The War of Wars (96 page)

On 28 July the armada left Kent and had reached Holland by the evening. The Scheldt estuary was divided in two by three big islands: the most navigable entrance was the West Scheldt, which would open the way up to the city of Antwerp. To enter this it was necessary to take the Dutch forts on Kadzand on the south side of the Wielengen Channel leading to the West Scheldt and then strike north at Flushing. The first goal was to land 5,000 troops to take the Kadzand.

Unfortunately, a gale drove the British into the entrance to the East Scheldt to the north. Even so, some 12,000 troops under Coote were disembarked at Veere to march across the island of Flushing at the entrance of the estuary and take the town of Flushing. They had to take two towns in the middle of the island before they got there. By now Flushing had been reinforced.

Meanwhile a force of British troops, supposed to take Kadzand on the other side of the Channel, had not yet done so. These almost incredibly leisurely proceedings took place as the French, caught entirely by surprise with only 1,500 men to defend the main river entrance to Antwerp, dug in and sent frantic messages to Paris. There, in Napoleon’s absence in Austria, the devious police chief Fouché was effectively in charge and brushed aside the minister of war to put Bernadotte, who was in disgrace after his performance at Wagram, in charge of proceedings. Both Fouché and Bernadotte to some extent represented the old revolutionary Jacobin faction, and hated Napoleon. This was clearly an attempt to show that France could defend itself and survive without the Emperor.

Bernadotte arrived in time to reinforce Louis Napoleon, who had around 12,000 troops in Antwerp. The momentum was being lost by the British; by the end of August there were 26,000 French troops in Antwerp. Chatham meanwhile had settled down in agreeable quarters at Middelbourg on the island of Walcheren. One officer observed:
‘God knows! Everything goes on at headquarters as if they were at the Horse Guards; you must signify what you want, you must call between certain hours, send up your name and wait your turn.’

At last on 13 August the British opened fire on Flushing. It was a devastating broadside, in which virtually the whole town was set alight and 600 civilians were killed. As soon as the British entered on 18 August, the 6,000-strong French garrison surrendered. It was a repeat, without even the dash, of the attack on Copenhagen.

The British had suffered some 700 casualties. They proceeded, with great deliberation, to Batz, just off the point where the estuary narrowed to give access to Antwerp. While they waited for the order to advance, malaria, in that low-lying marsh, exacerbated by the French opening the sluices so that it would flood, attacked the troops, along with dysentery caused by salt meat and fat.

While the leisurely Chatham and the more impatient Strachan tried to decide which was the most suitable route for attack, they observed the reinforcement of Antwerp. Chatham, realistically, decided that an attack was out of the question and at the end of August ordered an evacuation to England. Some 3,000 had died and the rest, 11,000 of them seriously ill, were shipped to hospitals in Kent. Chatham had at least shown the good sense to cut his losses. But thousands had died and nothing had been gained. A doggerel of that time ran:

Lord Chatham, with his sword half-drawn,
Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan.
Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em,
Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.

As a result of the fiasco, Portland’s sickly government at last fell, to be replaced by a mediocrity, Spencer Perceval, and Francis was eventually forced to accede to most of Napoleon’s terms. Francis was allowed to stay on as Emperor. But Napoleon, after his near-miss, was in an angry mood: the Austrian empire was shorn of its share of Poland and all of its remaining lands down the Dalmatian coast, as well as Croatia and most of Slovenia. Bavaria’s pro-French puppet regime was given Salzburg, Berchtesgaden and a slice of Upper Austria. Part of eastern Galicia was
given to the Russians as a prize for staying out of the war. The Austrian army was to be reduced to 150,000 men, the militia disbanded, reparations of some 85 millions francs were to be paid, and Austria was ordered to join the Continental System.

Napoleon seemed to recover all his bounce and self-confidence after Wagram. In spite of the narrowness of victory, and his first ever defeat at Aspern-Eylau, he behaved as though the Austrian campaign had been one of his greatest achievements. Once again he had not understood that by treating the Austrians vengefully he had made another war inevitable. Much less had he realized that the Austrians had regained their self-respect during the Wagram campaign. Like a man who has suddenly peered over the edge – as he had at Aspern-Essling – and then saved himself, he behaved with an exuberance that had suddenly found its release. This expressed itself in a number of ways: an extraordinary attack on the Pope; a new bossiness towards his proconsular brothers; and the final decision to divorce Josephine.

Napoleon’s hubris was never more on public display than in the autumn of 1809 when he believed he had finally confounded all his enemies. Napoleon’s relations with the saintly but clever Pope Pius VII had long been deteriorating. He wrote to his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais:

My son, I perceive by his Holiness’ letter, which he certainly never wrote himself, that I am threatened. I would not tolerate this from any other Pope. What does Pius VII wish to do when he denounces me to Christendom? Put an interdict on my throne? Excommunicate me? Does he imagine that their muskets will drop from my soldiers’ fingers? Or is it to place a dagger in my people’s hands to assassinate me? . . . I shall doubtless hear that the Holy Father
intends to apply the scissors to my head and to lock me up in a monastery! . . . The present Pope has too much power; priests are not made to rule; let them follow the example of St Peter, St Paul, and the holy Apostles.

The Pope had been chafing at certain aspects of his Concordat with France and had taken the provocative step of refusing to apply the Continental System to his territories. Privately the Vatican was urging Austria to reignite its war with France. In response Napoleon had ordered a French occupation of the Papal States in 1808, which took place without resistance. Now the States were formally annexed. The Pope issued a bull of excommunication against whoever attacked the Holy See ‘whatever their honours or dignities’ – a transparent reference to Napoleon. The Emperor’s reaction was that ‘the bull of excommunication is so ridiculous a document that one may as well take no notice of it’. Napoleon was not prepared to put up with insolence, as he saw it, from the Pope who was his subject as a temporal ruler – indeed had no business to be a ruler himself or to meddle in temporal affairs.

Yet he did not want to offend the church, for which he had a healthy respect because of its hold over the spiritual loyalties of half the citizens of his empire. As he had once written:

Never throw oil, but throw water, on the passions of men; scatter prejudices, and firmly strive against the false priests who have degraded religion by making it the tool of the ambition of the powerful and of kings. The morality of the Gospel is that of equality, and hence it is most favourable to the republican government which is now to be that of your country. Experience has undeceived the French, and has convinced them that the Catholic religion is better adapted than any other to diverse forms of government, and is particularly favourable to republican institutions. I myself am a philosopher, and I know that, in every society whatsoever, no man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and whither he is going. Simple reason cannot guide you in this matter; without religion one walks continually in darkness; and
the Catholic religion alone gives to man certain and infallible information concerning his origin and his latter end.

He once told his minister in Rome, ‘Treat with the Pope as if he had 200,000 men.’ But now in 1809 after his excommunication he railed: ‘What can the Pope do? I have 300,000 men under my orders.’

Napoleon professed disdain for atheism on the grounds that ‘it takes from man all his consolations and hopes’ – which was hardly a ringing endorsement of religion. He also insisted:

How can morality exist? There is only one means – that of reestablishing religion . . . Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes, and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion. When one man is dying of hunger near another who suffers from surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority that can say to him, ‘God wills it so; there must be rich and poor in this world; but hereafter, and for ever, their lot will be different.’

But he never appeared to be a believer himself: he expressed doubt as to whether Jesus ever existed on two occasions, and on several others compared Him as an equal to Mohammed or Plato. Sometimes he expressed the view that Islam was a simpler and more effective religion than Christianity.

Following the papal bull of excommunication, Napoleon retaliated by having the Pope arrested and moved to Florence, in case Rome rose up in revolt against his arbitrary action; then he brought him to Nice, before holding him in Savona. The Pontiff was held in miserable and humiliating conditions, but the dignified sixty-seven-year-old scholar did not yield: on the contrary he refused to consecrate Napoleon’s bishops and instructed his followers not to co-operate with the Emperor.

Napoleon eventually sought a compromise, but the pontiff refused. He was brought to Fontainebleau by an angry Napoleon, where the new French court feared that Napoleon would get so angry that he would reverse the Revolution’s opposition to atheism. Cardinal Fesch,
his uncle, who remonstrated with him, was told to look up at the sky: ‘Do you see anything?’ Napoleon asked.

‘No,’ said Fesch.

‘In that case, learn when to shut up. I myself see my star; it is that which guides me. Don’t pit your feeble and incomplete faculties against my superior organism.’

The row with the Vatican had a final chapter to go; but Napoleon had no reason to prosecute it except his own desire to squash a lingering pocket of resistance against him: if the church was as powerful as he believed, it was not worth making an enemy of its leader; if it was powerless, he had no reason to proceed against it. But after Wagram he believed he could do anything with immunity, even overawe the Vicar of Christ on earth.

Napoleon’s attitude towards the lesser rulers of Europe was far more insulting. Of the Emperor Francis he wrote contemptuously: ‘The Emperor of Austria is always of the opinion of the last speaker . . . in five or six years he [will] begin the war again and become once more the tool of England.’

He scolded his younger brother, the playboy-ruler Jerome:

I have seen an order of the day signed by you that makes you the laughing stock of Germany, Austria and France. Have you no friend who will tell you the truth? You are a King and a brother of the Emperor – ridiculous title in warfare! You must be a soldier, and again a soldier, and always a soldier! You must bivouac with your outposts, spend night and day in the saddle, march with your advance guard so as to get information, or else remain in your seraglio. You wage war like a satrap. By Heaven! Is it from me you have learned that – from me, who with an army of 200,000 men live with my skirmishers? You have much ambition, some intelligence, a few good qualities – but spoiled by silliness, by great presumption – and have no real knowledge. In God’s name keep enough wits about you to write and speak with propriety.

He even delivered pompous lectures to Joachim Murat, his brother-in-law and one of the princes of his army as its greatest cavalry commander,
who he believed had tried to supplant him. ‘As a rule give nothing to people who have not worked 10 years for you . . . base yourself on the principle that the less the diplomatic corps see you the better.’

Napoleon’s motive in ruling his dominions through members of his family was not dynastic nepotism pure and simple – it was that these men were pliant and owed everything to him, so that he believed they would do as he ordered, whereas self-made men from outside the clan might not do so, particularly if they were talented. This was a partial misjudgement: independent they might not be, but that did not stop them bitterly resenting their overbearing relation – particularly in the case of Murat, who was merely married to his sister and who loathed him and considered his military talents inferior to his own.

Napoleon’s vainglory seemed to know no bounds. He wrote:

The Institute proposes conferring on the Emperor the title of Augustus and of Germanicus. Augustus gained one battle, at Actium. Germanicus won the sympathy of Rome by his misfortunes, but his life shows a decidedly moderate record. There is nothing to provoke emulation in the memory of the Roman Emperors. The only man, and he was not an Emperor, who was distinguished by his character and by his many illustrious achievements was Caesar. If the Emperor could wish a new title it would be that of Caesar. But so many puny princes have dishonoured that title – if such a thing were possible – that it no longer evokes the memory of the great Caesar, but that of a mass of German sovereigns, as feeble as they were ignorant, of whom not one has left a reputation behind him.

On a more sensible note he observed:

In a battle even the most skilful soldiers find it difficult to estimate the enemy’s numbers, and as a rule, one is apt instinctively to exaggerate the number. But if one is foolish enough to accept an inflated estimate of the enemy’s forces, then every cavalry colonel on reconnaissance espies an army, and every captain of light infantry
battalions. Again I repeat that in war morale and opinion are half the battle. The art of the great captain has always been to make his troops appear very numerous to the enemy, and the enemy very few to his own. So that today, in spite of the long time we have spent in Germany, the enemy do not know my real strength. We are constantly striving to magnify our numbers. Far from confessing that I had only 100,000 men at Wagram, I am constantly suggesting that I had 220,000. In my Italian campaigns, in which I had only a handful of troops, I always exaggerated my numbers. It served my purpose, and has not lessened my glory. My generals and practised soldiers could always perceive, after the event, all the skilfulness of my operations, even that of having exaggerated the numbers of my troops.