On the banks of the swollen Danube on 7 May, Bonaparte sent for Marbot. He wanted an officer to cross the flood and take a prisoner. ‘Take notice,’ said the emperor, ‘1 am not giving you an order; I am only expressing a wish. I am aware that the enterprise is as dangerous as it can be, and you can decline it without any fear of displeasing me.’ Here Marbot, in his own account, almost bursts with righteous conceit: ‘I had broken out all over in a cold sweat; but at the same moment a feeling…in which a love of glory and of my country was mingled perhaps with a noble pride, raised my ardour to the highest point and I said to myself: “The emperor has here an army of 150,000 devoted warriors, besides 25,000 men of his guard, all selected from the bravest. He is surrounded with aides-de-camp and orderly officers, and yet when an expedition is on foot, requiring intelligence no less than boldness, it is I whom the Emperor and Marshal Lannes choose.” “I will go, sir!”, I cried without hesitation; “I will go; and if I perish, I leave my mother to your Majesty’s care.” The emperor pulled my ear to mark his satisfaction. The marshal shook my hand.’
This is one of the most enchanting passages in Marbot’s narrative, inseparably linked to its time, nation and personalities. Conveyed by local boatmen, he braved the Danube torrent, secured three Austrian prisoners, and returned in triumph. He received the embrace of Lannes, an invitation to breakfast with the emperor, and his coveted promotion to major. A fortnight later, after innumerable adventures at Essling and Aspern, he carried the mortally wounded Lannes off the field. Marbot himself had lost a piece of flesh, torn from his thigh by a grapeshot, but carelessly ignored it. Bonaparte noticed the major’s bloody breeches and observed laconically: ‘Your turn comes around pretty often!’ It was a measure of the limitations of nineteenth-century weapons that any man could so often be injured by them, yet survive to fight again.
At Wagram in July 1809, Marbot suffered a serious falling-out with Marshal Masséna, on whose staff he was serving. The corn that covered much of the battlefield was set ablaze by smouldering cannon wadding. Men and horses suffered terribly, fighting amid the fires. Marbot’s mount was already scorched and exhausted when Masséna sought an aide to check the rout of a division broken by Austrian cavalry, and to direct the fugitives to the island of Löbau on the Danube. First in line for duty was Prosper, Masséna’s own son. Yet the marshal could not bring himself to despatch his offspring into the midst of the slaughter. He appealed to Marbot: ‘You understand, my friend, why I do not send my son, although it’s his turn; I am afraid of getting him killed. You understand? You understand?’ Marbot, disgusted, claims to have answered: ‘Marshal, I was going under the impression that I was about to fulfil a duty; I am sorry that you have corrected my mistake, for now I understand perfectly that, being obliged to send one of your aides-de-camp to almost certain death, you would rather it should be me rather than your son.’ He set off full-tilt across the murderous plain, only to find after a few minutes that Prosper Masséna, shamed by his father’s behaviour, had followed him. The two young men became friends thereafter, but the marshal never again addressed Marbot by the intimate ‘tu’.
A few days later, at Znaym, the rival armies were once more deploying for battle when an armistice was agreed between the French and the Austrians. Marbot was among a cluster of aides hastily despatched to intervene between the combatants. He raced in front of the advancing infantry, who were already crying ‘Vive l’empereur!’ as their bayonets and those of the Austrians ranged within a hundred paces of each other. A bullet struck the aide’s wrist, inflicting an injury that cost him six months in a sling. He charged on, crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ and holding up his uninjured hand to arrest the French advance. An Austrian officer attempting to convey the same message in front of his own ranks was hit in the shoulder before he and Marbot met and embraced, in a gesture unmistakable to both sides.
In April 1810, after more months of convalescence, Marbot set forth from his mother’s house in Paris to travel ahead of Masséna and prepare for the marshal’s arrival to command the Peninsular army. The major’s passage was enlivened by fever and a brush with Spanish guerrillas. Once he was on the battlefield with Masséna, his memoirs provide one of the most vivid, if absurdly prejudiced, French narratives of the Peninsula experience. He tells of actions and skirmishes innumerable, of ‘Marshal Stockpot’, the French deserter who established himself at the head of a band of French, Portuguese, Spanish and English deserters, living as bandits until Masséna disposed of them. He inflates the toll of English casualties in every encounter. He castigates Masséna for his failure to anticipate and frustrate Wellington’s retreat behind the lines of Torres Vedras – and for his folly in bringing his mistress on campaign.
One of Marbot’s best stories, whether accepted at face value or no, concerns a duel with a British light cavalry officer who trotted forward from Wellington’s lines one morning in March 1811 to challenge him: ‘Stop Mr Frenchman; I should like to have a little fight with you!’ Marbot professed to have treated this nonsense with disdain until the man shouted: ‘I can see by your uniform that you are on the staff of a marshal, and I shall put in the London papers that the sight of me was enough to frighten away one of Masséna’s or Ney’s cowardly aides-de-camp.’ This roused our hero to fury. He turned and charged towards the British officer, only to hear a rustling from nearby woodland, and perceive two English hussars dashing to cut off his retreat. ‘Only a most energetic defence could save me from the disgrace of being taken prisoner, through my own fault, in sight of the whole French army.’
He flew at the English officer, running him through the throat: ‘the wretch fell from his horse to the ground, which he bit in his rage’. Meanwhile, however, the two hussars were slashing Marbot’s shako, wallet and pelisse to ribbons. A thrust from the older soldier pierced the Frenchman’s side an inch deep. Marbot countered with a cut through the man’s jaw which slit his mouth from side to side, arresting his stricken cry of agony and causing him to decamp. The younger English soldier hesitated for a moment before likewise turning to flee, only to receive a thrust in the shoulder to hasten him on his way. Marbot cantered triumphantly back to the French lines, to receive the congratulations of Masséna and Ney, together with the plaudits of the army. As for the price, ‘the wound in my cheek was not important; in a month’s time it had healed over and you can scarcely see the mark of it alongside my left whisker. But the thrust in my right side was dangerous, especially in the middle of a long retreat, in which I was compelled to travel on horseback…Such, my children, was the result of my fight or, if you like, my prank at Miranda de Corvo. You have still got the shako which I wore, and the numerous notches with which the English sabres have adorned it prove that the two hussars did not let me off. I brought away the wallet also, the sling of which was cut in three places, but it has been mislaid.’
Marbot’s own account of himself is inimitable. Here was a soldier of the same mettle as the knights of fourteenth-century Europe, men for whom fighting was both their business and their pleasure. They cared little for softer pleasures or gentler virtues. A prig might say – and many prigs did – that they were a menace to civilisation, for peace was anathema to them. The major returned to France in July 1811, when Masséna was recalled by Bonaparte after his Peninsula disasters. Marbot himself attributed Bonaparte’s fall to his failure to finish the Spanish war before he set forth for Russia. He also acknowledged the quality and marksmanship of British infantry, even if he could never bring himself to think much of Wellington.
Marbot passed the summer and autumn in Paris, and finds a few words in his own tale to mention his marriage, to a