Читать книгу The History of Waterloo - John Codman Ropes - Страница 7

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The French army, it is hardly necessary to state, had been seriously affected by the sudden and complete change in government through which France had passed in April, 1814. Without going into particulars, it is sufficient to say that Napoleon found on his return from Elba much which needed to be undone and more which it was necessary to do. But the details of this partial reorganization do not greatly concern us. Napoleon unquestionably did his utmost to bring the troops into a state of efficiency. And he certainly was in great measure successful. The larger part of the Marshals and high officers remained in France and took command with cheerfulness, and the younger officers and the men were unanimous in their devotion to the cause of their country against the coalition. But some of the Marshals and generals high in rank had retired into Belgium with Louis XVIII.; others declined active service; and where there were so many defections, there was inevitably not a little suspicion and disquietude. In the reorganization, which was beyond a question necessary, great changes had to be made in the higher commands, and the regiments, even, were to a greater or less extent recast. The Guard was also reconstituted, a measure obviously wise, taking account of the prestige which this famous corps had always possessed, but a measure which, carried out as it had to be, in a very brief period of time, could not but injure to a considerable extent the value of the regiments of the line. It is true that France at this time was full of veteran soldiers; some 200,000 men had returned into the country from foreign prisons. There was an abundance of excellent material. But the circumstances under which the existing military force was reorganized and increased in numbers were unfavorable to the moral of the soldiers and of the army generally, and there was not sufficient time before the outbreak of hostilities to overcome the disturbing influences inseparable from such a state of things. The men were full of enthusiasm for and confidence in Napoleon; but they mistrusted many of their commanders. They were old soldiers, nearly or quite all of them, and understood their work perfectly; but the changes of the last eighteen months had been so utterly perplexing,—so thorough,—the new organization had been so recent and attended by so many disquieting circumstances and disturbing rumors, that the absolute confidence, which ought to exist between the officers and men of an army as strongly as between the members of a family, did not prevail.23

Coming now to the personnel of the army: Napoleon’s old chief-of-staff, Berthier, who had served him in this capacity for twenty years, who had grown accustomed to his ways, and was able by reason of his long experience to supplement his defects, had retired into Belgium with the King. To supply his place the Emperor selected Marshal Soult, certainly a very singular choice.24 Soult was a man of Napoleon’s own age,—he had for several years commanded an army in Spain, and had had, of course, a chief-of-staff of his own. To place such a man at such a time of his life on staff duty when he should be commanding troops, must strike any one as strange. Such an officer is not fitted by his experience in an independent command for the duties of a chief-of-staff. Those duties he has been for years accustomed to turn over to a subordinate. The personal attention which they need he has for years expected to be given by a junior officer. It is out of the question that he can, all at once, assume the extremely laborious duties which belong to the chief-of-staff. We shall, before we get through, have more than one opportunity to see how Soult performed his new tasks. It is safe to say that there was many a younger officer in the French army who would have served with much more efficiency in this all-important place, for which the utmost vigor and alertness of mind and body are wellnigh indispensable.

For the invasion of Belgium, Napoleon destined the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, and 6th Corps, and the Imperial Guard, besides a large force of cavalry. The five corps-commanders, d’Erlon, Reille, Vandamme, Gérard and the Comte de Lobau were all men of experience and admitted capacity. Vandamme was known specially as a hard fighter. Gérard was a comparatively young officer of great promise. The Comte de Lobau, under his original name of Mouton, had distinguished himself in the Austrian campaign of 1809. But no one of them equalled in military talent the leading generals in the Italian or Austerlitz campaigns,—Masséna, Lannes, Davout, Desaix, and their fellows. The commander of the cavalry, Grouchy, was a veteran of twenty years’ hard fighting, but was not credited with possessing any great capacity. The fact is that Napoleon himself could not do for his own army what the turmoil and chaos of the Revolution had done for the army of the republic, and that was to override seniority and all ordinary claims to promotion, and to open the door wide to youthful vigor and ambition. It was to the confusion created by the Revolution that the formidable list of warriors who served France so brilliantly for twenty years owed in great measure their rapid advancement. Napoleon himself constitutes no exception to this remark.

Napoleon25 says of his officers at this period:—

“The character of several of the generals had been weakened by the events of 1814; they had lost something of that audacity, of that resolution, of that confidence, which had * * * contributed so much to the successes of former campaigns.”26

Charras has a passage to the same effect:27—

“Enriched, systematically corrupted, by the prodigality of the Empire; enervated by luxury and pleasure; fatigued by twenty years of war, several among the generals would have preferred the tranquil life of their own homes to the labors of the march and the discomforts of the bivouac. They had tasted of peace for a whole year; they looked back on that period with regret. Some among them had met with rude defeats while in independent commands, and they remembered them well. Others, shaken by the cruel recollections of 1813 and 1814, despaired of the issue of the war in view of the enormous armies of the coalition and of the feebleness of our means of defence. All remained brave, intrepid; but all had not preserved the activity, the resolution, the audacity of their early days. Their moral was no longer equal to sustaining a reverse.”

These statements may very possibly be somewhat too highly colored, but there is little doubt that there was a good deal of truth in them. It is significant that they are made by writers who wrote of the campaign from opposite points of view. Napoleon in his narrative of the campaign sought to show that he was not the sole or even the chief cause of its failure, and claimed that his orders were not carried out with the spirit and energy which his lieutenants had once possessed. Charras on the other hand, throughout his history, is uniformly harsh in his comments on the Emperor’s conduct, and insists that he was greatly lacking both in physical strength and in energy of character. That both Charras and Napoleon, therefore, state that the higher officers of the army were not up to the mark of their earlier campaigns renders it very probable that such was the actual fact.

The importance of this fact is to be seen in its true light only when we bear in mind to how great an extent Napoleon’s campaigns required for their successful conduct qualities in his lieutenants by no means universally found even in respectable corps-commanders,—qualities far in excess of those commonly demanded. Napoleon was not content with mere obedience; he expected from his chief officers an intelligent comprehension of his views, and a vigorous and daring execution of the parts assigned to them,—a sort of coöperation, in fact. The movements with which the campaign of 1809 opened will best illustrate, perhaps, what is here referred to. It is not too much to say that without this hearty and intelligent work on the part of his lieutenants many of Napoleon’s most brilliant and successful campaigns could never have been carried out. We shall see in the course of this narrative how much he expected from Ney and Grouchy. Hence any inability or unwillingness on the part of the leading officers to render this assistance must be fully taken into account when we are seeking to understand this campaign of Waterloo.

We have not spoken of the commander of the Guard, Marshal Mortier, because he was taken ill just before the opening of the campaign, and no one replaced him. General Drouot, an artillery officer of great merit, was the adjutant-general of the Guard, and orders were given through him.

At the last moment, on the eve of the opening of hostilities, the Emperor sent for Marshal Ney. Why the orders to this distinguished officer were not given earlier, we are not informed; it seems like an unpardonable oversight, to say the least. As such Ney certainly regarded it.28 Ney was given no time for preparation; it was only by the exercise of great diligence that he reached the front when he did, and that was at five o’clock in the afternoon of the 15th, after the Sambre had been crossed. He was assigned to the command of the 1st and 2d Corps, commanded by the Counts d’Erlon and Reille respectively; but he was ignorant of their organization, and had even to learn the names of the division commanders. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand this strange neglect of Napoleon. No one knew better than he how important it is that the commander of an army or of a wing of an army should have ample time to know his troops and to be known by them, and that this was especially necessary where a reorganization had recently taken place.

In the army, thus constituted, there were, then, three Marshals. Of these, one, Soult, was serving in a new capacity for him, that of chief-of-staff; another, Ney, had not been given a fair chance to get a good hold on the troops assigned to him; the third, Grouchy, was not a man of superior capacity, had never commanded an army-corps in his life, and had only just been made a Marshal. Grouchy was at first assigned to the command of the reserve cavalry, consisting of the four cavalry corps of Pajol, Exelmans, Kellermann and Milhaud, numbering in all 13,784 men. But the campaign had scarcely opened when he was relieved from this duty, and placed in command of the right wing of the army, consisting of the 3d and 4th Corps, those of Generals Vandamme and Gérard, together with a considerable force of cavalry. Here again was a singular neglect on Napoleon’s part of the importance of allowing the new Marshal time to get used to his new duties; and, as we shall ultimately have occasion to see, this circumstance operated most unfavorably when Grouchy found himself in an independent command. It looks very much as if Napoleon only decided to send for Ney at the last minute, and as if the assignment of Grouchy to the command of the two corps of Vandamme and Gérard was not determined on until the campaign had opened.

But not only was the organization of the army not as perfect as it might have been by reason of the course which Napoleon pursued in regard to Ney and Grouchy; there was an officer whom he ordered to stay behind when he might have had him with himself as well as not, a man of the highest reputation, the Duke of Auërstadt, the Prince of Eckmühl, Marshal Davout. The Emperor had made him Minister of War, but Davout begged to have a command in the field. He represented to the Emperor,—29

“That the defence of Paris, notwithstanding its incontestable importance, was, like all questions of interior defence, only secondary, and essentially subordinate to the result of military operations; that when it was a question of playing a decisive part on the field of battle, it was not the time to make experiments with new men; that it was necessary, on the contrary, for the Emperor to surround himself with men who had given good account of themselves and who had had long experience in high command. The Marshal did not succeed in convincing the Emperor, who contented himself with replying: ‘I cannot entrust Paris to any one else.’ ‘But, sire,’ replied Davout, ‘if you are the victor, Paris will be yours; and if you are beaten, neither I nor any one else can do anything for you.’”

There can be no question that the Marshal’s reasoning was sound; but Napoleon persisted in his course. What he lost by not having Davout with him in this campaign, it is not easy to estimate; it is perhaps foolish to conjecture. But it would probably not be going too far to say that Davout in the place of either Ney or Grouchy would have prevented the catastrophe of Waterloo.

This sketch of the personnel of the French army naturally leads up to an estimate of its chief, that is, of his comparative fitness at this period of his life to undertake the tasks of such a daring, laborious and perilous campaign as this attack on Blücher and Wellington was sure to prove.

Most historians have agreed that in point of bodily activity the Emperor did not show himself in this campaign the equal of his former self; in fact, most writers have gone farther than this; they have attributed to him a lassitude of mind as well as of body, they have found a want of the mental activity and a lack of the resolute will, which had been so characteristic of him in his earlier days. The portrait of Napoleon by General Foy is one of the best we have, and is of especial value as having been drawn by a contemporary, who served throughout his wars and commanded a division at Waterloo.

“With his passions, and in spite of his errors, Napoleon is, taking him all in all, the greatest warrior of modern times. He carried into battle a stoical courage, a profoundly calculated tenacity, a mind fertile in sudden inspirations, which by unhoped-for resources disconcerted the plans of the enemy. * * * Napoleon possessed in an eminent degree the faculties requisite for the profession of arms; temperate and robust, watching and sleeping at pleasure, appearing unawares where he was least suspected, he did not disregard the details to which important results are sometimes attached. * * * He carried with him into battle a cool and impassible courage; never was a mind so deeply meditative more fertile in rapid and sudden illuminations. On becoming Emperor he ceased not to be the soldier. If his activity decreased with the progress of age, this was owing to the decrease of his physical powers.” And in a note he adds: “In the latter years the Emperor had grown fat; he ate more, slept longer, and rode less; but he retained all the vigor of his mind, and his passions had lost little of their strength.”30

There is in fact no reason to doubt that Napoleon’s habitual activity and even his capacity for physical exertion had in 1815 sensibly diminished. Like most men of forty-five, he was not so full of energy as he had been at five and twenty. He had also grown stout, and he was furthermore a sufferer from some painful maladies which rendered it difficult for him to keep on horseback for any great length of time.31 All these circumstances would naturally tend to diminish, more or less, the once ceaseless activity of his mind; we may, therefore, expect to find him less thoughtful, less vigilant, less careful, than he had been in his earlier campaigns. But it is plain that the standard by which the Napoleon of 1815 is tested is no ordinary standard,32 and it may well be that although he may have failed to come up to the high mark which he formerly attained, we shall nevertheless find in this campaign of Waterloo no conspicuous lack of ordinary activity and energy.

In conclusion, we may fairly say that while we recognize that the army with which Napoleon was preparing to take the field in June, 1815, was not as well-organized a body of troops as some of the armies which he had led to victory, that its corps-commanders were not as brilliant soldiers as were many of the distinguished generals of that period, that peculiar circumstances rendered Soult, Ney and Grouchy less serviceable than they probably would have been had things been otherwise ordered, and that the Emperor himself was more or less deficient in the never-resting activity of mind and body which he had once possessed, we must not forget that the soldiers and their officers were all veterans, that their generals had won their rank by distinguished service on many a bloody field, and that no man living surpassed their leader in military talent. It is not correct to say33 that the army which Napoleon led into Belgium was the finest he had ever commanded, but it is quite certain that it was by far the best of the three armies then in the field.

The strength and composition of this army, was, according to Charras,34 whom we may safely follow, as follows:—

1st Corps: d’Erlon.
Four divisions of infantry,—
Allix, Donzelot, Marcognet, Durutte	16,885		Men
One division of cavalry,—Jaquinot	1,506		„
Artillery,—46 guns,—engineers, etc.	1,548		„
Total,		19,939	„
2d Corps: Reille.
Four divisions of infantry,—
Bachelu, Jerome Napoleon,35 Girard, Foy	20,635		Men
One division of cavalry,—Piré	1,865		„
Artillery,—46 guns,—engineers, &c.	1,861		„
Total,		24,361	„
3d Corps: Vandamme.
Three divisions of infantry,—
Lefol, Habert, Berthezène	16,851		„
One division of cavalry,—Domon	1,017		„
Artillery,—38 guns,—engineers, &c.	1,292		„
Total,		19,160	„
4th Corps: Gérard.
Three divisions of infantry,—
Pécheux, Vichery, Bourmont36	12,800		„
One division of cavalry,—Maurin	1,628		„
Artillery,—38 guns,—engineers, &c.,	1,567		„
Total,		15,995	„
6th Corps: Lobau.
Three divisions of infantry,—
Simmer, Jeannin, Teste	9,218		„
Artillery,—32 guns,—engineers, &c.,	1,247		„
Total,		10,465	„
Imperial Guard:
Old Guard:
One division,—Friant,—grenadiers	4,140		„
Middle37 Guard:
One division,—Morand,—chasseurs	4,603		„
Young Guard:
One division,—Duhesme,—voltigeurs, &c.,	4,283		„
Two divisions of cavalry,—Guyot, Lefebvre-Desnouettes	3,795		„
Artillery,—96 guns,—engineers, &c.,	4,063		„
Total,		20,884	„
Reserve Cavalry: Grouchy.
1st Cavalry Corps: Pajol.
Two divisions,—Soult, Subervie	2,717
Artillery,—12 guns,	329
		3,046
2d Cavalry Corps: Exelmans.
Two divisions: Stroltz, Chastel	3,220
Artillery,—12 guns,	295
		3,515
3d Cavalry Corps: Kellermann.
Two divisions,—L’Heritier, Roussel	3,360
Artillery,—12 guns,	319
		3,679
4th Cavalry Corps: Milhaud.
Two divisions,—Wathier, Delort	3,194
Artillery,—12 guns,	350
		3,544
Total,		13,784	„
Workmen, waggoners, &c., about		3,500	„
Grand Total,		128,088	„
Leaving out the last item as consisting chiefly of non-combatants, we have an army consisting of		124,588	men.
Of these, the infantry numbered,		89,415	Men
the cavalry, including the horse artillery of the reserve cavalry, numbered,		23,595	„
the artillery (344 guns including the above) numbered,		11,578	„
Total,38 as above,		124,588	„