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‘Artillery should always be placed in the most advantageous positions, and as far as possible in the front of the line of cavalry and infantry, without compromising the safety of the guns.’

Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 54

‘To cannon, all men are equal.’

Napoleon to General Bertrand, April 1819

‘The Court of Vienna is behaving very badly,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph from Valladolid on January 15, 1809, ‘it may have cause to repent. Don’t be uneasy. I have enough troops, even without touching my army in Spain, to get to Vienna in a month . . . In fact, my mere presence in Paris will reduce Austria to her usual irrelevance.’¹ He did not know at that stage that Austria had already received a large British subsidy to persuade her to fight what would become the War of the Fifth Coalition. Archduke Charles had been putting all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five into uniform in the new Landwehr militia, some of whose units were indistinguishable from the regular army. He had used the period since Austerlitz to impose deep-seated reforms on the Austrian army, streamlining command structures, improving service conditions, simplifying drill movements, introducing the Bataillonsmasse method of protecting infantry against cavalry through making squares more solid, abolishing regimental guns to provide a larger artillery reserve, modifying skirmishing tactics, raising nine Jäger regiments (one-third rifle-armed) – and, above all, adopting the corps system. The archduke had co-written a book on military strategy in 1806, Grundsätze der Kriegkunst für die Generale (The Art of War for Generals), and meant to put his ideas to the test.

When in April 1807 Talleyrand had suggested to Napoleon that Austria should be encouraged to love (aimer) France and her successes, Napoleon had replied, ‘Aimer: I don’t really know what this means when applied to politics.’² It was true; his view of international affairs was largely self-interested, based on the assumption that states were in continual competition. Napoleon understood that Austria wanted revenge for the humiliations of Mantua, Marengo, Campo Formio, Lunéville, Ulm, Austerlitz and Pressburg, but he felt she would be foolish to go to war with only Britain and Sicily as allies, especially when Britain offered no troops. By contrast, Napoleon led a coalition that included Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Naples, Holland, Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Westphalia. ‘Prussia is destroyed,’ said Metternich, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, summing up the prevailing situation, ‘Russia is an ally of France, France the master of Germany.’³ Despite it being an inopportune time for Austria to declare war, they did, in yet another attempt to win back their position in Italy and Germany. It was precisely because there was no long period of peace after 1805 that the European Powers were able to wear France down, and much of the credit for that must go to Austrian persistence.

Once he was certain of his intelligence, Napoleon made a lightning dash from Valladolid to Paris. Galloping with Savary, Duroc, Roustam, an aide-de-camp and a small detachment of chasseurs, he covered the 70 miles to Burgos in four hours, much of it through guerrilla country. Thiébault saw him riding past his carriage ‘simultaneously lashing the horse of his aide-de-camp and digging the spurs into his own’.⁴ He left at 7 a.m. on January 17 and was back in Paris by 8 a.m. on the 23rd, having covered more than 600 miles in six days, an extraordinary feat. ‘While all the cabinets of the Allied powers believed he was engaged in operations in the north of Spain,’ recorded General Dumas, ‘he had returned to the centre of the empire, was organising another great army . . . surprising by this incredible activity those who expected to surprise him.’⁵ Napoleon later contrasted the campaigning in Spain and Austria, describing the Austrians to Davout as ‘a nation so good, so reasonable, so cold, so tolerant, so far removed from all excesses that there is not an example of a single Frenchman having been assassinated during the war in Germany’, whereas the Spanish were fanatics.⁶

As soon as he was in Paris, Napoleon ordered the legislature, a now emasculated body that sat for a total of only four months in 1809 and 1810, to call up the 1810 conscription class a year early, allowing him to mobilize 230,000 troops, the largest army he had ever commanded. In addition to keeping him extremely well informed about Austrian intentions and actions – Francis had taken the decision to go to war on December 23 and confirmed it in February – Napoleon’s spy network had also warned him of a dangerous rapprochement between Talleyrand and Fouché, who had long been sworn enemies but who were now plotting to put Murat on the French throne if Napoleon was killed in Spain. Lavalette’s interceptions of letters between Fouché’s and Talleyrand’s friends, supported by information that Eugène passed on, told Napoleon all he needed to know. On the afternoon of Saturday, January 28 he summoned Cambacérès, Lebrun, Decrès, Fouché and Talleyrand to his office at the Tuileries to deliver a diatribe against the last two that continued either for half an hour (according to Pasquier, who heard about it from Madame de Rémusat, who was told by Talleyrand) or two hours (according to Mollien, who wasn’t present but knew everyone involved).

Napoleon complained that Fouché and Talleyrand had criticized the Spanish campaign in the salons, despite the fact that it was going relatively well – Soult had forced the British off the peninsula from Corunna, killing Sir John Moore on January 16. They had also conspired against Joseph’s succession to the throne by promoting Murat, which meant they had broken their oath of allegiance to him. ‘Why,’ Napoleon concluded, addressing Talleyrand, ‘you are nothing but a shit in silk stockings.’⁷ Talleyrand remained perfectly calm, listening ‘with apparent insensibility’, and confined himself to telling a friend later on, ‘What a pity that such a great man should be so ill bred.’⁸ Two days after the interview Napoleon dismissed Talleyrand as Vice-Grand Elector, but allowed him to retain his other titles and rank and, inexplicably, didn’t exile him. Fouché kept his ministry as well. Soon afterwards, Metternich paid a ‘Monsieur X’ between 300,000 and 400,000 francs for detailed information about the French order of battle; Talleyrand is considered the prime suspect.⁹

Metternich remained in Paris until the last possible moment before requesting his passports, perhaps in order to continue gathering secret intelligence from ‘Monsieur X’. As usual, Napoleon gave his enemy dire warnings of the consequences of going to war. When he saw Metternich just prior to the rupture of diplomatic relations on March 23, he asked:

Were you bitten by a tarantula? What’s threatening you? Who do you resent? You still want to set fire to the world? Why? When I had my army in Germany, you didn’t find your existence threatened, but now it’s in Spain you find it compromised! There’s some strange reasoning. What will result? I’m going to arm because you are arming; because finally I have something to fear, and it pays to be cautious.¹⁰

Metternich protested in suave diplomatic language but Napoleon cut in: ‘Where do your concerns come from? If it’s you, monsieur, who have communicated them to your Court, speak, I’ll give all the explanations you need to reassure it . . . Monsieur, I was always duped in all my transactions with your Court; we have to talk straight.’¹¹ As with the Wars of the Third and Fourth Coalitions, Napoleon did not want or need this conflict, and was vocal in his desire to avoid it. Yet he once again wasn’t willing to make any compromises to prevent it, since he was confident he would win. On March 9 alone he sent twenty-nine letters preparing for the coming clash.*

 • • •

Archduke Charles’s plan was to lead eight corps into Bavaria, while simultaneously sending one into Poland and two into Italy. He hoped for a declaration of war from Prussia and significant revolts against Napoleon’s rule across Germany, but when it became clear that neither would be forthcoming he switched his main effort south of the Danube, to cover Vienna and liaise with his forces in Italy. This led to extreme disorder in the army as units crossed and re-crossed the region, and the loss of precious time. When Saragossa finally fell on February 20, after an heroic resistance, Joseph was re-established in Madrid two days later, and Napoleon could concentrate fully on the threat to his ally Bavaria.

By March 30 Napoleon had set out his entire strategy for Berthier, whom he put in command of the Army of Germany until he could arrive in person, knowing he could not give either Davout or Masséna command over the other, since both were proud, successful, senior marshals who thought themselves equals. A huge bataillon carré was to be put in place, to lure the Austrians into a gigantic trap when they launched their offensive, which was expected some time after April 15. In the vanguard, along the Isar river, was Lefebvre’s Bavarian corps of three divisions under Prince Louis of Bavaria, Prince Carl-Philipp Wrede and Count Bernard Deroy, with General Jean-Baptiste Drouet (later Comte d’Erlon) its chief-of-staff. Lefebvre would be joined by Lannes’ corps once that great fighter had returned from Spain. On the left between Bayreuth and Nuremberg was Davout’s large corps of three infantry divisions plus one new reserve and one new German division, the 2nd Heavy Cavalry Division and a light cavalry brigade, some 55,000 men and 60 guns in all. On the right was Oudinot’s corps of infantry and light cavalry at Pfaffenhoffen. Masséna’s corps formed the rearguard around Augsburg. The Cavalry Reserve under Bessières, consisting of two light and two heavy divisions, and the Imperial Guard and Vandamme’s Württembergers were formed up at Strasbourg. In total, the Army of Germany numbered 160,000 men and 286 guns, the corps within relatively short marching distances of each other, with Ratisbon (present-day Regensburg) as the central pivot of their deployment. Should the Austrians attack before April 15, Napoleon ordered Berthier to concentrate instead between Augsburg and Donauwörth.

In reply to Napoleon’s request for aid against Austria under the terms of the Erfurt Convention, Tsar Alexander sent 70,000 men under Prince Golitsyn, but they managed to cross the border into Austrian Galicia near Lemberg only on May 22 and thereafter avoided all contact with the enemy; they suffered just two casualties throughout the entire campaign.¹² The Austrians therefore had to divert the minimum resources to the east, and were able to concentrate almost everything against Napoleon, to his deep ire.

Austria formally declared war on France and Bavaria on April 3, and Archduke Charles (though he was personally opposed to the declaration, thinking that war came too early) issued a martial proclamation to the Austrian people on the 6th.* Four days later, 127,000 Austrians crossed the River Inn and entered Bavaria, but instead of showing the speed Archduke Charles had hoped for, they were slowed down by bad weather to 6 miles a day and reached the Isar only on the 15th, the same day that Austria also invaded the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. The opening moves of the French campaign were badly bungled by Berthier, who misunderstood Napoleon’s orders and panicked when the Austrians attacked five days earlier than expected. On April 14 he sent Davout’s corps to concentrate on Ratisbon rather than Augsburg and he dispersed the army along the River Lech, 52,300 troops to the north of it and 68,700 south, many of whom were out of marching range of each other, while a concentrated mass of Austrians descended on Landshut. Calm returned to the Donauwörth headquarters only when Napoleon – having been warned by telegraph on April 12 that the Austrians had crossed the Inn – arrived five days later.* ‘Soldiers!’ he proclaimed. ‘I arrive in the midst of you with the rapidity of the eagle.’¹³

‘Berthier had lost his head when I reached the seat of war,’ Napoleon later recalled.¹⁴ It was true, but as soon as he arrived in Donauwörth and discovered how badly dispersed his forces were he recognized the Austrian attack on Landshut to be both a threat and an opportunity: his corps could now converge on Archduke Charles from several directions at once. Masséna and Oudinot were ordered to advance on Landshut to threaten enemy lines of communication; Vandamme and Lefebvre were sent to Abensberg; Davout was ordered to rejoin the main army, which involved a tough 80-mile march, leaving a garrison of the 65th Line under his cousin, Colonel Baron Louis Coutard, to hold the bridge at Ratisbon. So important were these orders that Napoleon sent four aides-de-camp with each, rather than the usual three. Masséna was ordered to push forward quickly to Pfaffenhoffen and attack the enemy’s flank, while making sure that Augsburg was kept as an impregnable base of operations.

By April 18 the Austrians found themselves not pursuing a retreating enemy, as they had imagined they would be, but instead facing a resurgent one. Napoleon was on the road to Ingolstadt with Lannes at his side, encouraging his German troops as he passed them. A colonel of the Austrian general staff was captured during the day and brought before Napoleon for questioning. When he refused to answer, the Emperor said, ‘Don’t worry, sir, I know everything anyway,’ and he then quickly and accurately described the locations of all the Austrian corps and even the regiments facing him. ‘With whom have I the honour of speaking?’ asked the impressed Austrian. ‘At this,’ recalled Chlapowski, ‘the Emperor inclined himself forward, touched his hat and replied “Monsieur Bonaparte”.’¹⁵ (The colonel must have been spectacularly unobservant, because, as Chlapowski noted, throughout the interview the French infantry were crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as they marched past.)

That evening Napoleon wrote to Masséna explaining that Charles ‘has debouched from Landshut upon Ratisbon with three corps, estimated at 80,000 strong. Davout, leaving Ratisbon, is marching towards Neustadt . . . the enemy is lost if your corps, debouching before daybreak by way of Pfaffenhoffen, falls upon the rear of Archduke Charles. Between the 18th, 19th and 20th, therefore, all the affairs of Germany will be settled.’ In his own handwriting, Napoleon wrote a postscript that read: ‘Activité, activité, vitesse! Je me recommande à vous.’ (Activity, activity, speed! I’m counting on you.)¹⁶ Masséna replied by promising to march through the night if necessary, and was as good as his word; his bravery and tenacity during this campaign were extraordinary. Archduke Charles, who had received reports that Davout had come south of the Danube with some 30,000 men, wanted to destroy his corps in isolation from the rest of Napoleon’s army, rather as Bennigsen had hoped to do to Lannes at Friedland. He had clearly forgotten what Davout’s corps had managed to achieve on its own at Auerstädt three years before.

The first real encounter of the campaign the following day set the pattern for the rest of it when Davout managed to escape destruction at Archduke Charles’s hands in the villages of Teugen and Hausen below the Danube and to join Napoleon safely. Under lowering skies, two forces, equally uncertain of each other, collided in hilly country, where the Austrians fought in a slow and rigid fashion while Davout’s veterans manoeuvred with skill. The Austrians withdrew east after their failure, allowing Napoleon to organize a pursuit. On the same day, Lefebvre won a clash at Arnhofen, and Montbrun won at Schneidhart. Although Charles had 93,000 men in the field to Napoleon’s 89,000, the initiative now very much lay with the Franco-Bavarians.

Napoleon’s plan was to cut off Charles’s line of retreat to Vienna and trap him in Bavaria. With Davout on his left, Lefebvre and Lannes in the centre, and Oudinot on the right, Napoleon ordered Masséna to send help towards Abensberg but to direct his main force towards Landshut, to strike against the enemy lines of communication. On April 20 Colonel Coutard hid his colours and surrendered Ratisbon. Heavily outnumbered, he had held out for over twenty-four hours and caused twice as many casualties as his force had suffered. That same day, Napoleon had launched a sustained offensive along a wide front in a series of hamlets south of the Danube, 20 miles east of Ingolstadt. He had been up at 3 a.m., sending orders to Lefebvre, Masséna and Vandamme, and by 6.30 he, Lannes and Bessières were riding for Abensberg. On a hillside later called the Napoleonshöhe* outside the town, Napoleon delivered this stirring declaration to the officers of the Bavarian corps, translated for him by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and published as an Order of the Day:

Bavarian soldiers! I do not come to you as a French emperor, but as Protector of your country and the Confederation of the Rhine. Today you will fight alone against the Austrians. No French serve in your front ranks; I am entirely confident in your bravery. For two hundred years, Bavarian flags, protected by France, have resisted Austria. We are going to Vienna, where we will know how to punish Austria for the harm she has so often done to your country. Austria wants to partition your country and disband your units and distribute you among their regiments. Bavarians! This war is the last you will fight against your enemies; attack them with the bayonet and annihilate them!¹⁷

He then launched attacks along two axes, one south-eastwards from Abensberg and Peissing towards Rohr and Rottenburg, and a second one south-eastwards from Biburg to Pfeffenhausen. The well-placed and equally numerous Austrians fought well for most of the day, but once Napoleon knew that his left under Lannes was making progress he rode forward from the Napoleonshöhe to oversee it.

After the battle, the chef d’escadron of the 2nd Chasseurs à Cheval presented Napoleon with two captured Austrian flags, the first of the campaign, with blood pouring from his face from a sabre slash. Napoleon asked his name, which was the splendid one of Dieudonné Lion. ‘I will remember you and you will be grateful,’ Napoleon told him, ‘you are well marked.’ Months later, when Berthier suggested a man to fill a vacancy in the Guard chasseurs, Napoleon demurred, saying he wanted to give the promotion to Lion.

Napoleon believed he was pursuing the main body of the enemy towards Landshut, whereas in fact Archduke Charles was heading for Ratisbon. Two large Austrian columns under Baron Johann von Hiller converged on Landshut, creating a vast traffic jam near the two bridges. The French artillery under General Jacques de Lauriston (who, like many of Napoleon’s senior commanders, had been taken from Spain) was deployed on the ridge between Altdorf and Ergolding and poured fire into the crowded town. (Standing on the bridge at Landshut today one can see in how few places the Austrians could have organized counter-fire.) Once the Austrians were over the bridge they tried to burn it, but the flames were doused by a persistent rain. At 12.30 p.m. Napoleon turned to his aide-de-camp General Georges Mouton and said: ‘Put yourself at the head of that column, and carry the town.’¹⁸

It must have seemed like a death sentence at the time, but Mouton led his grenadiers in a charge, covered by heavy musket fire from the island banks. His sappers smashed the town gates with axes, and men of the 13th Légère joined the attack, as did three battalions and two squadrons of Bavarians and some Württembergers, so that by 1 p.m. Landshut had fallen. Archduke Charles lost nearly 5,000 men, 11 guns and all his baggage-train, amounting to 226 wagons.¹⁹ Napoleon later gave Mouton a magnificent painting of the action at the bridge, and made an uncharacteristically weak pun about his ‘sheep’ (mouton) being a lion. ‘This keepsake from Napoleon was worth more than the highest eulogies,’ said another aide-de-camp of the picture, and by the end of the campaign Mouton had been made the Comte de Lobau.²⁰*

Just as in 1806, Napoleon discovered only after the battle that Davout, the ‘Iron Marshal’, had been facing the main body of the enemy, this time at Laichling, where he had managed to hold off Archduke Charles. Davout sent Napoleon four messages from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 21, telling him that Charles was bringing up his reserves for a major counter-attack. From 2 a.m. on the 22nd Napoleon exploded into activity, ordering Lannes, Vandamme and Saint-Sulpice with 20,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry to go north as soon as possible. Oudinot and the rest of the Bavarians were already under orders to join Davout, so within an hour Napoleon had 50,000 infantry, 14,000 cavalry and 114 guns closing in on Archduke Charles.

On the 22nd, Napoleon fought Charles at the battle of Eggmühl, the culmination of the Landshut Manoeuvre, where the corps system once again brought victory. Davout’s corps had fixed the 54,000 Austrians and 120 guns, but Charles delayed his attack until General Johann Kollowrath’s corps had arrived from Ratisbon 15 miles to the north, giving Napoleon time to rush Lannes and Masséna 25 miles up from Landshut to relieve Davout. When Charles saw Bavarian and Württemberger cavalry arriving on the field, forcing one of his divisions back onto the heights behind the town, he called off the whole assault. Napoleon arrived on the battlefield with Lannes’ and Masséna’s corps soon after 2 p.m. and fell on the enemy’s left. Victory was won with Austrian losses of over 4,100 and 39 guns to Napoleon’s 3,000 men. He made Davout the Prince d’Eckmühl shortly afterwards.

‘With the army I generally travelled in a carriage during the day with a good, thick pelisse on, because night is the time when a commander-in-chief should work,’ Napoleon said years later. ‘If he fatigues himself uselessly during the day, he will be too tired to work in the evening . . . If I had slept the night before Eggmühl I could never have executed that superb manoeuvre, the finest I ever made . . . I multiplied myself by my activity. I woke up Lannes by kicking him repeatedly; he was so sound asleep.’²¹ Napoleon was more fond of Lannes than of any other marshal – after the death of Desaix, Lannes and Duroc were his closest friends – and accepted teasing from him that he wouldn’t from others. Lannes went so far as to say ‘that he was to be pitied for having such an unhappy passion for this harlot [cette catin]’, that is, Napoleon. As Chaptal recalled: ‘The Emperor laughed at these jokes because he knew that he would always find the marshal there for him when he needed him.’²²

 • • •

The French victory at Eggmühl forced the Austrians to fall back to Ratisbon in some disorder hoping to escape across the Danube. Reaching Ratisbon on April 23, Napoleon ruled out a siege as taking too long, and instead insisted on storming the town by escalade – ladders placed twenty paces apart against the wall – which was achieved at the third attempt. The strong 30-foot-wide stone bridge was Charles’s only line of escape. It was – and is – one of the great bridges over the Danube, with six big stone pillars, and it would have been hard to destroy by cannon-fire. Charles was about to cross it to safety, but lost a further 5,000 men and 8 guns doing so. Near where the railway line is today Napoleon was hit in the right ankle by a spent bullet, which caused a contusion. He sat on a drum as the wound was dressed by Yvan, and a hole was cut in his boot so that it wouldn’t hurt too much when he was riding.²³ So as not to demoralize the troops, the instant his wound was dressed he ‘rode down the front of the whole line, amid loud cheers’.²⁴ Later in the battle he said, ‘Doesn’t it seem as though the bullets are reconnoitring us?’²⁵ On May 6 he reassured Josephine, ‘The bullet which touched me did not wound me. It barely shaved my Achilles tendon.’²⁶

After the battle of Ratisbon, a grognard asked Napoleon for the cross of the Légion d’Honneur, claiming that he had given him a watermelon at Jaffa when it ‘was so terribly hot’. Napoleon refused him on such a paltry pretext, at which the veteran added indignantly, ‘Well, don’t you reckon seven wounds received at the bridge of Arcole, at Lodi and Castiglione, at the Pyramids, at Acre, Austerlitz, Friedland; eleven campaigns in Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Poland . . .’ at which a laughing emperor cut him short and made him a chevalier of the Légion with a 1,200-franc pension, fastening the cross on his breast there and then. ‘It was by familiarities of this kind that the Emperor made the soldiers adore him,’ noted Marbot, ‘but it was a means available only to a commander whom frequent victories had made illustrious: any other general would have injured his reputation by it.’²⁷

Victories were rarely more frequent than over the four consecutive days of Abensberg, Landshut, Eggmühl and Ratisbon. On the 24th the army rested, and the Emperor interviewed some of his officers. Captain Blaze recorded Napoleon’s conversation with a colonel who had clearly mastered his regimental rolls:

‘How many men present under arms?’

‘Sire, eighty-four.’

‘How many conscripts of this year?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘How many soldiers who have served four years?’

‘Sixty-five.’

‘How many wounded yesterday?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘And killed?’

‘Ten.’

‘With the bayonet?’

‘Yes, Sire.’

‘Good.’²⁸

It was considered bravest of all to fight with the bayonet, and after an action on May 3 Napoleon was delighted that the bravest soldier in the 26th Légère actually bore the name Carabinier-Corporal Bayonnette, whom he made a chevalier of the Légion with a pension.²⁹

When Napoleon reached the gates of Vienna on May 10, 1809, his Polish aide-de-camp Adam Chlapowski

saw a sight that I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. Even then I found it hard to believe. The city walls were not crowded, but there were still a good many well-to-do inhabitants on the ramparts. The Emperor rode right up to the glacis, so only a ditch ten yards wide separated him from these people. When they recognized him, from the last time he had been there, in 1805, they all took off their hats, which I suppose could be expected, and then began cheering, which seemed unnecessary and less fitting to me . . . When I expressed my surprise to some French officers, they assured me that they had seen and heard exactly the same thing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1806.³⁰

Napoleon spent half an hour riding around the defences of Vienna ‘and from time to time raised his hat in response to the cheering, just as if he were riding around Paris’. He had an escort of only twenty-five men riding with him. Turning towards Schönbrunn Palace outside the city, where he was staying as he had in 1805, he told Chlapowski: ‘A bed will already be made up for you there. You’ve spent so many nights on horseback, it’s time you had a rest courtesy of the Emperor Francis.’³¹

After a very brief bombardment, Vienna surrendered to Napoleon at 2 a.m. on May 13, by which time the Archduke Charles – having destroyed all the bridges – was on the right bank of the Danube, which had a very different, far wilder watercourse than today’s calm and heavily canalized river. ‘The princes of this House have abandoned their capital,’ Napoleon declared in a proclamation that day, ‘not like soldiers of honour who cede to the circumstances and setbacks of the war, but like the perjured who are pursued by their own remorse.’³² Yet while he didn’t mind rebuking the Habsburgs, he didn’t want to alienate the Viennese, who had promised to police the city themselves. ‘All stragglers who under the pretext of fatigue have left their units to maraud,’ he ordered on the 14th, ‘shall be rounded up, tried by summary provost courts, and executed within the hour.’³³ Each column had a tribunal set up to punish pillaging.

Napoleon’s men spent three days constructing a bridge of boats downstream from Vienna which he could cross to attack the Austrian army. At 5 p.m. on May 18, General Gabriel Molitor’s infantry division started to traverse the Danube by boat. They made it only to the two-mile-wide Lobau Island, from which they began to build more substantial bridges onto the opposite bank. Napoleon has been criticized subsequently for not having built sufficiently strong bridges, but there were few specialist engineers in his army, it was a fast-flowing river, and the Austrians kept floating trees and other detritus downstream – on one occasion an entire dismantled watermill – to damage them.

Once again, as at Austerlitz and in Poland, Napoleon was at the end of a very long supply line, deep inside enemy territory, fighting an opponent who hadn’t sued for peace when his capital had fallen. An Austrian army under Archduke Johann von Habsburg – Emperor Francis and Archduke Charles’s younger brother – was now coming back from Italy, after having been defeated by Eugène at the battle of the Piave river on May 8. The Tyrol was in revolt against Bavaria under its charismatic leader Andreas Hofer. There was discontent among Germans who resented French hegemony, and Archduke Charles’s strategy seemed to be designed to deny Napoleon a decisive battle. Yet on the late afternoon of the 19th a bridge 825 yards long, built on eighty-six boats and nine rafts, spanned the Danube, and by noon the next day the army was crossing over to Lobau Island in force. Another bridge, 100 yards long resting on fifteen captured pontoons and three trestles, stretched to the opposite bank. It looked decidedly rickety, but Napoleon decided to risk a crossing.

 • • •

The villages of Aspern and Essling lie 3 miles apart on the north-eastern side of the Danube 22 miles east of Vienna. At midnight on May 20, Masséna climbed the church tower at Aspern and, seeing relatively few campfires, informed Napoleon that the Austrians were retreating, whereas in fact they were forming up to attack. It was the same mistake that Murat had made on the morning of Eylau. Napoleon crossed at dawn on Sunday, May 21, and, showing characteristic foresight, immediately ordered that the defences of the bridgehead be improved. Unfortunately, Masséna had failed to fortify Aspern properly, probably considering it unnecessary if Archduke Charles was withdrawing. By 8 a.m. it became very clear that he wasn’t.

In 1809, Aspern consisted of 106 two-storey houses with walled gardens running east–west along two roads with a handful of traverse streets, a church and cemetery with a chest-high wall (the church houses today’s museum), a solid vicarage and a large garden on a slight rise at its western end. An earth bank lined the road to Essling – and still does – which in turn had fifty-six houses in two groups on either side of the village square, and a large granary with 3-foot-thick stone walls. Napoleon intended to use these two villages and the road between them as bastions, while developing his attack across the Marchfeld plain beyond. The plain was so flat that it had been used by the Austrian army as a parade-ground.

The Danube had risen 3 feet overnight and by 10 a.m. the northernmost boat-bridge had been smashed by a laden barge. The French repaired it in time for General Jean d’Espagne’s heavy cavalry to get across, walking over by dismounted squadrons. Napoleon, just east of Aspern, considered retreating when he learned about the damage to the bridge, since one of the cardinal laws of war is never to fight with a river to one’s back, but his generals (except the silent Berthier) assured him they could hold the ground. At 1 p.m. he heard that a large Austrian army was on its way across the Marchfeld, something he might have been aware of earlier had his light cavalry’s intelligence gathering not been disrupted by Austrian skirmishers. The numbers involved were daunting: some 37,000 Austrians attacked on Sunday May 21 and the next day 85,000 with 292 guns. Some 30,000 Frenchmen had crossed on Sunday and 20,000 more on Monday, but they had only 58 guns.³⁴ If Davout’s corps had managed to get across the Danube, those unpromising ratios would have been more even, but the state of the bridges now precluded that.

The first clashes came between 1 and 2 p.m. at Aspern, where 5,000 French defenders had to fend off vastly more attackers. French artillery punished the attacking columns and a battalion of the 67th Line stood up behind the cemetery walls and delivered a crushing volley. But the Austrians came on relentlessly, and savage fighting developed in the village streets. Dense clouds of smoke from gunfire added to the grimness of the struggle. After 3 p.m. a ninety-gun Austrian battery further blasted the village, sweeping away the outer barricades.

Napoleon followed the battle’s progress sitting on a drum in a little hollow near where the Aspern Tileworks is today, about halfway between the two villages. He ordered Bessières to use four divisions to secure the centre – a role similar to that of Murat at Eylau – which was achieved in four major cavalry charges. As the charges went forward, Napoleon massed his artillery to help defend Aspern by punishing Austrian cavalry that came too close. By 4.30 p.m. an Austrian attack of three columns after a major bombardment forced the defenders out of the church and cemetery. An hour later Legrand’s division was ordered in, and the 26th Légère and 18th Line recaptured Aspern, but half an hour later Archduke Charles himself accompanied a six-battalion attack, with thirteen more in support, crying: ‘For the Fatherland! Forward courageously!’ (It was said he carried a flag himself, but he later denied this.) The church and cemetery were stormed as the village caught fire and the French pulled out.

Despite several further bridge collapses, General Claude Carra Saint-Cyr of Masséna’s 4th Corps – no relation to Gouvion Saint-Cyr – managed to get his division across the Danube and rush to Aspern, retaking the southern edge of the village. The fighting went on until 9 p.m. Some 8,000 Austrian and 7,000 French spent the night there, as the bridge was repaired yet again by 10 p.m. Fourteen Guard battalions, Lannes’ corps and enough guns to give Napoleon a total of 152 now managed to cross the Danube, but still not Davout’s corps. The Austrians had attacked the village of Essling and its near-impregnable granary (where one can still see the bullet holes in the wooden door) at 4.40 p.m. Lannes personally supervised the defences – cutting loopholes, sighting batteries, barricading streets, crenellating walls – until the fighting there ceased at 11 p.m.

The second day began at 3.30 a.m. when Masséna’s 18th and 4th Line crashed into Aspern and charged in column up the two main streets, supported by the 26th Légère and 46th Line, and the Baden Jägers. Most of the village was regained by 4 a.m., though not the church. Fighting carried on at sunrise, and at 7 a.m. Masséna reported to Napoleon that he had the whole village back after seeing it change hands four times, although by 11 a.m. the Austrians had regained most of it again. At Essling, the Young Guard pushed into the village just in time to stop it falling.

Between 6 and 7 a.m. Napoleon was ready to launch a major three-divisional attack in close battalion columns. Lannes went in on the right with Saint-Hilaire’s division, Oudinot was in the centre and General Jean Tharreau on the left. Behind them were General Antoine de Lasalle’s light cavalry and Nansouty’s heavy cavalry. Though covered by an early-morning fog, the massed Austrian artillery punished them terribly. Immense courage was shown. At one point Saint-Hilaire had the 105th Line bayonet-charge a regiment of Austrian cuirassiers, forcing them back onto the reserve grenadiers behind them. By 9 a.m. the French were low on ammunition, since wagons couldn’t cross the bridge, and the attack stalled after Saint-Hilaire – who had been promised a marshal’s baton – lost his foot to a cannonball (he died fifteen days later when the wound went gangrenous).

With the bridge down again and Charles bringing up a huge battery in the centre, making further French attacks there impossible, Napoleon began considering the complexities of a full-scale retreat over the makeshift bridges, sending word to Lannes to wind down the attack. Lannes got his battalions into two lines of squares and they fell back with remarkable discipline, as if on parade. In the course of the withdrawal, Oudinot’s entire staff was killed or wounded, and he himself picked up yet another wound. Napoleon had to refuse the suicidal request of General Dorsenne, who had had no fewer than three horses shot from under him, to attack the enemy guns with the Old Guard.

By 3 p.m. Austrian grenadiers had taken most of Essling except the granary, which was held by General Jean Boudet. When Napoleon personally ordered the Old Guard to the left of Essling to check an advance by Archduke Charles, the soldiers insisted that he retire to safety before they attacked. It was just as well, as one in four men were killed or wounded in the ensuing fight. Masséna led three battalions of the Young Guard on foot into Aspern at 11 a.m., but by 1 p.m. the Austrians were again in control. An hour later both sides were utterly exhausted after eleven hours of almost non-stop fighting. By 3.30 p.m. Archduke Charles had concentrated a grand battery of between 150 and 200 guns – the largest in the history of warfare up to that moment – in the centre, silencing one battery of Lannes’ artillery after another. Then they turned on any exposed French formations; in all the Austrian artillery fired 44,000 rounds during the two days of battle. Among their many victims was Lannes himself. Sitting cross-legged on the bank of a ditch, he had both knees smashed by a ricocheting 3-pound cannonball. The thirty-year-old was taken back to the French camp of Ebersdorf, beyond the Danube, where the head surgeon, Larrey, amputated his left leg and fought to keep the right one. In the days before anaesthetics, the pain of these operations is unimaginable, but all the witnesses of Lannes’ wounding agree that his courage was exemplary.

At about 4 p.m., with the bridges just about passable again, Napoleon ordered his army to fall back over the Danube to Lobau Island. He commandeered twenty-four guns and all the available ammunition to cover the bridgehead. First the wounded, then the artillery, then the Guard infantry (except the tirailleurs or light infantry skirmishers still engaged at Essling), then the heavy cavalry, then the infantry, then the light cavalry and finally the rearguard infantry divisions went back over the Danube; some voltigeurs did not make it to the island until long after nightfall, making the journey by boat. Archduke Charles felt that his army was too exhausted to disturb the French retreat, although several Austrian generals heatedly disagreed, so the Austrians remained on the other side of the river. At 7 p.m. Napoleon held one of his very infrequent conferences of war. Berthier, Davout and Masséna all wanted to retreat far back beyond the Danube, but Napoleon persuaded them that Lobau had to be the base for future operations and that if he evacuated the island he would have to abandon Vienna.

 • • •

Napoleon had been defeated for the first time since Acre ten years before, and for only the fourth time in his career so far. (The relatively minor Bassano and Caldiero battles had both taken place in November 1796.) His total losses were estimated at between 20,000 and 23,000 killed and wounded and 3,000 captured, but only 3 guns had been lost, testament to the discipline of the retreat. Austrian losses were similar, with 19,000 killed and wounded, though only 700 captured.³⁵ Napoleon’s bulletin the next day, which admitted only to 4,100 killed and wounded, referred to the battle of Aspern-Essling as ‘a new memorial to the glory and inflexible firmness of the French army’ – which was as close as he could come to an admission of defeat. Later he would claim that when Lannes regained consciousness he had said: ‘Within an hour you will have lost him who dies with the glory and conviction of having been and being your best friend’, a grammatical construction unlikely to have leaped to the mind of a man who had just had one leg amputated and might have been about to lose the other.³⁶

As the Austrians were claiming to have won the battle of Aspern, Napoleon made Masséna the Prince of Essling, although Masséna hadn’t set foot there during the battle. In Paris, the prefecture of police was ordered to put up posters asking Parisians to light up their front rooms to celebrate the victory.³⁷ Yet on the morning of May 23 the bridge linking Lobau with the northern bank was dismantled, and the island was turned into a fortress. That evening, exhausted French soldiers sat down to a dinner of horseflesh, which Marbot recalled was ‘cooked in cuirasses and seasoned with gunpowder’ instead of pepper. Provisions and ammunition were taken to Lobau by boat, the wounded were sent to Vienna, field hospitals were set up and new, stronger bridges were built and protected by stakes driven into the riverbed.

Gangrene set into Lannes’ leg and it took him nine days to die. Napoleon visited him twice daily, and arrived to see him moments after he had expired.³⁸ His valet Louis Constant found the Emperor shortly afterwards in his quarters, ‘seated immobile, mute, and staring into space, in front of his hastily prepared meal. Napoleon’s eyes were inundated with tears; they multiplied and fell silently into his soup.’³⁹ Napoleon’s anguish is confirmed by the accounts of Ségur, Las Cases, Pelet, Marbot, Lejeune and Savary.* Both Constant and Napoleon’s pharmacist, Cadet de Gassicourt, claimed that Lannes had berated the Emperor for his ambition, but Marbot, Savary and Pelet vehemently denied it.⁴⁰ Today Lannes lies in caverne XXII of the Panthéon, in a coffin draped with the tricolour, under nine flags hanging from walls covered with the names of his battles. ‘The loss of the Duke of Montebello, who died this morning, has grieved me much,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine on May 31. ‘So everything ends!!! Adieu, my love; if you can do anything toward consoling the Marshal’s poor widow, do it.’⁴¹

 • • •

‘I was right not to count on allies like those,’ Napoleon told Savary of the Russians in early June,

what could be worse if I hadn’t made peace with Russia? And what advantage do I get from their alliance, if they aren’t capable of ensuring peace in Germany? It is more likely that they would have been against me if a remnant of human respect hadn’t prevented them from betraying right away the sworn faith; let’s not be abused: they all have a rendezvous on my grave, but they don’t dare to gather there . . . It’s not an alliance I have here; I’ve been duped.⁴²

By the time Napoleon returned to Schönbrunn Palace on June 5 the goodwill of Tilsit, more or less maintained at Erfurt, had been seriously damaged.

It was not all anger at that time, however, especially once Marie Walewska arrived.* One evening at Schönbrunn, Napoleon asked for a cold chicken as a late supper; when it was brought he asked: ‘Since when has a chicken been born with one leg and one wing? I see that I am expected to live off the scraps left me by my servants.’ He then pinched Roustam’s ear, teasing him for having eaten the other half.⁴³ Rapp records the Emperor as being ‘pretty generally in good humour’ at this time, despite the loss of Lannes, though he was understandably infuriated by a police report from Paris containing the latest rumour, that he had gone mad. ‘It is the faubourg St Germain which invents these fine stories,’ he said, settling on his habitual bugbear of the aristocratic and intellectual salons of that district; ‘they will provoke me at last to send the whole tribe of them to the flea-bitten countryside.’⁴⁴ The problem, as he told Caulaincourt, was that ‘Society in the salons is always in a state of hostility against the government. Everything is criticized and nothing praised.’⁴⁵

After Aspern-Essling Archduke Charles massed his forces along the Danube north of Vienna. Although the Austrians invaded Saxony on June 9, five days later Eugène won a significant victory over Archduke Johann at the battle of Raab in Hungary, which delighted Napoleon both because it denied Archduke Charles much-needed reinforcements and because Eugène’s Army of Italy could now join him. He was also impressed with the fight that Prince Poniatowski’s Poles were putting up against the Austrians in Silesia, in conspicuous contrast to the Russians, who were reluctant to engage at all.

By early July the Grande Armée’s engineers had built such strong bridges to Lobau Island that Napoleon could boast, ‘The Danube no longer exists; it’s been abolished.’⁴⁶ With flexible pontoons capable of being swung into operation from Lobau to the north bank, he was now ready, six weeks after Aspern-Essling, to exact revenge. Wearing a sergeant’s greatcoat he personally reconnoitred the best places to cross, going to within musket-range of the Austrian pickets on the other bank. Instead of due north, as he had previously, he decided this time he would head east towards the town of Gross-Enzersdorf. On the evening of July 4, 1809 the crossings began.

Napoleon had now amassed 130,800 infantry, 23,300 cavalry and no fewer than 544 guns manned by 10,000 artillerymen, three times his force at Aspern-Essling. Captain Blaze recalled that ‘all the languages of Europe were spoken’ on Lobau Island – ‘Italian, Polish, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, and every kind of German’. Through intense planning and preparation, Napoleon got this enormous polyglot force – roughly the same number as attacked Normandy on D-Day – across one of Europe’s largest rivers into enemy territory on a single night, with all its horses, cannon, wagons, supplies and ammunition, and without losing a single man.⁴⁷ It was an astonishing logistical achievement. As soon as his men reached the far bank they crossed over the Marchfeld to face Archduke Charles’s army numbering 113,800 infantry, 14,600 cavalry and 414 guns. The battle they were about to fight was the largest in European history up to that point.

Like Arcole, Eylau, Eggmühl and Aspern-Essling, the battle of Wagram was fought over two days. By 8 a.m. on Wednesday, July 5, Gross-Enzersdorf had fallen to the French and by 9 a.m. Oudinot, Davout and Masséna had all crossed the river. (Masséna rode in a carriage having been injured in a fall from his horse on Lobau.) Napoleon set up his headquarters on the knoll at Raasdorf, the only pimple of ground for miles around on the otherwise totally flat Marchfeld. Archduke Charles lined his troops behind the fast-flowing Russbach, a stream about 25 to 30 feet across, hoping that his brother Archduke Johann would arrive in time from Pressburg, some 30 miles away to the south-east.

Napoleon placed Davout’s corps and two dragoon divisions on the right flank, with Oudinot in the centre and Masséna and the light cavalry on the left. Bernadotte’s corps of 14,000 Saxons were in close support, and a second great line was formed by the Army of Italy under Eugène and Macdonald, Marmont’s corps and the Imperial Guard. Bessières’ Reserve Cavalry made up a third. The Portuguese Legion secured the bridgehead from Lobau, and ammunition and supply wagons continued to pour across in prodigious numbers. Napoleon’s plan was for Davout to turn the enemy’s left flank while Oudinot and Bernadotte pinned down the Austrians frontally and Masséna protected the connection to the island. At the right moment the Army of Italy would then break through the centre. Archduke Johann’s appearance behind Davout on the right flank could have compromised Napoleon’s plan seriously, so both sides were constantly on the lookout for him.

At 2 p.m. the French army advanced under a hot sun across the waist-high cornfields of the Marchfeld, fanning out over the 16-mile-wide battlefield as they went. At 3.30 Bernadotte quickly took Raasdorf without firing a shot and by 5 p.m. was deployed before Aderklaa, a vital village on the battlefield, the seizure of which could nearly cut the Austrian army in two. Napoleon assaulted the whole Austrian line from Markgrafneusiedl to Deutsch-Wagram, ordering Oudinot, rather ambiguously, to ‘push forward a little, and give us some music before night’.⁴⁸ Oudinot sent his troops wading across the Russbach, their muskets and ammunition pouches carried above their heads. At 7 p.m. his 7,300 troops attacked Baumersdorf, a thirty-house hamlet on the river defended by 1,500 Austrians, taking heavy casualties. Napoleon’s evening attacks on July 5 came too late in the day, were too unspecific in their objectives and were unco-ordinated. Although the Russbach was little more than a stream, it disordered infantry and was impassable to cavalry and artillery except by its very few bridges. The attack did pin down the Austrians, but by 9 p.m. the French had been pushed back across the Russbach everywhere, and Oudinot had lost a large number of men.

At about 8 p.m. some of Eugène’s Army of Italy got into the town of Deutsch-Wagram, although four of his generals were wounded and 2,000 Italians broke and fled. At 9 p.m. Bernadotte attacked Aderklaa with 9,000 Saxon infantry and 14 guns. The fighting was chaotic, but he continued until 11 p.m., losing half his force; he was voluble in his denunciations of Napoleon afterwards for having ordered the assault.⁴⁹ Davout wisely called a halt to the attacks, and by 11 p.m. the fighting had died down. The Austrians had got the better of the first day. During the night, they launched eighteen fire-rafts down the Danube to take down the pontoon bridges, but they were stopped by the stakes the French had driven into the riverbed.

 • • •

As Davout was preparing a dawn attack on Thursday the 6th, his aide-de-camp Colonel Lejeune ran into thousands of Austrians forming up for the attack but he couldn’t get back in time to warn the marshal.⁵⁰ Fortunately, Davout was ready to meet the assault on Grosshofen when it came at 4 a.m., not least because Archduke Charles’s orders for absolute silence prior to the attack had not got through to the regimental bandsmen. Napoleon, disturbed at breakfast by the din on his right flank and fearing that Archduke Johann had arrived from the east, sent some heavy cavalry reserves to help Davout. Over the next two hours the Austrians took and then lost Grosshofen.

Bernadotte fell back from Aderklaa without orders to do so, allowing the Austrians to take the village for no losses, as an artillery duel commenced between the two grand batteries. At 7.30 a.m., having consulted Masséna, Napoleon had to order the recapture of Aderklaa by Saint-Cyr’s French and Hessian division, which was successful after fierce fighting and a musketry duel conducted at only eighty paces. During the day, Aderklaa – so nonchalantly evacuated by Bernadotte – saw 44,000 Austrians engage 35,000 French and Germans. ‘Is that the scientific manoeuvre by which you were going to make the Archduke lay down his arms?’ Napoleon asked Bernadotte sarcastically, after which he removed him from command with the words: ‘A bungler like you is no good to me.’⁵¹ By 9.45 a.m. General Molitor from Masséna’s corps retook Aderklaa, but many men had died as a result of Bernadotte’s unforced error.

At 10 a.m., using a watchtower on the heights above Markgrafneusiedl as his aiming-point, Davout sent 10,000 cavalry across the open plain to the right, sweeping aside the Austrian cavalry and providing room for Friant’s and Morand’s infantry divisions to advance, forcing the Austrians to extend the line in order to prevent their flank being turned.* If Archduke Johann had arrived at this point it could have been disastrous for Napoleon, but he had allowed his men a lunch stop on the way and told his brother he couldn’t arrive before 5 p.m., so Charles now had to commit his reserves. When Johann’s scouts finally arrived they advised him that the battle was lost and there was no point in his coming out onto the field at all, so he didn’t. Anyone other than the Emperor’s brother would have faced a court martial for this decision.

Markgrafsneusiedl was now the key to the Austrian position. An escarpment turns north-east there and the slopes are gentle. The village is just below. Fierce house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting took place between the stone houses, the windmill, the monastery and old moated church, but unco-ordinated Austrian counter-attacks failed to retake what was soon a burning village. Astonishingly, Napoleon – who had spent sixty of the previous seventy-two hours in the saddle – took one of his ten-minute naps at about this point of the battle, a measure of his sangfroid as much as of his exhaustion. When he woke and saw that Markgrafneusiedl was still in Davout’s hands, he pronounced the battle won.⁵² Napoleon’s ability to sleep on a battlefield with 700 cannon firing is all the more remarkable considering that on or near the Raasdorf knoll that served as his headquarters no fewer than twenty-six staff officers were killed or wounded that day. Both the men commanding the two regiments composing the Guard Chasseurs à Cheval lost a leg: Major Pierre Daumesnil, who was riddled with wounds and was admired by the whole army, lost his left leg, while his friend Major Hercules Corbineau, brother of Napoleon’s aide-de-camp who had died at Eylau, lost his right. (When Corbineau went to Napoleon years later to discuss the deposit he needed to put down before he could become a tax inspector in the Seine department, the Emperor is credited with saying that he would take his leg in lieu of any need for a down-payment.) After a howitzer shell caused Napoleon’s horse to shy, Oudinot exclaimed, ‘Sire, they are firing on the headquarters.’ ‘Monsieur,’ the Emperor replied, ‘in war all accidents are possible.’⁵³ And when a staff officer had his helmet knocked off by a cannonball, Napoleon joked: ‘It’s a good job you’re not any taller!’⁵⁴

When shortly before 11 a.m. Archduke Charles sent 14,000 men marching along the Danube towards the Lobau bridgehead, hoping to cut off Napoleon’s line of retreat and get behind the French lines, Masséna’s corps undertook one of the most ambitious manoeuvres of the campaign, marching 5 miles right across the battlefield, directly in front of two Austrian corps.⁵⁵ Napoleon then ordered Bessières to launch a cavalry attack at the junction between Kollowrath’s corps and the Austrian grenadier reserves. He watched as 4,000 heavy cavalrymen rode past him crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, to which he replied, ‘Ne sabrez pas: pointez, pointez’ (Don’t slash, use the points of your swords, use the points).⁵⁶ Bessières’ horse was shot from under him and Bessières himself was hit by a cannonball and taken from the field. Napoleon urged those who knew not to draw attention to what had happened as he feared it would affect morale. Once Bessières recovered he teased him that that his absence cost him 20,000 prisoners.⁵⁷ His charge was the last decisive use of cavalry on a Napoleonic battlefield, just as the battle as a whole was the start of the dominance of artillery. Cavalry would no longer be the pivotal arm in warfare, though it was to take many decades before this was fully appreciated.

The French lost huge numbers of horses at Wagram, but Bessières’ charge bought time for the deployment of Lauriston’s massive Grand Battery of 112 guns. These included sixty 12-pounders of the Imperial Guard artillery – his ‘cherished daughters’ – in the centre of the battlefield. He pounded the Austrian positions with 15,000 rounds, which bounced often on the flat hard ground and set the cornfields alight, burning many of the wounded to death. The battlefield resounded with a gigantic percussive din.

When the Austrians fell back, the Grand Battery pushed forward. Napoleon asked for twenty volunteers from each company of the Old Guard infantry to run forward to help manoeuvre and service these guns, and he got them. At about 1 p.m., as Davout advanced along the Russbach, Napoleon ordered Macdonald to make an attack that would pin down the Austrian reserve formations and stop them from moving against Davout. Macdonald had hoped to be raised to the marshalate when it was first created in 1804, but his republican politics – he still wore his old uniform with its tricolour sash – and his friendship with Moreau had precluded that. As Eugène’s immensely competent second-in-command, he had done very well in Italy, and at Wagram he performed superbly. His 8,000 men now formed a gigantic, hollow, open-backed square 900 yards wide and 600 yards deep, which he marched towards the Austrian line, with cavalry covering its open back. It was the last time such a formation was used in the Napoleonic Wars because it was so hard to control; the front battalions could fire but not those behind them, and it naturally drew much artillery fire. Nonetheless, there was far too much Austrian cavalry near by not to have the men in square. The formation also made it look as though Macdonald had far more men than he really did.

Although it took heavy casualties, Macdonald’s square – supported by the light cavalry of the Army of Italy on the right and heavy cavalry on the left, and with covering fire from the Grand Battery – bought the time necessary for Masséna and Davout to outflank the Austrian right and left respectively. Seeing that Macdonald needed further support, Napoleon released Wrede’s 5,500-strong Bavarian Division and some of the Young Guard. (Lightly wounded in this attack, Wrede melodramatically cried out, ‘Tell the Emperor I die for him!’ only to receive the robust reply from Macdonald: ‘You’ll live; tell him yourself.’⁵⁸)

At 2 p.m. Archduke Charles decided on a phased withdrawal. The Grenadiers and Reserve Cavalry covered each other as the villages of Stadlau, Kagran, Leopoldsdau and Strebersdorf continued to be contested. There was no sign of panic. It was at this late stage of the battle that the brilliant French cavalry general Antoine de Lasalle – who had distinguished himself at Austerlitz, Eylau and Stettin, saved Davout’s life in Egypt, broken seven swords in the 1800 campaign and saved Murat’s life at Heilsberg – was shot dead at the head of his men. ‘Any trooper who is not dead by thirty is a coward,’ he had once said of the hussars, ‘and I don’t anticipate exceeding that length of time.’⁵⁹ He was thirty-three.

Some of the French units had spent forty hours in almost continuous action, and most were simply too exhausted to pursue the enemy. As he shared some soup, bread and chicken with a voltigeur at around 7 p.m., Napoleon recognized that he could not follow up his victory on the field. Although the name of Wagram is to be found in marble alongside Austerlitz and Arcole at the foot of Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, in fact it was something of a pyrrhic victory. No fewer than 30,000 men of the Grande Armée were killed or wounded at Wagram and 4,000 captured, and it lost many of its horses, eleven guns, three eagles and nine colours. The Austrian losses, at 23,000 killed and wounded and 18,000 captured, were substantial, but they lost only nine guns and one colour owing to their disciplined withdrawal back towards Znaïm. ‘The whole French army got drunk the night after the battle of Wagram,’ Captain Blaze recalled. ‘The vintage was good, the quantity abundant, the soldiers drank immoderately.’⁶⁰ After two such days, they deserved it.

 • • •

‘No rancour,’ Napoleon said to Macdonald afterwards, in recognition of their past political differences; ‘from today we’ll be friends, and I will send you, as proof, your marshal’s baton that you won so gloriously yesterday.’⁶¹ It was one of only two battlefield batons Napoleon ever bestowed, the other being Poniatowski’s during the battle of Leipzig. Despite his disapproval of Oudinot’s high losses on the first day, and his criticisms of Marmont’s tardiness in crossing the Danube, they too received batons a week later. Marmont was only thirty-four, bringing the average age of the active-duty marshalate down to forty-three. These three post-Wagram creations were described by the soldiers at the time as ‘One for friendship, one for France, and one for the army’, as Marmont had been with Napoleon since Toulon, Macdonald was a fine soldier and Oudinot was beloved by his men.⁶²

‘My enemies are defeated, thrashed, in full rout,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine at 2 a.m. on the night after the battle; ‘they were very numerous; I have crushed them. My health is good today.’⁶³ Three hours later he told her that he had captured one hundred guns – an absurd exaggeration – and complained of sunburn. A further, inconclusive battle was fought by Marmont against Archduke Charles at Znaïm on July 10–11, and Napoleon accepted the Archduke’s offer of an armistice the next day. He wasn’t to see a battlefield again for another three years.

Francis I refused the armistice agreed between Napoleon and Archduke Charles six days after Wagram. Some 40,000 British troops had just landed on Walcheren Island in Holland, carried in 35 ships-of-the-line and 200 other vessels, and he wished to see how Britain’s attack developed before he sued for peace. The expedition was a disaster: it was immediately struck down by a malarial-dysentery infection that disabled half the men and killed over 10 per cent of them (as against only 106 lost in battle). ‘Fever and inundation will render an account of the English,’ Napoleon wrote to his war minister Henri Clarke with remarkable foresight as early as August 9. ‘As long as they remain on the island of Walcheren there is nothing to fear . . . Allow them to lash their buttocks in the marshes and pursue the shadow of a prey.’⁶⁴ With 11,000 sick soldiers, the expedition limped home just before Christmas. Fouché had acted quickly, raising a large army to protect Antwerp should the British land there too, but Napoleon was only mildly impressed: ‘You might take it into your head to raise an army against me!’ he shot back.⁶⁵ Even before that, in September, Francis acknowledged that the Walcheren expedition could not save him, and Austria began negotiations to end the War of the Fifth Coalition.