15 
THE demotion that humiliated Dumas proved to be an opportunity. By being denied his place as a general of division in charge of thousands, he was freed from administrative and political duties and thrown back into the role in which he had originally made his name: at the head of small mounted bands running reconnaissance missions and riding in to engage the enemy, in terrain too rugged or dangerous for the main army to reach yet.
In January 1797, Napoleon reorganized the French Army of Italy into three main columns, with the goal of driving the Austrians up into the Alps and out of Italy. If the French columns succeeded in this, they might even follow their enemy and burst down into the heartland of Austria itself, from which the enemy’s capital, Vienna, would be just a day’s ride away.
For the first two weeks of February 1797, Dumas and a small band of dragoons under the command of General André Masséna advanced relentlessly, driving the Austrian army ever farther north toward their own border. “[Dumas] flies from one city to another, from one village to another, hacking everything to pieces,” runs one account, “capturing two thousand prisoners here, one thousand there, he performs truly fantastic charges.” The Austrians came up with a name for the relentless French general who stalked them through the snow: die schwarze Teufel, the “Black Devil.”
Dumas arrived in Italy too late to be part of the core group of generals who were calling themselves “the men of Italy.” Dumas proved his mettle to these generals many times over, but he always kept himself a bit aloof. He was disturbed by the generals’ growing idolization of General Bonaparte. Without authorization from the government in Paris, Napoleon had started having honorary swords made to his own specifications, with his name and dedication engraved on them, and handing them out to officers for bravery after battles. He also gave out hefty cash rewards to the men of Italy to thank them personally for their service. The men of Italy talked a little too much of themselves and their brilliant commander-in-chief for Dumas’s taste, and too little of the goals and values of the Republic. The words of the “Marseillaise” were no mere martial lyrics to Dumas; they burned in his consciousness.
One of the generals greatly admired Dumas’s integrity. General Barthélemy Catherine Joubert desperately wanted to recruit Dumas to serve in his column. Joubert was also a true republican—a patriot in the 1790 style. Some lines he had written to Dumas as part of an update on siege preparations in late December read almost like a platonic love letter from one revolutionary general to another: “I have no less impatience for the moment, General, when I will meet a republican as good as you are. I gather up all personal glory to merit his esteem.”
Joubert had command of twenty thousand French troops facing an even greater number of the enemy dug into the rocky terrain running up along the Adige River into the Tyrol, the alpine borderland between Austria and Italy. It would be some of the toughest fighting the French had yet faced. The area was defended not only by Austrian regulars but by Tyrolean mountain militias, and both groups knew this country far better than the French blues ever could.
At the end of February, Joubert got his wish: Napoleon transferred Dumas to his column. Joubert briefed Dumas on the mission: to chase the Austrians all the way to the Brenner Pass, “the great gate” of Italy, through which countless barbarian invasions had passed—only this time the French invaders would be going in the other direction, north up through the Italian Tyrol, over the Alps, and down into the Austrian heartland.
Dumas must have been greatly relieved at being out from under Masséna and given a place with his fellow republican Joubert. On his first week with his new comrades, Dumas led a small force up a tributary of the Adige to outflank the Austrians. The enemy was camped out along the river, guarding every bridge. He took them out, one by one. In this close-in fighting, where the horses and men had to keep their footing sometimes in the torrent itself, Dumas’s imposing skills—lunging, jumping, unhorsing opponents with a single whack of his saber, or even a fist—did much to break enemy morale and cheer his own troops. Over and over again Dumas charged larger groups of Austrians and forced a surrender or put them on the run.
An official army report from the first week of March, describing the taking of a strategic point on the river, captures Dumas as an almost cinematic war hero: “The battle was uncertain, until General Dumas, commanding the cavalry, rushed into the village of Tramin, took six hundred prisoners, and captured two cannons; as a result, the enemy column … was blocked from entering Botzen [a key city in the Italian Tyrol], and was forced to scatter into the mountains.” Dumas went on to save General Joubert himself shortly thereafter, when his new commanding officer was ambushed on a maneuver by a larger Austrian force. Dumas snuck around the enemy soldiers and struck at them from behind, as Joubert described it to Napoleon, always with a faintly breathless admiration for the powerhouse who had been assigned to serve under him.
Dumas’s own battle reports describe the hot violence of the encounters with matter-of-fact professionalism: “I charged the enemy cavalry that was advancing on me, they were thoroughly routed although superior in number: I cut the face of a commander and the neck of a cavalryman; the regiment I was in command of killed, took and wounded several Austrian cavalrymen.” But he was careful to credit fellow officers as well: “The adjutant general Blondeau showed great courage. General Belliard’s column aided by the 8th Dragoon Regiment took 1,200 prisoners: this general again showed great distinction.”
Throughout February and March, despite the bitter cold weather, Dumas chose to camp by the banks of the Adige with his dragoon bands rather than settling into one of the captured Austrian towns and fortresses that the French had taken alongside it. As Dermoncourt observed, the campaign Dumas was fighting was “more like a race than a war.” He had never fought better.
YET behind Dumas’s frenzied battling lay not just the desire for glory but the deepest anguish. On March 3 he wrote Marie-Louise: “My beloved, for the past nineteen days I haven’t received any of your precious news; I don’t know to what I should attribute this damnable delay. Our worries are at their peak, and I think I have more than one reason.”
Two days later, he wrote again, finally having heard from her. The letter Marie-Louise sent him has been lost, but in it she seems to have hinted that his fears were justified. A terrible event had befallen their younger daughter, Louise, a toddler of thirteen months.
To the only one I care about in the whole world
My virtuous friend, you have told me about an event that tears away half of my existence and I think I have been confirmed in my fear that something even more awful has happened; if it was unfortunately so, you must reveal everything … (the truth, that is)
… my poor Louise, my unfortunate child. It is perhaps in vain that I call out to you!… My divine friend, I will not live in peace until I receive a letter from you that tells me the truth (but I am still trembling) …
Adieu my love, your letter has distressed me too much to have the strength to say any more, give a big kiss [to] my, I don’t dare say children—or my child and our respectable parents, and above all you, forever.
It isn’t clear whether it was an illness or accident, but Dumas would soon learn that little Louise was dead. If anything his sense of loss and grief over the next weeks and months seems to have driven him to fight harder. The man the Austrians called the Black Devil continued to rout them out of the Adige River Valley. Dumas’s efforts were so effective that Joubert at one point began to refer to him as General of Division Dumas, even though he had no division. Joubert officially gave Dumas control of a few regiments, but whenever he could, Dumas rode out ahead with his small bands of dragoons.
Some twenty-five miles north of Botzen, the Austrian forces were dug in “in a terrible position,” as Dumas reported to Joubert, at Clausen, a small Tyrolean city of quiet church squares and streets that end in sheer cliffs, set dramatically against snowcapped peaks nearly as high as the Swiss Alps. The Austrians had artillery emplacements above the town and thousands of troops protecting it. Hundreds of Tyrolean fighters hid in the woods and in rock formations, sniping at any French troops they saw. It was a shooting gallery in which the Austrians and their local allies had all the high ground.
On the morning of March 23, Dumas and Dermoncourt rode into town at the head of about thirty dragoons and “crossed Clausen under enemy fire,” as Joubert would report to Napoleon, even as the bulk of the French forces were pinned down nearby. On the far side of the town stood a strategic bridge, across the Eisack River, which at this point alternated between narrow streams and raging torrents, all pitched at preposterously steep inclines. The French could not advance farther north to pursue the Austrians toward the border without crossing this bridge. The Austrians were as determined to hold the bridge as Dumas was to take it. They scattered carts filled with heavy stones all over it, Dermoncourt recalled, against which Dumas “did more alone with his Herculean strength than the twenty-five of us put together. When I say twenty-five I exaggerate; the Austrian bullets had done their work, and five or six of our men were disabled.”
The troops received reinforcements, and as soon as they had pushed the last of the carts into the river, Dumas crossed the bridge into the town of Brixen. Dumas and Dermoncourt found themselves alone there. The enemy was firing at them from high positions in the boulders by the banks and from the far side of the bridge. Troops faced them in hand-to-hand combat. Dermoncourt recalled watching Dumas “lift his saber, as a thresher lifts his flail, and each time the sword was lowered a man fell.” Trapped himself by a trio of Austrian cavalrymen, Dermoncourt received a serious shoulder wound, severing the tendon. The Austrians “continued to hack at me with saber-swipes, and soon would have entirely skewered me, if I had not managed to draw a pistol out of my holster with my left hand.”
Early in the battle Dumas’s horse was shot out from under him and fell in such a way that the Austrians were sure it had killed him. “The Black Devil is dead!” the cry went up. But then Dumas rose from the dead, or, rather, from behind his horse, which he then used as cover to stage his own counter-fusillade. He had discovered a small cache of loaded Austrian guns, which he now used to return fire.
As Dermoncourt lay in a bleeding heap, he later recalled, “I managed to turn toward the general; he was standing at the head of the bridge of Clausen and holding it alone against the whole squadron; and as the bridge was narrow and the men could only get at him two or three abreast, he cut down as many as came at him.”
Bleeding from the arm, thigh, and head, Dumas slashed and stabbed with unrelenting fury, and with such power that most every Austrian touched by his blade fell mortally wounded or took a deadly dive over the bridge into the river below. When he was finally relieved on the bridge by a few dozen French cavalry and the Austrians retreated, Dumas did not rest but leapt on a horse to pursue the fleeing enemy nearly ten miles into the alpine woods.
“I must make a full report about the conduct of General Dumas,” Joubert wrote to Napoleon after the battle, “who charged three times at the head of the cavalry and killed several cavalrymen with his own hand; he contributed not a little by his courage to the success of this day.”
The final outcome of the day, according to Joubert: “we have taken fifteen hundred enemy prisoners, our loss has been about a thousand give or take.”
Meanwhile, of the man who had been at the very front of the action, surrounded by enemy soldiers shooting and hacking at him: “[Dumas] has received two light saber wounds during the time he was fighting off the Austrian cavalry, alone, on a bridge.” Another account says that musket fire pierced his greatcoat in seven places, though Dumas somehow emerged unscathed.
In the safe at Villers-Cotterêts lay a letter Dumas had written to friends from the headquarters of the Army of Italy. In it, he describes leading the cavalry into the Tyrol and how “these victories were necessary to dissipate a little the stinging grief of the irreparable loss which I had of my unfortunate Louise … cherished and adored child, who was always before my eyes and accompanied me day and night.” Then, as always, his thoughts quickly return to his beloved wife: “What worries me still more, is the state in which my wife finds herself, because this event will make itself felt.”
THIS time, Napoleon did not expunge Dumas’s heroism at Clausen in his report to Paris:
General Dumas at the head of the cavalry has killed with his own hand several enemy cavalrymen. He has been twice slightly wounded by enemy sabers, and his aide-de-camp Dermoncourt has been seriously wounded. This General held a bridge all alone for many minutes against the enemy cavalry who were trying to cross the river. By doing so, he was able to delay the enemy advance until reinforcements arrived.
At the end of March, Dumas received a letter from Napoleon announcing that “as the General-in-Chief wants to show his satisfaction to General Dumas for his valorous conduct in the recent actions in the Tyrol, he therefore grants him the command of all cavalry troops in the divisions stationed in the Tyrol.”
As a further sign that Napoleon was ready to forgive Dumas fully, he added this line to the following week’s report: “I request that General Dumas, who, along with his horse, has lost a pair of pistols, be sent a pair of pistols from the armament manufacturer at Versailles.”
Napoleon also gave Dumas a new nom de guerre, hailing him as “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol”—high praise indeed in that era. “Rome was in great hazard of being taken, the enemy forcing their way onto the wooden bridge,” Plutarch recounted, and “Horatius Cocles … kept the bridge, and held back the enemy.” Dumas was referred to as the “Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” in all subsequent writings about him down to the early twentieth century, when classical allusions fell out of favor.
During the rest of 1797, Napoleon concluded the victory over the Austrians by forcing them to negotiate and sign a humiliating peace treaty, the Treaty of Campo Formio, which acknowledged all the new French-sponsored Italian republics, ceding various non-Italian Austrian territories to Paris, including the Austrian Netherlands as well as key islands in the Mediterranean. Napoleon also forced a laundry list of other concessions on the emperor. (One of these endeared him to liberal-minded people everywhere: General Lafayette, still held by the Austrians after deserting from the French army and attempting to flee the continent with his honorary American passport, was at last set free.)
While the treaty negotiations were going on, Napoleon appointed General Dumas military governor of Treviso, a wealthy province and city of the same name twenty-five miles outside Venice and filled with rich vineyards and residences built by Venetian merchants over the centuries. Dumas helped the residents rebuild their lives under the new order, taking part in local hunting expeditions and, if their letters to him are any guide, generally showing an evenhandedness that shocked civilians under his jurisdiction. A folder in the safe at Villers-Cotterêts contained these letters to General Dumas from the citizens of Treviso province, who mix flattery and thanks with fulsome attempts to prove that they, too, were true-blue republicans in the highest French style:
In this state of revolution, so new to us, and in a Democracy developing from Italy’s own regeneration, we had the greatest need to find in you, Citizen General, a Father, who would guide our steps, and support our efforts to consolidate ourselves in this state of cherished Liberty that we owe to the generosity of the French. Here we are, freed from a most hideous slavery, and here we are under the protection of your justice and selflessness.