The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (47 page)

The thirteen months Bonaparte spent in Egypt would open this ancient and mysterious land to European scholarship, but it had almost no effect on the course of Bonaparte’s career. The hopeless isolation of his army meant that no one back in France heard about the deteriorating condition of his army, the outbreaks of bubonic plague, the massacres of unruly natives, a futile raid into Palestine, and the suicides of desperate officers. All that Paris heard was that Bonaparte had vanquished the dreaded and exotic Mameluke cavalry under the pyramids. It didn’t matter that the Egyptians quickly learned to avoid open battle in favor of hit-and-run tactics that whittled away the army’s morale; Bonaparte had proved himself to be the new Caesar.
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In August 1799, Bonaparte abandoned his battered army to its fate and snuck back to France—to yet another hero’s welcome. His country needed him. All of the foreign enemies he had beaten had rejoined as the Second Coalition and attacked.

1799: Coup d’etat c’est moi

But first things first. The French Republic was still sputtering along in its usual chaos, facing schemes and uprisings from internal enemies on both the left and the right. Royalists were trying to restore a king, while radicals wanted to redistribute property to the poor. Then Bonaparte arrived triumphantly from Egypt, and no one asked why his army wasn’t with him.

After much scheming behind the scenes, and with the backing of the home army, a cabal of conspirators supplemented the weak and quarrelsome elected body that ran the republic (the Directory) with three powerful chief executives (“consuls”)—Bonaparte and two others who thought they could keep up with him. When Bonaparte asked the citizenry to approve this change, the French people overwhelmingly supported the idea with 99 percent of the vote. Technically, only 30 percent of the voters actually supported the idea, but since Bonaparte’s little brother, in his position as interior minister, was the one counting the votes, the reported vote was 99 percent in Bonaparte’s favor.
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Now Bonaparte was ready to fight off the Second Coalition. Against all expectations, he slipped over the Alps during the winter. Then a quick, deadly campaign in Italy convinced the rest of Europe to leave France alone for the time being. An unparalleled five years of peace ensued.

In 1804, at the age of thirty-five, Bonaparte was secure enough in his position to drop the pretense of republican rule. He decided that consul was a silly title, so he transformed from Citizen Bonaparte to Emperor Napoleon. To gain respectability in the eyes of his fellow monarchs, he restored the official role of the Catholic Church, put Sunday back into the calendar, and returned to counting the years starting from the year of the birth of Christ. He also reestablished slavery in the Caribbean colonies. In 1809, Emperor Napoleon dumped Josephine, the exciting little tart he had married in his youth, and married the teenage daughter of the emperor of Austria, who was not enthusiastic about her new job, considering what the French had done to her great aunt, Marie Antoinette. In time, however, she grew to love and cling to him desperately, often distracting him at pivotal moments in history.

When war resumed against the Third Coalition in 1805, it unleashed the Napoleon of legend, leading his armies across Europe, steamrolling everyone who stood in his way. He fought big, bloody battles against the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians at Austerlitz and Ulm (1805), Jena and Auerstadt (1806), Eylau and Friedland (1807), Aspern and Wagram (1809), to name just a few. If you’re a total nerd for tactics, this is your favorite part, but the rest of you need to know only that Napoleon proved unstoppable, no matter how many countries ganged up on him, no matter how big their armies. He beat them all with dazzling skill. The whole of Europe west of the Elbe River ended up under Napoleon’s rule—either directly or through his family, whom he appointed as kings of satellite nations. Austria and Prussia were allowed to remain as free kingdoms, but they were trimmed down to a less threatening size.

Peninsular War

Napoleon’s only setbacks during his zenith were in and around Spain. In 1800 he had bullied the Spanish into an alliance that joined their fleet to his. On paper, it was beginning to look like Napoleon might be able to challenge British control of the seas; however, in 1804, Nelson destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, which ended any hope Napoleon had of expanding his empire beyond Europe. Playing to his remaining strengths, he tried to break Britain by prohibiting all trade between the continent and the United Kingdom. Any countries that broke the embargo were occupied by French troops and bundled into the empire. To tighten control over the ports, he directly annexed much of the European coastline, to the Baltic Sea in the north and to the Croatian coast in the south.

Portugal, however, stubbornly stayed outside this Continental System. Napoleon sent an army to remove this pro-British blemish from the map of Europe, but this required a long supply line across Spain. Heavy military traffic across their country led to friction with the Spaniards, which led to brawls, then riots, and eventually rebellion. A full French invasion in 1808 replaced the Bourbon king in Madrid with Napoleon’s brother, but the natives continued to fight using a nasty style of hit-and-run tactics that came to be called
guerrilla
, the Spanish word for “little war.” The French routinely tortured and executed any suspected rebels who fell into their hands (and vice versa), which provided the subject for a haunting series of Goya drawings but did nothing to break the rebellion. Eventually, regular British troops under the duke of Wellington fought their way out of Portugal to support the rebels.

Style of Warfare

The most significant difference between warfare under Napoleon and that of earlier generations was the nationalistic passions unleashed by the French Revolution. France was able to fight the whole of Europe because it rallied the entire homeland to defend the ideals of equality and reason against the sullen peasant levies under gentlemen officers that characterized the monarchial way of war. With the whole nation involved, the size of the armies escalated, from 60,000 who fought on both sides at Marengo in 1800, to 165,000 at Austerlitz in 1805, to 300,000 at Wagram in 1809.
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Napoleonic warfare represented the peak of the musket era, which meant that armies lined up, blasted away at each other, and then charged. This may sound stupid to us, but Napoleonic firepower was so inefficient that the only way to make a dent in the opposition was to concentrate hundreds of muskets together, firing in calm, steady volleys.

Instead of carefully aimed shots, the infantry relied on rapid mass fire to erode the enemy line. Muskets were designed to be loaded and fired quickly, not accurately. Powder, ball, and wadding were shoved down the muzzle in disciplined, unthinking motions. A smooth bore left a loose fit between the ammunition and the barrel, which made it easier to load but weakened the blast, reduced the range, and spoiled the aim. Rifles, which had a tighter, spiraled bore, were more accurate than muskets, but they were too slow and difficult to load to have much effect on the battlefield aside from scattered sniping and harassment.
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To allow officers to distinguish friend from foe on a smoky battlefield, soldiers wore uniforms of bright, distinctive colors and fought in geometric formations under giant banners. Every unit of a Napoleonic army had precise mathematical characteristics—speed of movement, length of front, rate of fire, stamina—which good generals could calculate at a glance. With careful maneuver, a line might be able to bring a little extra firepower on the enemy line. If a regiment could catch the enemy infantry from the side, it could bring more muskets to bear than the enemy could. Better yet, a regiment might be able to catch the enemy between two firing lines. Then, when the enemy has been shaken, the regiment could fix bayonets and charge, hoping to cover the open ground before the enemy could fire more than a couple of volleys.

Attacking in line (strung out across a wide front, but with no depth) was difficult because a thin line could easily lose its cohesion. Some soldiers would move faster than others; others would fall behind; some might veer a bit left, others a bit right. Gaps would form quickly. Most generals preferred to attack in a column (fewer men across the front, but many more in depth). Gaps were less of a problem for a column, because plenty of replacement soldiers stood behind any opening that might appear.

Exploding artillery shells make for exciting cinema, but simple, solid cannonballs were more commonly used to break up infantry formations. These would rip a gash through any line of soldiers who stood in the way and inflict horrible wounds, easily pulping any body part they hit and scattering jagged bone fragments like shrapnel into the neighboring ranks. At closer range, grapeshot and canister (the cannon equivalents of shotgun shells) would be sprayed into infantry formations. A column took heavier casualties from cannon than from muskets because it was deeper and more crowded. A line was the opposite. Cannon shot hitting a line might tear apart one or two soldiers before skidding to a halt in the mud behind it.

For all of the dangers of standing stiffly in formation as a target for artillery, it was still safer than trying to run. Cavalry was always ready to swoop in with sabers and spears to cut down any stray foot soldiers they spotted. This included not only enemy cavalry but friendly cavalry as well, which usually had orders to make an example of shirkers and deserters.

Improvements in musketry had reduced cavalry’s impact on battle and pushed the horsemen off to the sidelines. Attacking a block of infantry was almost impossibly deadly, but cavalry could easily scatter and slaughter loose formations of skirmishers, hunt down snipers, or massacre infantry that broke formation and ran. When attacking artillery, cavalry would chase gunners away from their cannons and then hammer iron spikes into the touchholes, rendering them useless. The best defense for infantry against horsemen was a tight square, bristling with bayonets in every direction, but that made a better target for artillery.
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Like a deadly game of rock, paper, scissors, no single formation was best against all enemies.

The point of a Napoleonic battle was not to simply slaughter the opponents willy-nilly. Rather, it was to wreck the discipline and cohesion of the enemy, regiment by regiment; to blunt its attacks, to rip open its line with artillery, chase enemy soldiers from the field with an infantry charge, and keep them running with a cavalry pursuit. Toward the end of the day, generals on both sides would have plenty of useless units, not measured purely in terms of casualties, but in the numbers scattered, exhausted, lost in the smoke, plundering the dead, hiding, or evacuating the wounded. Generals would feed fresh reserves into sectors where the enemy might be vulnerable to one last punch. It didn’t always work. At Waterloo, the slaughter of Napoleon’s last reserve (the Old Guard) at the end of the day destroyed any hope Napoleon might have had of recovering the upper hand.
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Away from the Battlefield

Medicine was still largely based on folk cures and Greco-Roman theory, so more soldiers died from disease than from battle. Gathering thousands of young men from all over the continent into army camps often exposed them to childhood diseases, such as measles and smallpox, which they had never developed immunity against. Poor rations led to scurvy. Wounds led to infection. Poorly designed latrines and wells spread waterborne diseases such as typhoid fever and dysentery, while wearing the same uniform day after day allowed thriving colonies of lice and fleas to spread typhus and bubonic plague. In especially unhealthy environments, strange new diseases could cripple an army. When Napoleon tried to reestablish control over the rebellious island of Haiti, the French had to abandon their invasion after losing half their men to yellow fever.

On the plus side, vaccination was just coming into practice, and the field of public health got a major boost during the Napoleonic era as nations scrambled to keep enough children alive to restock the armies. It was probably no coincidence that Prussia established nationwide free vaccination in 1806, right after its army was wiped out by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena.
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Civilians rarely came under direct fire. Armies needed open ground on which to deploy, so they avoided fighting in cities. Battlefields were usually small enough to allow any local farm families to scurry out of range at the first sign of trouble. On the other hand, besieged cities were commonly bombarded. The British fleet killed 1,600 civilians during its shelling of Copenhagen in 1807.
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The reach of Napoleonic campaigning was restricted by the appetites of draught animals. If the army traveled more than a few days from a river or seaport, the wagons would have no room for anything more than the hay to feed the animals that pulled the wagons. The only way past this was for foraging parties to constantly scrounge ahead of the main army, confiscating the forage that peasants had set aside for their own animals.

As unprecedented numbers of soldiers tramped back and forth across Europe, they requisitioned food from the farms they passed. They killed livestock for their own use, including chickens that would have been better used laying eggs and cows that would have been better used producing milk. The armies seized horses and oxen for transport. They conscripted the able-bodied and left the old, the young, and the feeble to fend for themselves. This continued year after year, without letup. It has been reckoned that a million civilians across northwest Europe died as a result of these wars.