The Illustrious Dead (3 page)

Bonaparte didn’t compare himself to his contemporaries, none of whom (except perhaps for the French diplomat Talleyrand) could match his intellect or energy. Instead, he saw himself in a world-historical continuum, with Alexander the Great and the Caesars of Rome as his peers. “I am the successor,” Napoleon said, “not of Louis XVI, but of Charlemagne.” He believed that he had been chosen to remake human society. To do that, first he must grasp and then control the levers of power. Ruthlessly, if necessary.

To accept peace and turn to the work of civic administration (which he always claimed that he yearned to take up full-time) would be to spurn his own gifts. Napoleon was enough a child of the Revolution to see warfare not only as a practical means to power but as a test of himself as a whole man. He believed that every person should exhaust his possibilities, and his were near-infinite. To turn away before a perfect empire was created, an empire stronger and more enlightened than any that had gone before, was unacceptable.

England for the moment was out of reach. But Russia, too obstinate and too powerful for its own good, was not.

A
LEXANDER
I
OF
R
USSIA
was much closer to a recognizable nineteenth-century monarch than his counterpart in Paris: bright but intellectually lazy; an aesthete who played at military affairs and never really mastered the basics; a vain man not cut out for leadership who could nevertheless on very rare occasions take a position and hold it against everything. Raised in the hothouse climate of the royal palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Alexander had led a cosseted life unsettled only by the murderous strains between his father and grandmother. He was more fluent in English and French than he was in his native language and was completely unfamiliar with the Russia of the steppes or the brutal degradation of the serfs on the estates. Napoleon would say later that he found Alexander to be deeply intelligent but that there was a piece of his character missing. The tsar rarely had the will to carry out intentions to the end, no matter how bitter. Deeply curious, he read prodigiously, but rarely finished a book.

Alexander led from fear: fear of the military, of his father’s fate, of his mother, and of his people, who were so often a mystery to him.

Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801, Napoleon attempted to pry him from his alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia and neutralize Russia as a player in the game for Europe. But Alexander, with his own ambitions for empire, eventually came to regard Napoleon as all the European monarchs did, as a usurper who had enslaved half of Europe and unsettled the rest. He turned down Napoleon’s proposals and joined forces with Austria for a climactic battle on December 2, 1805: Austerlitz.

Austerlitz was Napoleon’s apogee. There he faced highly rated generals and outthought them at every turn in a battle that unfolded so seamlessly it was as if he had written out the events in longhand the night before. His army proved to be deft and maneuverable, even swelled to the then-unprecedented size of 75,000 men (a figure that would be dwarfed by the Grande Armée in 1812). The emperor fought a new kind of warfare, emphasizing speed, concentrated power, surprise, and improvisation.

After another crushing victory over Russian forces at Friedland in June 1807, Napoleon and Alexander finally met at Tilsit the following month for a peace conference and the emperor laid siege to him as if he were a romantic conquest. The satanic elf that Alexander had been warned about turned out to be a fascinating charmer, a seducer of great intellectual skill and apparent honesty. Napoleon for his part allowed himself to believe that Alexander was a kindred soul, at least for his present purposes. “He is a truly handsome, good and youthful emperor,” he wrote, and the two spent nearly two weeks firming up their alliance.

The main result was the humiliation of Prussia, which was cut down to almost half its size, and an uneasy stalemate over Poland, which Alexander and the political class in Moscow had always considered to belong to the homeland. Napoleon wanted to keep Poland outside of Russian control, as a buffer against any ambitions Alexander might have on his empire. Not only that, he had proposed enlarging the grand duchy with the 1.3 million citizens of western Galicia. This would turn Poland into a significant nation-state and a staging ground for Napoleon’s armies.

Despite himself, Alexander was swayed by Napoleon and left Tilsit hopeful of a long-lasting alliance. But the return to Moscow dashed cold water in his face. Almost every segment of his power base was against the treaty—from his mother the empress, who hated Bonaparte to her marrow; to the business class, worried about French merchants expanding into their traditional markets in the Baltic; to the military elite, largely French-speaking but traumatized by two wars in which Napoleon had shredded their ranks. “Love for the Tsar has changed to something worse than hatred, to a kind of disgust,” wrote a Russian observer in his diary. There were warnings that Alexander would be assassinated like his despised father. A wave of Russification swept through the upper classes, with traditional arts and language finding a new popularity in the face of what was considered a French humiliation.

Napoleon’s true target in courting Alexander was, of course, England. He had contemplated an invasion of the British Isles almost as soon as he came to power, but the inherent difficulty of the enterprise, and the looming power of the Royal Navy, had foiled his plans at every turn. What he’d failed to do militarily he tried to do commercially with the Continental System, an economic blockade instituted in 1806 and adopted by Alexander’s Russia after the Tilsit conference. But the blockade was a failure. Smugglers carrying English goods regularly skirted the French authorities and their lackeys and did a booming business in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, often with the corrupt approval of Napoleon’s handpicked rulers. Even his brothers Joseph in Naples, Louis in Holland, and Jérôme in Westphalia, who had been placed on the throne by the emperor, allowed British merchant ships into their harbors to trade freely.

French manufacturers simply couldn’t supply the finished goods that England did. Russia was hit especially hard: its thriving export market in raw materials such as tallow, pitch, wood, corn, iron, and leather collapsed under Napoleon’s regime. England responded with its own blockade, a much more effective one, as it was enforced by the Royal Navy. Rich barons in Paris had to smuggle in tobacco and coffee, and even aristocratic families hung a single lump of sugar from their ceilings on a string and allowed their members only a single dunk of the sweetener into their coffee. In Hamburg, all but three of the city’s four hundred sugar factories closed as a result of the embargo, and one of Napoleon’s administrators there had to turn to England to get warm uniforms for the emperor’s troops, without which they would have “perished with the cold.” England had woven itself into the fabric of international life, and even Bonaparte couldn’t unravel its ties.

In December 1810, the young Tsar Alexander, under pressure from his merchants and after watching the value of the paper ruble fall 50 percent, opened Russian ports to ships from neutral countries (which were sure to be filled with British goods) and slapped steep tariffs on French luxury products. The Continental System was effectively dead in Moscow. The blockade was almost universally hated, but it was Napoleon’s only real weapon against En gland. If he let Russia openly flout the embargo, it would become an “absurdity,” in the emperor’s opinion. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Sooner or later we must encounter and defeat the Russians,” Napoleon had written as early as 1806, and now the case for him became even more pressing.

For his part, the tsar eventually saw Napoleon clearly, not as a monster or a soul mate (a notion he had briefly entertained) but as a conqueror who demanded obedience, pure and simple. Concessions on Poland and the embargo were Napoleon’s main demands now, and Alexander knew he couldn’t relent on the first issue. “The world is clearly not big enough for us,” he wrote in the buildup to the war, “to come to an understanding over that country.”

The emperor was intensely frustrated by Alexander’s stubbornness. From speaking of the young man as an underrated ruler, Napoleon began to revert to the old chestnuts of anti-Russian invective: Alexander was inscrutable, a Tatar, a barbarian. He repeated to his advisers ridiculous stories and accounts of conspiracies hatched by the Russian imperial court to overthrow or undermine him. Perhaps as in every war, the enemy used many of the same tropes in describing Napoleon, especially that of a barbarian.

But disillusionment with Alexander didn’t necessitate war with Russia. The tsar was flouting the embargo on English goods, but so were Napoleon’s own brothers. Poland was still securely in the French sphere, and Alexander had been sufficiently cowed by two defeats not to attempt anything in the near future. Still, Napoleon (like Alexander) had domestic concerns that would be alleviated by a new war: the nobles were pressing the emperor for reform, and a crop failure in 1811 had exacerbated tensions and depressed the economy. Fresh victories would turn the public’s mind away from the increasing authoritarianism of his rule.

There are a hundred theories as to why Napoleon began to contemplate war with Russia, from Freud’s speculation that he was driven by guilt over his recent divorce from the empress Josephine to mental complications from his declining health. Napoleon said that the speculation that swirled around him even during the lead-up was frivolous. “I care nothing for St-Cloud or the Tuileries,” he said of two of his magnificent residences. “It would matter little to me if they were burned down. I count my houses as nothing, women as nothing, my son as not very much. I leave one place, I go to another. I leave St-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to gratify myself, but out of dry calculation.” Dry calculation, of course, in the service of a fantastic ambition.

L
ETTERS FLEW BETWEEN
Paris and Moscow in 1810 and 1811, the tone getting progressively colder and more threatening. War drew closer and Alexander knew it was going to be costly. “It is going to cause torrents of blood to flow,” he wrote. In addition to the disagreement over the blockade, Alexander fumed at Napoleon’s refusal to divvy up the Ottoman Empire as promised; his installation in 1810 of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as king of Sweden, which Alexander viewed as an aggressive French threat on his border; and France’s swallowing up of the Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany, which was supposed to fall to Alexander’s brother-in-law. These actions inflamed age-old stereotypes of French arrogance and gave an increasingly hostile Alexander little room to maneuver with his nobles or military advisers. He felt that war was coming and that it would decide the fate of his empire.

France was already at war with Spain and England on the Iberian Peninsula, a vicious, seesaw campaign that gave birth to the concept of the guerrilla war. Spain had included some brilliant successes, but over the course of three years it had shown Napoleon’s weakness as a political strategist: he repeatedly concluded that the revolt had been quashed when it hadn’t, never comprehended the nationalistic fervor of the rebels, and failed, crucially, to set up an adequate supply system for his 350,000 troops. His “live off the land” philosophy had worked in the emperor’s blitzkrieg victories, but when extended over time, it led to an embittered populace, fueling the resistance.

The quagmire of Spain only made a fast victory in Russia seem more attractive. But this war would be different from all the other Continental campaigns Napoleon had fought: the musket cartridges that, as 1811 ended, were being packed into knapsacks from Brittany to Rome would be superseded by a force being carried to the battlefield by the soldiers themselves, secreted in the folds of their clothes. The killing agent that the scientists would discover two hundred years later in Vilnius was already present in the Grande Armée’s ranks.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     2

A Portable Metropolis

T
HE ARMY THAT THE EMPEROR MOBILIZED TO THREATEN
Russia was enormous: all told, 690,000 men were under arms, including reserves, of whom between 550,000 and 600,000 would actually cross the Niemen River into Russian territory. Over the corps of veterans had been layered green recruits, who would hopefully learn enough from their peers to make it to and then over the battlefields. It was a staggering collection of men from a dozen different nations and duchies and kingdoms, speaking a babel of languages, overseen by a legendary administration that could move semaphore signals at 120 miles per hour and staffed by veterans who had fed, clothed, and nursed Napoleon’s armies from Italy to Spain to Egypt.

As it assembled, the army and its trail of approximately 50,000 wives, whores, sutlers, and attendants represented more people than lived in the entire city of Paris. (To accomplish that today would take over 2.1 million men.) It formed the fifth-largest city in the world, after Tokyo and before Istanbul. The Grande Armée had become a portable metropolis, with its own courts of justice, its own criminals, its own hospitals and patois. The small mercenary armies that had fought in Europe at the service of kings for centuries were gone, replaced by a behemoth.

Most of the men were, unlike their mercenary predecessors, motivated to serve under Napoleon by more than compulsion or gold. It wasn’t a volunteer army by any means—Napoleon had sent teams to force French conscripts from their town halls and homes—but many of the men wanted to have an adventure, to squeeze some loot out of their enemies, to honor France or their own brief lives, or to write their name in glory on the battlefield. Napoleon guaranteed that one could burst from the ranks and become an officer for a single act of bravery, and that spoke to many of his soldiers.

The Grande Armée was divided into three components. The 250,000-strong First Army Group was made up of three battalions, along with the Imperial Guard and the cavalry. The Second and Third Army groups, totaling 315,000 men, would play a mainly supporting role, guarding supply lines, patrolling the rear, and being called on to reinforce depleted battalions.

Napoleon led the Imperial Guard of 50,000 handpicked troops known as the “immortals.” These were the reserves, to be utilized to tilt a battle at the crucial moment. The Imperial Guard, essential to the outcome of so many battles past and to come, were Napoleon’s elite: Each had to be able to read and write and stand above five foot six (in a time when most Frenchmen were closer to five feet). Each had served in at least three campaigns and bore the scars of at least two wounds. They looked the part of the military beau ideal in their two-foot shakos: mustached, young, and strapping.

If you wanted to find living, breathing examples of what changes Napoleon had wrought, you could do worse than look to the ranks of this army, especially the men who led them, his marshals. They were the new aristocracy. The title of “marshal” had existed before the Revolution as part of the vast system of favor currying and court intrigue that had so depressed the young Napoleon and his peers, but the emperor refashioned it into an order of real accomplishment, open to anyone. He named twenty-six marshals between 1804 and 1815. In Louis XVI’s time, many of them would have toiled away in obscurity. Under Napoleon, they made his army even more formidable. Among them, Davout, Murat, and Ney, along with General Junot, stand out.

Louis-Nicolas Davout was the exception among the four: he would most likely have played a leading role in the French army if Napoleon had never been born. A strict taskmaster and disciplinarian, he was descended from a blue-blooded line of patrician warriors that extended back to the Crusades. Known as the “Iron Marshal,” the balding general was the archetype of the committed professional soldier that forms the backbone of any great army. Many commanders envied him, as Davout had been the first among them to achieve fame in France. He was as hated for his perfectionism and his temper as he was admired, but his troops knew at least that he would see to their every need and would suffer every hardship they suffered. He commanded I Corps.

Joachim Murat was a different kind of personality entirely. He had grown up around horses, working in the stables of his father, a country innkeeper, until he was sent away to join the priesthood, a perfectly respectable career. But it was the wrong one for Murat, who with his almost feminine good looks and thirst for fame wanted a career in the cavalry. Murat ran away to join the King’s Chasseurs at the age of twenty and became Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Italian campaign. Dressed in his trademark outré costumes—scarlet thigh-high leather boots, a tunic made of cloth of gold, a sky blue jacket, and a sword belt crusted with diamonds was a typical combination—he consistently matched his daring on the field with an instinctive flair for tactics, especially in a brilliant flanking maneuver in Egypt that won him his own division. Napoleon once snapped at the young general, “You look like a clown,” but he favored boldness in his generals and Murat exemplified it.

Murat did lack Davout’s almost genetic loyalty to his leader. He had flirted with Josephine, and he was thrown into a fit of depression and jealousy when Napoleon failed to name him king of Spain, instead awarding him Naples. The former seminarian was a brilliant field leader but nakedly ambitious and often reckless to a dangerous degree. He commanded the Grande Armée’s cavalry units.

At the head of III Corps, Michel Ney was known even before Russia as “the Bravest of the Brave.” His father was a poor cooper who couldn’t afford to set him up in a profession, so Ney took up arms. Imperturbable, vulgar, badly educated, he rose by a native talent for battlefield strategy and sheer fearlessness. One of his typical exploits dated from 1799, when Ney entered a town occupied by enemy Austrian units disguised as a Prussian civilian. Wandering the streets, he took note of every guard post and every tent, then strolled back across the picket lines to plan his offensive. Had he been caught, he would have been executed as a spy, but Ney seemed indifferent to the danger. The outnumbered French regiment attacked the next day and took the town easily.

A peasant in the best sense, Ney was also difficult to command and sometimes rash in his hurry to engage the enemy, but the emperor couldn’t resist his toughness. “That man is a lion,” he remarked to his staff at the Battle of Friedland as Ney marched by with his troops. From the emperor, it was high praise.

One key player without a marshal’s baton was Jean-Andoche Junot, who had been with Napoleon from 1793, and had been seriously wounded in the head at Lonato in 1796. Erratic, fearless, and loyal, Junot hated the fact that he had never become a marshal. Some said that the head wound had altered his personality. But Napoleon stood by him. It would prove to be a risky decision.

The men Napoleon had assembled to lead the Grande Armée in Russia had all proved themselves in battle and believed in daring over caution. Napoleon had no pure theorists or rear-echelon generals in his key commands. His leaders had risen largely through their own instincts, and they, like their leader, loved risk. They were an apt expression of his reign, and no one had been able to match them.

T
HE MAKEUP OF DIFFERENT
units varied based on availability of men, casualties, illness, and the role of the particular force, but certain parameters were common throughout the Grande Armée. The smallest infantry unit was the company of 100-140 men. Six companies on average formed a battalion, which averaged around 600 men (but which could fluctuate down to 300 and up to 1,200). Four battalions made up a regiment of approximately 2,500 men. Two regiments on average made a division of 5,000 men or so, including an attached artillery unit. The largest force in the Russian campaign was the corps, made up of several divisions, allied with cavalry units and artillery.

The size of the corps varied from the 10,000-strong force under Prince Eugène, Napoleon’s stepson (from his marriage to Josephine) and ruler of Venice, to Murat’s 40,000 cavalrymen to Davout’s mammoth I Corps, which fielded 70,000 men at the start of the campaign, more troops than many armies had put into the field a generation before, and a force that underlined Napoleon’s confidence in the Iron Marshal. Attacks were most often carried out at the corps and division level, depending on how broad the field of battle was.

Napoleon was the undisputed head of the Grande Armée. Beneath him on the command chart was his chief of staff, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, who was closer to an exalted secretary, dispensing his orders and running the organization. Under Berthier were the marshals and a few high-ranking generals, each commanding one of the eleven corps put into the field. Each marshal or corps commander had a complete hierarchy under him: generals, majors, down to the commanders of the individual infantry battalions, artillery units, and cavalry regiments.

In all, Napoleon commanded 522,300 infantry, 94,000 cavalry, 47,000 artillery, and 21,000 miscellaneous troops. Some 449,000 of these were first-line troops intended for battle.

The deeper statistics were telling: Two-thirds of the troops were non-French. Napoleon had insisted that his allies bear a large share of the burden of his ambitions. That 80,000 were mounted on horseback indicated that Napoleon intended to strike fast and end the war quickly. (But with a sure hand—all the corps were commanded by French generals or marshals, apart from the Polish and Austrian forces.) The unprecedented size of the army meant not only that it would be a monumental task to keep it fed and organized, but that Napoleon, who had throughout his career maneuvered his regiments like an admiral commanding a fleet of highly maneuverable light cruisers, darting and speeding to arrive at an unexpected position at a crucial moment in time, was now at the helm of a massive and unwieldy ship.

These figures make Napoleon’s uncanny relationship with his soldiers even more impressive. Most of his troops, it has to be emphasized, were from nations
he had conquered by force.
The emperor had humiliated Austria in war after war, and yet its men fought for him; he had forced Holland to accept his brother Louis as its king (later to remove him), but the Dutch would have enthralling moments in Russia. Certainly he had coerced their leaders, but most of his troops ought to have been sabotaging him at every turn, or performing only well enough to avoid being shot for desertion. But they would fight, for the most part, like lions. It was as if, in 1945, General Patton had convinced the conquered Germans to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific. Very few leaders throughout history could have done it.

Some have suggested that the emperor’s army was, in fact,
too
large. Napoleon biographer Frank McLynn argues that Napoleon had become an expert in winning with armies of 100,000 troops, “which permitted the speed and flexibility that produced an Austerlitz.” McLynn suggests that Napoleon failed to do the correct math: increasing his army’s striking ability sixfold increased his command and supply problems not by a similar number but exponentially. “It was an impossible dream,” McLynn writes, “something impracticable before the advent of railways and telegraph.”

But had Napoleon begun with one-quarter of the force he assembled and not won a quick and devastating battle, the killing agent that would turn up in those bones in Vilnius, and which was already filtering through his ranks, would have quickly whittled those numbers down to a pittance. Each strategy, in retrospect, had its risk.

A
LEXANDER’S FRONTLINE FORCES
in the beginning numbered only about 162,000, giving the French a three-to-one advantage at the beginning of the war. His army was strong at the bottom, dissolute in the middle, and often chaotic at the top. The ordinary Russian soldier was typically poorly fed, poorly equipped, but decently trained and ferocious in battle, especially in a defensive posture. Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.

The officer corps was a glaring weakness. Officers gambled, whored, and drank when they should have been drilling their men. Commanders weren’t held to account for the performance of their troops or junior officers. They treated the common soldiers more like automatons or serfs they had inherited than men to be inspired and led.

And the Russian high command, although it contained some brilliant officers, was riven with dissension. “The headquarters of the Emperor were already overrun with distinguished idlers,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the brilliant German strategist attached to the Russian headquarters staff. Petty intrigues, nationalist posturing between the Russians and Germans and Austrian commanders, coteries and cliques all contributed to an atmosphere where decisions were made and unmade in hours. Alexander lacked the backbone to stop the intriguing that every general, sensing the chance to mold the tsar to his wishes, engaged in.