Napoleon and His Court by C. S. Forester

Author:C. S. Forester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Napoleon, biography
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1924-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

CAROLINE MURAT

(née BONAPARTE)

CHAPTER XII

STARS OF LESSER MAGNITUDE

‟BAD troops do not exist,” said Napoleon on one occasion. “There are only bad officers.” Napoleon did his best therefore to find good officers, and trusted that the rank and file would through them become good soldiers. And yet, was he successful either in his end or in his method? The army of 1796, which he did not train, was timid in retreat though terrible in advance. The men were fanatics, and similar strengths and weaknesses are typical of fanatics in large bodies. In 1800 Napoleon had an army which he could manœuvre in line, and which bore the dreadful strain of Marengo without breaking. Half the men in the ranks, however, were untrained boys, who, as Napoleon’s despatches tell us, were ignorant a few days before the battle as to which eye they should use to aim their muskets. Marengo was largely a personal triumph for Napoleon; it was his vehement encouragement, coupled with the confident expectation of Desaix’ arrival, which held the men together during that long-drawn agony.

The peace which followed Hohenlinden gave Napoleon a chance to train an army as he wished, and the Austerlitz campaign found him at the head of an army of two hundred thousand men, half of them veterans, all of them of very considerable length of service, who were to a man inspired with the utmost enthusiasm for him and for the Empire. Yet at Austerlitz the line was abandoned almost entirely in favour of the column; the columns showed evident signs of disintegration even when victorious. It was already a little obvious that the Imperial armies were only adapted to a furious offensive effort, and that failure of this effort meant unlimited catastrophe. At Jena the Prussians were too heavily outnumbered to offer any serious resistance, but at Eylau the French army was only saved from destruction after the failure of their first offensive by the fact that Napoleon held ready at hand eighteen thousand cavalry, and by the constitutional sluggishness of the Russian army.

Friedland offered the last example of a really heroic defensive by an Imperial force, but the soul of that defensive was Lannes. Few other men could have held a French army corps together against superior forces as did Lannes on that fateful anniversary of Marengo. After Friedland we find the French army growing progressively poorer and more unreliable. We read of panics at Wagram, of the introduction of regimental artillery to give the infantry confidence, of shameless skulking on the field of battle and of heavy desertion while on the march. Discipline was fading at the same time as devotion to the Emperor was losing some of its force. In the Russian campaign of 1812 the Grand Army had barely crossed the frontier before it began to go to pieces. Napoleon could not trust his men to manœuvre at Borodino, and in consequence he had to rely on frontal attacks made against elaborate fieldworks defended by the most stubborn of all Continental infantry.

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