Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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and a round hat with a vast red, white and blue feather. Saliceti thought of the war in terms of loot for himself and money to send home to the impoverished Directory. He asked the terms of the treaty and was annoyed that Napoleon had not squeezed more out of the Piedmontese. The treaty, he said, was altogether too moderate.

      Napoleon intended to be moderate. He saw the war in northern Italy differently from Saliceti. He was fighting the Austrians, but he was also liberating the Italians, long ‘enslaved’ in the duchy of Milan. ‘Peoples of Italy!’ he announced in a printed proclamation, ‘The French army is come to break your chains … We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs. We wage war with generous hearts, and turn ourselves only against the tyrants who seek to enslave us.’

      Coming down from the arid mountains into the fertile plain, Napoleon was able to care for his army. He obliged the town of Mondovi, for instance, to provide 8,000 rations of fresh meat and 4,000 bottles of wine, and the people of Acqui to sell their own boots to the French, otherwise they would be confiscated. Having raised morale, Napoleon prepared his men for the next task, to destroy Beaulieu. ‘You have accomplished nothing unless you finish what remains to be done. Are there any among you whose courage is flagging? No. Every one of you, on returning to his village, would like to be able to say with pride, “I was with the army in Italy.”’

      To destroy Beaulieu Napoleon first had to cross the Po. The direct route lay by Pavia, the Austrian strong-point, where in 1528 François I had been made prisoner. That would be costly in lives, and Napoleon sought another crossing. In one of his library books he had read that Maillebois’s army in 1746 had crossed the Po as far downstream as Piacenza. Napoleon raced for Piacenza, where he found the Po to be 500 yards wide. While his men eyed gloomily the vast expanse of brown water and laid bets that a crossing would take at least two months, Napoleon chose a brave young officer from the Pyrenees, Jean Lannes, known for his neatness and his vast repertory of swear words, and sent him across the river in boats with 900 men. Despite enemy fire Lannes established a bridgehead and Napoleon succeeded in getting his whole army across in two days. Then he swept up towards Milan, outflanking the main Austrian army. ‘When Beaulieu learned what had happened,’ Napoleon wrote to the Directors, ‘he realized too late that his fortifications on the Ticino and his redoubts at Pavia were useless and that the French republicans were not so inept as François I.’

      The battle that Napoleon had sidestepped on the Po he was to fight on a river nearer Milan, the Adda. There was one bridge across the Adda, at the little town of Lodi, and to hold it Beaulieu had left his rearguard: 12,000 men and sixteen guns. Arriving in Lodi at noon on 10 May, Napoleon went to reconnoitre. Near the river stood a statue of John Nepomuke, a saint who had chosen to be drowned rather than reveal the secret of the confessional. Hiding behind this statue, Napoleon studied the river through his telescope. It was not very deep but it was rapid. The wooden pile bridge, without parapets, was 200 yards long and twelve feet wide. On the far bank the Austrian guns were massed in a strong fifteenth-century fort and high pentagonal tower. They were firing as Napoleon reconnoitred, and one of their shells exploded almost at his feet: but St John Nepomuke took the full blast, and Napoleon escaped without a scratch.

      Napoleon decided to storm the bridge. There was no historical precedent for storming a bridge under heavy fire and his generals said it was madness. But Napoleon went ahead. He would combine it, in his usual style, with a flanking movement, this time by his cavalry, whom he ordered to gallop up the Adda, find a crossing, and then sweep down on the Austrian right. Then he gathered his infantry, 4,000 of them, in the town square. They were mostly Savoyards, one a red-haired colossus named Dupas who, like Napoleon, had witnessed the storming of the Tuileries and saved several Swiss from death. The French soldier, according to a Polish officer on Napoleon’s staff, was remarkable for two things: physical fitness and a horror of opprobrium. It was on the latter trait that Napoleon now played. Astride a white horse, he rode along the ranks. He wanted to storm the bridge, he told the Savoyards, but he didn’t see how he could. He didn’t have enough confidence in them. They would fool about firing their muskets and in the end wouldn’t dare to cross. He nettled the troops, he goaded them, and at last, by six o’clock in the evening, he had worked them up to a pitch of courage. Then he ordered the gate leading to the bridge to be opened, and drums and fifes to play their favourite anthems: ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Les héros morts pour la liberté’.

      Still on his white horse, Napoleon posted himself by the bridge and urged on the Savoyards, as they poured out of the square at the double, shouting ‘Vive la République!’ and clattered on to the wooden bridge. In front strode the colossal Dupas. Austrian guns blazed and the bridge began to be raked by lead of every calibre. Many Frenchmen fell. Anxiously Napoleon snapped orders. Massena and Berthier and Lannes led more volunteers down the long terrible line of planks. Fifty yards from the end soldiers jumped into the river and splashed ashore to try to silence the murderous guns. The Austrians replied with a cavalry attack, which swept into the river all the French who had landed. Napoleon looked constantly upstream, waiting tensely. At last his cavalry appeared – very late because they had failed to find a ford. They fell on the Austrians from the flank and silenced their guns, so that more and more Savoyards got across the long wooden bridge. As darkness fell, the Austrians ran, leaving behind sixteen guns, 335 dead and wounded, 1,700 prisoners. French losses were about 200 dead.

      The battle of Lodi marks a new stage in Napoleon’s development. Previous engagements he had won by strategic or tactical skill, but here, against heavy odds, he had incited to the extremes of courage, and to eventual victory, a ragged army, for months ill-fed mainly on potatoes and chestnuts. At Lodi, for the first time he became aware of his powers of leadership.

      Five days later Napoleon entered Milan. A delegation humbly brought him the keys of the city. To the delegation leader Napoleon said severely, ‘I hear you’ve got men under arms.’ ‘Just three hundred, to keep order,’ replied the Italian, adding with characteristic flattery, ‘They’re not real soldiers like yours.’ This made Napoleon smile.

      While bells pealed from the thousand-pinnacled cathedral and crowds of Milanese burghers cheered, Napoleon took up residence in the palace from which the Austrian archduke had recently fled, after making millions from hoarded corn. At a state dinner, speaking in Italian, he promised the people of Milan the eternal friendship of France. To the Directors he wrote, ‘The Tricolour flies over Milan, Pavia, Como and all the towns of Lombardy.’ He could be well pleased. He had accomplished the first two acts of the drama set him: peace with Piedmont, conquest of the duchy of Milan. There remained Act III, decisive victory over the Austrians, and with that victory peace.

      Amid these successes, Napoleon received a letter from the Directors, the most painful letter he had ever received in his life. The Directors informed Napoleon that he was to give up sole command of the Army of the Alps. Henceforth that army was to be under joint command of General Kellermann, lately commanding the Army of the Moselle, and of General Buonaparte. Kellerman would continue fighting the Austrians in the north, while Napoleon was to undertake a new campaign in the south, against the Papal States and Tuscany, both friendly to Austria.

      Napoleon knew Kellermann to be a haughty Alsatian with a bony face and thin lips, a sound commander but at sixty-one slow and set in his ways. Yet because he was senior to Napoleon and his name a household word – he had won the battle of Valmy in 1792 – Kellermann would inevitably have the final say. Doubtless Napoleon recalled the Maddalena fiasco: he did not relish serving again under a man less eager and daring than himself.

      Napoleon wrote a letter to the Directors, objecting strongly to their proposals: ‘Kellermann would command the army as well as myself; for no one could be more convinced than I am that our victories are due to the courage and dash of the army; but I think that to give Kellermann and myself joint command in Italy would mean ruining everything. I can’t agree to serve with a man who believes himself the best general in Europe; and in any case I am sure one bad general is better than two good ones. War, like government, is a question of tact.’

      Napoleon saw another side to the matter. In an order of the day issued at Nice he had told his troops that they would find in him ‘a comrade-in-arms supported by the confidence of the Government’: that is, they could count on Paris backing their lives to

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