#Napoleon sleeping in the bivouac

[josefavomjaaga]

Some more letters from the Russian retreat

The volume "Lettres interceptées pendant la campagne de 1812" has some more letters by Junot. Three of them (to Madame Foy, to the secretary Cissout and to Laure Junot) have been written as late as 9 November at Smolensk. They show that the situation was very different for the various French army corps. Napoleon's headquarters was safely staying in Smolensk, while for the rest of the army the constant harrassments by cossacks and the horrors of the retreat had already started - something that Junot may be mostly unaware of. This is the beginning of his letter to Laure:

Smolensk, 9 November 1812 My dear Laure, It's been a long time since I last wrote to you, and you can see from the date of my letter that we have travelled a long way. The first four days were superb, but the cold and snow on the fifth exhausted us terribly. Since we left I have only twice slept in a house, always in the bivouac or in my car, without eating all day until nine or ten o'clock in the evening. Yesterday I arrived here and today it's five o'clock in the evening and I still don't have any of my carriages arriving. Fortunately I found General Charpentier who received me in his home, but he is badly set up in terms of wine and cook, so you can imagine that I don't find the inn very good.

Judging from this, it seems that Junot has reached Smolensk comparatively fine, with or even ahead of headquarters, and the only thing he has to complain about, besides exhaustion, is that his baggage and kitchen train is so far in the rear that he can only have dinner late in the evening, while the cooking in the house of his host is not to his likings.

At the same time, most of the army is still on the march, fighting for their lives ever since 3 November (combat of Viasma). The situation is quite different for them, as shown by some letters Eugène wrote to his wife in those same days:

Semlowo, 4 November 1812, 3 pm I don't know how many days I have been unable to write, my dear Auguste […] I told you from a small castle near Mojaïsk that we were marching to take winter quarters closer to the countries with resources; since then, the enemy has amused himself by following us, and every day we have been in the presence of their numerous cavalry. Finally, yesterday they vigorously attacked Marshal Davout, who was in charge of the rearguard, and at the same time attacked me from the flank. For a moment I even had one of my divisions separated from me; but the matter was settled, Marshal Davout was freed, and together we continued our march on Viazma. [...] We have made some very fine retrograde movements, hunger and fatigue are still following us a little, but I think that when we get to Smolensk we will find a little more abundance; there are only a few more days of patience to be had. Farewell, my good friend, I leave you to throw myself on a bearskin and get some much-needed sleep.

Two days later:

Boldin, 6 November 1812, 3 am […] We have suffered a few hardships over the last few days, because we are marching along the same route that the whole army has already taken, but it is precisely in these difficult circumstances that men are judged, and it is a good school. Farewell, my dear Auguste; my health is good; yesterday I had a much-needed shave, for it had been, would you believe it? ten days since I had shaved, and I looked like a capuchin; […]

And finally, after the disaster at the Vop:

Doukowtchina (Dukhovshchina), 11 November 1812 I am hastening to give you my news, my dear Auguste, which I have not been able to do for four days; it is quite good; I say quite good, because I am suffering from a leg that is a little swollen; I think it is only from fatigue: I have had a lot of it all these days, because the weather and the season have become so bad that, to continue my march, I have had to abandon part of my artillery and almost all my baggage. We are in great need of rest, and I hope that it will not be long. I am afraid that the Emperor is not happy, but I have done everything humanly possible; the enemy has followed our movement with cavalry and artillery: in one of these small cannonades, d'Anthouard was wounded in the thigh; nothing is broken, but it will be three months before he recovers. Poor Méjan lost his carriage, his belongings, etc., and I had to take him in the only carriage I had left. These are our misfortunes, they are great, but our courage is not lost, that's the main thing.

[lesmislettersdaily]

Napoleon In A Good Humor

Volume 2: Cosette; Book 1: Waterloo; Chapter 7: Napoleon In A Good Humor

The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme smile is God’s alone.

Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is certain that Cæsar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o’clock on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious saying, “We are in accord.” Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer in accord.

He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts, halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington. He said: “It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English who have just arrived at Ostend.” He conversed expansively; he regained the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf Juan, and cried, “Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!” On the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. “That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.

At half-past three o’clock in the morning, he lost one illusion; officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens. At four o’clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably Vivian’s brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o’clock, two Belgian deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment, and that the English army was ready for battle. “So much the better!” exclaimed Napoleon. “I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive them back.”

In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant’s chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, “A pretty checker-board.”

In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, “We have ninety chances out of a hundred.” At eight o’clock the Emperor’s breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond’s; and Soult, a rough man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, “The ball takes place to-day.” The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, “Wellington will not be so simple as to wait for Your Majesty.” That was his way, however. “He was fond of jesting,” says Fleury de Chaboulon. “A merry humor was at the foundation of his character,” says Gourgaud. “He abounded in pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty,” says Benjamin Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was he who called his grenadiers “his grumblers”; he pinched their ears; he pulled their moustaches. “The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,” is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French brig of war, Le Zéphyr, having encountered the brig L’Inconstant, on which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon from L’Inconstant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself, “The Emperor is well.” A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an hour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in hand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them the order of battle.

At nine o’clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelons and set in motion in five columns, had deployed—the divisions in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; as they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets, mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, “Magnificent! Magnificent!”

Between nine o’clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor’s expression, “the figure of six V’s.” A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm, which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, “There are four and twenty handsome maids, General.”

Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried. All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing themselves, he said, “It is a pity.”

Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o’clock in the evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable; it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his horse’s feet stood. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a shell of sixty pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb, was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon: “Fool, it is shameful! You’ll get yourself killed with a ball in the back.” He who writes these lines has himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.

Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place, are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later, exclaimed, “They have altered my field of battle!” Where the great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe. The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other, the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole of that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley, which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated the problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fast in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whose presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.

What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l’Alleud is a Belgian village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level, and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is, a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench, sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep, crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the Braine-l’Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives the name of the dead, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels, and the date of the accident, February, 1637.8 It was so deep on the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.

On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible; that is to say, terrible.

[microcosme11]

Print variants on a painting by Adolphe Roehn of the eve of the battle of Wagram, here transposed to Austerlitz. From the Napoleon collection at McGill University.

http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/napoleon

[northernmariette]

Part 3: Army life for the Napoleonic infantryman (sort of)

This is my third translated post, drawn from an article in the September 2019 issue of Historia magazine, This the same magazine from which I posted eight biographical sketches of Marshals recently. I was inspired to do this by @history-and-arts‘s recent participation in a re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo.

The article is specific to the battle of Ulm, but parts of it are applicable to army life throughout the Napoleonic wars. Today’s post is about bivouacs, and about the transportation of war supplies - the latter specific to the march of the army to Ulm. For the two years preceding this battle, Napoleon had been involved in preparing an invasion of Britain, and had stationed seven army corps along the northern coasts of France and the Flemish coast, Bernadotte holding the easternmost position in Holland, and Augereau the westernmost in Brest. There will be more about this in my final post.

Bivouacs

During the march to the Rhine, soldiers were billeted in the homes of local people. This operation, carried out in total improvisation and to the surprise of all, provoked much resistance in the communities. Once across the Rhine, the soldiers usually slept in bivouacs without tents, which were discarded [or never brought along at all? the text is unclear] in order to speed up the advance. Neither the Austrians nor the Russians made such choices, and traveled more slowly.

The caravan of the Guard

The planned invasion of England could not include large numbers of horses and baggage trains for food, ambulances, and supplies. As he was unable to buy necessary equipment for a convoy, Napoleon urgently requisitioned harnessed civilian carriages and their drivers, while the bulk of the army's baggage (spare equipment, officers' luggage, victuals) was kept within certain limits and did not reach the troops until later. The Imperial Guard was the main beneficiary of the requisitions, and travelled towards the Rhine faster than the units of the line. 

I might be dead wrong, but I think that by and large Napoleon’s troops continued to be billeted with local inhabitants wherever they went, and that tents were not generally used. This proved disastrous during the retreat from Russia, as many soldiers froze to death in their sleep. Again if I’m not mistaken, this is why Ney would have his men march at night, during the coldest hours, and had them sleep during the day when it wasn’t quite as cold.

As for the Imperial Guard getting special treatment, it was inevitable that it would be resented by the ordinary troops. I wonder if that resentment was reflected on Bessieres.

[microcosme11]

Napoleon asleep

Primitive copy of that painting of Napoleon before the battle of Wagram. (pinterest, no info)

[microcosme11]