‘You’re being rather hot-headed, Belliard,’ said Napoleon, coming back to speak to his roving general. ‘It’s too easy to get things wrong in the heat of battle. Go back and have another look, then you can come and talk to me.’ Belliard was scarcely out of sight when another messenger came galloping in from the battlefield.
‘Well, what do you want?’ said Napoleon, with the air of a man thoroughly annoyed by constant pestering.
‘Sire, the prince . . .’ the adjutant began.
‘Wants reinforcements?’ growled Napoleon with an angry gesture. The adjutant confirmed this with a nod, and was about to go into detail, but the Emperor turned away, took a couple of steps, stopped, turned back, and called Berthier over. ‘The reserves are needed,’ he said with a slight spreading of the hands. ‘Who shall we send in? What do you think?’ he asked Berthier, whom he would later describe as ‘that gosling I’ve turned into an eagle’.
‘Claparède’s division, sire,’ said Berthier, who knew all the divisions, regiments and battalions by heart.
Napoleon nodded in agreement.
An adjutant galloped off to Claparède’s division. Within minutes the young guards drawn up behind the redoubt were on the move. Napoleon gazed in their direction without saying a word. Then suddenly he said to Berthier, ‘No. I can’t send Claparède. Send Friant’s division.’
Although there was nothing to be gained by sending Friant’s division in preference to Claparède’s, and in fact it would now be awkward and time-consuming to bring Claparède to a halt and dispatch Friant, the order was carried out to the letter. Napoleon could not see that as far as his troops were concerned he was acting like a doctor issuing prescriptions that would slow down the patient’s progress, a function he knew well and roundly condemned.
Friant’s division vanished like the rest into the smoke of the battlefield. Adjutant after adjutant now came galloping in from every side, all with the same message, as if they were working in collusion. They all asked for reinforcements, and they all told the same story: the Russians were sticking to their posts and keeping up a hellish barrage of fire, so bad that the French troops were melting away.
Napoleon sat on a camp-stool, and thought things over.
M. de Bausset, the great traveller, hadn’t had a bite to eat since early morning, so he now came over to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to propose a little lunch.
‘I was hoping by now to be able to congratulate your Majesty on a victory,’ he said.
Napoleon’s only response was to shake his head. Taking the negative gesture as a reference to victory rather than lunch, M. de Bausset risked a respectful little joke: surely there was no reason in the world that ought to get in the way of lunch when lunch was at hand.
‘Oh, go away,’ snapped Napoleon with a dark glare, turning his back on the man. M. de Bausset’s face positively glowed with a beatific smile that blended sympathy, regret and delight, as he glided back to the other generals.
Napoleon’s heart was sinking, like that of a lucky gambler who has been throwing his money about senselessly and always won, only to find himself more and more certain to lose just at the point when he has carefully calculated all the possibilities and worked out his system.
His men were the same, the generals were the same, the same preparations had been made, the same dispositions, the same ‘short and sweet’ proclamation, and he was the same – he knew that, he knew he was even more experienced and skilful now than before – and even the enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland. But the wave of a hand that had once inspired such dread seemed to have been magically deprived of its power.
All the old tactical ploys that always brought success – concentrating his batteries on a single point, use of reserves to break the line, cavalry attack by ‘men of iron’ – all these had been used, but they weren’t bringing victory, and, worse still, the same reports came pouring in from all quarters: generals killed or wounded, the need for reinforcements, the Russians standing their ground and the French troops in disarray.
Hitherto, it had only taken a few words of command, just a sentence or two, for marshals and adjutants to come galloping back with congratulations, radiant faces and stories of trophies captured: entire divisions taken prisoner, sheaves of enemy colours and eagles, cannons and stores, and the only request from Murat was to let the cavalry go and get the baggage-trains. It had been like this at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram and everywhere else. But now something unusual was happening to his men.
