Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

All armies seek to create an ethos in which such ambitions prosper. Only where at least a handful of soldiers possess either an exceptional sense of duty – like Sergeant-Major Hollis – or an extravagant hunger for fame – like the VC winner mentioned above – can the cause of their nation in arms flourish. A small minority of natural warriors is almost invariably fighting alongside a majority of other soldiers who threaten their army’s prospects of operational success by their eagerness to preserve their own lives. Macaulay’s Horatius demanded:

How can man die better than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?

From a Western commander’s viewpoint, however, a distressingly small number of men share this sanguine view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behaviour in battle by foes such as the wartime Japanese and Germans, and even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behaviour in action which was more likely than not to result in the death of the warrior concerned. It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behaviour than their own. This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism, merely to recognise our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his actions would have won warm Western applause if performed sixty years ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in two world wars included the approving words: ‘with absolute disregard for his own safety’.

The currency in which a notable warrior has been rewarded in modern times is, of course, an intrinsically worthless disc or cross of metal, which society has successfully promoted as desirable. The United States and Britain have customarily awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross – both mid-nineteenth-century creations – for single acts of bravery, episodes which lasted only a matter of minutes. Remarkably few of these supreme national tokens have been given for displays of courage sustained over months or years, such as were demanded as a commonplace from soldiers of earlier centuries. Indeed, the first VC was awarded for an act many people would consider a mere impulsive gesture of self-preservation: during the Crimean War a British sailor picked up a live shell which landed on the deck of his ship, and threw it overboard. In a rash moment, Congress once awarded its Medal of Honor to every member of a Civil War regiment, until wiser counsels prevailed and this largesse was retracted.

A friend who served as an infantry officer in Italy in the Second World War once observed to me that when one is twenty years old, the prospect of a ‘gong’ can incite some men to remarkable exertions. The possibility of recognition through medals has prompted many warriors to try harder, and thus caused battles to be won. The warrior’s cliché is correct, that ‘the only one who knows what a medal is worth is the man who won it’. All veterans perceive a distinction between a ‘good’ Silver Star or DSO or Croix de Guerre – gained for courage and leadership – and the other kind which ‘comes up with the rations’, not infrequently as a gesture to a career officer with influential connections. The courage of General George Patton was undisputed, but posterity is entitled to recoil from the shamelessness with which in both world wars he solicited medals from friends in high places – and received them. Likewise, I recall the rancour of an RAF veteran as he described his 1943 squadron commander. Many aircrew considered this officer a coward. He relaxed sufficiently one night in the mess to avow without embarrassment: ‘I am a career airman. I intend to survive the war.’ So he did, taking considerable care of his own safety. But the fellowship of the RAF hierarchy ensured that he got his ‘gong’ when he relinquished his squadron. Few people whom the wing-commander met in later life can have possessed any notion how relatively easily his DSO was earned. In the eyes of a new generation ignorant of the nuances of the warrior culture, the mere fact of an officer’s operational service admitted him to the ranks of ‘war heroes’.

One of the more notable follies committed during the premiership of John Major was his 1994 ‘reform’ of military decorations. Historically, only the Victoria Cross was open to all ranks. Commissioned officers and private soldiers were otherwise eligible for separate awards. Major’s new approach reflected a drowning politician’s quest for populist favour by introducing so-called ‘classless’ medals. His policy ignored the reality recognised by every fighting soldier: qualities demanded of officers and men on the battlefield are equally precious, but different in kind. Many British rankers who held the Distinguished Conduct Medal or Military Medal, abolished in the Major reforms, were dismayed. Here was a civilian politician who had never borne arms, trampling clumsily upon the recognition of battlefield achievement, and thoroughly upsetting those ‘at the sharp end’.

Many decorations are awarded for spectacular acts of courage. But others are issued cynically, because commanders deem it morally necessary to console a vanquished army, or to inspire men to try harder by giving awards for feats which are, in truth, no more than many of their comrades perform. For instance, some wartime heavy bomber pilots were decorated – several posthumously – for efforts to keep crippled aircraft aloft at the risk of their own lives, enabling the rest of their crews to bale out. This was a relatively commonplace manifestation of courage, but it was rewarded with decorations, to encourage emulation.

Official recognition of warriors’ deeds is often arbitrary, not least because it requires the survival of credible witnesses, almost invariably officers, to submit citations. Here we are back to Brown on Resolution. Every army in modern times has operated a more or less crude rationing system in apportioning decorations between units. This creates injustices both of omission and commission, well understood by fighting men. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who famously despised soldiers and sailors, once scornfully rehearsed to me the extravagant list of ‘gongs’ awarded after the Royal Navy’s bloody 1918 raid on the German submarine base at Zeebrugge, to make survivors feel better. If warriors cannot always be successful, their commanders find it expedient at least to convince them that some of their number have been brave enough to sustain collective honour.

What makes some warriors perform exceptional deeds? Charles Wilson, Churchill’s personal doctor during his premiership, served in France as an army doctor in the First World War, and afterwards wrote The Anatomy of Courage. Wilson, who became Lord Moran, rejected the view that courage is simply a quality possessed by some men and not by others. Nor, he argued, is it a constant, like income; rather, it is a capital sum of which each man possesses a variable amount. In all cases, such capital is eventually exhausted. There seems considerable evidence to support Moran’s thesis. In World War II, it was accepted that most fighting units advanced from amateur status in their first actions to much greater professionalism after some battle experience; thereafter, however, among the Western Allies at least, the aggressiveness and usefulness of a given formation declined, as it became not ‘battle-hardened’ – an absurd cliché - but tired and wary of risk. A veteran of Normandy once observed to me: ‘You fight a damn sight better when you don’t know where it hurts.’ In other words, the less battle-experienced soldier, the novice, sometimes performs feats from which a veteran would flinch.

The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic, others painfully melancholy. Some of those portrayed were notably successful in their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of scepticism does these remarkable men – and two women – no disservice, nor does an acknowledgement that few were people with whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.

When I began writing, I intended to include figures as far back in history as the periods of Leonidas, Hannibal, Saladin. Yet sifting the evidence about such people, I came to believe that it was too doubtful and fragmentary to form a basis for convincing character studies. The distinguished historian of the Hundred Years War Jonathan Sumption notes that Walter Mannay, one of the foremost among King Edward Ill’s knights, paid Froissart cash for a fulsome testimonial in his Chronicles. The historical evidence about the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae may be summarised thus: Leonidas probably existed, and probably died in a battle there. That is all, and not enough for the book which I wanted to write.

My own stories are confined, therefore, to modern times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They concern characters about whom we know enough to construct credible and, I hope, entertaining portraits. The selection is whimsical. The range of personalities is designed to illustrate different aspects of the experience of war on land, at sea and in the air over the past two centuries. Several are national icons, while others have lost their lustre, and fallen into an obscurity from which 1 hope this book will help to rescue them. Some may seem unsympathetic, and some were failures. The characters and fates of warriors are as diverse as those of people who follow any other calling.

Most of these tales concern soldiers, but I have included one remarkable sailor, and two airmen who seem archetypes of the twentieth-century warrior. My collection – which of course is only a modest assay of a seam overflowing with riches – also favours those who left behind autobiographies, diaries or other writings, that provide insights into their thoughts as well as their deeds. The balance is thus unjustly loaded towards officers at the expense of those whom they commanded, and towards the articulate at the expense of the illiterate, not all of the latter members of the Brigade of Guards. Aficionados of naval history may justly complain that seamen are under-represented, but this is a portrait of human behaviour rather than a historical narrative balanced between the three dimensions of modern warfare.

If successful warriors have often been vain and uncultured men, their nations in hours of need have had cause to be profoundly grateful for their virtues, even if they have sometimes been injured by their excesses. Today, we recognise that other forms of courage are as worthy of respect as that which is shown on the battlefield. But this should not cause us to steal from the legends of former times their due as pillars of history. How far have we come, how sadly has Britain changed, when the Mayor of London proposes the removal from their plinths in Trafalgar Square of statues of British military commanders! He declares that prowess in war, especially colonial war, is no longer a fitting object for admiration. True, it is a strange quirk of fate that causes bronze images of two of the less admirable military leaders in British history, Earl Haig and the Duke of Cambridge, to dominate Whitehall. Yet it seems grotesque to seek to erase from our consciousness, in a shamelessly Stalinist spirit, a great military heritage.

This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.

MAX HASTINGS

Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya

November 2004

1 Bonaparte’s Blessed Fool (#ulink_52e22b73-e66b-5023-b47c-3d2b19a4691c)

THE WARS OF NAPOLEON produced a flowering of memoirs, both English and French, of extraordinary quality. Each writer’s work reflects in full measure his national characteristics. None but a Frenchman, surely, could have written the following lines about his experience of conflict: ‘I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will add that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services prove, I think, sufficiently.’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot was the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Brigadier Gerard: brave, swashbuckling, incapable of introspection, glorying without inhibition in the experience of campaigning from Portugal to Russia in the service of his emperor. Marbot was the most eager of warriors, who shared with many of his French contemporaries a belief that there could be no higher calling than to follow Bonaparte to glory. Few modern readers could fail to respect the courage of a soldier who so often faced the fire of the enemy, through an active service career spanning more than forty years. And no Anglo-Saxon could withhold laughter at the peacock vanity and chauvinism of the hussar’s account of the experience, rich in anecdotage and comedy, the latter often unintended.

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot was born in 1782 at Beaulieu in the Corrèze, son of a country gentleman of liberal inclinations who became a general in France’s revolutionary army. With his round face and snub nose, the child Marcellin was known to his family as ‘the kitten’, and for some years during the nation’s revolutionary disorders attended a local girls’ school. He was originally destined for a naval career, but a friend urged his father that life aboard a warship mouldering in some seaport under British blockade was no prospect for an ambitious youth. Instead, in 1799 a vacancy was procured for him in the hussars. The seventeen-year-old boy was delighted, and from the outset gloried in his new uniform. His father, however, was uneasy about his shyness, and for some time was prone to refer to his son in company as ‘Mademoiselle Marcellin’ – rich pickings there for a modern psychologist. In those days when every hussar was expected to display a moustache as part of his service dress, the beardless teenager at first painted whiskers on his face.

Marbot met Bonaparte for the first time when accompanying his father to take up a posting with the army in Italy. They were amazed to encounter the hero of the Pyramids at Lyons, on his way back to Paris from Egypt, having abandoned his army to seek a throne, a quest to which General Marbot, a committed republican, declined to give his assistance. In Italy, young Marcellin won his spurs. Despatched with a patrol to seize Austrian prisoners, the sergeant in command professed sudden illness. The boy seized the opportunity and assumed leadership of the troop: ‘When…I took command of the fifty men who had come under my orders in such unusual circumstances, a mere trooper as I was and seventeen years old, I resolved to show my comrades that if I had not yet much experience or military talent, I at least possessed pluck. So I resolutely put myself at their head and marched on in what we knew was the direction of the enemy.’

Marbot’s patrol surprised an Austrian unit, took the necessary prisoners, and returned in triumph to the French lines where their self-appointed commander was rewarded with promotion to sergeant, followed soon afterwards by a commission. He survived the terrible siege of Genoa, where his father died in his arms following a wound received on the battlefield. Soon afterwards the young man was posted to the 25th Chasseurs. In 1801 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to that hoary old hero Marshal Augereau, with whom he travelled for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula.

By 1805, already a veteran, Marbot was an eager young officer with Bonaparte’s Grand Army, ready for a summer of campaigning against the Austrians and Russians. ‘I had three excellent horses,’ he enthused, adding bathetically, ‘and a servant of moderate quality.’ The duties of aides-de-camp were among the most perilous in any army of the time. It was their business to convey their masters’ wishes and tidings not only across the battlefield, but from end to end of Europe, often in the teeth of the enemy. In the period that followed, writes Marbot, ‘constantly sent from north to south, and from south to north, wherever there was fighting going on, I did not pass one of these ten years without coming under fire, or without shedding my blood on the soil of some part of Europe.’ It is striking to notice that, until the twentieth century, every enthusiastic warrior regarded it as a mark of virility to have been wounded in action, if possible frequently. A soldier who avoided shedding his own blood, far from being congratulated on luck and skill, was more likely to be suspected of shyness.

Marbot began the 1805 campaigning season by carrying despatches from the emperor to Marshal Masséna in Italy, through the Alpine passes. Then he took his place beside Augereau for what became the Austerlitz campaign. ‘Never had France possessed an army so well-trained,’ he exulted, ‘of such good material, so eager for fighting and fame…Bonaparte…accepted the war with joy, so certain was he of victory…He knew how the chivalrous spirit of Frenchmen has in all ages been influenced by the enthusiasm of military glory.’ Seldom has there been an era of warfare in which officers and soldiers alike strove so ardently for distinction. If there were young blades in Bonaparte’s army who confined themselves to doing their duty, history knows nothing of them. In the world of France’s marshals and their subordinates, there was a relentless contest for each to outdo the others in braving peril with insouciance. Its spirit was supremely captured by the tale of Ney, after the battle of Lutzen, encountering the emperor. ‘My dear cousin! But you are covered in blood!’ exclaimed Bonaparte in alarm. ‘It isn’t mine, Sire,’ responded the marshal complacently, ‘except where that damned bullet passed through my leg!’

Having survived the carnage at Austerlitz, Marbot found himself among a throng of French officers sitting their horses around Bonaparte on the day after the battle, gazing out on the broken ice of the Satschan Lake, strewn with debris and corpses. Amidst it all, a hundred yards from the shore they beheld a Russian sergeant, shot through the thigh and clinging to an ice floe deeply stained with his blood. The wounded man, spying the glittering assembly, raised himself and cried out in Russian, ‘All men become brothers once battle is done.’ He begged his life from the emperor of the French. The entreaty was translated. Bonaparte, in a characteristic impulse of imperial condescension, told his entourage to do whatever was necessary to save the Russian. A handful of men plunged into the icy water, seized floating baulks of timber, and sought to paddle themselves out to the floe. Within seconds they became clumsy prisoners of their frozen clothing. They abandoned efforts to save the enemy soldier, and struggled ashore to save themselves.

Marbot, a spectator, declared that their error had been to brave the water fully clad. Bonaparte nodded assent. The would-be rescuers had shown more zeal than discretion, observed the emperor dryly. The hussar now felt obliged to put his own counsel into practice. Leaping from his horse, he tore off his clothes and sprang into the lake. He acknowledged the shock of the deadly cold, but ‘the emperor’s presence encouraged me, and I struck out towards the Russian sergeant. At the same time my example, and probably the praise given me by the emperor, determined a lieutenant of artillery…to imitate me.’ As he struggled painfully amid the great daggers of ice, Marbot was dismayed to find his rival catching him up. Yet he was obliged to admit that alone, he could never have succeeded in his attempt. Together, and with immense labour, the two Frenchmen pushed the wounded Russian on his crumbling floe towards the shore, battering a path through the jumble of ice before them. At last they came close enough for onlookers to throw out lifelines. The two swimmers seized the ropes and passed them around the wounded man, enabling him to be dragged to safety. They themselves, at their last gasp, bleeding and torn, staggered ashore to receive their laurels. Bonaparte called his mameluke Roustan to bring them a glass of rum apiece. He gave gold to the wounded soldier, who proved to be Lithuanian. Once recovered, the man became a devoted follower of the emperor, a sergeant in his Polish lancers. Marbot’s companion in mercy, the lieutenant of artillery, was so weakened by his experience that after months in hospital, Marbot recorded pityingly that he had to be invalided out of the service. The hussar, of course, was back on duty next day.

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.