking curious outlandish tongues,
Cossack scouts in other words, had appeared for the first time that
very day in Nemours and Fontainebleau, terrifying the inhabitants. It
seems highly probable that if Napoleon's force could have made a quick
push from Montereau early on the eighteenth, it would have cut off a
considerable portion of Schwarzenberg's left. In any case the Emperor
was deeply incensed by what he considered Victor's slackness, and
degraded him. The humbled marshal confessed his fault, displaying
profound contrition, and was speedily restored to partial favor, being
intrusted with the command, under Ney, of a portion of the young
guard.
This was the third of the marshals--Augereau, Macdonald, Victor, each
in turn--who since the opening of the campaign had shown a physical
and moral exhaustion disabling them from rising to the heights of
Napoleon's expectation. "We must pull on the boots and the resolution
of '93," wrote the Emperor to Augereau; he was quite right: nothing
short of the unsapped revolutionary vigor of France could have saved
his cause. On the eighteenth, after a six hours' struggle, the French
under Gerard and Pajol seized Montereau. Napoleon had halted at
Nangis, and there Berthier received by a flag of truce a letter from
Schwarzenberg, declaring that he had ceased his offensive march in
consequence of news that preliminaries of peace had been signed the
day previous at Chatillon. This was probably as base a ruse as any
ever practised by Napoleon's generals. It is likely that all the
Austrian marches and countermarches for ten days past had been but a
bustling semblance calculated for diplomatic effect. Be that as it
may, before Napoleon's advance the Austrian commander had quailed,
and, with the French at Montereau, his columns were already moving
back to Troyes, where they were drawn up in battle array. Napoleon
wrote indignantly to Joseph that the ruse was probably preliminary to
a request for an armistice, and that he would now accept nothing short
of the Frankfort proposals. "At the first check the wretched creatures
fall on their knees." Meanwhile he led his army over the river to
Nogent, and prepared to attack Schwarzenberg.
But Bluecher had not been idle; by superhuman exertions he had
collected and strengthened his army at Chalons, and on the
twenty-first he appeared at Mery on the Seine, threatening Napoleon's
left flank in case of an advance toward Troyes. By this time the
flames of French patriotism were rekindled in town and country, and,
the soldiers being flushed with victory, it was clearly the hour to
strike at any hazard. Oudinot was despatched with ten thousand men to
hold Bluecher, and this task he actually accomplished, capturing that
portion of Mery which lay on the left bank of the river, and
fortifying the bridge-head against all comers. Marmont being at
Sezanne with eight thousand men to cover Paris, and Mortier at
Soissons with ten thousand to prevent the advance of York and Sacken,
Napoleon marched on Troyes. It was late in the evening when his main
army was drawn up, and in order to leave time for his rear to come in,
he postponed operations until the morning. Schwarzenberg had seventy
thousand in line, but at four in the early dawn of the twenty-second,
leaving in place a front formation sufficient to mask his movements,
he decamped with his main force and withdrew behind the Aube.
Arrived at Bar, the Austrian commander wrote on the twenty-sixth an
admirable letter of justification for the course he had taken. Defeat
would have meant a retreat, not behind the Aube, but the Rhine. "To
offer a decisive battle to an army fighting with all the confidence
gained in small affairs, manoeuvering on its own territory, with
provisions and munitions within reach, and with the aid of a peasantry
in arms, would be an undertaking to which nothing but extreme
necessity could drive me." This retreat put a new aspect on the
diplomacy of Chatillon. On the nineteenth Caulaincourt received a
despatch from Napoleon revoking the carte blanche entirely; the same
day Napoleon received an ultimatum from the congress, written several
days before, to the effect that he was to renounce all the
acquisitions of France since 1792, and take no share in the
arrangements subsequent to the peace. This last clause being a covert
suggestion of abdication, the recipient flew into a passion; when
finally he was soothed by the pleadings of Berthier and Maret, he gave
such a meaningless reply as would enable negotiations to proceed, but
his counter-project he addressed directly to the Emperor Francis. It
was a refusal to give up Antwerp and Belgium, and an emphatic
recurrence to the Frankfort proposals. "If we are not to lay down our
arms except on the offensive conditions proposed at the congress, the
genius of France and Providence will be on our side."
Napoleon's missive suggested to his father-in-law, as was its
intention, that a continental peace on the Frankfort basis would leave
France free to recuperate her sea power and continue the war with
England alone. This was the wedge which for some time past the writer
had been proposing to drive into the coalition so as to separate
Austria from Russia. Castlereagh was very uneasy as to the possible
effect of the message, and there was much anxiety among all the
diplomats. Their first step was to send a pacific reply and renew
their request for an armistice. Napoleon consented, but stipulated
that hostilities should proceed during the preliminary pourparlers,
and that in the protocol a clause should be inserted declaring that
the plenipotentiaries were reassembled at Chatillon to discuss a peace
on the basis proposed at Frankfort. A commission to arrange the terms
of the armistice met on the twenty-fourth. That they were not in
earnest is shown by Frederick William's despatch of the twenty-sixth
to Bluecher, saying, "The suspension of arms will not take place." That
very day, also, in a council of war held by the allied generals, it
was determined to form an invading army of the south. Bluecher was
authorized to make a diversion in favor of the main army--a move which
he had really begun the day before by a march to the right. Napoleon,
leaving Macdonald and Oudinot, with forty thousand men, to follow
Schwarzenberg, hurried after Bluecher with his remaining force. On the
twenty-eighth the commission adjourned its sessions with a formal
reiteration of the ultimatum already made by the allied powers.
The reason was that by that time its members believed Napoleon to be
elsewhere engaged. Schwarzenberg's army had checked Oudinot, and as
his troops recuperated their strength the leader recovered partial
confidence. Bluecher being off for Paris, with Napoleon on his heels,
the main army of the allies had then turned on the forces of Macdonald
and Oudinot, and had driven them westward until in the pursuit it
reached Troyes, where it halted, ready, in case of Bluecher's defeat,
to recross the Rhine. The congress of Chatillon was formally reopened
on March first, and continued its useless sessions until the
nineteenth, when it closed. During this second period none of the
important dignitaries, except Schwarzenberg and the King of Prussia,
attended; the rest withdrew to Chaumont, where, on March ninth, the
three powers signed a treaty with England, dated back to March first,
binding themselves, in return for an annual subsidy of five million
pounds sterling equally divided, that each would keep a hundred and
fifty thousand men in the field, for twenty years if necessary,
provided Napoleon would not accept the boundaries of royal France--a
futile stipulation. This treaty was the precursor of that iniquitous
triple alliance between Russia, Austria, and Prussia which was
destined not merely to hamper England herself so seriously in the
subsequent period of history, but to stop for some time the progress
of liberal ideas throughout Europe.
Bluecher crossed the Marne on February twenty-seventh with half his
force, and then attempted to cross the Ourcq in order to attack Meaux
from the north. But he was checked by Marmont and Mortier, with the
sixteen thousand men they already had, and then, after six thousand
new recruits came in from Paris, he was forced to retreat. Should
Napoleon arrive in time he would be annihilated. Accordingly he
hastened up the valley of the Ourcq with his entire force. Napoleon
arrived on the Marne too late to attack Bluecher's rear, and after
some hesitation as to whether he should not return to complete his
work with Schwarzenberg, he finally determined that, inasmuch as the
fortress of Soissons was secure, and Bluecher must therefore retreat to
the eastward, he could himself deliver an easy but staggering blow on
the Prussian flank when they should cross the Aisne at Fismes.
Accordingly, on March third the worn-out columns of the French passed
over the Marne. Unfortunately, Soissons had been left by Marmont in
charge of an inexperienced commander, who had surrendered almost
without resistance when, on March second, Buelow and Wintzengerode,
having come in from the Netherlands, suddenly appeared before the
place. This stroke of good fortune enabled Bluecher not merely to find
a city of refuge for his exhausted and disorganized force, but to
recruit it by the two victorious and elated corps which thenceforth
served him as an invaluable rear-guard. Napoleon, thwarted again, gave
no outward sign of the despair he must have felt, but crossed the
Aisne on March fifth, and occupied Rheims, in order at least to cut
Bluecher off from any connection with Schwarzenberg. He then turned to
join Marmont and Mortier in order to drive Bluecher still farther
north, so that, as he wrote to Joseph, he might gain time sufficient
to return by Chalons and attack Schwarzenberg.
In spite of all his discouragements, Bluecher had no intention of
retreating without a blow. There was constant friction between the
Prussian commander and his subordinates, so that dissension prevented
prompt action. Nevertheless, after much delay the army was got in
motion to resume the offensive, the general plan being to move
eastward instead of withdrawing due north, to cross the plateau of
Craonne, and, descending into the plain north of Berry, to attack the
French in force as they advanced to Laon. Napoleon had expected to
meet his foe under the walls of that city; his quick advance was as
much of a surprise to Bluecher as Bluecher's was to him. The first shock
of battle, therefore, occurred at Craonne on the sixth, when neither
army was in readiness. But Bluecher secured the advantage of position.
Though he had only a portion of his force, the troops he did have were
on a commanding plateau above the enemy when the action began. The
skirmishes of the first day, however, were indecisive. Napoleon's
knowledge of the district being defective, he sought to secure the
best possible information from the inhabitants. Some one mentioning
incidentally that the mayor of a neighboring town was named de Bussy,
Napoleon recalled, with his astounding memory, that in the regiment of
La Fere he had had a comrade so named. The mayor turned out to be the
sometime lieutenant, and, with superserviceable zeal, the former
friend poured out worthless information which led the Emperor to
believe that on the morrow there would be only Bluecher's rear-guard to
disperse. But it was not so. Bluecher struggled with his utmost might
to gather in his cavalry and artillery, while Sacken, with the
Russians, stood like a wall, repelling the successive surges of Ney
and Victor the whole day through. At nightfall the Prussian commander,
finding it impossible to assemble guns or horsemen over the icy
fields, gave orders for retreat, and his army passed on to Laon.
Though Craonne was a victory, the losses of the French were
proportionately greater than those of the enemy, and the pursuit,
though spirited, gained no advantage. "The young guard melts like
snow; the old guard stands; my mounted guards likewise are much
reduced," were the words of Napoleon's private letter. Yet he pressed
on. The night of the seventh he spent in a roadside inn under the sign
of "The Guardian Angel." There Caulaincourt's last messenger from
Chatillon found him. The congress was still sitting, but the warrior
knew the fact meant and could mean nothing to him; though the allies
had increased their demands in proportion to their victories, they had
not lessened them in proportion to their defeats. Whatever terms he
might accept, and whatever Metternich might say, this war he felt sure
was one for his extermination. As he said then and there, it was a
bottomless chasm, and he added, "I am determined to be the last it
shall swallow up." So he made no answer, and spent the night
completing his plans for battle at Laon.
That place stands on a terraced hill rising somewhat abruptly from the
plain, and throughout the eighth Bluecher arrayed his army in and on
both sides of the city, which itself was of course the key. Napoleon,
being a firm believer in such movements when on friendly soil, made a
long night march. He reached the enemy's fore-posts early on the
ninth, and drove them in. At seven Ney and Mortier began the battle
under cover of a mist, and captured two hamlets at the foot of the
hill. Marmont was on the right, and had already been cut off from the
center by a body of Cossacks; but he attacked the village of Athies.
After a long day's hard fighting, he succeeded in capturing a portion
of it. Further exertion being impossible, his men bivouacked, while he
himself withdrew to the comforts of Eppes, a chateau three miles
distant. It was noon when Napoleon learned that Marmont had been
severed from the line; at once he renewed his attack on Laon, but
though he gained Clacy on his left, he lost Ardon, and was thus more
completely cut off from Marmont. That night York fell upon Marmont's
men unawares, and routed them utterly.
Napoleon heard of this disaster shortly after midnight. He was, of
course, deeply agitated--did he dare risk being infolded on both
sides, or should he brave his fate in order to mislead the enemy? He
chose the desperate course, and when day broke stood apparently
undismayed. Even when two fugitive dragoons arrived and confirmed in
all its details the terrible news from Athies, he issued orders as
bold as if his army were still entire. This was a desperate ruse, but
it succeeded, for the pursuit of Marmont's men was stayed. At four the
main French army began its retreat, and the next morning saw it at
Soissons; six thousand had been killed and wounded. Again Napoleon's
name had stiffened the allies into inactive horror, for they did not
pursue. York was so disgusted with the dissensions at Bluecher's
headquarters that he threw up his command and left for Brussels.
Bluecher was literally at the end of his powers. "For heaven's sake,"
said Langeron, a French refugee in the Russian service, on whom the
command would have devolved, "whatever happens, let us take the corpse
along." "The corpse," with dimmed eyes and trembling hands, traced in
great rude letters an epistle beseeching York to return, and this,
indorsed by another from the Prince Royal of Prussia, brought back the
able but testy refugee.
Meantime Rheims, intrusted to a feeble garrison, had been taken by
Langeron's rear-guard under St. Priest, another French emigrant in the
service of the allies. By this disaster communication between
Schwarzenberg and Bluecher had been reestablished. In the short day
Napoleon could spend at Soissons, he took up twenty-five hundred new
cavalrymen, a new line regiment of infantry, a veteran regiment of the
same, and some artillery detachments. It is not easy to conceive of
recuperative power more remarkable than that which was thus exhibited
both by France and her Emperor. These men had been sent forward from
Paris in spite of the profound gloom now prevalent there. The truth
was at last known in the capital; Joseph was hopeless; the Empress and
her court were preparing for extremities. News had come that in the
south Soult had been thrown back on Toulouse; that in the southwest
royalist plots were thickening; that in the southeast Augereau had
been forced back to Lyons; Macdonald was ready to abandon Provins at
the first sign of advance by Schwarzenberg; and the sorry tale of Laon
was early unfolded. Yet the administrative machinery was still
running, and soldiers were being manufactured from the available
materials. Those who had been sent to Soissons had been hastily
gathered, equipped, and drilled almost without hope, but they were
precious since they enabled Napoleon to refit his shattered
battalions.
Marmont had unwisely abandoned Berry-au-Bac, and that in disregard of
orders. But otherwise he had done his best to make good a temporary
lapse, and had got together about eight thousand men at Fismes. His
narratives give a graphic picture of the situation--of disorder,
confusion, chaos among his troops, of artillery served by
inexperienced sailors, of undrilled companies whose members had
neither hats, clothes, nor shoes. There were plenty of captured
uniforms and head-coverings, but they were so infested with vermin
that the French, sorry as was their plight, refused to wear them, and
clung to their old tatters. Marmont's men were heroes, he himself was
not yet a traitor. Though overborne by a sense of Napoleon's
recklessness, and therefore unfit for the desperate self-sacrifice
which would have made him a fit coadjutor for his chief, he was
prepared to atone for his disgrace at Athies. Early in the morning of
the thirteenth the main French army moved from Soissons; at four in
the afternoon Marmont opened the attack on Rheims. Napoleon himself
had arrived, but his troops were slow in coming up, and there was no
heavy artillery wherewith to batter in the gates. The struggle went on
with desperate courage and gallantry on both sides. St. Priest was
killed by the same gunner whose aim had been fatal to Moreau. "We may
well say, O Providence! O Providence!" wrote Napoleon to his brother.
At ten the beleaguered garrison began to sally and flee. Napoleon rose
from the bearskin on which he had been resting before a bivouac fire,
and storming with rage lest his prey should escape, hurried in the
guns, which were finally within reach. Amid awful tumult and carnage
the place fell; three thousand of the enemy were slain, and about the
same number were captured. The burghers were frenzied with delight as
the Emperor marched in, and the whole city burst into an illumination.
Next morning Napoleon and Marmont met. The culprit was loaded with
reproaches for the affair at Athies, and treated as a stern father
might treat a careless child. No better evidence of the Emperor's low
state is needed. Marmont was now the hero of the hour; his peccadillos
might well have been forgotten for the sake of securing his continued
faithfulness. With Napoleon at his best, this would surely have been
the case; but aware that at most the war could be a matter of only a
few weeks, the desperate man overdid his role of self-confidence,
being too rash, too severe, too haughty. Not that he was without some
hope. Although for two years the shadow had been declining on the dial
of Napoleon's fortunes, and although under adverse conditions one
brilliant combination after another had crumbled, yet his ideas were
as great as ever, the adjustment of plans to changing conditions was
never more admirable. The trouble was that effort and result did not
correspond, and this being so, what would have been trifling
misdemeanors in prosperity seemed to him in adversity to be dangerous
faults. The great officers of state and army, imitating their master's
ambitions, had acquired his weaknesses, but had failed in securing
either his strength or his adroitness. With him they had lost that
fire of youth which had carried them and him always just over the line
of human expectation, and so his nice adjustments failed in
exasperating ways at the very turn of necessity. Hard words and
stinging reproofs are soon forgotten in generous youth; they rankle in
middle life; and even the invigorating address or inspiring word, when
heard too often for twenty years, fails of effect. The beginning of
the end was the loss of Soissons at the critical instant. Napoleon was
uncertain and touchy; his marshals were honeycombed with disaffection;
the populations, though flashing like powder at his touch, had nowhere
risen _en masse_. Thereafter the great captain was no longer waging a
well-ordered warfare. Like an exhausted swordsman, he lunged here and
there in the grand style; but his brain was troubled, his blade
broken. Some untapped reservoirs of strength were yet to be opened,
some untried expedients were to be essayed, but the end was
inevitable. The movement on Rheims was the spasmodic stroke of the
dying gladiator.
CHAPTER VIII
THE STRUGGLES OF EXHAUSTION[9]
[Footnote 9: References: Houssaye, Napoleon a l'ile d'Elbe,
in Revue historique, tom. 51, pp. 1-25. Metternich's
Memoirs.]
The Allies Demoralized -- Napoleon's Desperate Choice -- The
Battle at Arcis -- The Correspondence of Caulaincourt and
Napoleon -- Panic at Schwarzenberg's Headquarters --
Cross-purposes of the Allies -- Napoleon's Determination
Confirmed -- His Over-confidence -- The Resolution to Abandon
Paris -- The French Brought to a Stand -- Their Masked Retreat --
Inefficiency of Marmont and Augereau -- Napoleon's March toward
St. Dizier -- His Terrible Disenchantment -- How the Allies had
Discovered Napoleon's Plans -- Their Determination to Pursue --
The Czar's Resolution to March on Paris -- Successful Return of
the Invaders.
Though unscientific as a military move and futile as to the ultimate
result of the war, the capture of Rheims was, nevertheless, a telling
thrust. On receipt of the news from Laon, Schwarzenberg had
immediately set his army in motion against Macdonald, and Bluecher,
after waiting two days to restore order among his worried troops and
insubordinate lieutenants, had advanced and laid siege to Compiegne.
The capture of Rheims checked the movements of both Austrians and
Prussians; dismay prevailed in both camps, and both armies began to
draw back. The French halted at Nangis in their retreat before
Schwarzenberg, and the people of Compiegne were released from the
terrors of a siege. "This terrible Napoleon," wrote Langeron in his
memoirs--"they thought they saw him everywhere. He had beaten us all,
one after the other; we were always frightened by the daring of his
enterprises, the swiftness of his movements, and his clever
combinations. Scarcely had we formed a plan when it was disconcerted
by him." Besides this, in obedience to Napoleon's call, the peasantry
began an organized guerrilla warfare, avenging the pillage,
incendiarism, and military executions of the allies by a brutal
retaliation in kind which made the marauding invaders quake. Finally
the momentary consternation of the latter verged on panic when the
report reached headquarters that Bernadotte, lying inactive at Liege
with twenty-three thousand Swedes, had permitted a flag of truce from
Joseph to enter his presence. Could it be that the sly schemer, for
the furtherance of his ambition to govern France, was about to turn
traitor and betray the coalition?
But the consternation of the allies was the least important effect of
the capture of Rheims by Napoleon.[10] It initiated certain ideas and
purposes in his own mind about which there has been endless
discussion. Many see in them the immediate cause of his ruin, a few
consider them the most splendid offspring of his mind. Reinforcements
from Paris, slender as they were, flowed steadily into his camp; and
when he learned that both Schwarzenberg and Bluecher had virtually
retreated, he believed himself able to cope once more with the former.
Accordingly he dictated to his secretary an outline of three possible
movements: to Arcis on the Aube, by way of Sezanne to Provins, and to
Meaux for the defense of Paris. The first was the most daring; the
second would cut the enemy off from the right bank of the Seine, but
it had the disadvantage of keeping the troops on miry cross-roads; the
third was the safest. Of course he chose the way of desperation--all
or nothing. Leaving Marmont with seven thousand men at Berry-au-Bac,
and Mortier with ten thousand at Rheims and Soissons, he enjoined them
both to hold the line toward Paris against Bluecher at all hazards, and
himself set out, on March seventeenth, for Arcis on the Aube. This he
did, instead of marching direct to Meaux for the defense of Paris,
because it would, in his own words, "give the enemy a great shock, and
result in unforeseen circumstances."
[Footnote 10: See Houssaye, 1814, pp. 258 _et seq._]
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 Chatillon
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 Chatillon. 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
Fere-Champenoise simultaneously with the departure of the messenger
for Chatillon. 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 Angouleme 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 Chatillon, 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
Chatillon 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
Fere-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 Bluecher'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 Bluecher
should resume the offensive, to abandon Paris and hasten to Chalons.
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 Bluecher had
resumed the offensive, and a swift courier was despatched summoning
Marmont to Chalons. 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 Gerard 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 Bluecher 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 Chalons, began to withdraw toward Fismes, where he effected a
junction with Mortier. His intention was to keep Bluecher from Paris
by false manoeuvers. Rheims and Epernay at once fell into hostile
hands; there was no way left open toward Chalons except the long
detour by Chateau-Thierry and Etoges; and Bluecher, 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 Chambery 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.
The night after his retreat from Arcis, Napoleon sent out a
reconnaissance to Vitry, and finding it garrisoned by Prussians,
swerved toward St. Dizier, which, after a smart combat, he entered on
the twenty-third. This placed him midway between the lines of his
enemy's communication both from Strasburg and from Basel; which of the
two, he asked himself, would Schwarzenberg return to defend? Thinking
only how best to bait his foe, he set his army in motion northward;
the anxious Austrian would certainly struggle to retain the line in
greatest danger. This illusion continued, French cavalry scoured the
country, some of the Chatillon diplomats were captured, and the
Emperor of Austria had a narrow escape at Bar. It seemed strange that
the country-side as far as Langres was deserted, but the fact was
apparently explained when the news came that the enemy were in force
at Vitry; probably they had abandoned Troyes and had disregarded
Brienne in order to divert him from his purpose.
Alas for the self-deception of a ruined man! The enemy at Vitry were a
body of eight thousand Russian cavalry from the Silesian army, sent,
under Wintzengerode, to dog Napoleon's heels and deceive him, just as
they actually did. Having left Vitry on the twenty-eighth, they were
moving toward St. Dizier when Napoleon, believing that they formed the
head of a powerful hostile column, fell upon them with needless fury,
and all too easily put them to flight; two thousand were captured and
five hundred killed. Thanks to Marmont's disobedience and bad
judgment, Bluecher had opened communications with Schwarzenberg, and
both were marching as swiftly as possible direct to Paris. Of this
Napoleon remained ignorant until the twenty-eighth. From his prisoners
the Emperor first gained a hint of the appalling truth. It was
impossible to believe such reports. Orders were issued for an
immediate return to Vitry in order to secure reliable information.
Arrived before the place, Napoleon called a council of war to decide
whether an attempt to storm it should be made. In the moment of
deliberation news began to arrive in abundance: captured despatches
and bulletins of the enemy, confirmed by definite information from the
inhabitants of the surrounding country. There could no longer be any
doubt: the enemy, with an advantage of three days' march, was on his
way to Paris. The futility of his eastward movement appears to have
struck Napoleon like a thunderbolt. Paris abandoned in theory was one
thing; France virtually decapitated by the actual loss of its capital
was quite another. The thought was unendurable. Mounting his horse,
the unhappy man spurred back to St. Dizier, and closeted himself in
silent communing with his maps.
The allies had not at first divined Napoleon's purpose. Indeed, their
movements in passing the Aube and on the day following were little
better than random efforts to fathom it. But on the morning of the
twenty-third two important messengers were captured--one a courier
from Berthier to Macdonald with despatches stating exactly where
Napoleon was; the other a rider with a short note from Napoleon to his
Empress, containing a statement of its writer's plans. This famous
paper was lost, for Bluecher, after having read it, let the rider go.
But the extant German translation is doubtless accurate. It runs: "My
friend, I have been all day in the saddle. On the twentieth I took
Arcis on the Aube. The enemy attacked at eight in the evening. I beat
him, killed four thousand men, and captured four cannon. On the
twenty-first the enemy engaged in order to protect the march of his
columns toward Brienne and Bar on the Aube. I have resolved to betake
myself to the Marne in order to draw off the enemy from Paris and to
approach my fortifications. I shall be this evening in St. Dizier.
Adieu, my friend; kiss my boy." Savary declares that there was a final
phrase: "This movement makes or mars me."
The menace to their lines of communication at first produced
consternation in the council of the allies. The first proposition laid
before them was that they should return on parallel lines and recover
their old bases. Had this scheme been adopted, Napoleon's strategy
would have been justified completely instead of partially as it was;
nothing but a miracle could have prevented the evacuation of France by
the invaders. But a second, calmer thought determined the invaders to
abandon both the old lines, and, opening a new one by way of Chalons
into the Netherlands, to make the necessary detour and fall on
Napoleon's rear. Francis, for the sake of keeping close touch with his
own domains, was to join the Army of the South at Lyons. Although
there is no proof to support the conjecture, it seems as if the Czar
and the King of Prussia had suggested this so that both Francis and
Metternich might be removed from the military councils of the allies
in order that the more warlike party might in their absence take
decisive measures. That night a package of letters to Napoleon from
the imperial dignitaries at Paris fell into the hands of the invaders.
The writers, each and all, expressed a profound despondency, Savary in
particular asserting that everything was to be feared should the enemy
approach the capital. Next morning, the twenty-fourth, the junction
between Bluecher and Schwarzenberg was completed. Francis and
Metternich being absent, Schwarzenberg, listening to warlike advice,
determined to start immediately in pursuit of Napoleon and seek a
battle. The march was begun, and it seemed as if Napoleon's wild
scheme was to be completely justified. He had certainly displayed
profound insight.
Alexander, however, had been steadily hardening his purpose to
annihilate Napoleon. For a week past Vitrolles, the well-known
royalist agent, had been at his headquarters; the accounts of a steady
growth in royalist strength, the efforts of Napoleon's lifelong foe,
Pozzo di Borgo, and the budget of despondent letters from the Paris
officials, combined to temper the Czar's mystical humor into a
determination of steel. Accordingly, on the same day he summoned his
personal military advisers, Barclay, Wolkonsky, Diebitsch, and Toll;
then, pointing out on a map the various positions of the troops
engaged in the campaign, he asked, significantly and impressively,
whether it were best to pursue Napoleon or march on Paris. Barclay
supported the former alternative; Diebitsch advised dividing the army
and doing both; but Toll, with powerful emphasis, declared himself for
the second course. The Czar listened enthusiastically to what was near
his own heart, and expressed himself strongly as favoring it; the
others yielded with the eagerness of courtiers, and Alexander,
mounting his horse, spurred after Frederick William and Schwarzenberg.
The new plan was unfolded; the Prussian king supported it;
Schwarzenberg hesitated, but yielded. That night orders were issued
for an about-face, a long explanatory despatch was sent to Bluecher,
and on the twenty-fifth the combined armies of Bohemia and Silesia
were hurrying with measured tramp toward Paris. For the first time
there was general enthusiasm in their ranks. Bluecher, who from his
unremitted ardor had won the name of "Marshal Forward," was
transported with joy.
[Illustration: In the collection of the Marquis of Bassano
NAPOLEON-FRANCOIS-CHARLES-JOSEPH, PRINCE IMPERIAL; KING OF ROME; DUKE
OF REICHSTADT.
_From the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence_.]
The two armies marched on parallel lines, and met with no resistance
of any importance, except as the various skirmishes enabled the
irregular French soldiers to display a desperate courage, not only the
untried "Marie Louises" coming out from Paris, but various bodies of
the national guard convoying provision-trains. It was the twenty-fifth
before Marmont and Mortier effected their junction, and then, although
about sixteen thousand strong, they were steadily forced back through
Fere-Champenoise and Allemant toward Charenton, which was under the
very walls of Paris. Marmont displayed neither energy nor common sense
on the retreat: his outlying companies were cut off, and strategic
points which might have been held were utterly neglected. The army
with which he reached Paris on the twenty-ninth should have formed an
invaluable nucleus for the formation and incorporation of the numerous
volunteers and irregular companies which were available; but, like its
leader, it was entirely demoralized. Ledru des Essarts, commander of
Meaux, was obliged on the twenty-seventh to abandon his charge, a
military depot full of ammunition and supplies, which was essential to
the safety of Paris. The garrison consisted of six thousand men, but
among them were not more than eight hundred veterans, hastily
collected from Marmont's stragglers, and the new conscripts were
ill-conditioned and badly commanded. Although the generals drew up
their men with a bold front to defend the passage of the Marne, the
undisciplined columns were overwhelmed with terror at the sight of
Bluecher's army, and, standing only long enough to blow up the
magazines, fled. They fought gallantly, however, on their retreat
throughout the twenty-eighth, but to no avail; one position after
another was lost, and they too bivouacked on the evening of the
twenty-ninth before the gates of the capital. It is a weak curiosity,
possibly, but we must wonder what would have occurred had Marmont,
instead of retreating to Fismes on the eighteenth, withdrawn to
Rheims, where he and Mortier could at least have checked Bluecher's
unauthorized advance, and perhaps have held the army of Silesia for a
time, when the moral effect would probably have been to justify
Schwarzenberg and confirm his project for the pursuit of Napoleon. In
that case, moreover, the precious information of Napoleon's letter to
his consort would not have fallen into his enemies' hands. Would
destiny have paused in its career?
CHAPTER IX
THE BEGINNING OF THE END[11]
[Footnote 11: References: Napoleon, King of Elba. Pons de
l'Herault, Memoire aux puissances alliees; publ. pour la
"societe d'histoire contemporaine." Houssaye, Napoleon a
l'ile d'Elbe. Sorel, Essais d'histoire et de critique.
Talleyrand, Metternich. Sorel, Le Congres de Vienne. Rose,
Napoleonic Studies. Campbell, Napoleon at Fontainebleau and
Elba. Foresi, Napoleone I all' isola dell' Elba.]
Napoleon's Problem -- The Military Situation -- A Council of War
and State -- The Return to Paris -- Prostrating News -- The
Empress-Regent and her Advisers -- Traitors Within -- Talleyrand
-- The Defenders of the Capital -- The Flight of the Court -- The
Allies before the City.
The pallid, silent Emperor at St. Dizier was closeted with
considerations like these. He knew of the defeat which forced Marmont
and Mortier back on Paris; the loss of the capital was imminent;
parties were in a dangerous state; his marshals were growing more and
more slack; he had failed in transferring the seat of war to Lorraine;
the information he had so far received was almost certainly colored by
the medium of scheming followers through which it came. What single
mind could grapple with such affairs? It was not because the thwarted
man had lost his nerve, but because he was calm and clear-minded, that
he felt the need of frank, dispassionate advice on all these matters.
On the other hand, there stood forth in the clearest light a single
fact about which there could be no doubt, and it alone might
counterbalance all the rest: the peoples of northern and eastern
France were at last aroused in behalf of his cause. For years all
Europe had rung with outcries against the outrages of Napoleon's
soldiery; the allied armies no sooner became invaders in their turn
than they began to outstrip their foe in every deed of shame; in
particular, the savage bands from Russian Asia indulged their inhuman
passions to the full, while the French peasantry, rigid with horror,
looked on for the moment in paralysis. Now they had begun to rise in
mass, and from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-eighth their volunteer
companies brought in a thousand prisoners. The depots, trains, and
impedimenta of every sort which the allies abandoned on turning
westward fell into the hands of a peasant soldiery, many of whom were
armed with shot-guns. The rising for Napoleon was comparable only to
that which earlier years had seen in the Vendee on behalf of the
Bourbons.
Besides, all the chief cities of the district were now in the hands of
more or less regular troops; Dunette was marching from Metz with four
thousand men; Broussier, from Strasburg with five thousand; Verdun
could furnish two thousand, and several other fortresses a like
number. Souham was at Nogent with his division, Allix at Auxerre with
his; the army at the Emperor's disposal could easily be reckoned at
seventy thousand. Assisted by the partizan bands which now hung in a
passion of hatred on the skirts of the invaders, and by the national
uprising now fairly under way, could not the Emperor-general hope for
another successful stand? He well knew that the fear of what had
happened was the specter of his enemy's council-board; they would, he
reckoned, be rendered over-cautious, and give him at least a fortnight
in which to manoeuver before the fall of Paris could be expected.
Counting the men about Vitry and the garrison reinforcements at only
sixty thousand, the combined armies of Suchet, Soult, and Augereau at
the same number, that of Marmont at fourteen thousand, and the men in
the various depots at sixteen thousand, he would have a total of a
hundred and fifty thousand, from which he could easily spare fifty
thousand to cut off every line of retreat from his foe, and still have
left a hundred thousand wherewith to meet their concentrated force on
a basis of something like equality. From the purely strategic point of
view, the march of the allies to Paris was sheer madness unless they
could count on the exhaustion of the population right, left, and
behind. If the national uprising could be organized, they would be cut
off from all reinforcement and entrapped. Already their numbers had
been reduced to a hundred and ten thousand men. Napoleon with a
hundred thousand, and the nation to support him, had a fair chance of
annihilating them.
It was, therefore, not a mere hallucination which led him to hope that
once again the tangled web of affairs might be severed by a sweep of
the soldier's saber. But of course in the crisis of his great decision
he could not stand alone; he must be sure of his lieutenants.
Accordingly, after a few hours of secret communing, he summoned a
council, and laid before it his considerations substantially as
enumerated. Those present were Berthier, Ney, Lefebvre, Caulaincourt,
and Maret; Oudinot and Macdonald, at Bar on the Ornain and Perthes
respectively, were too distant to arrive in time, but he believed that
he knew their opinion, which was that the war should be continued
either in Lorraine or from a center of operations to be established at
Sens. From this conclusion Macdonald did not once waver; Oudinot had
begun to hedge; their absence, therefore, was unimportant. Berthier
was verging on desperation, and so was Caulaincourt, who, since
leaving Chatillon, had been vainly struggling to reopen negotiations
for peace on any terms; Ney, though physically brave, was not the
stuff from which martyrs are made, and Lefebvre, naturally weak, was
laboring under a momentary attack of senility. The council was
imperative for peace at any price; the Emperor, having foreseen its
temper, had little difficulty in taking the military steps for
carrying out its behests.
Early in the morning of March twenty-eighth the army was set in motion
toward Paris. The line of march was to be through Bar on the Aube,
Troyes, and Fontainebleau, a somewhat circuitous route, chosen
apparently for three reasons: because the region to be traversed would
still afford sustenance to the men, because the Seine would protect
its right flank, and because the dangerous point of Meaux was thus
avoided. Such a conclusion is significant of the clearest judgment and
the nicest calculation. Pages have been written about Napoleon's
hallucinations at the close of his career; neither here nor in any of
the courses he adopted is there aught to sustain the charge. At
breakfast-time a squad of jubilant peasants brought in a prisoner whom
they believed to be no less a person than the Comte d'Artois. In
reality it was Weissenberg, an Austrian ambassador on his way to
London. He was promptly liberated on parole and despatched with
letters to Francis and Metternich. By a curious adventure, Vitrolles
was in the minister's suite disguised as a serving-man, but he was not
detected.
[Illustration: Map of the field of operations in 1814.]
At Doulevant Napoleon received cipher despatches from La Valette, the
postmaster-general in Paris, a trusted friend. These were the first
communications since the twenty-second; the writer said not a moment
must be wasted, the Emperor must come quickly or all would be lost.
His decision once taken, Napoleon had grown more feverish with every
hour; this message gave wings to his impatience. With some regard
for such measures as would preclude his capture by wandering bands of
Cossacks, he began almost to fly. New couriers were met at
Doulaincourt with despatches which contained a full history of the
past few days; in consequence the troops were spurred to fresh
exertions, their marches were doubled, and at nightfall of the
twenty-ninth Troyes was reached. Snatching a few brief hours of sleep,
Napoleon at dawn next morning threw discretion to the winds, and
started with an insufficient escort, determined to reach Villeneuve on
the Vanne before night. The task was performed, but no sooner had he
arrived than at once he flung himself into a post-chaise, and, with
Caulaincourt at his side, sped toward Paris; a second vehicle, with
three adjutants, followed as best it might; and a third, containing
Gourgaud and Lefebvre, brought up the rear. It will be remembered that
Gourgaud was an able artillerist; Lefebvre, it was hoped, could rouse
the suburban populations for the defense of Paris. At Sens Napoleon
heard that the enemy was ready to attack; at Fontainebleau that the
Empress had fled toward the Loire; at Essonnes he was told that the
decisive battle was raging; and about ten miles from the capital, at
the wretched posting-station of La Cour de France, deep in the night,
fell the fatal blow. Paris had surrendered. The terrible certainty was
assured by the bearer of the tidings, Belliard, a cavalry officer
despatched with his troop by Mortier to prepare quarters for his own
and Marmont's men.
Maria Louisa had played her role of Empress-regent as well as might be
expected from a woman of twenty-three with slender abilities; only
once in his letters did the Emperor chide her, and that was for a
fault at that time venial in European royalty: receiving a high
official, in this case the arch-chancellor, in her bedchamber. On the
whole, she had been dignified and conciliatory; once she rose to a
considerable height, pronouncing before the senate with great effect a
stirring speech composed by her husband and forwarded from his
headquarters. About her were grouped a motley council: Joseph, gentle
but efficient; Savary, underhanded and unwarlike; Clarke, working in
the war ministry like a machine; Talleyrand, secretly plotting against
Napoleon, whose title of vice-grand elector he wore with outward
suavity; Cambaceres, wise but unready; Montalivet, adroit but
cautious. Yet, while there was no one combining ability, enthusiasm,
and energy, the equipment of troops had gone on with great regularity,
and each day regiments of half-drilled, half-equipped recruits had
departed for the seat of war. The national guards who garrisoned the
city, some twelve thousand in all, had forgotten their imperialism,
having grown very sensitive to the shafts of royalist wit; yet they
held their peace and had performed the round of their duties.
Everything had outwardly been so quiet and regular that Napoleon
actually contemplated a new levy, but the emptiness of the arsenals
compelled him to dismiss the idea. Theoretically a fortified military
depot, Paris was really an antiquated fortress with arsenals of
useless weapons. Spasmodic efforts had been made to throw up redoubts
before the walls, but they had failed from lack of energy in the
military administration.
A close examination of what lay beneath the surface of Parisian
society revealed much that was dangerous. Talleyrand's house was a
nest of intrigue. Imperial prefects like Pasquier and Chabrol were
calm but perfunctory. The Talleyrand circle grew larger and bolder
every day. Moreover, it had influential members--de Pradt, Louis,
Vitrolles, Royer-Collard, Lambrecht, Gregoire, and Garat, together
with other high functionaries in all departments. Bourrienne
developed great activity as an extortioner and briber; the great
royalist irreconcilables, Montmorency, Noailles, Denfort, Fitz-James,
and Montesquiou, were less and less careful to conceal their activity.
Jaucourt, one of Joseph's chamberlains, was a spy carrying the latest
news from headquarters to the plotters. "If the Emperor were killed,"
he wrote on March seventeenth, "we should then have the King of Rome
and the regency of his mother.... The Emperor dead, we could appoint a
council which would satisfy all opinions. Burn this letter." The
program is clear when we recall that the little King of Rome was not
three years old. Napoleon was well aware of the increasing chaos, and
smartly reproved Savary from Rheims.
But Talleyrand was undaunted. At first he appears to have desired a
violent death for Napoleon, in the hope of furthering his own schemes
during a long imperial regency. At all events, he ardently opposed the
departure of the Empress and the King of Rome from Paris. Nevertheless
it was he who despatched Vitrolles, the passionate royalist, to
Nesselrode with a letter in invisible ink which, when deciphered,
turned out to be an inscrutable riddle capable of two interpretations.
"The bearer of this deserves all confidence. Hear him and know me. It
is time to be plain. You are walking on crutches; use your legs and
will to do what you can." Lannes had long before stigmatized the
unfrocked bishop as a mess of filth in a silk stocking; Murat said he
could take a kick from behind without showing it in his face; in the
last meeting of the council of state before the renewal of
hostilities, Napoleon fixed his eyes on the sphinx-like cripple and
said: "I know I am leaving in Paris other enemies than those I am
going to fight." His fellow-conspirators were scarcely less bitter in
their dislike than his avowed enemies. "You don't know the monkey,"
said Dalberg to Vitrolles; "he would not risk burning the tip of his
paw even if all the chestnuts were for himself." Yet, master of
intrigue, he pursued the even tenor of his course, scattering
innuendos, distributing showers of anonymous pamphlets, smuggling
English newspapers into the city, in fact working every wire of
conspiracy. Surprised by the minister of police in an equivocal
meeting with de Pradt, he burst out into hollow laughter, his
companion joined in the peal, and even Savary himself found the
merriment infectious.
Toward the close of March the populace displayed a perilous
sensitiveness to all these influences. The London "Times" of March
fifteenth, which was read by many in the capital, asked what pity
Bluecher and the Cossacks would show to Paris on the day of their
vengeance, the editor suggesting that possibly as he wrote the famous
town was already in ashes. Such suggestions created something very
like a panic, and a week later the climax was reached. When the
fugitive peasants from the surrounding country began to take refuge in
the capital they found business at a standstill, the shops closed, the
streets deserted, the householders preparing for flight. From the
twenty-third to the twenty-eighth there was no news from Napoleon; the
Empress and council heard only of Marmont's defeat. They felt that a
decision must be taken, and finally on the twenty-eighth the imperial
officials held a council. The facts were plainly stated by Clarke; he
had but forty-three thousand men, all told, wherewith to defend the
capital, and in consequence it was determined to send the Empress and
her son to Rambouillet on the very next day. This fatal decision was
taken partly through fear, but largely in deference to Napoleon's
letter containing the classical allusion to Astyanax. The very men who
took it believed that the Parisian masses would have died for the
young Napoleon, and deplored the decision they had reached. "Behold
what a fall in history!" said Talleyrand to Savary on parting. "To
attach one's name to a few adventures instead of affixing it to an
age.... But it is not for everybody to be engulfed in the ruins of
this edifice." From that hour the restoration of the Bourbons was a
certainty.
It was a mournful procession of imperial carriages which next morning
filed slowly through the city, attracting slight attention from a few
silent onlookers, and passed on toward Rambouillet. The baby king had
shrieked and clutched at the doors as he was torn away from his
apartments in the Tuileries, and would not be appeased; his mother and
attendants were in consternation at the omen, and all thoughtful
persons who considered the situation were convinced that the
dissolution of the Empire was at hand. A deputation from the national
guard had sought in vain to dissuade
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