Citizen Emperor (53 page)

The outcome of the battle could have gone either way, and for the French to have described it as a victory was nothing more than propaganda. Napoleon was contemplating a retreat when the Russians decided to move first. Those who had survived realized that the losses had been massive – how could they not? – and some at least wrote home, so that news of the scale of the carnage began to filter back to France, leaving Paris ‘stupefied’, in a state of desolation.
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The potential consequences for Napoleon were serious. Eylau could undermine his reputation, and hence both his authority and his legitimacy.
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He consequently attempted to counter the rumours about the butchery that had taken place.
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Privately, he wrote to people in his entourage; publicly, he ordered Cambacérès to organize celebrations,
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telling him to write up an account of ‘one of the most memorable’ battles of the war in the
Moniteur
, and asking others to ‘spread the . . . news . . . in an unofficial way’.
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Napoleon’s desire to hide the extent of the carnage is one of the key themes in his letters back to Paris during the weeks after the battle.
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Since it was impossible to overcome the negative impression Eylau had left on public opinion, Cambacérès suggested an alternative approach – an account of the aftermath of the battle. Napoleon was thus to be presented to the public not as a victorious general, but as a man appalled by the losses. The official story was circulated throughout France via the famous 58th Bulletin of the Grande Armée, in which the French losses were reduced to 1,900 killed and 5,700 wounded, while 7,000 Russians were reported dead, although we can notice two words that had never appeared in a bulletin before that date (and that did not do so again) – ‘horror’ and ‘massacre’ – both used to describe the aftermath of battle.
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For the first time, the reader was being asked to imagine the result of a battle: nine or ten thousand bodies, four or five thousand dead horses, the debris of muskets, sabres, cannon balls, munitions and cannon next to which their gunners lay dead, and the whole scene depicted against a background of snow. Napoleon went one step further, personally dictating to General Henri-Gatien Bertrand a supposed eyewitness account of the battle attesting to the exploits of the French. His
Relation de la bataille d’Eylau par un témoin oculaire
(Account of the battle of Eylau by an eyewitness), presented as a translation from the German, was simultaneously published in Berlin and Paris.
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In it, the battle was portrayed as a victory. Consequently, individual losses or acts of sacrifice were highlighted, such as the supposed last words of a dying officer, absurd and tasteless: ‘I die happy since victory is ours, and I expire on the bed of honour.’
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It is with some justification that historians have seen in this nothing more than a cynical exercise in damage control, an attempt by Napoleon to displace concern over the French dead and wounded on to the enemy dead and wounded.
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Before making a judgement, it is worth recalling that Napoleon was probably shocked by this loss of life, as was every other witness who wrote about it, either shortly afterwards or indeed many years later. In his memoirs, François-Frédéric Billon, assistant to the surgeon-in-chief Dominique Jean Larrey, left us with an account of Napoleon’s visit to the battlefield: ‘I was standing on a stone bench against the wall when he passed near me. The emperor was doing his best to prevent his horse trampling on so many human remains; unable to do so, he gave up the reins, and that is when I saw him cry.’
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Billon wrote up the account decades later. Did he really see Napoleon crying or was he simply reporting what he had read about this episode, thus playing into the hands of the propagandist? This gruesome description of the trampling of Napoleon’s horse over body parts is meant to elicit a feeling of pathos for the Emperor, one aspect of how carnage can be used to counter the negative fallout from a battle, but there is nevertheless no denying that Napoleon was affected – up to a point. The day after the battle, he wrote to Maria Walewska asking whether she suffered as much as he from the separation.
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His letter to Josephine about a week later was of a somewhat different tenor. ‘The countryside is covered with the dead and dying,’ he wrote. ‘It is not the the [sic] best part of war. One suffers and the soul is oppressed to see so many victims. Nevertheless, I am doing very well.’
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It is the written stammer that makes one think that, yes, the aftermath may have disturbed Napoleon, despite what might appear to the modern reader as the thoughtlessness of ‘I am doing very well.’ That, however, falls within the logic of a regime that was built around the person of one man. If the Emperor was well, the state was well. His concern, in other words, did not run particularly deep and certainly not deeply enough for him actually to do anything for the wounded. While the French wounded were treated relatively well, most of the Russian wounded died in appalling conditions.
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Helping them may never have crossed his mind. The Russian wounded were left on the battlefield, and more often than not froze to death. Those Russian troops capable of reaching their own hospital at Grodno were more than likely to starve to death.
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According to one account of his visit, Napoleon got off his horse and started to walk across the battlefield; then, after prodding one of the corpses with his foot, he turned to his generals and declared: ‘This is so much small change.’
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And yet, despite the mauling, the Russians still refused to give up. One French officer, Fantin des Odoards, considered the Russians’ reluctance to surrender the result of their ‘semi-civilized’ state, incapable of accepting the generosity of the victors.
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Napoleon, on the other hand, was desperate for peace, for in an unprecedented move, six days after Eylau, he wrote to Frederick William offering to restore all his former lands in return for a renewal of the Franco-Prussian alliance.
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Frederick William replied on 21 April, suggesting a general peace congress that would be held in then neutral Copenhagen. Napoleon urged Prussia not to wait. He was, in other words, recommending Prussia to enter into a separate arrangement with France, leaving Russia in the lurch. Nothing came of this.

‘One More Victory’

Napoleon spent the months of March and April 1807 considerably reinforcing the army, possibly realizing that if the Russians had beaten him at Eylau, he would have had few reserves and would therefore have had difficulty fending off attacks in Germany.
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A new army of 100,000 men was raised. It marks a turning point in the composition of the Grande Armée. Increasingly, from this time, more and more foreign contingents would make up the numbers. In the new corps commanded by Marshal Lefebvre, for example, only 10,000 out of the 30,000 men were French. The rest were Poles, Italians and Germans.

Napoleon took to the field with this new Grande Armée. The Russians under Bennigsen attacked first. On 5 June they moved through the town of Heilsberg (present-day Lidzbark Warmin´ ski). Napoleon marched north to try and counter them. A battle of sorts took place on 10 June during which the French lost over 10,000 men for little or no gain (the Russians lost around 8,000). Once again, the Russians held their ground. It looked as though the fighting was going to continue the next day – the Russians began with a heavy bombardment in the morning – but threatened by a flanking movement they decided to retreat during the night of 11–12 June, abandoning their supplies and wounded.

The pursuit continued. Napoleon surmised that Bennigsen would attempt to cross the River Alle – in order to get to Königsberg – at the town of Friedland (today Pravdinsk in Russia) on the left bank about forty-eight kilometres south-west of Königsberg. Napoleon made the error of splitting his force in two, sending 60,000 men under Murat, Soult and Davout to try and capture Königsberg, while he sent Lannes with around 10,000 men to try and take the bridgeheads at Friedland. Lannes and Bennigsen reached Friedland at around the same time during the night of 13–14 June, from opposite banks of the river.
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The next morning, the French found themselves facing 45,000 Russians. Bennigsen saw a chance and crossed the river in the belief that he would easily be able to defeat the advance guard, then make off before Napoleon and the bulk of the French army arrived. He was mistaken; more and more Russian troops got caught up trying to defeat the French so that by mid-morning the whole Russian army had crossed the river. By then, they had lost the advantage of numerical superiority; by late morning the two sides were more or less equal. Bennigsen had let slip an opportunity to destroy Lannes completely. Not only that, but he was no longer able to use the river as a defensive barrier; he now had it, and the town of Friedland with its narrow streets, at his back (and he was in no position to retreat; it had taken him five hours to get his army across the river over a few bridges and pontoons).

Napoleon arrived a little after midday and took over command of the fighting, but he did not launch a full-scale attack until 5.30 that evening, by which time the French had almost 80,000 men available. Napoleon, ‘radiating joy’, convinced he was about to destroy the Russian force, galloped past his troops reminding them that it was the anniversary of Marengo. Attack and counter-attack followed, but each time the Russian assaults were successfully stymied so that they were pushed back into an ever-diminishing area within the town where they fought until the streets were heaped with dead and wounded.
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The Russians were slaughtered where they stood.
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At one point, General Victor brought up thirty guns to fire into the Russian infantry, gradually reduced their range from about 1.4 kilometres to within sixty paces and poured case shot into their ranks, inflicting devastating casualties. The French should have annihilated the Russians, but for some inexplicable reason Napoleon held back troops that had not engaged till then. Things were bad enough as they were: the Russians suffered anywhere between 18,000 and 20,000 casualties – about 30 per cent of the army – for 8,000 French. Bennigsen was able to extricate the remaining troops, but the Russian army was no longer in any position to fight. ‘My dear,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine the next day, ‘I write you only a line for I am very tired.’
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There was not much humanity shown for the dead and the dying. The battle finished around eleven in the evening, just as light was fading. Fantin des Odoards was obliged to spend the night where he found himself, trying to get some sleep on a blood-soaked field, with a dead horse for a pillow.

I was overwhelmed with sleep and fatigue, but I could not sleep . . . I waited for dawn, going over the events in my head, and thinking of the friends which they had deprived me of. Only a deaf person or someone deprived of all sensitivity would have been able to sleep amid the deplorable noise made around us by the unfortunate wounded whose moaning was carried afar by the wind in the silence of the night.
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In the heat of the moment, wrote Fantin des Odoards, the individual was capable of being transformed into a brutal killer, but in the cold light of day, when one could see the consequences of the killing on the field of battle, ‘he cursed the war and its authors and, without daring to admit it, felt remorse at being among the passive instruments of such horrors’.
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This second major defeat in two years was as traumatic for Alexander as the battle of Austerlitz.
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Bennigsen wrote a letter to the Tsar (15 June) asking him to put an end to the fighting. Most of the Russian generals in Alexander’s entourage agreed that there was little point in continuing the war: the army was so depleted and Prussia so crushed that the path to Russia lay completely open. There were others though, such as his new foreign minister, Count Andrei Budberg, ‘wound up to a pitch of fury against Bonaparte’,
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who still insisted on Russia’s potential to win a war of attrition.
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Napoleon was in no better shape; the burden of the war in terms of casualties was beginning to take its toll.
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He too had been thinking of putting an end to the conflict, and of offering Alexander an alliance.
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It is what a number of politicians in France were also hoping for. On 18 June, shortly after the battle of Friedland, Talleyrand sent off a missive to Napoleon stating that he hoped it was the last victory he would be obliged to win because, ‘wonderful though it is, I have to admit that it would lose in my eyes more than I can say if Your Majesty were to march to new battles and expose himself to new dangers . . . because I know how much Your Majesty despises them’.
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In ‘court speak’, Talleyrand was suggesting that he believed Napoleon was driven by some vague and indiscriminate desire to dominate, invade and conquer, and that it was time to stop. A similar sentiment was expressed by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Siffrein Maury; when writing to Napoleon to congratulate him on his victory he insinuated that enough was enough. ‘The war is hence exhausted through its own exploits. Enough victories, enough triumphs, enough wonders.’
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It was the first time the elite had expressed reservations about where Napoleon was leading them, but he did not, probably could not, heed the warning.