Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

Marbot saw as much of Bonaparte as any man of his rank through the years that followed. In July 1806 he carried despatches to the French embassy in Berlin, and returned to report to the emperor in Paris that he had seen Prussian officers defiantly sharpening sabres on the embassy steps. ‘The insolent braggarts shall soon learn that our weapons need no sharpening!’ exclaimed Bonaparte. We may suspect that the emperor viewed Marbot just as his fictional self viewed Gerard in Conan Doyle’s tales – as a wonderfully loyal, courageous, unthinking instrument with less guile than a gundog. Marbot himself tells several stories of how he was duped by treacherous foreigners with no understanding of the nobility and dignity of war. Indeed, his contempt for the lack of chivalry displayed by Englishmen, Russians, Austrians and suchlike is matched only by his disdain for their military incompetence. On those freakish occasions when he is forced to acknowledge that lesser breeds prevailed on the battlefield, such misfortunes are invariably attributed either to the enemy’s superior numbers or to the folly of some French subordinate commander. Bonaparte’s soldiers, in Marbot’s eyes, were paragons of courage and honour. We learn little from his narrative of the trail of devastation they wreaked across occupied Europe. To the gallant young officer, as to most of his comrades, Bonaparte was an idol, rather than the ruthless despot who brought misery to millions. Marcellin says nothing in his memoirs of his elder brother Antoine-Adolphe, also a soldier, who was arrested in 1802 for an alleged plot against the ruler of France in favour of a republic.

Marbot fretted about receiving less than his share of glory at Jena in October 1806, but a few months later, at the age of twenty-four, he gained his coveted captaincy. It was in this rank that he served at Eylau in February 1807. The battle prompted one of his most remarkable stories, which sounds more like an experience of Baron Munchausen than that of a French cavalry officer. Marbot was riding a mare named Lisette, whose naturally vicious temperament he had with difficulty suppressed. First his servant, then the captain himself, forced sizzling joints of hot mutton into the horse’s mouth when she sought to attack them. Since these salutory experiences, Lisette had been a model mount. In the midst of the great engagement at Eylau, in which Augereau’s corps suffered severely, Bonaparte sent word to the marshal that he should try to save the 14th Infantry, whose dwindling band of survivors held a hillock in the path of the Russian advance. Two aides spurred forth, to be swallowed up in the chaos and never seen again. Marbot stood next in line. ‘Seeing the son of his old friend, and I venture to say his favourite aide de camp, come up, the kind marshal’s face changed, and his eyes filled with tears, for he could not hide from himself that he was sending me to almost certain death. But the emperor must be obeyed.’

Marbot dashed away. Lisette, ‘lighter than a swallow and flying rather than running, devoured the intervening space, leaping the piles of dead men and horses, the ditches, the broken gun carriages, and the half-extinguished bivouac fires’. Cossacks turned to pursue Marbot like beaters driving a hare, yet none could catch his racing steed. He reached the frail square formed by the survivors of the 14th, surrounded by dead Russian dragoons and their horses. Amid a hail of fire, the aide passed the order to withdraw. The commanding major shrugged that retreat was impossible. A fresh Russian column was even now a mere hundred paces away. ‘I see no means of saving the regiment,’ said the major. ‘Return to the emperor, bid him farewell from the 14th of the line, which has faithfully executed his orders, and bear to him the eagle which he gave us and which we can defend no longer.’

Here, couched in language worthy of Macaulay, is the very stuff of the legend of Bonaparte’s army, which Marbot did as much as any man to enshrine for posterity. A Russian cannonball tore through the aide’s hat as he seized the regiment’s eagle and strove to break off its staff, the more readily to bear it to safety. He was so badly concussed by the impact that blood poured from his nose and ears. As the enemy’s infantry closed upon them, doomed soldiers cried out ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Several Frenchmen set their backs against Lisette’s flanks, crowding the mare so tightly than Marbot could not spur her away. A wounded French quartermaster-sergeant fell under her legs, and a Russian grenadier sought to bayonet the man where he lay. The attacker, drunk as Russians always were on battlefields depicted by Marbot, missed his aim. One thrust struck the cavalryman’s arm, another pierced his mount’s flank. Lisette’s latent savagery reawakened, ‘she sprang at the Russian, and at one mouthful tore off his nose, lips, eyebrows and all the skin of his face, making of him a living death’s head, dripping with blood’. Then the mare surged out of the mêlée, kicking and biting as she went, seizing one Russian officer bodily and eviscerating him. She bolted at full gallop, not checking until she reached Eylau cemetery, where she collapsed from loss of blood. Marbot, himself fainting with pain, slid into unconsciousness.

When the battle was done, he was saved by the merest chance from the mound of snow and corpses in which he lay, incapable of movement. A servant of Augereau saw a looter carrying a pelisse which he recognised as that of the general’s aide, and induced the man to lead him to the spot where he had found it. Both mare and rider survived. Marbot wrote archly: ‘Nowadays, when promotions and decorations are bestowed so lavishly, some reward would certainly be given to an officer who had braved danger as I had done in reaching the 14th Regiment; but under the Empire, for a devoted act of that kind I did not receive the cross [of the Legion of Honour] nor did it ever occur me to ask for it.’ Poor man, he was in truth obsessed with promotions and medals. He rejoiced mightily when at last he received the cross from his emperor two years later, at the age of twenty-six.

Marshal Augereau was so badly wounded at Eylau that it was years before he was again fit to take the field. Marbot found himself temporarily unemployed. After two months’ convalescence in Paris, however, he was attached to the staff of Marshal Lannes, with whom he served at the battle of Friedland in June 1807. He witnessed the meeting of Bonaparte and the Tsar at Tilsit, and was then sent with the emperor’s despatches to Dresden. There and afterwards in Paris he briefly savoured the delights of a full purse, his status as one of the emperor’s favoured champions, and the tender care of his mother, whom he adored. The only other female object of affection who earns a brief mention in Marbot’s memoirs is the wife whom he married in 1811. Women otherwise have no place in his tale, and perhaps little even in his career as a soldier. Many men such as Marbot became so absorbed in the business of war that they perceived women merely as a source of amusement during leaves, and as childbearers when duty granted an officer leisure to think of such marginal matters as procreation.

The year 1808 found the hussar despatched among the staff of the emperor’s brother-in-law Prince Murat to Spain, where Bonaparte was bent upon overturning the monarchy in favour of his own nominee. Murat aspired to the crown for himself. To his chagrin, however, he was obliged to content himself with the throne of Naples, while that of Spain was given to Bonaparte’s elder brother Joseph. Even the insensitive Marbot, billeted in Madrid when the Spaniards rose in revolt against the French despot and his occupying army, recognised the folly of Bonaparte’s Spanish adventure: ‘this war…seemed to me wicked, but I was a soldier and I must march or be charged with cowardice’. He was appalled by the savagery of the Spanish guerrillos, which bore especially hard on aides, who had to travel far and alone. Once, on a mission bearing despatches, he found the body of a young chasseur officer nailed by his hands and feet to a barn door, under which a fire had been lighted. The Frenchman was still bleeding, and Marbot soon afterwards found himself in a bloody confrontation with the killers, which cost him another wound. The package which he bore was finally carried to Bonaparte by another officer, proudly stained with Marbot’s blood.

In the spring of 1809, the French army in Spain was battling to seize Saragossa, which the Spanish were defending stubbornly. Assault after assault was beaten back. Marbot was ordered to lead a fresh attack, and was reconnoitring the ground when he felt himself pushed sharply backwards, and collapsed to the ground. A Spanish bullet had struck him beside the heart. The after-effects of this wound caused him much discomfort in the saddle after the fall of Saragossa, when he had to travel back to Paris with Marshal Lannes, and thence onwards for the next of Bonaparte’s German campaigns. At the battle of Eckmuhl, Marbot’s worst inconvenience was to have his horse shot under him. A few days later, on 23 April, he was in mortal danger again. At the assault on Ratisbon, Lannes was so frustrated by the failure of his men to scale the walls under heavy fire that he seized a ladder himself, exclaiming: ‘I will let you see that I was a grenadier before I was a marshal, and still am one.’ Marbot tore the ladder from his mentor by main force, and with a comrade holding the other end, dashed for the walls. Though scores of French soldiers were falling around them, Marbot and his companion claimed the honour of reaching the summit of the walls first among Bonaparte’s army. He then persuaded the Austrian officer defending the gate to surrender.

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 certain Mademoiselle Desbrières, of whose character and appearance he says less than about those of his favourite chargers. He was now appointed senior major – and in his own eyes effective commander, given the age and infirmity of his colonel – in the 23rd Chasseurs, a light cavalry regiment. It was at the head of the 23rd, about whose prowess he writes with glowing pride, that he advanced across the Niemen in June 1812, amid the Grand Army bound for Moscow. His regiment served in the corps of Oudinot, for whose incompetence Marbot nursed a hearty contempt. Through the weeks that followed he led his men in action after action, until a brush with Russian infantry on the last day of July cost him a bullet in the shoulder. He frankly admits that he would have accepted evacuation to the rear had not he yearned so desperately for his colonelcy. Bonaparte promoted no man in his absence from the field.

Thus Marbot soldiered on despite the pain of his wound, which was so great that when he led his regiment into action at Polotsk two weeks later he was unable to draw a sword. The 23rd Chasseurs were left at Polotsk with St Cyr’s corps through the two months that followed, while the rest of the Grand Army advanced to Moscow and disaster. To his immense joy, on 15 November Marbot received news of his colonelcy, the letter marked with a scribbled line from Bonaparte: ‘I am discharging an old debt.’

Marbot proudly describes the ingenuity with which he equipped his own regiment to play its part when it was at last summoned to join the Grand Army on the retreat from Moscow. He ensured that the men of the 23rd were provided with winter clothing. Those whose horses died were sent back to Germany, to remove useless mouths. A regimental cattle herd was established and mills commandeered to grind corn for the men, when other units were starving.

In the last days of November, the chasseurs found themselves committed to the terrible action at the crossing of the Beresina, which made an end of so many Frenchmen. On 2 December, in twenty-five degrees of frost, Marbot received a lance thrust in the knee during a mêlée with cossacks, as he strove to turn aside their points with his bare hand in order to reach them with his sabre. Here, indeed, was the bloody intimacy of war as it had been waged since earliest times. The Frenchman was enraged a moment later to feel the pressure of a muzzle against his cheek, and to hear a double report as a cossack fired ‘treacherously’ upon him from behind with a double-barrelled pistol. One bullet passed through the colonel’s cloak, the other killed a French officer. Marbot turned on the Russian in a rage as he took aim with a second pistol. The man suddenly cried out in good French: ‘Oh God! I see death in your eyes! I see death in your eyes!’ Marbot responded furiously: ‘Ay, scoundrel, and you see right!’

Curiously enough, such dialogues were not uncommon in the midst of combat, in an age when many of Bonaparte’s foes spoke French. The Russian fell to his sabre. Marbot then turned on another young Russian, and was raising his weapon when an elderly cossack threw himself across the Frenchman’s horse’s neck, beseeching him: ‘For your mother’s sake spare this one, who has done nothing!’ Marbot claims that on hearing his revered parent invoked, he thought he heard her own voice cry out ‘Pardon! Pardon!’ and stayed his hand. His sword point dropped.

Marbot came out of Russia in terrible pain from his wound, icicles hanging from his horse’s bit, most of his troopers dismounted by the starvation of their mounts, the wounded borne on sledges. Yet his regiment fared vastly better than most. In the 23rd, 698 men returned out of 1,048 who had crossed the Niemen eastwards a few months earlier. Bonaparte complimented Marbot on his achievement in saving so many, though his troopers had missed the worst of the campaign.

The colonel was occupied at the regimental depot at Mons, training replacements, until June 1813 when he resumed command of his active squadrons on the Oder. The highlight of his service at Leipzig was an attempt to encircle and capture the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia as they reconnoitred the French positions on 13 October before battle was joined. Marbot had almost completed a manoeuvre to cut off the glittering array of majesties from their own lines when a careless Frenchman dropped his carbine, which went off, betraying the presence of the chasseurs. The throng of enemy commanders and their staffs hastily turned and galloped away. If only his ploy had succeeded, lamented the colonel, ‘the destinies of Europe would have been changed’. As it was, he could only withdraw his men to the French line and share the army’s fate – decisive defeat. He himself was wounded, bizarrely, by an arrow in the thigh, fired by a Bashkir tribesman in the ranks of the Russians.

Marbot fought on with his regiment through the last bitter battles of the war. At Hanau, the regiment charged five times. Again and again it fought fierce actions to cover the retreat of the shrinking French army. In the winter of 1814, back at his depot in Belgium, which Bonaparte had claimed as French soil, Marbot found local people increasingly hostile and alienated. He fought one of his last little clashes in Mons itself, against Prussian cossacks.

After Bonaparte’s first abdication, Marbot was retained in the Bourbon army, and appointed to command the 7th Hussars. Inevitably, on the return of his idol from Elba he led his regiment to join the emperor’s colours. In the first surge of enthusiasm in April 1815 he perceived a chance that the English, and the rest of Europe, might acquiesce peacefully in the restoration of Bonaparte’s rule. He was swiftly disabused. On 17 June, after the action at Quatre Bras, Marbot was promoted major-general, though his appointment never took effect. He spent most of the day of Waterloo fuming in frustration on the French right wing, waiting to take to Bonaparte news of Grouchy’s arrival with his corps, which was expected hourly.

‘I cannot get over our defeat,’ he wrote in a letter shortly afterwards. ‘We were manoeuvred like so many pumpkins.’ He spent much of the afternoon pushing pickets forward in search of Grouchy. These men instead found themselves skirmishing with Blücher’s vanguard on the Wavre road. When Marbot sent gallopers to inform Bonaparte that strong Prussian columns were advancing upon Mont St Jean, the reply came back that he must be mistaken, these were surely Grouchy’s regiments. Marbot’s few hundred horsemen were driven relentlessly back upon the crumbling imperial army, and soon found themselves receiving the attentions of the British left. The colonel of the 7th Hussars received yet another wound – an English lance thrust in the side. He wrote in a letter soon afterwards: ‘It is pretty severe, but I thought I would stay to set a good example. If everyone had done the same, we might yet get along…No food is sent to us, and so the soldiers pillage our poor France as if they were in Russia. I am at the outposts, before Laon; we have been made to promise not to fire, and all is quiet.’ For Marbot, Bonaparte’s final exile to St Helena prompted despair, and political ruin. He himself, one among so many traitors to the Bourbons, was obliged to quit France for three years of exile in Germany.