LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 8 The Italian Campaign

      THE war in which Napoleon was about to fight was being waged by two men with family reasons for loathing the French Republic. Emperor Francis II, one year older than Napoleon, was a timid, decent Austrian with little talent or energy; but as the nephew of Marie Antoinette, and seated on Europe’s oldest throne, he had committed himself to restoring a Bourbon king to France. His ally, Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont, was a vain bigot who imprisoned liberals and brought back the Inquisition. He was constantly dropping off to sleep, hence his nickname, ‘King of the Dormice’, but as the father-in-law of the Comte de Provence – ‘Louis XVIII’ – he bestirred himself in his waking intervals to try to restore the throne of France.

      Napoleon’s orders were to cross the Alps into Piedmont, the fertile plain of the upper Po Valley. He was to engage and defeat the Austrians and Piedmontese. He was to occupy the Austrian duchy of Milan; Piedmont he could treat as he wished. He was then to negotiate peace, thereby making it possible to reduce France’s huge and expensive army. Such a conquest as this of northern Italy had twice been attempted in the last hundred years, by Villars and by Maillebois: both attempts had failed.

      Napoleon set up his headquarters at Nice and met his senior officers. There was Massena, a thin, wiry ex-smuggler with a big sabre nose, who looked like an eagle and had an eagle’s eye for terrain. He had been fourteen years a sergeant-major, unable, like other rankers, to rise higher until the Revolution opened commissions to all. Elected colonel by his men, he was now a general, a dry, silent, dour character. Another general who had risen from the ranks was Charles Augereau, a tall, talkative, foul-mouthed Parisian of the streets, who had sold watches in Constantinople, given dancing lessons, served in the Russian army, and eloped with a Greek girl to Lisbon, yet for all that was a stern disciplinarian. There was Kilmaine, a mad Dubliner who commanded the thin nags misnamed cavalry. Finally there was Louis Alexandre Berthier. At forty-three he was older than the others, had been born into the officer class, and had fought in the American War of Independence, being cited for bravery at Philipsburg. Outwardly he was unprepossessing, with a big ungainly head, frizzy hair and a nasal voice. He spluttered and stammered, and he had a habit of biting the finger-nails of his big red hands. But his brain was like a filing-cabinet, orderly and neat to the last detail. Berthier was a born chief-of-staff and had no ambition to command. Massena, however, had, and with some justice had been hoping for the job given to Napoleon. He grumbled with Augereau at serving under this whipper-snapper from Paris, and when Napoleon kept passing round Josephine’s portrait, they sniggered.

      Napoleon was satisfied with his senior officers, but he dismissed as incapable five brigadiers, and sent away four aged cavalry colonels, ‘only good for office work’. He brought in brave men of his own, notably Junot and Murat. Berthier in particular pleased him by his energy, exactitude and the way he could express in dispatches exactly what his commander-in-chief wanted to say.

      Napoleon turned to his men. At a time when France had 560,000 citizens under arms, Napoleon’s army was neither the largest nor the best trained. It consisted of 36,570 infantry, 3,300 cavalry, 1,700 artillerymen, sappers and gendarmes: a total of 41,570. Most were southerners, lively and garrulous Provençals, boasting Gascons, eager, dogged Dauphinois mountaineers.

      At this time the basic French fighting man wore blue trousers and tunic, and a black leather cartridge-pouch containing thirty-five cartridges; attached to it was a leather purse for spare flints, a screwdriver and the tire-balks, a special pin for clearing the aperture of the sighting-vane on his musket, which tended to clog, and the rag for cleaning the working parts. On his back he carried a calfskin haversack containing – theoretically – spare boots, extra cartridges, bread or biscuit for four days, two shirts, a collar, a vest, a pair of pants, stockings, gaiters, a nightcap, brushes, and a sleeping-bag. Altogether, including musket, he carried a weight of 50 lbs.

      His 17.5 mm musket, four feet long, weighed 9¹/₂ lbs. To fire it, he first opened the pan, tore a cartridge open with his teeth, filled the pan with some of the gunpowder from the cartridge and shut it. He then poured the rest of the gunpowder down the muzzle, rammed home the cartridge with its lead bullet after it, using two thrusts of his ramrod. Finally he cocked the gun and fired. He could fire two rounds a minute. Every fifty shots he had to clean the barrel and change the flint. At the end of the musket, when charging the enemy, he fixed a bayonet 21 ins. long.

      Napoleon found that very few in his army were equipped to this standard. Their uniforms were diverse, some of the veterans clinging to patched white tunics of pre-Revolutionary days, which they were unwilling to have dyed. Most wore ragged linen trousers. On their heads were battered caps, revolutionary bonnets, bearskins that had lost their fur, helmets without plumes. Thin in the face, because they did not have enough to eat, they looked like scarecrows. On their feet a few wore boots; others made do with clogs; some had scraps of cloth, some no more than plaited straw. And this was the army he was expected to march into Italy!

      What struck Napoleon most was his army’s ‘frightening penury’, so he spent his gold at once on six days’ rations of bread, meat and brandy. No one would accept a letter of exchange for 162,800 francs which the Government had given him: understandably, since it was drawn on Cadiz. With the Directors’ permission he sent Saliceti to Genoa to raise a three and a half million franc loan; this Saliceti failed to do, but he did buy enough corn for three months’ bread, if eked out with chestnuts. Napoleon also bought 18,000 pairs of boots. With bread and boots he could manage.

      On 6 April Napoleon moved his headquarters fifty-five miles forward to Albenga, still on the coast. ‘Misery has led to indiscipline,’ he found, and some troops refused to march. On the 8th: ‘I have sent for court-martial two officers alleged to have shouted “Long live the King!”’ In an order of the day Napoleon insisted that discipline is ‘the nerve of armies’, and cases of indiscipline he treated severely. Everywhere he tightened up. Augereau, who had never quailed in his life before, confided to Massena, ‘I can’t understand – it that little bugger makes me afraid.’

      In the past half-century, war in Europe had become a gentleman’s profession, comparable to boar-hunting or dancing the minuet. The rules were everything. Two armies met, and slowly deployed into long, perfectly dressed lines. Each general sought to discover the other’s weak point. Then he launched an assault by parallel columns, equidistant from each other, in perfect alignment, in perfect step. After at most a few hours’ fighting, each withdrew to its camp. There was little bloodshed, battles were usually drawn, and so the tide of war flowed back and forth, indecisively.

      Then came the Revolution. France for the first time grew conscious of its nationhood and, as in Elizabethan England and Philip II’s Spain, a tremendous energy was released, an urge at all costs to win. NCOs rose to be generals, and their raw troops, trained in a hurry, could not perform the elaborate movements beloved of royal armies. So they attacked more quickly, more loosely and no longer according to the text-book: in single column or, like Carteaux, in ‘column of three’. Successful elsewhere, these methods had not yet produced results in the difficult up-and-down country of the Italian frontier. As Napoleon put it, ‘We have been playing for [three] years in the Alps and Apennines a perpetual game of prisoners’ base.’

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