Читать книгу Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 20

When he reached the headquarters of the Army of Italy at Nice on 26 March 1796, the twenty-six-year-old Bonaparte faced one of the greatest challenges of his life. He had never held independent command of so much as a platoon in the field, yet he was now commander-in-chief of an army, staffed with men older and more experienced than him, with sound reputations. Such was André Masséna, eleven years his senior, a big, tall man with expansive gestures and an ironic, malicious smile, the son of a petty grocer from Nice who had been orphaned early and run away to sea, then joined the royal army in which he rose as high as a plebeian could, before, after a spell as a smuggler, fighting his way to general’s rank in the army of the Republic. He was a force of nature, uneducated, ostentatiously brave, determined and effective in battle, displaying tactical flair – and a piratical lust for treasure. Another was Charles-Pierre Augereau, twelve years older than Bonaparte, the son of a servant and a Parisian fruit-seller who had a long career behind him as a mercenary in the Neapolitan and Prussian armies before rising in that of the Republic by his conspicuous bravery. He too was a tall, martial figure, with a big nose, the blustering demeanour of a bully and the subversive attitude of a proletarian revolutionary. Foul-mouthed and violent, this child of the streets was popular with his men. The only thing the third corps commander shared with the others was a massive physique. Jean-Mathieu Sérurier was an educated fifty-three-year-old minor nobleman and veteran of the royal army who had seen action in the Seven Years’ War, a conscientious, steady, brave and efficient general.

Unlike regular armies, in which a man’s rank is taken as a mark of his worth, in the armies of the Republic officers and men learned to trust and esteem only those with a reputation bestowed by those who served under them and spread by word of mouth. Masséna had come across Bonaparte at the siege of Toulon, but was unaware of his contribution to the fall of the town, and to him and the other officers in the Army of Italy, its new commander was an unknown quantity. But they did know he had taken part in the events of Vendémiaire and that he was a political appointment, a ‘Parisian general’ and an ‘intriguer’ with no substance, in the words of another who had come across him at Toulon, chef de bataillon Louis-Gabriel Suchet. They had been expecting the worst, but when they actually saw the man they despaired. In their eyes his diminutive stature, pathetic appearance, awkward manner and rasping voice ruled him out as an effective leader of men.1

Bonaparte immediately assumed a tone which brooked no argument. ‘I have taken command of the Army of Italy,’ he wrote to Masséna less than forty-eight hours after his arrival. ‘Nominating me, the executive Directory hopes that I may be of use in leading it towards the brilliant destiny which awaits it. Europe contemplates it with awe, and France expects from it all the triumphs of a campaign.’ At the same time he flattered the commanders, officers and men, raising their hopes of action, glory and rewards, while Junot and Marmont spread their own admiration and love of the new commander. With a dose of wishful thinking, four days after his arrival he assured Josephine that ‘my soldiers display a confidence in me impossible to describe’.2

The troops were in poor shape. To have any idea of the conditions, one has to forget all the paintings of finely-uniformed officers leading ranks of men with immaculate white facings and bright-red epaulettes on their well-cut blue coats, with blue, white and red plumes in their hats. Few of the men had boots, and many had no trousers. Some had no uniform jackets. They made themselves footwear out of woven straw and in the absence of hats wore knotted handkerchiefs on their heads. Most of them looked more like scarecrows than soldiers.3

They had scant equipment, and were expected to find themselves shelter for the night as best they could when on operations, as there were no tents. Disease and infections dramatically reduced the number of effectives. The companies contracted to supply them pocketed most of the money they received from the government. Even in cantonment around Nice the troops were poorly fed, with meat once every four days, beans once in three, and bowls of rice flavoured with lard the rest of the time. In the autumn they had been able to supplement their diet by gathering chestnuts, but the winter had robbed them of this resource. They could not buy food as they were paid irregularly, and then only in worthless assignats. Some of the senior officers who received cash contributions from the local administration to pay the men did not pass it on. The men had been stuck in the same place for months with nothing to do, and morale was low. Desertion was rife and acts of insubordination frequent. Disaffection had reignited anti-government and even royalist feeling among the older men, and shouts of ‘Vive le Roi’ were not infrequent. One demi-brigade mutinied shortly before Bonaparte’s arrival, one soon after.4

Bonaparte realised extreme measures were needed, and with Saliceti as the Directory’s commissioner, he was in a position to take them. He had a couple of officers court-martialled to set an example. He sent Chauvet to Genoa to raise a loan and purchase supplies, and wrote to the local authorities demanding food and forage, threatening to send the men out to loot and rape if these were not provided. With a mixture of threat and flattery he managed to get the contractors to disgorge victuals and the local administration to make up for some of the arrears in pay. He gave instructions that the men must have fresh or salt meat every day.5

He had selected as his chief of staff a man of experience, his senior in rank and age, whom he had met only recently. The forty-two-year-old Alexandre Berthier had trained as a military engineer and cartographer before receiving his baptism of fire as a captain in the American War of Independence. With his steady temperament, extraordinary memory, unmatched attention to detail, precise mode of expression and legible handwriting, Berthier was the perfect man for the job. He could grasp in a second some hastily-rapped-out order and give it coherent form, while his team ensured it was passed on to the appropriate quarter with a professionalism hitherto unknown in the army of the Republic. Bonaparte supervised and inspected, noting deficiencies and passing them on to Berthier, demanding immediate action. He was so confident that within two days of his arrival he reported to Carnot that ‘I have been very well received by the army, which shows a confidence in me for which I am deeply grateful.’ Quite how much confidence the army felt is questionable.6

François Vigo-Roussillon, a sergeant in the 32nd Demi-Brigade under Masséna, was astonished when his neighbour whispered that the diminutive figure who had just ridden up to their ranks was the new commander-in-chief. ‘His appearance, his dress, his bearing did not appeal to us,’ he recalled; ‘… small, slight, very pale, with great black eyes and hollow cheeks, with long hair falling from his brow to his shoulders in two dog’s ears, as they were then known. He wore a blue uniform coat and over that a nut-brown overcoat. He was mounted on a large bony sorrel horse with a docked tail.’ He was followed by a single servant ‘on a rather sad looking mule’ borrowed from the supply train. The new general introduced himself to the assembled troops with a speech in which he held out the prospect of glory and the possibility of rich plunder if they managed to defeat the enemy and break into Italy. His address produced little effect, and one officer recalled that afterwards the men made fun of his hairstyle and mimicked his accent.7

The troops were an amalgam of former royal soldiers, volunteers and conscripts. Most of the younger men came from the poorer mountainous regions of southern France. They were physically hardened and used to rigorous marches. The make-up of the officer corps was overwhelmingly plebeian (the percentage of nobles had fallen from 80 to 5 between 1789 and 1793), which contributed a sense of fraternity between officers and men, enhanced by the universal penury, as officers and even most of the generals could not afford a horse (the artillery was drawn by mules). The most disciplined units were those which had just been transferred from Spain, where they had fought a victorious campaign.8

The infantry divisions each had between three and five demi-brigades, the basic fighting unit at the time. The heavy demi-brigades were supposed to number 3,000 men and the light ones 1,500. Masséna commanded two divisions, Augereau and Sérurier one each. The cavalry, which numbered less than 5,000 men and was of poor quality and short of horses, was led by General Henri Stengel, a fifty-two-year-old German who had been in French service from the age of sixteen. The overall strength of the French Army of Italy was, on paper, 60,000 men, but most historians agree that the real figure was no more than about 47,000. Some put it as low as 35,000.9

Facing them in the Alpine passes were 18,000 men of the Sardinian army, well-trained, hardy Savoyard mountain men under the command of the Austrian field marshal baron de Colli. Beside them stood 35,000 Austrians under the seventy-one-year-old Field Marshal de Beaulieu, a Belgian by birth. His troops were disciplined, well-trained, steady and motivated, but they were used to set-piece battles and methodical manoeuvres, which would disadvantage them in the tight valleys and boulder-strewn terrain on which they were to fight.

Bonaparte’s orders were to stage a diversion that would tie down the maximum number of Austrian forces in Italy while the two stronger French armies poised on the Rhine defeated the main Austrian army in Germany and marched on Vienna. But he did not think like a soldier content merely to carry out the task he had been set. He believed that as long as the Habsburgs remained dominant in Italy they would present a threat to France, and that the centuries-old rivalry between the two states for hegemony over the peninsula should be resolved. He had studied the various Franco-Austrian wars over Italy, most recently Marshal Maillebois’ campaigns of 1745–46. He had pored over maps of the area during the past two years, becoming familiar with the lie of the land and making mental notes of which passes were practicable by artillery, where rivers could be forded, and which were the possible lines of advance and retreat not only for his own army but for the enemy as well. He meant to wipe out the threat to France by expelling the Austrians from Italy.

One weapon in this struggle would be the nascent Italian national movement, which identified the Austrians as oppressors. Many of the nationalists were living in exile in Nice, and Bonaparte held meetings with them. He did not think much of those he met, and had a poor opinion of Italians in general, but he decided to take 150 of them, led by Filippo Buonarroti, along with him. On 31 March he issued a proclamation to the people of Piedmont announcing that the French nation would shortly liberate them.10

The following day his divisions were on the move. On 4 April he set up headquarters at Albenga, where he heard of the death of his friend Chauvet in Genoa. Collot was shocked by the apparent indifference with which Bonaparte received the news, merely instructing him to take over. Here and on similar occasions he made a show of calm, even brash self-control, hiding the emotional turmoil that comes through in his letters, particularly to Josephine. ‘Not a day has passed without my writing to you, not a night has passed without me pressing you in my arms, I have not drunk a cup of tea without cursing the desire for glory and the ambition which keep me far from the soul of my life,’ he had written from Nice, complaining that her letters were scarce and cold, and that in contrast to his soldiers, only she withheld her trust and remained ‘the joy and the torment’ of his life.11

To her, he poured out his despair at the news of Chauvet’s death. ‘What is the future? What is the past? What are we?’ he questioned, wondering at the purpose of life, and ‘what magical fluid shrouds us and conceals all that we should most want to know?’ But this was no time to brood, and he must think only of the army. Two days later he wrote to her in more passionate vein, telling of his burning desire for her and sending her a kiss on a point of her body ‘lower than the heart, much, much lower’.12

On 9 April Bonaparte transferred to Savona as his three corps took up their positions, with Masséna on the right, Augereau in the centre and Sérurier to their left. But it was the Austrians who struck first. Beaulieu had misinterpreted a French reconnaissance along the coast as the vanguard of an attack on Genoa, and, assuming that the whole French army would be following, decided to drive in its flank through Montenotte and Monte Legino. His attack on what he assumed to be the French flank ran head-on into the units at Monte Legino preparing to attack.13

Bonaparte had intended to strike at the gap where the Alps ended and the Apennines began, which was the juncture between the Sardinians and their Austrian allies. While Sérurier pinned down the Sardinians frontally and Augereau turned their flank at Millesimo, Masséna was to move into the gap between the two armies. Bonaparte calculated that if he inserted a wedge between the two and prised them apart, strategic imperatives would force the Sardinians to fall back in a northerly direction towards their base at Turin and the Austrians to retreat eastwards towards theirs at Milan. He would then be able to defeat them separately. His studies had convinced him that it was superior numbers that won battles, and that the art of war could be reduced to the one principle of bringing greater forces to bear at a given point.14

As they sheltered from the torrential rain that night, planning to renew their attack the next morning, the Austrians at Monte Legino were unaware that, quickly appraising the situation, Bonaparte had ordered Masséna to veer right and make a forced march through the night to Montenotte in their rear. ‘Everything suggests that today and tomorrow will go down in history,’ Berthier wrote to Masséna with his latest orders.15

The following morning, as the Austrian commander was about to push home his attack, the dispersing mist revealed Masséna’s divisions deploying on his flank and rear. Coming under simultaneous attack from two sides, he ordered a retreat which quickly turned into a rout. It had been little more than a skirmish, with Austrian losses in dead, wounded and prisoners around 2,700 and the French no more than a hundred, but Bonaparte accorded it the status of a full-scale battle. In his self-aggrandising report to the Directory, he claimed that the main Austrian force commanded by Beaulieu himself was involved, that it had lost up to 4,000 men and ‘several’ flags (in fact only one was captured), and blew the event up to epic proportions. His order of the day to the troops echoed this, praising them for their glorious exploit. It was the first brush-stroke of what was to be a masterpiece of mendacity.16

Beaulieu had in fact spent the day several kilometres away, sitting badly bruised by a roadside while his escort struggled to repair the carriage that had pitched him to the ground. He had realised his mistake too late and had lost valuable time, which Bonaparte was not going to let him regain. He urged Augereau, most of whose men were still marching without boots, and many without muskets, to hasten his attack on Millesimo, and Masséna to strike further into the Austrian rear at Dego. Once Augereau had accomplished his task, he was to swing left and begin to roll up the extremity of the Sardinian line.

Bonaparte needed to keep up the momentum so that neither of his opponents had time to regroup and strike back; if they did, he would be caught between two fires. He therefore reacted violently to any apparent hitch. After Augereau had sent the Sardinians reeling at Millesimo, one force of about 1,000 men under General Provera had ensconced themselves in an old fortress at Cosseria. Knowing them to have no more supplies or water than those they carried, Augereau meant to leave a few hundred men to pin them down and take their inevitable surrender while he went after the retreating main body of Sardinians. But Bonaparte insisted he storm Cosseria. In the ensuing assault the French suffered heavy losses from the Sardinians sniping from the battlements. Provera offered to capitulate, but Bonaparte tried to bully him into unconditional surrender, threatening to take no prisoners, and ordered Augereau to attack once more. This attack proved as futile as the first. Provera duly surrendered the next morning, having lost no more than 150 men, while Bonaparte’s impatience had cost the French at least 600 and possibly as many as 1,000 casualties. He did have the good grace to admit his mistake and express regret.17

To Augereau’s right, Masséna attacked the citadel of Dego, where over the next two days some of the most serious fighting took place, with the citadel changing hands several times. After the final assault, which he directed himself, Bonaparte promoted a young chef de bataillon named Lannes whose dash had caught his attention.

On 16 April Bonaparte learned that Beaulieu was retreating to Acqui on the road to Milan; his plan had worked. He ordered Masséna to move northwards against the Sardinians. Colli’s dwindling force was falling back in order to defend Turin. It fought doggedly, inflicting heavy losses on the French, but on 21 April, after a brief defence it had to abandon its base and stores at Mondovi. That evening the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus, summoned a special council in Turin. As Beaulieu had signalled that he was not able to come to his aid further resistance seemed pointless; on the morning of 23 April Colli requested an armistice.

Bonaparte replied that he lacked the necessary powers and continued his advance. When pressed by the desperate Sardinians to agree to a ceasefire, he replied that he would be putting himself at risk if he did so without guarantees, and could only sign one if they handed over the fortresses of Coni, Tortona and Alessandria. In order to prevent Beaulieu from attempting to succour his Sardinian allies, he moved quickly on Cherasco and Alba, where he encouraged Piedmontese revolutionaries to establish a ‘Republic’, as a signal to the king that he could overthrow him if he wished. He applied further pressure by raising his demands to include the cession of Savoy and Nice to France, and the supply of his army with all its needs. These he delivered as an ultimatum on 27 April.18

The two men sent to conclude the negotiations and sign the armistice, the old Piedmontese General La Tour and Colli’s chief of staff Colonel Costa de Beauregard, found Bonaparte late on the night of 27 April in a barely guarded house in Cherasco. He was haughty and firm, threatening to launch further attacks every time they suggested softening his terms. At one o’clock in the morning he informed them that his troops were under orders to begin the advance on Turin at two. But having bullied them into signing the armistice he offered them a snack of broth, cold meats, hardtack and some pastries made by the local nuns, during which he became talkative. Although Beauregard was impressed by the brilliance and wide-ranging interests Bonaparte displayed, he found him cold, proud, bitter, and lacking in any grace or amenity. He also noted that he was very tired and his eyes were red. As they parted he said to Bonaparte, ‘General, how sad that one cannot like you as much as one cannot help admiring and esteeming you!’19

Bonaparte had weightier concerns than the affection of his enemies. He had exceeded both his brief and his duty as a soldier. He was single-handedly deciding French foreign policy, presenting the Directory with a fait accompli. He was, it is true, acting in concert with commissioner Saliceti who was with him during the negotiations, but he was still at risk of being recalled in disgrace. As he had meant to act independently all along, he had anticipated this eventuality and been shoring up his position.

His treatment of the troops under his command had been designed from the start not only to make them more effective as fighting men, but also to turn them into his men. He had achieved the first aim by giving them victory: nothing acts on the soldier’s self-esteem like success. It was clear to them that this success was largely due to Bonaparte’s talents, yet he made them feel it was all down to them. He had developed a gift for talking to the men as equals. His extraordinary memory allowed him to remember their names, their units, where they came from, their ages, histories, and above all their military exploits. He would come up to a man and ask about some personal problem or congratulate him on a past feat like an old comrade. He was not shy of reprimanding officers in front of the troops, to show that he was their friend.

He had refrained from being too strict with them at first, allowing these men who had been starved of food, comforts and action for so long to indulge their basic instincts. They preyed on the country they went through, and by the time he had reached Cherasco he had to admit to being frightened by the ‘horrors’ they were committing. ‘The soldier who lacks bread is driven to excesses of violence which make one blush for humanity,’ he reported on 24 April. By then they had had a chance to fill their bellies and pull boots and items of clothing they lacked from Austrian and Sardinian dead or prisoners. Once he had halted his advance and managed to capture Sardinian stores, Bonaparte was able to begin reining them in. ‘The pillage is growing less widespread,’ he reported to the Directory on 26 April. ‘The primal thirst of an army lacking everything is being quenched.’ He had three men shot and six others condemned to hard labour, then shot a few more for looting a church. ‘It costs me much sadness and I have passed some difficult moments,’ he admitted.20

While he tightened discipline, he took care to flatter the soldiers’ self-esteem, making throwaway statements such as ‘With 20,000 men like that one could conquer Europe!’ He described their feats of arms in superlative terms in his proclamations. In that of 26 April he listed the engagements they had taken part in as if they were great battles, gave inflated figures of enemy dead and wounded, guns and standards captured, and told them they were heroic conquerors and liberators who would one day look back with pride on the glorious epic they had shared in. He encouraged the sense that they were making history with references to Hannibal as they came over the Alpine passes.21

A mixture of growing self-confidence and the urge to earn praise fed their eagerness to live up to his expectations of them. ‘I can hardly express to what degree of intoxication and pride such resounding, repeated and rapid triumphs transported our army, and what a noble emulation inspired all ranks,’ noted Collot. ‘They vied with each other to be the first to reach a redoubt, to be the first to storm a battery, the first across a river, to show the most devotion and audacity.’22

Bonaparte’s despatches to the Directory were no less hyperbolic. He wrote dramatic descriptions of every engagement, exaggerating the obstacles and the efforts with which they had been overcome, playing fast and loose with facts and figures, and singling out individual acts of courage in melodramatic images of republican heroism. At the same time, he stressed his lack of equipment and berated his masters in Paris for failing to send him guns and trained artillery officers and engineers. To Carnot he expressed his ‘despair, I could almost say my rage’ at not having the tools with which to do the job he had been set.23

Desperate to reap the fruits of success, the Directory proclaimed the victories of French arms loudly and published extracts from the despatches. The name of Bonaparte was soon familiar throughout the country, and was becoming subliminally associated with heroism, genius and victory. On 25 April Bonaparte sent Joseph and Junot to Paris with the twenty-one enemy standards captured so far, knowing that their progress through France and their arrival in Paris would make an impression. ‘It would be difficult to convey the enthusiasm of the population,’ Joseph confirmed. After signing the armistice of Cherasco, Bonaparte sent Murat with the document and more standards. Whatever their feelings about him and his doings, the Directory were happy to bask in the reflected glory, and could only hail him as a national hero.24

Murat was burdened with another mission – to persuade Josephine to come to Italy. From the moment he left Paris Bonaparte had not stopped thinking about her and longing for her to join him, and nothing could banish her from his thoughts. He could not understand why she did not write more often, why her letters were often lukewarm, and why she had not made haste to join him. He wrote to her every day, sometimes more than once, even after exhausting marches and hard-fought engagements. He had thoughts for nobody else. After Dego he was brought a beautiful young woman taken prisoner along with an Austrian officer, but he passed up the chance of having her and allowed her to go on her way.25

When he sent Joseph to Paris he entrusted him with a letter for Josephine, whom he had yet to meet. She was sure to like him, he wrote. ‘Nature has endowed him with a gentle, even and thoroughly good character; he is full of good qualities,’ he assured her. He wanted her to come out to Italy with the returning Junot. ‘You must come with him, do you understand?’ he wrote, urging her to seek inspiration and strength by reading Ossian. ‘Take wing, come, come!’ He had also written to Barras, asking him to press her to come. From Cherasco the day following the armistice he assured her that no woman was ever ‘loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness’, and that his love grew with every day that passed. He could not understand how she had come to mean so much to him. He had a carriage, silver and china for her, so all she needed was to bring a chambermaid and a cook.26

Josephine had no intention of leaving Paris, with its parties and theatres and the many friends she loved. And she had recently taken up with Hippolyte Charles, a dashing hussar officer, a good lover and a jovial companion who kept her entertained. Bonaparte had begun to suspect something of the sort, but his mind was taken up with more pressing matters.