This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.
MAX HASTINGS
Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya
November 2004
THE WARS OF NAPOLEON produced a flowering of memoirs, both English and French, of extraordinary quality. Each writer’s work reflects in full measure his national characteristics. None but a Frenchman, surely, could have written the following lines about his experience of conflict: ‘I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will add that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services prove, I think, sufficiently.’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot was the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Brigadier Gerard: brave, swashbuckling, incapable of introspection, glorying without inhibition in the experience of campaigning from Portugal to Russia in the service of his emperor. Marbot was the most eager of warriors, who shared with many of his French contemporaries a belief that there could be no higher calling than to follow Bonaparte to glory. Few modern readers could fail to respect the courage of a soldier who so often faced the fire of the enemy, through an active service career spanning more than forty years. And no Anglo-Saxon could withhold laughter at the peacock vanity and chauvinism of the hussar’s account of the experience, rich in anecdotage and comedy, the latter often unintended.
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot was born in 1782 at Beaulieu in the Corrèze, son of a country gentleman of liberal inclinations who became a general in France’s revolutionary army. With his round face and snub nose, the child Marcellin was known to his family as ‘the kitten’, and for some years during the nation’s revolutionary disorders attended a local girls’ school. He was originally destined for a naval career, but a friend urged his father that life aboard a warship mouldering in some seaport under British blockade was no prospect for an ambitious youth. Instead, in 1799 a vacancy was procured for him in the hussars. The seventeen-year-old boy was delighted, and from the outset gloried in his new uniform. His father, however, was uneasy about his shyness, and for some time was prone to refer to his son in company as ‘Mademoiselle Marcellin’ – rich pickings there for a modern psychologist. In those days when every hussar was expected to display a moustache as part of his service dress, the beardless teenager at first painted whiskers on his face.
Marbot met Bonaparte for the first time when accompanying his father to take up a posting with the army in Italy. They were amazed to encounter the hero of the Pyramids at Lyons, on his way back to Paris from Egypt, having abandoned his army to seek a throne, a quest to which General Marbot, a committed republican, declined to give his assistance. In Italy, young Marcellin won his spurs. Despatched with a patrol to seize Austrian prisoners, the sergeant in command professed sudden illness. The boy seized the opportunity and assumed leadership of the troop: ‘When…I took command of the fifty men who had come under my orders in such unusual circumstances, a mere trooper as I was and seventeen years old, I resolved to show my comrades that if I had not yet much experience or military talent, I at least possessed pluck. So I resolutely put myself at their head and marched on in what we knew was the direction of the enemy.’
Marbot’s patrol surprised an Austrian unit, took the necessary prisoners, and returned in triumph to the French lines where their self-appointed commander was rewarded with promotion to sergeant, followed soon afterwards by a commission. He survived the terrible siege of Genoa, where his father died in his arms following a wound received on the battlefield. Soon afterwards the young man was posted to the 25th Chasseurs. In 1801 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to that hoary old hero Marshal Augereau, with whom he travelled for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula.
By 1805, already a veteran, Marbot was an eager young officer with Bonaparte’s Grand Army, ready for a summer of campaigning against the Austrians and Russians. ‘I had three excellent horses,’ he enthused, adding bathetically, ‘and a servant of moderate quality.’ The duties of aides-de-camp were among the most perilous in any army of the time. It was their business to convey their masters’ wishes and tidings not only across the battlefield, but from end to end of Europe, often in the teeth of the enemy. In the period that followed, writes Marbot, ‘constantly sent from north to south, and from south to north, wherever there was fighting going on, I did not pass one of these ten years without coming under fire, or without shedding my blood on the soil of some part of Europe.’ It is striking to notice that, until the twentieth century, every enthusiastic warrior regarded it as a mark of virility to have been wounded in action, if possible frequently. A soldier who avoided shedding his own blood, far from being congratulated on luck and skill, was more likely to be suspected of shyness.
Marbot began the 1805 campaigning season by carrying despatches from the emperor to Marshal Masséna in Italy, through the Alpine passes. Then he took his place beside Augereau for what became the Austerlitz campaign. ‘Never had France possessed an army so well-trained,’ he exulted, ‘of such good material, so eager for fighting and fame…Bonaparte…accepted the war with joy, so certain was he of victory…He knew how the chivalrous spirit of Frenchmen has in all ages been influenced by the enthusiasm of military glory.’ Seldom has there been an era of warfare in which officers and soldiers alike strove so ardently for distinction. If there were young blades in Bonaparte’s army who confined themselves to doing their duty, history knows nothing of them. In the world of France’s marshals and their subordinates, there was a relentless contest for each to outdo the others in braving peril with insouciance. Its spirit was supremely captured by the tale of Ney, after the battle of Lutzen, encountering the emperor. ‘My dear cousin! But you are covered in blood!’ exclaimed Bonaparte in alarm. ‘It isn’t mine, Sire,’ responded the marshal complacently, ‘except where that damned bullet passed through my leg!’
Having survived the carnage at Austerlitz, Marbot found himself among a throng of French officers sitting their horses around Bonaparte on the day after the battle, gazing out on the broken ice of the Satschan Lake, strewn with debris and corpses. Amidst it all, a hundred yards from the shore they beheld a Russian sergeant, shot through the thigh and clinging to an ice floe deeply stained with his blood. The wounded man, spying the glittering assembly, raised himself and cried out in Russian, ‘All men become brothers once battle is done.’ He begged his life from the emperor of the French. The entreaty was translated. Bonaparte, in a characteristic impulse of imperial condescension, told his entourage to do whatever was necessary to save the Russian. A handful of men plunged into the icy water, seized floating baulks of timber, and sought to paddle themselves out to the floe. Within seconds they became clumsy prisoners of their frozen clothing. They abandoned efforts to save the enemy soldier, and struggled ashore to save themselves.
Marbot, a spectator, declared that their error had been to brave the water fully clad. Bonaparte nodded assent. The would-be rescuers had shown more zeal than discretion, observed the emperor dryly. The hussar now felt obliged to put his own counsel into practice. Leaping from his horse, he tore off his clothes and sprang into the lake. He acknowledged the shock of the deadly cold, but ‘the emperor’s presence encouraged me, and I struck out towards the Russian sergeant. At the same time my example, and probably the praise given me by the emperor, determined a lieutenant of artillery…to imitate me.’ As he struggled painfully amid the great daggers of ice, Marbot was dismayed to find his rival catching him up. Yet he was obliged to admit that alone, he could never have succeeded in his attempt. Together, and with immense labour, the two Frenchmen pushed the wounded Russian on his crumbling floe towards the shore, battering a path through the