Читать книгу Napoleon - Vincent Cronin - Страница 13

THE war in which Napoleon was about to fight was being waged by two men with family reasons for loathing the French Republic. Emperor Francis II, one year older than Napoleon, was a timid, decent Austrian with little talent or energy; but as the nephew of Marie Antoinette, and seated on Europe’s oldest throne, he had committed himself to restoring a Bourbon king to France. His ally, Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont, was a vain bigot who imprisoned liberals and brought back the Inquisition. He was constantly dropping off to sleep, hence his nickname, ‘King of the Dormice’, but as the father-in-law of the Comte de Provence – ‘Louis XVIII’ – he bestirred himself in his waking intervals to try to restore the throne of France.

Napoleon’s orders were to cross the Alps into Piedmont, the fertile plain of the upper Po Valley. He was to engage and defeat the Austrians and Piedmontese. He was to occupy the Austrian duchy of Milan; Piedmont he could treat as he wished. He was then to negotiate peace, thereby making it possible to reduce France’s huge and expensive army. Such a conquest as this of northern Italy had twice been attempted in the last hundred years, by Villars and by Maillebois: both attempts had failed.

Napoleon set up his headquarters at Nice and met his senior officers. There was Massena, a thin, wiry ex-smuggler with a big sabre nose, who looked like an eagle and had an eagle’s eye for terrain. He had been fourteen years a sergeant-major, unable, like other rankers, to rise higher until the Revolution opened commissions to all. Elected colonel by his men, he was now a general, a dry, silent, dour character. Another general who had risen from the ranks was Charles Augereau, a tall, talkative, foul-mouthed Parisian of the streets, who had sold watches in Constantinople, given dancing lessons, served in the Russian army, and eloped with a Greek girl to Lisbon, yet for all that was a stern disciplinarian. There was Kilmaine, a mad Dubliner who commanded the thin nags misnamed cavalry. Finally there was Louis Alexandre Berthier. At forty-three he was older than the others, had been born into the officer class, and had fought in the American War of Independence, being cited for bravery at Philipsburg. Outwardly he was unprepossessing, with a big ungainly head, frizzy hair and a nasal voice. He spluttered and stammered, and he had a habit of biting the finger-nails of his big red hands. But his brain was like a filing-cabinet, orderly and neat to the last detail. Berthier was a born chief-of-staff and had no ambition to command. Massena, however, had, and with some justice had been hoping for the job given to Napoleon. He grumbled with Augereau at serving under this whipper-snapper from Paris, and when Napoleon kept passing round Josephine’s portrait, they sniggered.

Napoleon was satisfied with his senior officers, but he dismissed as incapable five brigadiers, and sent away four aged cavalry colonels, ‘only good for office work’. He brought in brave men of his own, notably Junot and Murat. Berthier in particular pleased him by his energy, exactitude and the way he could express in dispatches exactly what his commander-in-chief wanted to say.

Napoleon turned to his men. At a time when France had 560,000 citizens under arms, Napoleon’s army was neither the largest nor the best trained. It consisted of 36,570 infantry, 3,300 cavalry, 1,700 artillerymen, sappers and gendarmes: a total of 41,570. Most were southerners, lively and garrulous Provençals, boasting Gascons, eager, dogged Dauphinois mountaineers.

At this time the basic French fighting man wore blue trousers and tunic, and a black leather cartridge-pouch containing thirty-five cartridges; attached to it was a leather purse for spare flints, a screwdriver and the tire-balks, a special pin for clearing the aperture of the sighting-vane on his musket, which tended to clog, and the rag for cleaning the working parts. On his back he carried a calfskin haversack containing – theoretically – spare boots, extra cartridges, bread or biscuit for four days, two shirts, a collar, a vest, a pair of pants, stockings, gaiters, a nightcap, brushes, and a sleeping-bag. Altogether, including musket, he carried a weight of 50 lbs.

His 17.5 mm musket, four feet long, weighed 9¹/₂ lbs. To fire it, he first opened the pan, tore a cartridge open with his teeth, filled the pan with some of the gunpowder from the cartridge and shut it. He then poured the rest of the gunpowder down the muzzle, rammed home the cartridge with its lead bullet after it, using two thrusts of his ramrod. Finally he cocked the gun and fired. He could fire two rounds a minute. Every fifty shots he had to clean the barrel and change the flint. At the end of the musket, when charging the enemy, he fixed a bayonet 21 ins. long.

Napoleon found that very few in his army were equipped to this standard. Their uniforms were diverse, some of the veterans clinging to patched white tunics of pre-Revolutionary days, which they were unwilling to have dyed. Most wore ragged linen trousers. On their heads were battered caps, revolutionary bonnets, bearskins that had lost their fur, helmets without plumes. Thin in the face, because they did not have enough to eat, they looked like scarecrows. On their feet a few wore boots; others made do with clogs; some had scraps of cloth, some no more than plaited straw. And this was the army he was expected to march into Italy!

What struck Napoleon most was his army’s ‘frightening penury’, so he spent his gold at once on six days’ rations of bread, meat and brandy. No one would accept a letter of exchange for 162,800 francs which the Government had given him: understandably, since it was drawn on Cadiz. With the Directors’ permission he sent Saliceti to Genoa to raise a three and a half million franc loan; this Saliceti failed to do, but he did buy enough corn for three months’ bread, if eked out with chestnuts. Napoleon also bought 18,000 pairs of boots. With bread and boots he could manage.

On 6 April Napoleon moved his headquarters fifty-five miles forward to Albenga, still on the coast. ‘Misery has led to indiscipline,’ he found, and some troops refused to march. On the 8th: ‘I have sent for court-martial two officers alleged to have shouted “Long live the King!”’ In an order of the day Napoleon insisted that discipline is ‘the nerve of armies’, and cases of indiscipline he treated severely. Everywhere he tightened up. Augereau, who had never quailed in his life before, confided to Massena, ‘I can’t understand – it that little bugger makes me afraid.’

In the past half-century, war in Europe had become a gentleman’s profession, comparable to boar-hunting or dancing the minuet. The rules were everything. Two armies met, and slowly deployed into long, perfectly dressed lines. Each general sought to discover the other’s weak point. Then he launched an assault by parallel columns, equidistant from each other, in perfect alignment, in perfect step. After at most a few hours’ fighting, each withdrew to its camp. There was little bloodshed, battles were usually drawn, and so the tide of war flowed back and forth, indecisively.

Then came the Revolution. France for the first time grew conscious of its nationhood and, as in Elizabethan England and Philip II’s Spain, a tremendous energy was released, an urge at all costs to win. NCOs rose to be generals, and their raw troops, trained in a hurry, could not perform the elaborate movements beloved of royal armies. So they attacked more quickly, more loosely and no longer according to the text-book: in single column or, like Carteaux, in ‘column of three’. Successful elsewhere, these methods had not yet produced results in the difficult up-and-down country of the Italian frontier. As Napoleon put it, ‘We have been playing for [three] years in the Alps and Apennines a perpetual game of prisoners’ base.’ To end the game a general would need exceptional qualities.

Napoleon, in this context, had four such qualities. To start with, he possessed a particular kind of physique, distinguished by broad chest and big lungs. The big lungs inhaled deep chestfuls of air to oxygenate his blood, and this generous supply of oxygen in turn provided him with an unusually quick rate of metabolism. ‘Marry us quickly:’ that is one example from hundreds of a pulsating activity which made Napoleon desirous and capable of doing things with the utmost speed. Secondly, Napoleon was able to get along, for a few days at a time, on very little sleep. He made up for nights in the saddle by snatching half-an-hour of sleep when occasion offered. Since the first hour of unconsciousness rests the body as much as three hours in the middle of a full night’s sleep, Napoleon with quick naps was able to keep up his tremendous activity for eighteen and twenty-hour days.

The third quality Napoleon brought to the Army of the Alps was an eye for topography. This was part of his Corsican heritage. In an island virtually without roads, to get fast from Ajaccio to Bonifacio, or from this village to that, one had to make use of every defile, every pass, every goat track. A wrong turning could cost you a night on the mountainside, or a bullet in the back. Napoleon therefore had evolved a ‘feel’ for country: from the shape and line of hills he could gauge exactly where and to what level the hidden valleys would fall.

Finally, Napoleon was a gunner. He had few guns at present, but he was to use soldiers much as he used guns: concentrating them from several sides at once against a single point, and when that fell, moving them quickly against a second point.

Napoleon, in his headquarters at Albenga, studied his map, with red pins marking enemy positions. The Austrian army numbered 22,000, the Piedmontese 25,000, so in this respect the enemy had the edge. Moreover, in mountain warfare, the defenders always hold the advantage. For three years French generals had tried to cross into Piedmont over the Maritime Alps. Passes being few, narrow and well protected, they had failed. Napoleon had already decided to abandon this route. Instead, he chose to move along the coast, make a feint to march through neutral Genoa, thus drawing the Austrian commander down from his mountain base at Alessandria. Then he would swing up from the sea, through the Cadibona-Carcare gap, which divided the Alps from the Apennines. Here he would strike fast and hard at an allied army which, in trying to protect Genoa, would have dangerously extended its lines. Through the gap he would debouch into Piedmont. Instead of crossing the Alps, he would turn them.

Napoleon began by asking the Senators of Genoa for permission to march through Genoese territory against the Austrians, knowing that they would inform Beaulieu, the seventy-one-year-old Fleming who commanded the Austrian army. Napoleon then divided his army into three: one division under Massena, one under Augereau, a third under Sérurier. A small task force under La Harpe Napoleon flipped forward as bait to Voltri, fifteen miles short of Genoa. Beaulieu hurried down from the heights with 10,000 men. On 10 April he attacked La Harpe and drove him out of Voltri, while Beaulieu’s colleague, Argenteau, swooped down by another route, hoping to cut off La Harpe’s retreat.

On 11 April Napoleon swung into action. He quickly drew back La Harpe to the Cadibona-Carcare gap, and moved Massena’s division to the same area. His third division he moved to the far end of the gap, to prevent any help from the Piedmontese. Meanwhile the Austrian general, Argenteau, had marched into the gap and was launching attacks on Napoleon’s decoy: the earth-fort of Montenotte, held by 1,200 picked French troops.

On the morning of the 12th Napoleon ordered La Harpe to attack Argenteau in front, and Massena to attack him in the flank and rear. He had made it a rule that generals were to write on their messages the hour, not just the day; this was because his tactics, as now, depended on exact timing. The perfectly synchronized attack took Argenteau by surprise. One thousand feet up amid outcrops of grey schist Napoleon directed operations from a nearby ridge, watching his 16,000 ill-fed, ill-equipped troops in their blue uniforms attack, with musket-fire and bayonet charge, 10,000 white-uniformed Austrians who lacked nothing. With negligible losses they killed or wounded 1,000 Austrians and took 2,500 prisoners. Montenotte, fought in cold rain, was Napoleon’s first victory.

Napoleon marched quickly up the gap to attack the Piedmontese before Beaulieu should have time to rejoin them. The Piedmontese army was in two parts, one at Ceva, the other, under General Provera, at Millesimo. Napoleon ordered Sérurier to launch feint attacks at Ceva, while he, at the head of Massena’s and Augereau’s divisions, marched on Millesimo. The battle of that name took place on the 14th and again, by quick marching, Napoleon had favourable odds of sixteen to ten. This time his victory was even more crushing, and he captured the whole of Provera’s corps. On the same day, leaving Augereau in front of Ceva to aid Sérurier, Napoleon led two divisions against 6,000 Austrians at Dego, and won his third victory. Next day, he defeated a further 6,000 Austrians dispatched by Beaulieu to help the Piedmontese.

For ninety-six hours almost non-stop Napoleon had marched his army up and down the steep foothills of the Alps, across passes, and through defiles, and he had thrown them into four major battles. He had run circles round the enemy in a way never before known. Now they were dispersed and divided. While the Austrians fell back to protect their base in Pavia, the surviving half of the Piedmontese force dug in on the River Tanaro.

Napoleon rested his men, then marched fast to the Tanaro. Crossing that river, on the 21st he defeated the Piedmontese near Vico and entered Mondovi. The Piedmontese fell back to the River Stura, with their left on the town of Cherasco, only thirty miles from their capital, Turin. Napoleon marched up to the Stura, prepared to cross it, and announced his terms for peace. It was all too quick, too bewildering for the King of the Dormice. From the palace of Turin he sent envoys to seek an armistice – Salier de La Tour and Costa de Beauregard, one of the last officers to quit Fort Mulgrave when Napoleon captured it during the siege of Toulon.

They arrived at Napoleon’s lodgings, Count Salmatori’s palazzo in Cherasco, at eleven at night on 27 April. Berthier woke Napoleon, who came down in his general’s uniform, with high riding-boots, but without sword, hat or scarf. His chestnut hair was unpowdered and gathered in a pigtail, but with strands over his cheeks and forehead. He was pale and his eyes were reddened with fatigue.

Napoleon listened in silence while Salier put forward proposals. Instead of answering, he asked curtly whether King Victor Amadeus accepted French terms, yes or no. Salier complained that they were very harsh, notably the surrender of Cuneo, key to their Alpine frontier. ‘Since drawing them up,’ Napoleon replied, ‘I have captured Cherasco, Fossano and Alba. You ought to consider them moderate.’ Salier mumbled a phrase about not wishing to desert the Austrians. Napoleon’s answer was to pull out his watch. ‘It is one o’clock. I have ordered an attack at two. Unless you agree to hand over Cuneo this morning, that attack will take place.’ The envoys exchanged a look, and said they would sign.

They asked for coffee. Napoleon sent for some, then from the thin portmanteau in his bedroom took two porcelain cups. He had no spoons, however, and beside them placed brass army issue spoons. On the table lay black bread and a plate of cakes, a peace offering from the Cherasco nuns. When Costa de Beauregard remarked on this Spartan simplicity, Napoleon explained that the portmanteau was his only baggage: less than he used to carry as an artillery officer. The Austrians, he said, had too much baggage.

Napoleon was feeling elated and unusually talkative. He told Costa he had proposed the plan he had just carried out as early as 1794, but it had been rejected by a council of war. Councils of war were merely an excuse for cowardice, and while he commanded none would be held. He took Costa on to the balcony to watch the sun rise, and there questioned him about Piedmont’s resources, artists and intellectuals, surprising Costa by his knowledge, especially of history. Among Napoleon’s orders from Paris was one charging him to secure works of art for the enjoyment of the French people, and referring to the treaty just signed Napoleon said, ‘I thought of demanding Gerard Dou’s painting of The Woman with Dropsy, which belongs to King Victor, but itemized alongside the fortress of Cuneo, I was afraid it would appear a bizarre innovation.’ This is a significant little remark. Fearless innovator on the battlefield, when it came to a treaty Napoleon was afraid of risking ridicule by doing something unusual.

At six in the morning Saliceti arrived. As government commissioner with the Army of the Alps, he wore a more splendid uniform than Napoleon’s: blue tunic and breeches, red and white sash with a red, white and blue fringe, and a round hat with a vast red, white and blue feather. Saliceti thought of the war in terms of loot for himself and money to send home to the impoverished Directory. He asked the terms of the treaty and was annoyed that Napoleon had not squeezed more out of the Piedmontese. The treaty, he said, was altogether too moderate.

Napoleon intended to be moderate. He saw the war in northern Italy differently from Saliceti. He was fighting the Austrians, but he was also liberating the Italians, long ‘enslaved’ in the duchy of Milan. ‘Peoples of Italy!’ he announced in a printed proclamation, ‘The French army is come to break your chains … We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs. We wage war with generous hearts, and turn ourselves only against the tyrants who seek to enslave us.’

Coming down from the arid mountains into the fertile plain, Napoleon was able to care for his army. He obliged the town of Mondovi, for instance, to provide 8,000 rations of fresh meat and 4,000 bottles of wine, and the people of Acqui to sell their own boots to the French, otherwise they would be confiscated. Having raised morale, Napoleon prepared his men for the next task, to destroy Beaulieu. ‘You have accomplished nothing unless you finish what remains to be done. Are there any among you whose courage is flagging? No. Every one of you, on returning to his village, would like to be able to say with pride, “I was with the army in Italy.”’

To destroy Beaulieu Napoleon first had to cross the Po. The direct route lay by Pavia, the Austrian strong-point, where in 1528 François I had been made prisoner. That would be costly in lives, and Napoleon sought another crossing. In one of his library books he had read that Maillebois’s army in 1746 had crossed the Po as far downstream as Piacenza. Napoleon raced for Piacenza, where he found the Po to be 500 yards wide. While his men eyed gloomily the vast expanse of brown water and laid bets that a crossing would take at least two months, Napoleon chose a brave young officer from the Pyrenees, Jean Lannes, known for his neatness and his vast repertory of swear words, and sent him across the river in boats with 900 men. Despite enemy fire Lannes established a bridgehead and Napoleon succeeded in getting his whole army across in two days. Then he swept up towards Milan, outflanking the main Austrian army. ‘When Beaulieu learned what had happened,’ Napoleon wrote to the Directors, ‘he realized too late that his fortifications on the Ticino and his redoubts at Pavia were useless and that the French republicans were not so inept as François I.’

The battle that Napoleon had sidestepped on the Po he was to fight on a river nearer Milan, the Adda. There was one bridge across the Adda, at the little town of Lodi, and to hold it Beaulieu had left his rearguard: 12,000 men and sixteen guns. Arriving in Lodi at noon on 10 May, Napoleon went to reconnoitre. Near the river stood a statue of John Nepomuke, a saint who had chosen to be drowned rather than reveal the secret of the confessional. Hiding behind this statue, Napoleon studied the river through his telescope. It was not very deep but it was rapid. The wooden pile bridge, without parapets, was 200 yards long and twelve feet wide. On the far bank the Austrian guns were massed in a strong fifteenth-century fort and high pentagonal tower. They were firing as Napoleon reconnoitred, and one of their shells exploded almost at his feet: but St John Nepomuke took the full blast, and Napoleon escaped without a scratch.

Napoleon decided to storm the bridge. There was no historical precedent for storming a bridge under heavy fire and his generals said it was madness. But Napoleon went ahead. He would combine it, in his usual style, with a flanking movement, this time by his cavalry, whom he ordered to gallop up the Adda, find a crossing, and then sweep down on the Austrian right. Then he gathered his infantry, 4,000 of them, in the town square. They were mostly Savoyards, one a red-haired colossus named Dupas who, like Napoleon, had witnessed the storming of the Tuileries and saved several Swiss from death. The French soldier, according to a Polish officer on Napoleon’s staff, was remarkable for two things: physical fitness and a horror of opprobrium. It was on the latter trait that Napoleon now played. Astride a white horse, he rode along the ranks. He wanted to storm the bridge, he told the Savoyards, but he didn’t see how he could. He didn’t have enough confidence in them. They would fool about firing their muskets and in the end wouldn’t dare to cross. He nettled the troops, he goaded them, and at last, by six o’clock in the evening, he had worked them up to a pitch of courage. Then he ordered the gate leading to the bridge to be opened, and drums and fifes to play their favourite anthems: ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Les héros morts pour la liberté’.

Still on his white horse, Napoleon posted himself by the bridge and urged on the Savoyards, as they poured out of the square at the double, shouting ‘Vive la République!’ and clattered on to the wooden bridge. In front strode the colossal Dupas. Austrian guns blazed and the bridge began to be raked by lead of every calibre. Many Frenchmen fell. Anxiously Napoleon snapped orders. Massena and Berthier and Lannes led more volunteers down the long terrible line of planks. Fifty yards from the end soldiers jumped into the river and splashed ashore to try to silence the murderous guns. The Austrians replied with a cavalry attack, which swept into the river all the French who had landed. Napoleon looked constantly upstream, waiting tensely. At last his cavalry appeared – very late because they had failed to find a ford. They fell on the Austrians from the flank and silenced their guns, so that more and more Savoyards got across the long wooden bridge. As darkness fell, the Austrians ran, leaving behind sixteen guns, 335 dead and wounded, 1,700 prisoners. French losses were about 200 dead.

The battle of Lodi marks a new stage in Napoleon’s development. Previous engagements he had won by strategic or tactical skill, but here, against heavy odds, he had incited to the extremes of courage, and to eventual victory, a ragged army, for months ill-fed mainly on potatoes and chestnuts. At Lodi, for the first time he became aware of his powers of leadership.

Five days later Napoleon entered Milan. A delegation humbly brought him the keys of the city. To the delegation leader Napoleon said severely, ‘I hear you’ve got men under arms.’ ‘Just three hundred, to keep order,’ replied the Italian, adding with characteristic flattery, ‘They’re not real soldiers like yours.’ This made Napoleon smile.

While bells pealed from the thousand-pinnacled cathedral and crowds of Milanese burghers cheered, Napoleon took up residence in the palace from which the Austrian archduke had recently fled, after making millions from hoarded corn. At a state dinner, speaking in Italian, he promised the people of Milan the eternal friendship of France. To the Directors he wrote, ‘The Tricolour flies over Milan, Pavia, Como and all the towns of Lombardy.’ He could be well pleased. He had accomplished the first two acts of the drama set him: peace with Piedmont, conquest of the duchy of Milan. There remained Act III, decisive victory over the Austrians, and with that victory peace.

Amid these successes, Napoleon received a letter from the Directors, the most painful letter he had ever received in his life. The Directors informed Napoleon that he was to give up sole command of the Army of the Alps. Henceforth that army was to be under joint command of General Kellermann, lately commanding the Army of the Moselle, and of General Buonaparte. Kellerman would continue fighting the Austrians in the north, while Napoleon was to undertake a new campaign in the south, against the Papal States and Tuscany, both friendly to Austria.

Napoleon knew Kellermann to be a haughty Alsatian with a bony face and thin lips, a sound commander but at sixty-one slow and set in his ways. Yet because he was senior to Napoleon and his name a household word – he had won the battle of Valmy in 1792 – Kellermann would inevitably have the final say. Doubtless Napoleon recalled the Maddalena fiasco: he did not relish serving again under a man less eager and daring than himself.

Napoleon wrote a letter to the Directors, objecting strongly to their proposals: ‘Kellermann would command the army as well as myself; for no one could be more convinced than I am that our victories are due to the courage and dash of the army; but I think that to give Kellermann and myself joint command in Italy would mean ruining everything. I can’t agree to serve with a man who believes himself the best general in Europe; and in any case I am sure one bad general is better than two good ones. War, like government, is a question of tact.’

Napoleon saw another side to the matter. In an order of the day issued at Nice he had told his troops that they would find in him ‘a comrade-in-arms supported by the confidence of the Government’: that is, they could count on Paris backing their lives to the full with supplies, ammunition and so on, and they would not be ‘let down’ for political reasons. And now, it seems, they were being let down. In a second letter Napoleon wrote to the Directors: ‘I cannot give the country the service it sorely needs unless you have entire and absolute confidence in me. I am aware that it needs much courage to write you this letter: it would be so easy to accuse me of ambition and pride!’

The Directors considered Napoleon’s answers. They were doubtless nettled by his obstinacy, but they could not help but be impressed by his arguments. Moreover, the implicit threat to resign, after such a string of victories, must have weighed heavily with them. They decided to scrap the idea of a joint command. Napoleon was to remain sole commander, but in that case he must carry out single-handed the two tasks they had originally proposed.

Napoleon was much relieved. At the beginning of June he learned that Marshal Wurmser, a Frenchman from Alsace in the service of Austria, had left the Rhine with a large Austro-Hungarian army, and was marching south to drive him out of Italy. Napoleon calculated that Wurmser could not arrive before 15 July. That gave him six weeks to swoop on the Papal States and Tuscany, frighten them into neutrality, and collect what gold he could for France’s empty coffers.

Napoleon had marched fast in the spring, but that summer he marched even faster. Recrossing the Po, he entered the northernmost part of the Papal States, Emilia-Romagna, scattered the papal army of 18,000 men, entered Florence and seized Leghorn, an important English commercial and banking enclave. Here he captured ships and gold. He also equipped the 500 Corsican refugees in Leghorn, and organized an expedition which by the end of the year was to make Corsica once again French. On 13 July he was back in Milan, having marched 300 miles in under six weeks, cowed all central Italy, and seized, in booty and indemnities, forty million francs, mainly gold.

Napoleon had meanwhile been watching the Austrians closely. Wurmser had crossed the Brenner and was moving down the valley of the River Adige with a huge army – 50,000 men. At Castiglione Napoleon defeated each wing in turn. Wurmser tried again in September, only to be repulsed at Roveredo and Bassano. Then, two months later, a fresh Austro-Hungarian army, this time under Alvinzi, swept into Italy, and Napoleon with his tired troops crushed it at Areola.

At Areola, like Lodi a battle for a bridge, Napoleon had his horse shot under him. Maddened by its wound, the horse seized the bit between its teeth, galloped towards the Austro-Hungarians and plunged into a swamp. Napoleon was thrown, and found himself shoulder deep, in the black swamp mud, under heavy enemy fire. At any moment he expected the Austrians to charge and cut off his head – he could offer no resistance. But his brother Louis had been watching and with another young officer named August Marmont dashed into the swamp and succeeded in dragging out Napoleon. This, Napoleon considered, was one of the most dangerous moments in all his battles.

Barras and his fellow Directors, meanwhile, had their eyes fixed on Napoleon. They were pleased by the arrival of forty million francs, but worried by Napoleon’s tendency to take an independent line. First there had been the treaty with Piedmont, judged too moderate; then his high-handed attitude over Kellermann; and now there were reports that he was snubbing Saliceti and Garrau, the Directors’ own representatives. Napoleon had denied being ‘ambitious’ – most hateful of words – but how sincere was that denial? It might be necessary to arrest him for political ‘ambition’, like two earlier commanders of the same army. They decided to send a general of proved loyalty to find out. Officially his job would be to arrange an armistice; in fact he had orders to spy on Napoleon.

Henri Clarke, aged thirty-one, was an honest desk general of Irish descent with moon face, curls and double chin. He arrived at Napoleon’s headquarters in November and with a shrewd eye began taking notes. Berthier, he observed, had high moral standards and took no interest in politics; Massena was brave, but slack about discipline and ‘very fond of money’. As for Napoleon, Clarke gave this word-picture: ‘haggard, thin, the skin clinging to his bones, eyes bright with fever’ – he had caught a chill after his ordeal at Areola. For nine days Clarke secretly observed the commander-in-chief and then sent back the following report:

He is feared, loved and respected in Italy. I believe he is attached to the republic and without any ambition save to retain the reputation he has won. It is a mistake to think he is a party man. He belongs neither to the royalists, who slander him, nor to the anarchists, whom he dislikes. He has only one guide – the Constitution … But General Buonaparte is not without defects. He does not spare his men sufficiently … Sometimes he is hard, impatient, abrupt or imperious. Often he demands difficult things in too hasty a manner. He has not been respectful enough towards the Government commissioners. When I reproved him for this, he replied that he could not possibly treat otherwise men who were universally scorned for their immorality and incapacity.

What Napoleon had in mind was that Saliceti ruthlessly pillaged churches and sold in the streets, on his own account, chalices and ciboriums containing consecrated hosts. This set a bad example at a time when Napoleon was doing everything possible to curb even minor looting. Clarke recognized that Napoleon’s attitude to the commissioners was justified, for he added: ‘Saliceti has the reputation of being the most shameless rogue in the army and Garrau is inefficient: neither is suitable for the Army of Italy.’

When they read Clarke’s report, the Directors decided that their suspicions about Napoleon were unfounded. They promised him their full support, and in their letters and orders showed renewed confidence in whatever decisions he might take. This renewal of confidence came just in time, for Napoleon was now facing his gravest threat. Having beaten Beaulieu’s army, and Wurmser’s two Austro-Hungarian armies, he was now being attacked by a fourth and a fifth.