The Memoirs of General Baron de Marbot Part 38

My position, as commander of the advance-guard, was now very difficult; for how could I, without a single infantryman and with cavalry packed between two high mountains and an uncrossable torrent, fight troops on foot whose scouts, climbing up the rocks would shoot us at close range? I sent at once to warn the divisional general, but Exelmans could not be found. However I had been ordered to advance and I could not stop the divisions which were following me, so I continued my march until at a bend in the valley my scouts told me that they were in sight of a detachment of enemy Hussars.

The Austro-Bavarians had made the same mistake as our leaders; for if the latter had sent cavalry to attack a long and narrow pa.s.s, where no more the ten or twelve hors.e.m.e.n could ride abreast, our enemies had sent cavalry to defend a position where a hundred sharpshooters could hold up ten regiments of cavalry. I was highly delighted to see that the enemy had no infantry, and as I knew from experience that when two opposing columns meet at a narrow spot, victory always goes to the one which, hurling itself at the head of the enemy, drives it back into the troops behind it, I launched at the gallop my elite company, of which only the leading platoon could engage the enemy; but they did so with such elan that the head of the Austrian column was overwhelmed and the rest thrown into such complete confusion that my troopers had only to take aim.

We continued the pursuit for more than an hour. The enemy regiment in front of us was that of General Ott. I had never seen such well turned out Hussars. they had come from Vienna, where they had been fitted with completely new uniforms, Their outfit, although a little theatrical, looked very handsome: the pelisse and dolman in white and the trousers and the shako in lilac; all clean bright and shining. One might have thought they were going to a ball, or to play in a musical comedy.

This brilliant appearance contrasted somewhat with the more modest toilette of our Cha.s.seurs, many of whom were still dressed in the worn clothing in which they had bivouacked for eighteen months, in Russia, Poland, and Germany, and whose distinguishing colours had been dimmed by the smoke of cannon and the dust of battlefields. However, under those threadbare garments were brave hearts and st.u.r.dy limbs. So the white pelisses of Ott's Hussars became horribly bloodstained, and this pretty regiment lost in killed and wounded more than 200 men without one of our Cha.s.seurs having the smallest sabre cut, the enemy having always fled without ever turning to fight. Our Cha.s.seurs took a large number of excellent horses and gold-braided pelisses.

Up until then everything had gone well, but as I galloped after the victors who pursued the vanquished, I was a bit worried about the end of this strange encounter, for the diminishing height of the mountains which bordered the Kinzig indicated that we were nearing the end of the valley, and it was likely that we would find ourselves in a small plain, full of infantry whose volleys and cannon fire would make us pay dearly for our success: but happily there was no such thing, and as we emerged from the pa.s.s we saw not a single infantryman, but only some cavalry, part of which comprised the main body of that section of Ott's regiment of Hussars, which we had so roughly manhandled and who in their panic continued their headlong flight, taking with them some fifteen squadrons, who retired to Hanau.

General Sebastiani then deployed his three divisions of cavalry which were soon supported by the infantry of Marshals Macdonald and Victor and several batteries. Then the Emperor with part of his guard, appeared and the rest of the French army followed.

It was now the evening of the 29th of October; we established our bivouacs in a nearby wood; we were only a league from Hanau and the Austro-Bavarian army.

Chap. 32.

Here now are the reasons why Exelmans dropped behind when we were going through the pa.s.s. Before we entered the valley, the scouts had brought to him two Austrian soldiers absentees from their unit, who were scrounging and drinking in an isolated village.

Exelmans was having them questioned in German by one of his aides, when he was surprised to hear them reply in fluent French. One of these men, half drunk, and thinking it would do him good, announced that they were Parisians. As soon as he uttered these words, the general, furious that Frenchmen should take up arms against their fellow countrymen, ordered them to be immediately shot. The poor lad who had boasted of being French was about to be put to death, when his companion, sobered by this fearful spectacle, protested that neither of them had ever set foot in France, but having been born in Vienna to parents who, although they came from Paris, were naturalised Austrians, they were regarded as Austrian subjects and had been forced to join the regiment a.s.signed to them. To prove this he showed his army record which confirmed the fact. Exelmans, yielding to the advice of his aides-de-camp, agreed to spare the innocent man.

At this stage, hearing the sound of firing, the General wished to reach the head of the column which I was commanding; but on his arrival at the mouth of the pa.s.s, he found it impossible to get through and take a place in the ranks because of the speed with which the two regiments were galloping after the enemy. After trying many times he was so jostled that he fell with his horse into the Kinzig and nearly drowned.

The Emperor, who was preparing for battle, took advantage of the night to reduce the amount of wheeled transport by sending all the baggage off to the right, in the direction of Coblentz, escorted by some battalions of infantry and the cavalry of Lefebvre-Denouettes and Milhau. This was a great relief to the army.

On the morning of the 30th, the Emperor had at his disposal only the infantry Corps of Macdonald and Victor, amounting to 5000 men, supported by Sebastiani's cavalry division.

In the direction from which we were coming, a large forest, through which the road runs, covers the approach to Hanau. The tall trees of this forest allow movement without much difficulty. The town of Hanau is built on the other side of the river Kinzig.

General de Wrede, although not lacking in military skill, had, however, made the serious mistake of placing his army where it had the river at its back, which deprived it of the support which it could have received from the fortifications of Hanau, with which he could not communicate except by the bridge of Lamboy, which was his only road of retreat. It is true that the position he occupied barred the way to Frankfort and to France, and he felt certain that he could prevent us from forcing a pa.s.sage.

On the 30th of October at dawn the battle began, like a great hunting party. Some grape-shot and some small-arms fire from our infantry, together with a charge in open order by Sebastiani's cavalry, scattered the first line of the enemy, somewhat unskillfully placed at the extreme edge of the wood; but as one penetrated a little further, our squadrons could not operate except in the few clearings which they came across, only the Light Infantry followed in the steps of the Bavarians, whom they pursued from tree to tree to the end of the forest. At that point they had to stop, faced by an enemy line of forty thousand men, whose front was covered by eighty guns.

If the Emperor had had with him all the troops which he brought from Leipzig, a vigorous attack would have made him master of the Lamboy bridge, and General de Wrede would have paid dearly for his temerity, but Marshals Mortier and Marmont and General Bertrand, as well as the artillery, were held up by various pa.s.ses, mainly that of Gelnhausen, and had not yet arrived. Napoleon had no more than ten thousand troops. The enemy should have taken advantage of this to attack us in force, but they did not dare, and this hesitation gave time for the artillery of the Imperial Guard to arrive.

As soon as General Drouet, their commander, had fifteen pieces in the field, he began firing, and his line grew in size until he had fifty cannons, which he advanced, firing continuously, although he still had very few troops behind him to give support; however it was not possible for the enemy to see through the thick smoke from the guns, that the gunners had little to back them up. Eventually the infantry Cha.s.seurs of the Imperial Old Guard appeared, just as a gust of wind blew away the smoke.

At the sight of their busbies, the Bavarian infantry recoiled in fear. General de Wrede in an effort to stop this disorder at all costs, ordered all his cavalry, Austrian, Bavarian and Russian, to charge our artillery, and in an instant our battery was surrounded by a swarm of hors.e.m.e.n... but at the voice of their commander, General Drouet, who, sword in hand, set them an example in resistance, the French gunners, taking their muskets, remained calmly behind their guns, from where they fired point-blank at the enemy. Nevertheless, the great number of the latter would have eventually triumphed, had not, on the Emperor's order, all Sebastiani's cavalry, along with all that of the Imperial Guard , mounted Grenadiers, Dragoons , Cha.s.seurs, Mamelukes, Lancers and Guards of Honour, hurled themselves furiously on the enemy cavalry, killing a great number and dispersing the rest.

Then, falling on the Bavarian infantry squares, they broke them and inflicted tremendous losses, at which stage the Bavarian army, put to rout, fled to the bridge over the Kinzig and to the town of Hanau.

General de Wrede was a brave man, so, before admitting himself beaten by forces half as numerous as his, he resolved to make another effort, and gathering all the troops remaining to him, he made a surprise attack on us. Suddenly a fusillade broke out and the forest rang once more to the sound of artillery; cannon-b.a.l.l.s whistled through the trees, from which great branches fell with a crash....The eye sought in vain to pierce the depths of the wood; one could hardly see the flash of the guns, which lit, at intervals, the shade cast by the foliage of the huge beeches, beneath whose canopy we fought.

Hearing the noise made by this attack, the Emperor sent from his position the infantry Grenadiers of his Old Guard, led by General Friant who soon overcame this last effort of the enemy, who now hastily left the field of battle to re-group under the protection of the fort of Hanau, which they abandoned during the night, leaving behind a great number of wounded. The French occupied the fort.

We were no more than two short leagues from Frankfort, a considerable town, with a stone bridge across the Main. The French army would need to go along the bank of this river to reach Mainz and the frontier of France, which was a day's march from Frankfort; so Napoleon detached Sebastiani's corps and a division of infantry to go and occupy Frankfort, and to take over and destroy the bridge. The Emperor and the bulk of the army bivouacked in the forest.

The main road from Hanau to Frankfort runs along the right bank of the river Maine. General Albert, a friend of mine, who commanded the infantry which accompanied us, had been married, some years previously, at Offenbach, a charming little town, built on the left bank exactly opposite the spot where, after emerging from the woods of Hanau, we rested our horses on the immense and beautiful plain of Frankfort.

Finding himself so close to his wife and their children, General Albert was unable to resist the temptation to have news of them, and to rea.s.sure them of his well-being after the dangers he had encountered at the battles of Leipzig and Hanau. To do this he exposed himself to more risk, perhaps, than he had run during either of these sanguinary affairs, for advancing on horseback and in uniform to the edge of the river, in spite of our warnings, he hailed a boatman who knew him; but while he was chatting with this man, a Bavarian officer ran up with a picket of infantry who, aiming their weapons, prepared to shoot at the French general. However, a large body of citizens and boatmen crowded in front of the soldiers and prevented them from firing, for General Albert was very well liked in Offenbach.

As I looked at this town, to where I had come while fighting for my country, I did not dream that one day it would be my refuge from the proscription of a French government, and that I would spend three years there in exile.

After leaving the forest of Hanau to go on his way to Frankfort, the Emperor had hardly gone two leagues when he learned that fighting had broken out once more behind him. This was because the Bavarian general who, following his defeat the day before, had expected to be chased, with the Emperor at his heels, had taken rea.s.surance from seeing the French army more concerned to reach the Rhine than to pursue him, and had launched a brisk attack on our rear-guard.

However Macdonald, Marmont and Bertrand, who with their troops had occupied Hanau during the night, having allowed the Bavarians to attack them on that side of the Kinzig, received them with their bayonets, overwhelmed and ma.s.sacred them. General de Wrede was seriously injured, and his son-in-law, Prince d'Oettingen was killed.

The command of the enemy army then devolved onto the Austrian General Fresnel who ordered a retreat, and the French army continued on its way peacefully towards the Rhine. We recrossed the river on the 2nd and 3rd of November 1813, after a campaign which included brilliant victories and disasterous defeats, the main cause of which, as I have said, was the mistake made by Napoleon when, instead of making peace in June, following the victories of Lutzen and Bautzen, he quarreled with Austria, which involved the Confederation of the Rhine, that is to say all of Germany, so that he soon had the whole of Europe ranged against him.

After we had returned to France, the Emperor spent only six days at Mainz, and then went to Paris, preceded by twenty-six flags taken from our enemies. The army disapproved of this rapid departure on the part of Napoleon. It was accepted that there were important political reasons which called him to Paris, but it was thought that he should have divided his time between his capital and the need to re-organise his army, and that he should have gone from one to the other to encourage the activity of each, for he should have learned by experience that in his absence little or nothing was done.

The last cannon shots which I heard in 1813 were fired at the battle of Hanau, where I nearly spent the last day of my life. My regiment carried out five charges, two on infantry squares, one on artillery and two on Bavarian cavalry; but the greatest danger I ran was when an ammunition wagon, loaded with mortar bombs, caught fire and exploded close to me. I have told how, on the Emperor's order, all the cavalry were in action at a particularly difficult moment.

Now, in these circ.u.mstances, it is not good enough for a unit commander to send his troops blindly forward, a thing I have seen done on several occasions, but he must pay the closest attention to the ground over which his squadrons are about to pa.s.s, in case he sends them into bogs and marshes.

I was therefore, a few paces ahead, followed by my regimental staff and with my trumpeter at my side, who at a given command would signal to the various squadrons the obstacles which they would find in their way. Although the trees were widely s.p.a.ced, the pa.s.sage through the forest was difficult for the cavalry because the ground was littered with dead and wounded men and horses, arms, cannons and ammunition wagons, abandoned by the Bavarians. You can understand that in these conditions when one is galloping through shot and sh.e.l.l to reach the enemy one cannot always take much care of oneself, and I relied greatly on the intelligence and suppleness of my excellent and brave Turkish horse, Azolan. The little group which followed me had been much reduced by a blast of grape-shot which had wounded several of my orderlies and I had beside me only the trumpeter, a charming and good young man, when I heard from all along the line, cries of "Look out, Colonel!" And I saw ten paces away Bavariana ammunition wagon which one of our sh.e.l.ls had set on fire.

A huge tree which had been knocked down by cannon-b.a.l.l.s barred my way forward, and to go round it would have taken too long.

I shouted to the trumpeter to duck, and crouching on my horse's neck, I urged him to jump the tree. Azolan leapt a long way, but not far enough to clear all the leafy branches in which his legs became entangled. The wagon was now in flames and the powder about to catch. I thought I was done for... when my horse, as if he realised our common danger, started bounding four or five feet into the air, getting always further from the wagon, and as soon as he was clear of the branches he galloped off with such speed that he really seemed to be "Ventre a terre".

I was shaken when the explosion occurred, but it seemed I was out of range of the bursting sh.e.l.ls for neither I nor my horse were touched.

Sadly it was not so for my poor young trumpeter, for when we resumed our march after the explosion we saw his body, mutilated by the sh.e.l.l fragments, and his horse also cut to pieces.

My brave Azolan had already saved my life at the Katzbach. I now owed him my life for the second time. I made much of him, and as if to show his pleasure he whinnied at the top of his voice. It is at times like these that one has to believe that some animals are more intelligent than is generally thought.

I greatly regretted the death of my trumpeter, who by his courage and his behaviour had made himself liked by all the regiment. He was the son of a teacher at the college in Toulouse, and had had a good education. He delighted in producing Latin quotations, and an hour before his death, the poor lad, having noticed that almost all the trees in the forest of Hanau were beeches, whose branches stretched out to make a sort of roof, had thought it a suitable occasion to declaim one of Virgil's eclogues, beginning:

"t.i.tyre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine f.a.gi..."

which greatly amused Marshal Macdonald who happened to be pa.s.sing and who exclaimed, "There's a jolly lad whose memory isn't upset by his surroundings; I'll bet it's the first time anyone has recited Virgil to the sound of enemy cannon fire!"

"Those who live by the sword, perish by the sword" says the scripture, and if this is not applicable to every soldier, it was to a great many under the Empire. For example, M. Guindet, who killed Prince Louis of Prussia in the fighting at Saalefeld, was himself killed at the battle of Hanau. It was no doubt the fear of meeting a similar fate which led the Russian General Czernicheff to run away from danger.

You may remember that in the first months of 1812, this officer, then a colonel, an aide-de-camp and favourite of the Emperor Alexander, came to Paris where he abused his position to corrupt two poor employees in the Ministry of War , who were executed for having sold to him situation reports on the French army, and that the Russian Colonel only escaped the penalty of the law by secretly fleeing the country. On his return to Russia, M.de Czernicheff, although he was a courtier rather than a soldier, was given the rank of general officer and the command of a division of 3000 Cossacks, the only Russian troops who appeared at Hanau where their leader played a role which made him a laughing stock among the Austrians and Bavarians who were present at this engagement.

Czernicheff, as he marched towards us, spoke loudly of victory, believing that he had to face only soldiers who were sick and disorganised; but he changed his tune when he saw himself in the presence of the hardy and vigorous troops returning from Leipzig.

General de Wrede had great difficulty in persuading him to enter the line, and as soon as he heard the fearsome cannonade of our artillery, he and his 3000 Cossacks trotted bravely off the field, to the cat-calls of the Austro-Bavarian troops, who witnessed this shameful conduct. When General de Wrede went personally to make some scathing observations, M. de Czernicheff replied that his regiment's horses needed feeding and that he was taking them for this purpose to nearby villages. This excuse was regarded as so ridiculous that for some time afterwards the walls of German villages were decorated by caricatures of M. de Czernicheff feeding his horses with bunches of laurels gathered in the forest of Hanau.

Once across the Rhine, the soldiers who made up the remains of the French army expected to see an end to their hardships as soon as they set foot on the soil of their motherland; but they were much mistaken, for the government, and the Emperor himself, had so much counted on success, and had so little foreseen that we might leave Germany, that nothing had been made ready at the frontier to receive and re-organise the troops. So, from the very day of our arrival at Mainz, the men and the horses would have gone short of food if we had not spread them out and lodged them with the inhabitants of nearby villages and hamlets; but since the first wars of the revolution, they had lost the habit of feeding soldiers, and complained vociferously, and it is true that the expense was too great for the communes.

As it was necessary to guard, or at least to watch over the immensely long frontier formed by the Rhine from Basle to Holland, we settled, as best we could the numerous sick and wounded in the hospitals of Mainz. All fit men rejoined the core of their regiments, and the various units of the army, which for the most part consisted only of a small cadre, were spread along the river. My regiment, together with what was left of Sebastiani's cavalry corps, went down the Rhine by short marches; but although the weather was perfect and the countryside charming, we were all deeply unhappy, for one could foresee that France was going to lose possession of this fine land, and that her misfortunes would not stop there.

My regiment spent some time in Cleves, next a fortnight in the little town of Urdingen, and then went on to Nimeguen. During this sad journey we were painfully affected by the sight of the inhabitants on the opposite bank, the Germans and the Dutch, tearing down the French flag from their steeples and replacing it with the flags of their former sovereigns. In spite of these gloomy reflections, all the colonels tried to re-organise the few troops which remained to them, but what could one do without clothing, equipment or replacement of arms?...

The need to provide food for the army compelled the Emperor to keep it dispersed, whereas to re-organise it would require the creation of large centres of concentration. We were therefore in a vicious circle. However, the allies, who should have crossed the Rhine a few days after us, to prevent our re-organisation, felt themselves still so weakened as a result of the hard blows we had delivered during the last campaign, that they needed time to recover.

They left us in peace for the months of November and December, the greater part of which I spent on the bank of the Rhine, in the ghost of the army corps commanded by Marshal Macdonald.

I was eventually ordered, as were the other cavalry colonels, to take all my dismounted men to my regimental depot for the task of building up new squadrons. The depot of the 23rd was still at Mons, in Belgium, and that is where I went. It was there that I saw the end of the year 1813, so filled with great events and in which I had had encountered many dangers and undergone so many trials.

Before I end my chronicle of the year, I ought to summarise briefly the final events of the campaign of 1813.