The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David A. Bell

Author:David A. Bell [Bell, David A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

7

Days of Glory

Today . . . no government would dare say to its nation: Let us go conquer the world.

—BENJAMIN CONSTANT, 1813

I wanted to rule the world—who wouldn’t have, in my place?

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, TO BENJAMIN CONSTANT, 1815

Marengo, northern Italy. June 14, 1800. 5:00 P.M.

The day is turning into a disaster. On the flat, muddy plain of Bormida, forty-five miles north of Genoa, a well-drilled Austrian army is slowly and methodically pushing Napoleon Bonaparte toward defeat. As France’s First Consul, he is wearing, under his gray topcoat, a sumptuous dark blue uniform trimmed with gold leaf and is carrying a heavy ceremonial sword with a hilt elegantly sculpted into twin lions’ heads. But the splendor cannot distract him from the fact that he has made a dreadful mistake. Thinking that a confrontation with the Austrian army of General Michael Melas was days off, he has spread his army thinly across the plain and dispatched his best subordinate, Louis Desaix, southward with six thousand men to block Melas’s escape route. Even after the Austrians came across the Bormida River in force in the morning, it took Napoleon more than an hour to realize that the attack was not a mere feint. Now he is feeling the lack of men with desperate intensity. A note he has scribbled to Desaix reads: “For God’s sake, come up if you still can.”

His soldiers are exhausted and dangerously demoralized. In the French ninety-sixth demi-brigade, the grenadiers can barely see each other in the smoke. Despite rain the day before, the artillery has set the wheat fields on fire, and cartridge boxes left on the ground are exploding, sending shockwaves of panic through the ranks. No reinforcements have come in hours, and so the ammunition is running out. Worse, the French musket barrels are so hot from repeated firing that they can’t be loaded without the risk of exploding in their owners’ faces. In desperation, the soldiers are using a classic remedy: opening their trousers and urinating into the guns to cool them. But one powerful Austrian cavalry charge may be all that is needed at this point to break the French lines and turn a measured retreat into a rout.

And what then? Possibly, Napoleon can regroup and beat Melas elsewhere. But at this moment, here at Marengo, with Melas already accepting a round of applause from his staff officers, things look distinctly unpromising. Just ten days ago, the last French satellite state in Italy, the “Ligurian Republic” of Genoa, fell to the Austrians. All Napoleon’s earlier gains in the country have been wiped out. If he is decisively beaten at Marengo, he will look dangerously like yesterday’s man. Other generals are waiting for news and gently casting exploratory lures into the cloudy and treacherous waters of Parisian politics. Will Napoleon survive any better in these waters than Louis XVI or Robespierre?

But now, with the late spring sun still high, comes the first hint of deliverance. Desaix is back. Indeed, he had turned his troops around even

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