14    

 THE SIEGE

AT the fortress city of Mantua, the moss-covered walls are still riddled with bullet holes from the battles Dumas and his comrades fought here. This was the most important siege of the Italian campaign. Here the French challenged the forces of the Austrian Empire who held northern Italy in their grip, and the ground for Italian independence was laid.

Fifty miles north of the fortress city, where the misty hilltop plain of Rivoli guards the approaches to Lake Garda and the Alps, the French army fought its most famous battle. In a little village dotted with poplar trees, a tiny museum celebrates the revolutionary army’s most glorious campaign—the last, history would show, that it truly fought as republican brothers-in-arms. Among the endless portraits and trinkets celebrating Napoleon, I discovered a framed sheet of miniature engravings of the other French generals of the Italian campaign. Each portrait showed a general encased in a little oval frame, as if in a locket.

The portrait of General Dumas leapt out from the rows of his lighter-skinned comrades, with their romantic pompadours and bushy sideburns. Dumas’s hair was trimmed close and neat, his head turned in three-quarter view, one eyebrow cocked high. Most of the other generals looked off to the right or left or into the distance, in a pose of destiny calling. Others presented themselves in full antique profile or looked straight at the artist with a self-satisfied air. But Dumas peered out with an open, almost quizzical expression, and I had that uncanny feeling that while the others were frozen in their lost worlds, he was alive within his little oval—impatient, curious—staring right back at me from the two-hundred-year-old paper.

DUMAS arrived in Milan in November 1796 to join the Army of Italy. The very name the French had chosen—“the Army of Italy”—could be seen as a provocation to the various authorities who controlled the Italian peninsula. The capital of the army’s semimythical Italy was not on the peninsula at all—Rome was the capital of the Papal States—but in Paris, the beacon of light for the nascent Italian patriots.

Many international dreamers after liberty had drifted in and out of Paris since the early 1790s—Belgians, Germans, Poles, Saint-Dominguans—but the cause of the “Italians” was among the most far-fetched. Italy had not been a united nation since the fall of Rome. Since then, Italians had experienced independence only in the form of self-governing city-states, each of which had developed its art, commerce, and political power independently. The extreme geographical separation of the north and the south, from which deep cultural, political, and economic separations followed, helped keep a unified nation from emerging.

In the late eighteenth century, “Italy” was a concept few Italians understood or cared about. There were historical antecedents: Dante had spoken of Italy in a poetic sense and Machiavelli in a political one when he imagined a liberator to deliver his country from foreign occupation (at that point, Spain). But 250 years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Italy was more than ever under foreign domination—at the moment by the Austrian Empire.

Formerly powerful independent cities in the north, like Florence and Milan, had become Austrian imperial cities, like Vienna or Salzburg. Resentment of the Austrians provided much of the impetus for the nascent Italian patriotism and provided a terrific opportunity for the French: the Florentines and Milanese had fewer rights than the American colonists had had and a much greater sense of their own history. The American Revolution inspired them, and the spirit of 1789 brought a new sense of cohesion and urgency.

The French Army of Italy, under General-in-Chief Napoleon Bonaparte, burst across the western frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the most powerful Italian kingdom allied with the Austrians, in April 1796. After a series of lightning victories that caused the Sardinians to surrender and the Austrians to retreat, the French were welcomed into Milan on May 15 with revolutionary songs and adulation. Napoleon then paused the campaign, as would become his habit, and proceeded to overhaul the society and politics of northern Italy. He announced that more than a dozen ancient city-states would be incorporated into two new “independent republics”: the Cispadane Republic, south of the Po River, and the Transpadane Republic, north of it. These insta-republics amounted to a new kind of franchising of the Revolution: with this model, a “liberated” population would not need to wait more than a few days before a representative government sprang up fully formed in their capital, mimicking whatever style was then fashionable in Paris. Because this was 1796, the new Italian republics each got a version of the Directory—the fashion of republican government in Paris since the previous year—and its own French-style legal code. By July of the next year these two French-sponsored Italian republics had merged into one larger one called the Cisalpine Republic. Nobody much remembers these strange names today—but they were the political taproot of modern Italy.

They were also the model for how Napoleon would adapt and export the French Revolution at the head of his conquering armies. He understood how to use the rhetoric and spirit of the Revolution to advance his interests. The constitution for the Cisalpine Republic shows his approach; it begins with a statement justifying the French invasion and advertising its benefits to the local people:

The Cisalpine Republic was for many years under the domination of the Empire of Austria. The French Republic succeeded in its place by right of conquest; she renounces her claim from this day on, and the Cisalpine Republic is now free and independent.… [France] now gives to the Cisalpine people its own Constitution, which is the result of the most enlightened minds of the most enlightened nation in Europe.… No republic has existed in Italy for many years; the sacred fire of liberty had been snuffed out, and the most beautiful part of Europe lived under the foreign yoke. It is up to the Cisalpine Republic to show the world, by its wisdom, its energy, and the good organization of its armies, that modern Italy has not degenerated, and that it is still worthy of freedom.

Dumas was troubled by Napoleon’s approach. In Milan Dumas glimpsed the first signs that Napoleon was being treated less like a general and more like a potentate, wrapping himself in the Revolution in order to extend his own influence.

WHEN Napoleon took command of the Army of Italy at the end of March 1796, it was the worst equipped and the most demoralized of all the French armies. Many of its forty-two thousand troops marched without shoes, not to mention boots, and dressed in rags stolen from local peasants; its officers actually wore goatskins. Morale was so low and discipline so poor that it was said its soldiers sang royalist songs and one company had renamed itself “Dauphin” in honor of the murdered King Louis’s son. The government had withheld its limited resources from the Army of Italy because it felt that the more important war with the Austrian enemy was on France’s German frontier, or in Belgium. Italy was seen as a sideshow, and also a dangerous place to launch an offensive: France had not won a major victory here in centuries. Napoleon’s strategy for reviving the Army of Italy was based on making it self-sustaining. To make an army self-sustaining is not a pretty thing.

“Soldiers, you are badly fed and nearly naked,” Napoleon declared in March when he arrived in Nice, then the Army of Italy’s headquarters, to take its command. “I am going to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world, where you will find great cities and rich provinces; there, you will find honor, glory and riches.”

Inspiring words, but what did they mean? “The art of making war feed on war is totally unknown to us,” the military philosopher Guibert had written, arguing that armies needed to free themselves of their lumbering supply trains by living off the land and making the enemy bear the cost. “But if a general appeared who had such a talent, would we give him the power to put it into execution?” In fact, European armies spent most of the eighteenth century weaning themselves off this style of warfare, which had decimated much of the continent the previous century, in the Thirty Years’ War. States had built up complex logistical infrastructures that could transport in vast wagon trains everything an army needed to live and fight. This was how the Austrians, the Prussians, the Piedmontese, and all the Ancien Régime armies fought. Since 1793, the French revolutionary armies had revived the old tradition of pillage in a highly organized way; it was designed to avoid inflicting extreme suffering and starvation, which could cause revolt, while maximizing the profits of war for the republican liberators. Parisian art lovers benefited from each campaign, as the Louvre galleries filled with new works from around Europe.

But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level. He began by raising his soldiers’ back pay with a freedom fee imposed on the city of Milan—the price for its independence from Austria—to the tune of 20 million francs in cash. He followed this with liberation levies on every state, city, and principality the army invaded. The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris. The army also took precious manuscripts, books, and scientific instruments. Napoleon charged every local duke a ransom in artwork for an armistice, and the ransom was five times the usual rate for the pope, who had the best collections of anybody. In small towns that could not supply artwork, jewels, cash, or gold, the requisitions came in the form of sacks of flour or rations of meat and casks of wine.

From bare subsistence the soldiers of the Army of Italy suddenly began to live like kings; where they were hungry, they now commandeered thousands of steaks and bottles of wine from their liberated hosts. The hard-bitten bunch had more cash than it knew what to do with. One sergeant described how the officers bought jewelry: “The watchmakers and jewelers saw their shops emptied in twenty-four hours, and everyone strutted around with two watches decorated with chains and ornaments that fell halfway down their thighs, just as the fashion was in Paris at that time.”

An inventory taken in December 1796, the first full month Dumas was on duty with the Army of Italy, put the official estimate of cash collected to that point at 45,706,493 francs and the amount collected in gold, silver, and precious jewels at 12,132,909 francs. Liberated Italians were beginning to wonder whether French freedom was worth the heavy price.

Throughout his time with the Army of Italy, Dumas clashed with Napoleon on the issue of how to treat civilians. As in the Vendée, Mr. Humanity found himself again in the role of trying to keep his troops from exploiting the local population in the permissive atmosphere of war. He wrote countless letters of reprimand to his cavalry officers for infractions such as “constantly going to the inns, eating and drinking without paying.” He ordered that a certain officer be relieved of command and placed under arrest for being “unworthy to be called a Frenchman” because he confiscated cattle supposedly under Dumas’s authority. At the bottom of the arrest order Dumas added:

P.S. You will also warn the hussars of that detachment that all the requisitions that they had the impudence to make in my name are void, and that all the cattle which have been taken must be returned immediately to their owners.… —Alex Dumas

Where most other generals were coarsened by their time in the Vendée, Dumas seems to have been made even more sensitive to the need for maintaining correct relations between troops and the civilian population. He treated the occupied population the way he insisted his own soldiers be treated: as deserving of his respect and—at least when they were not actively fighting him—protection.

When Napoleon ordered the evacuation of the civilians in a battle zone Dumas controlled, Mr. Humanity bristled at the order to confiscate all of their property that could be useful to the French forces. He was careful not to directly contravene one of Napoleon’s orders, but his conduct amounted to a conscientious objection to the policy of plunder. He wrote to his brigadier to “soften the order” and to make sure people were not abused or cheated by the troops:

You will appoint two officers or more, clever and worthy of your trust, to conduct an inventory of grains, hay, straw, oats, carriages, horses and oxen, and [you will] leave the inhabitants enough to feed themselves and their cattle.…

When we need to make use of carriages, they will be driven by the inhabitants to whom they belong, but always escorted by the number of necessary soldiers who will make sure that the drivers are never separated from their carriages, [since] once we don’t need them anymore, they will be driven back to where they were taken from, by the same escort.

You will give the strictest orders [to ensure] that the houses these inhabitants will leave are subject to no misappropriations by the soldiers, by prescribing that whosoever be caught committing one, will be punished to the extent of the laws. In the same way, you will have [your troops] make sure that the inhabitants leave their homes in the greatest safety.…

Alex Dumas

Receiving orders that all women must leave a certain brigade within twenty-four hours, presumably to forestall rape and prostitution, Dumas does not object to the order but speaks to headquarters on the women’s behalf: “Where will these women who are three hundred leagues from their home go? The law commands, but humanity demands. I enlist you, therefore, to postpone the execution of this order until General Masséna has proposed a gentler method.”

Dumas attempted to avoid clashing with the commander-in-chief directly by adopting the time-honored strategy of pretending that the man on top must be shocked at any abuses, which surely happened without his knowledge. While complaining about the plunder of his men, he attributes some of their behavior to the greed of their officers.

General-in-Chief Bonaparte:

Daily, General, I receive complaints from inhabitants who are forced to contribute to our soldiers because of the carelessness of our military commissaries and our administrators, who reduce [our men] to going without the most basic necessities.… Obliged to resist the ravages of the weather, to which he is exposed for lack of shoes, of clothing, he must also battle with hunger and the deprivation of the other things in life, because a Commissary, a quartermaster, have preferred their pleasures, their own affairs instead of providing for his subsistence. Thus I am pained, General, to see him [this soldier] indulging in excesses unworthy of a Republican, and that because he has been two or three days without meat and without bread.…

Alex Dumas

After all, Dumas reasoned, the French could not claim to be liberating the Italians if they were at the same time pillaging their property and abusing their women. And indeed, as the campaign wore on, the policy of systematic pillage would undermine the initial widespread goodwill the Italian patriots felt for the French.

Dumas had been a general of division when Napoleon was still a captain, and he had continued to outrank the Corsican until December 1795. But the man still known as General Bonaparte was convinced he was destined to rise above his contemporaries to be much more than a general. To Dumas, the Republic’s generals stood together on the same plane and should be proud of the fact. Along with liberty, the Revolution’s two other commandments were equality and brotherhood. “The French Revolution stamped a peculiar seal upon our army,” Dumas’s son the novelist later wrote:

When I come across it I treasure the imprint as one would that of a precious medal that will soon be lost to rust, whose worth one wishes to impress upon one’s contemporaries, its characteristics upon posterity.… We shall misjudge all these men of the Republic if we judge them only by those who survived and whom we knew under the Empire. The Empire was an era of powerful pressures, and the Emperor Napoleon was a brutal coiner of metal. All money had to be stamped with his image, and all bronze smelted in his furnace.

The campaign for Italy was the beginning of Napoleon’s reminting the republican generals in his own image. General Alex Dumas refused the new stamp. From the beginning of their relationship, Dumas failed to recognize the special reverence in which Napoleon expected to be held. While this must have piqued Napoleon, he was enough of a pragmatist to keep an eye on General Dumas to see what he could contribute. As he would discover in the conquest of Italy, Dumas could contribute quite a lot, so Napoleon would tolerate his troublesome manner and annoying egalitarian values—up to a point.

THE Austrian Empire’s main line of defense in northern Italy was a chain of fortresses built along the ancient trade routes running up into the Tyrol region and across the Alps at the Brenner Pass. Since Roman times, this has been the main non-sea route connecting the Italian peninsula to the rest of Europe. Most of the route is densely wooded hilly terrain that, just south of the romantic city of Verona, opens up into the flat marshy plain surrounding the southernmost link in the fortress chain: Mantua.

By controlling Mantua, which stands almost in the center of northern Italy, guarding not only the route up to the Alps but also the crucial east-west axis linking the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, the Austrians effectively controlled northern Italy. They fortified and garrisoned Mantua, and after Napoleon’s victories against them, thousands more Austrian troops retreated into its fortress. The city was admirably protected by geography: by lakes on three sides and an impenetrable marsh on the fourth, southern side. The marsh, almost a swamp, produced one of the unhealthiest climates in northern Italy—flat, stale, and, at that time, miserably malarial—and it made direct assault on the fortress, which was reachable only by long causeway bridges, almost impossible. Napoleon instead decided to lay siege to it, counting on starving into submission the twenty-three thousand Austrian soldiers inside.

Six weeks after arriving in Milan to report to the Army of Italy, Alex Dumas was assigned to command the first division maintaining the siege at Mantua. Dumas’s two immediate predecessors in this post had resigned for medical reasons, overcome by the unhealthy climate; when Dumas arrived, his senior commander was ill.

Perhaps because he had grown up in a tropical climate, Dumas was not affected by the swamp air—and he was determined to come up with a way to break the Austrian grip on the city. He reviewed all aspects of the siege, inspecting the guard posts and gun emplacements, and interviewed all the officers under his command. He increased the number of patrols, especially at night.

Less than a week later, Dumas’s strategy bore fruit.

On Christmas Eve, his patrols arrested three men trying to cross through the French lines to enter the city. When they were brought to him in the middle of the night, he was particularly interested in one of them. The man’s bearing seemed to betray both intelligence and the fact that he was hiding something. Dumas suspected he might be in charge of a mission of some kind. He pressed the man, telling him that he knew he was on a mission to the Austrians and must have some sort of papers on him.

The man protested his innocence, claiming he was the son of a Veronese lawyer and had merely gotten into the wrong place at the wrong time. When nothing was found in his clothes or his books, Dumas accused him of having swallowed a message. At this point, he decided to frighten the man into a confession. Dumas’s son wrote a memorable account of the incident (based on Dermoncourt’s recollections) that accords with the official version:

Among my father’s favorite books were Caesar’s Commentaries. A volume of the Commentaries of the conqueror of Gaul lay open on the table placed near his bed, and the passage my father had been rereading before going to sleep was where Caesar relates that in order to get his lieutenant through to Labienus with valuable information, he had encased his letter in a little ivory ball about the size of a child’s toy; the messenger, when he came to the enemy’s posts, or to any place where he feared attack, was to carry the ball in his mouth, and to swallow it if he had a close call.

This passage from Caesar came back to him as a beam of light.

“Very well,” said my father; “since this man denies it, he must be taken out and shot.”

“What! General!” [he] exclaimed in terror. “Why am I to be shot?”

“To cut open your stomach and find the dispatches you have swallowed,” said my father with as much aplomb as if the thing had been revealed by some familiar spirit.

After the man confessed that he was a spy and that he did swallow the dispatches, it became a matter of how to get them out of him, short of disemboweling him. In the novelist’s account, Dumas dispatched Dermoncourt to find a pharmacist and have him prepare a purgative. When he returned, they gave the purgative to the spy; “then they took him to Dermoncourt’s room, where two soldiers kept him in sight, while Dermoncourt passed a very bad night, woken by the soldiers each time the spy put his hand anywhere near the button of his underclothes. Finally, around three in the morning, he delivered up a little ball of wax the size of a filbert.”

General Dumas’s letter to Napoleon the next day (Christmas, 1796) tells essentially the same story in a deadpan style. Dumas told the man, “if he did not want to be shot on the spot, to have me warned every time he needed to relieve himself.” And he concludes:

He did not fool me, he abided by my orders. Several times he asked for me, and several times I went through futile steps, until at last today he gave birth to the letter that I am having one of my aides-de-camp deliver specially to you.

There were in fact two letters inside the wax tablet, written on vellum.

One was from the Austrian emperor: the emperor told the general inside the fortress that “his valor and his zeal make me expect him to defend Mantua to the last extremity”; but, if the relieving army came too late and the men inside Mantua fortress started dying en masse from starvation and lack of supplies, they were to destroy everything in the city that could be used by the French—especially the fortress’s cannon—and then break out of siege over the marshland to the south to head toward the Papal States, where he and his men would find sanctuary. This was an interesting piece of information, because the French had always assumed that, were the Austrians to evacuate the fortress, they would head back north, toward their homeland. That the pope was offering the Austrians sanctuary was actionable news for the Army of Italy, for Napoleon had been looking for a reason to attack the Vatican.

General Dumas and his officers had been concerned, wrote the novelist, that “the dispatch might be in German, and no one in the area spoke German.… Great was the joy of the two officers when they saw that the letter had been written in French; it might have been said that the emperor and his commander-in-chief had foreseen the chance of the letter falling into my father’s hands.”

The other letter was from the Austrian general who was leading a twenty-eight-thousand-man army down to relieve the fortress. It explained that he would be coming down from the Tyrol but did not know exactly when his army could arrive.

Napoleon sent Dumas congratulations and sent a favorable note about the counterintelligence coup to the government in Paris. He then assigned Dumas command of a division at the fortified camp of San Antonio—Saint-Antoine, as the French called it—a village which guarded the approaches to Mantua from the north, the direction of the Alps.

THE siege wore on—a dull, nerve-racking affair, made worse by freezing rain, the constant lack of supplies, among the besiegers as well as the besieged, and mysterious, oddly spaced cannon fire that Dumas and his officers took for some sort of enemy signaling. In fact, they learned, it was only the “Venetian scoundrels”—officially neutral in the conflict—firing their weapons in celebration of the New Year. The French troops could barely sleep through the racket.

There were constant rumors of Austrian breakouts. Dumas often stayed out all night on horseback circling the perimeter, either alone or at the head of a few horsemen, looking for signs that the Austrians were on the move. In addition to all the fretting about when a breakout might happen, the dozens of letters Dumas wrote and received daily dealt with all the usual issues of functioning in a camp of some thousands of armed men. He requested thousands of soup rations and extra clothing, and suggested ways they could use the local river system to transport flour for making baguettes.

Finding that thousands of pairs of shoes were missing, Dumas became convinced that the commissaries, who were civilian contractors, were selling his troops’ supplies for profit. He wrote this letter to one he suspected in particular:

Citizen:

For a long time now, the troops want for rice, salt and many essential items; I would have thought that the first warnings I already gave you would have sufficed to compel you to employ any means necessary to put an end to this penury. I warn you that I am beginning to tire of such carelessness, and if you do not hasten to pull yourself out of it, I’ll know what needs be done.

Alex Dumas

Wading through hundreds of pages of correspondence on such matters—the eighteenth-century version of office e-mail but elaborately penned and watermarked—I imagined what a hard-charging warrior like Dumas must have felt like, sitting around using only his quill for twelve hours a day. Sometimes he and his immediate superior, General Serurier, would produce an entire correspondence on something like a gun emplacement, or even horse feed—all dated the same day, the messenger having ridden from the south of the city to the north and back as the generals debated the details. The monotony of the correspondence evoked the monotony of the siege, in the chilly, fetid air of the Mantua swamps, waiting for something to break.^*

On January 13, 1797, word came that the new Austrian divisions—the ones referred to in the wax-tablet messages—had been spotted north of Verona. These were 43,000 crack troops, heading straight for a French force of 10,300 men, which had retreated to Rivoli after early skirmishing. Napoleon sent in reinforcements, but the French were still outnumbered and outgunned.

Most of the Austrian troops would be pinned down in the Battle of Rivoli, but two columns of cavalry avoided the trap and headed straight for Mantua. In fierce fighting before dawn, the Austrians easily overwhelmed the smaller French divisions that guarded the northern approaches to the city.

General Serurier sent Dumas desperate letters—he seems to have written more than one an hour—wondering if they should retreat or regroup.

In what came close to insubordination, Dumas—from his position in the fortified village of San Antonio—told Serurier, stationed at Roverbella, that he could do what he pleased but that Dumas and his men were not moving and would stand and fight the Austrians. (Serurier was used to Dumas’s brash intensity by now; in a note typical of their correspondence, from four days earlier, Dumas wrote to his commander: “I am about to mount my horse. Tomorrow I will give you an account of the reasons that drive me to stay there all night.”) Dumas had only about six hundred men with him. In his memoir the novelist uses Alex Dumas’s mocking of Serurier’s concern as the basis for a conversation between Napoleon and his father in which Napolean pretends to reprimand him while privately approving:

“Ah! There you are, monsieur,” said Bonaparte, giving him a dark look.

My father could not let such a look pass without demanding an explanation.

“Yes, it’s me! Well, what is it?”

“General Serurier wrote you two letters yesterday, monsieur.”

“Well! What of it?”

“In the first he warned you of the possibility that he would retreat … What did you reply?”

“I replied, ‘Retreat to the devil, if you like; I couldn’t care less; but as for me, I’ll get myself killed, but I won’t retreat.’ ”

“Do you know that if you had written me a letter like that, I would have had you shot?”

“Maybe; but you would probably never have written me the kind of letter General Serurier wrote me!”

“That’s true,” Bonaparte said simply.

Then, turning to Dermoncourt:

“Go and form the troops into three columns, and report back when it’s been done.”

Dermoncourt left. Turning to my father, who was about to return to his room, [Napoleon said]:

“Stay here, General; I had to speak to you like that before your aide-de-camp; damn it! When a man writes such letters to his chief, he should at least write them himself, and not dictate them to his secretary. But we will say no more about it.”

The long-awaited breakout from the fortress came on the morning of January 16. If the troops from the fortress united with the Austrian troops coming to rescue them, Dumas’s force would be sunk. He would be outnumbered about ten to one.

But for now, it was only a little worse than three to one—the sort of odds that got Dumas’s blood going. Also, Dumas had heard that a few French units returning from the Battle of Rivoli had been spotted coming down the high road from Verona. He leapt into the saddle and rallied his men. They would ride to meet these French units and return together to confront the Austrians. So Dumas led the six hundred cavalrymen away from the position they were guarding and up the road toward Verona. The Austrians must have been pleased when they arrived at San Antonio and were able to take it without firing a shot. But their pleasure there was short-lived. After only an hour’s ride Dumas met the French units, and after brief introductions, they whirled around and all rode to San Antonio to face the Austrians.

As Dumas charged into town with the new troops at his back, the Austrians still outnumbered him—but now only about two to one.

Dumas always performed best when the odds were against him, and this morning proved no exception. As the white-jacketed Austrians charged from all sides, Dumas on his horse towered above the fray in his blue uniform with the red-white-and-blue sash, raining down saber blows. His sword arm was so powerful he could unseat a horseman with one blow, a great advantage in this sort of combat, and he had an intuitive sense for fighting multiple opponents at once. The chaos of battle was his home.

At one point, his horse was shot out from under him. But Dumas rose, found another horse, mounted, and continued slashing away at the Austrians. A cannonball landed directly in front of him, his new horse fell, and he went down a second time, only to rise again. By the end of the morning Dumas was still cutting down enemy troops without having sustained a single serious wound. His combined forces succeeded in driving the Austrian columns back—not only out of San Antonio but down the lakeside, across the bridge, and back through the gates of the citadel they’d just escaped.

DUMAS’S actions in beating back the Austrians’ breakout that morning prevented the uniting of the Austrian forces that could have broken the siege. By the time the large Austrian army finally arrived from the north, they found themselves trapped outside, isolated, unable to perform their mission. They fought the French in the fields, but at this point the rest of the French forces were returning victorious from the Battle of Rivoli. The hapless Austrian general who had made it all the way to Mantua now found himself squeezed by an accumulating catchall of French troops led by some of the finest commanders in the French army. After a couple of hours’ bloodshed, he surrendered. Two weeks later, Mantua finally caved: the Austrians raised the white flag of surrender over their main fortress in Italy. In Paris, Rivoli was celebrated as the greatest victory of the Italian war. But the whole point of Rivoli was to keep the Austrian reinforcements from rescuing and uniting with the army trapped inside Mantua, and it had been Dumas, at the head of his little force, who had saved the day at the fortress.

It was no wonder, then, that Dumas lost his temper when he read the official report of the battle, compiled by Napoleon’s aide-de-camp General Berthier, and saw that his role had been diminished to one of “in observation at San Antonio.” Berthier did include a phrase about Dumas’s fighting the enemy “well,” but this did nothing to make Alex Dumas reconsider what he was about to write into the official military record of the Army of Italy. Dumas picked up his quill and wrote to Napoleon a letter of such fantastical insolence it would be cited in every historical account of him as an example of his legendary temper:

January 18, 1797

GENERAL,

I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I stayed in observation throughout that battle. I don’t wish any such observation on him, since he would have shit in his pants.

Salute and Brotherhood!

ALEX. DUMAS

The Army of Italy was a tough-talking lot, but this was not a wise move. General Berthier was Napoleon’s right-hand man (he would later become his chief of staff). I made my way through Berthier’s report looking for the sentence that had infuriated Dumas. It comes on page 15 of what is a densely packed description of the entire campaign of the Army of Italy relating to the Siege of Mantua. It covers vast actions, such as the Austrian emperor’s redeployment of his forces from all around Europe to the Mantua effort, in just a paragraph. Given the scope of this report, obviously assembled from many sources and with an eye to being a strategic overview, Berthier’s description of Dumas’s role during the last day of the siege, while not correct, is not nearly so insulting as Dumas perceived it to be.

In the aftermath of great victories, Napoleon had a habit of reorganizing his forces and handing out promotions and spoils. Berthier sent out these appointments and, not surprisingly, Dumas got some bad news: he was not even being given his own division; rather,he was to command a subdivision under General Masséna, whom he did not like.

On Nivôse 28.

To General Bonaparte.

I have received your order, General.… I will not hide from you the surprise that the news of my transfer caused me. That on the day after a battle whose success I contributed to with all my power, I would see myself so dishonored!… and [that] you, General, who have always seemed to grant your esteem to the brave republicans in your army, you could, without even meeting with me, take [your esteem] away from me when I did everything to deserve it. I should have hoped for a little more consideration; after having commanded several armies, never defeated, finding myself the oldest general in this army at the moment when I believed I had [earned] new rights to the confidence of my chief and my comrades … I am sent to command a subdivision!

The letter went on quite a bit longer, and of course did nothing to improve his situation or get him what he calls, further down, “the justice I deserve.”

In a poignant coda to the incident, I discovered in Dumas’s military file the following testimony, written and mailed to Bonaparte one day later, signed by twenty-five members of “the 20th Dragoon Regiment, 1st Division, of the Mantua Blockade”:

We, Commander, officers, noncommissioned officers and Dragoons, members of the 20th Regiment, attest that Division General Dumas, in whose Division we [serve], took all possible measures and took all the actions in his power to get the Job done, that to our knowledge the General visited the outposts for three or four consecutive nights and gave himself no rest whatsoever.…

Moreover, we confirm that in the last affair of the 27th of this month, leading us, he acted as a Republican, full of honor and courage. Therefore we are signing the present declaration.

When Napoleon sent his January battle report to the Directory, he praised every other officer involved in ending the Siege of Mantua. General Dumas’s name was not mentioned once.

* I found another way of reliving the siege: when I was visiting Mantua and walking around the fortress, I met an interesting guide—a medical-parts salesman who became an eighteenth-century French infantryman on the weekends, his role in the local Napoleonic reenactors society. No casual weekend warrior, Massimo Zonca had spent years studying the northern Italian campaign of 1796–97 and had self-published a number of books on its battles, complete with elaborate maps and references. He showed me around the battlefields, gravesites, and redoubts where the fighting had occurred. He also showed me his costumes, including an authentic Charleville musket, which was so heavy I could barely heft it, and whose bayonet was the length of a small sword. We went to a meeting of his reenactment group’s “historical fencing society” in Verona, where old combat styles are practiced as a martial art, with real, bladed weapons.