1812. Adam Zamoyski
with green facings, which had spent the past year under Davout in Germany. They were commanded by Colonel Doreille, a Provençal who did not speak French. There were also many Spaniards, some three thousand of them, in the ranks of the second and third regiments of General d’Alorna’s Portuguese Legion, which numbered around five thousand men in total, uniformed in brown with red facings and English-style shakos. ‘The men, who are highly motivated, make up a fine unit, on which I believe we can count,’ General Clarke, Napoleon’s Minister of War reported. And finally there were two regiments of Croats, numbering just over 3500 men.18
The worth of all these troops was hugely enhanced by the presence of Napoleon. Not only because he lent them the value of his reputation as a military genius, but also because he had the gift of drawing the best out of them. He was masterly in his treatment of soldiers, whom he captivated with his bonhomie and his sometimes brusque lack of ceremony. He always knew which regiments had fought where, and when he reviewed them, he would walk up to older rankers and ask them if they remembered the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, or wherever it was that particular unit had distinguished itself. They would swell with pride, feeling that he had recognised them, and they could feel the envy of the younger men all around them. With the younger soldiers Napoleon adopted a solicitous manner. He would enquire if they were eating enough, whether their equipment was up to scratch, sometimes asking to see the contents of their haversacks and engaging them in conversation. He was well known for tasting the soldiers’ stew and bread whenever he passed a camp kitchen, so they felt his interest was genuine.
During a review shortly before the campaign, Napoleon stopped in front of Lieutenant Calosso, a Piedmontese serving in the 24th Chasseurs à Cheval, and said a few words to him. ‘Before that, I admired Napoleon as the whole army admired him,’ he wrote. ‘From that day on, I devoted my life to him with a fanaticism which time has not weakened. I had only one regret, which was that I only had one life to place at his service.’ Such a level of devotion was by no means rare, and transcended nationality. But Napoleon could not be everywhere, and the larger the army, the more diluted his presence would be.19
Napoleon’s determination to assemble such a vast force was bound to have a negative effect on its quality. Louis François Lejeune, a senior officer on Berthier’s staff, was detailed to inspect the troops already on the Oder and the Vistula in March 1812, and was bombarded with complaints from the commanders of the units he visited that half of the recruits they were receiving were useless.
He mentioned this to General Dejean, who was organising the cavalry in the area. Dejean told him that up to a third of the horses he had been sent were too weak to carry their burden, while nearly half of the men were too puny to wield a sabre. ‘I was not happy with the way the cavalry was being organised,’ echoed Colonel de Saint-Chamans, commanding the 7th Chasseurs à Cheval. ‘Young recruits who had been sent from depots in France before they had learnt to ride a horse or any of the duties of a horseman on the march or on campaign, were mounted on arrival in Hanover on very fine horses which they were not capable of managing.’ The result was that by the time they reached Berlin, the majority of the horses were suffering from lameness or saddle sores induced by the riders’ bad posture or their failure to take care in saddling up. More than one officer noted that recruits were not taught about checking whether their saddle was rubbing or how to detect the early signs of saddle sores.20
Sergeant Auguste Thirion of the 2nd Cuirassiers had a rosier view. ‘Such fine cavalry has never been seen, never had regiments reached such high complements, and never had horsemen been so well mounted,’ he wrote, adding that their leisurely march through Germany had actually hardened the horses and men. But the cuirassiers were the élite of the French cavalry. And good horses could be a problem in themselves, according to Captain Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches of the Foot Artillery of the Guard. ‘Our teams were of the best, and the equipment left nothing to be desired, but everyone was agreed that the horses were too tall and too strongly built, and unsuited to supporting hardship and lack of abundant nourishment,’ he wrote on leaving the depot at La Fère on 2 March 1812.21
Napoleon was not particularly bothered by such a state of affairs. ‘When I put 40,000 men on horseback I know very well that I cannot hope for that number of good horsemen, but I am playing on the morale of the enemy, who learns through his spies, by rumour or through the newspapers that I have 40,000 cavalry,’ he told Dejean when the latter reported his findings. ‘Passing from mouth to mouth, this number and the supposed quality of my regiments, whose reputation is well known, are both rather exaggerated than diminished; and the day I launch my campaign I am preceded by a psychological force which supplements the actual force that I have been able to furnish for myself.’22
The real strength of the French army was that all the men, even the lower ranks, were free citizens with a strongly patriotic education in the new public schools behind them. They could think as well as fight, and if they showed initiative as well as bravery they could gain promotion and rise very high. But Napoleon’s habit of rewarding mere bravery with promotion eventually led to units being commanded by men who lacked the necessary competence. ‘Among the generals of rapid promotion,’ wrote Karl von Funck, ‘there were only a few who had the gift of leadership; many lacked even the most elementary military knowledge … In the madness of daring they had learnt how to fling their intrepid forces against the foe, but they had no notion of judging a position, of even the first principles of operations, of withdrawing in good order if the first onset should fail …’ There was also a multitude of young officers drawn from the Parisian jeunesse dorée who had obtained promotion through string-pulling, who had mostly joined cavalry regiments because they liked the uniforms or the staff because they wanted to be close to Napoleon. Many were clearly not up to the job.23
Much of the revolutionary ardour that had fired the French armies of the 1790s and early 1800s had been quenched by 1812. ‘As the uniforms grew more embroidered and gathered decorations the hearts they covered grew less generous,’ as one observer put it. Napoleon himself sensed a lack of enthusiasm for the forthcoming campaign. ‘People have always followed him with excitement; he is surprised that they are not prepared to end their careers with the same dash with which they embarked on them,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain.24 But it was he who had turned his commanders into what they were.
‘From the moment that Napoleon came to power, military mores changed rapidly, the union of hearts disappeared along with poverty and the taste for material well-being and the comforts of life crept into our camps, which filled up with unnecessary mouths and with numerous carriages,’ in the words of General Berthézène. ‘Forgetting the fortunate experiences of his immortal campaigns in Italy, of the immense superiority gained by habituation to privation and contempt for superfluity, the Emperor believed it to be to his advantage to encourage this corruption.’25 He gave his marshals and his generals titles, lands and pensions on the civil list. He demanded of them that they keep palaces in Paris in which they were to entertain at the appropriate level. As members of his court, they must maintain a glittering entourage, as he increasingly did himself. This high living softened them up, and they became less and less willing to give up their warm beds and fine palaces in fashionable parts of Paris, not to mention their wives and mistresses, for the rigours of the bivouac and the uncertainties of war. This was particularly true of the marshals.
‘They were most of them between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five when, after a stormy youth, a man begins to look for a settled domesticity,’ wrote von Funck. ‘They could hardly expect to win a higher degree of fame, but might well jeopardise the reputations they had made.’ A good example was Napoleon’s chief of staff Marshal Berthier, Prince de Neuchâtel, a plump man of settled tastes in his mid-fifties with a magnificent apanage and an adored and adoring mistress in Paris.26
At the same time the lavish rewards given to those who distinguished themselves in battle were an irresistible incentive to soldiers and officers right up to the rank of general, who all saw in war the possibility of making their fortune. A simple soldier might obtain promotion, which would give him a higher salary and status, or the Légion d’Honneur, which meant pension rights. A general might obtain the coveted marshal’s baton, which signified fame and fortune, and a ducal title to boot.
There