THE FIFTH WAR WITH AUSTRIA--ECKMUeHL[30]
[Footnote 30: See Saski: Campagne de 1809, Lejeune, Memoires
du general. Fournier: Oesterreich nach dem Frieden von Wien.
Beer: Zehn Jahre oesterreichischer Politik (1801-10).]
Strategic Preliminaries -- Final Orders -- The Defensive Plan of
Austria -- Berthier's Failure -- Napoleon's Arrival at Donauwoerth
-- The Height of Napoleon's Ability -- The Austrian Advance --
The First Collision -- Concentration of Napoleon's Army -- The
Austrians Divided -- The Austrians at Eckmuehl -- The Battle --
Charles's Retreat -- The Five Days' Fight -- Its Results --
Charles at the Bisamberg -- Napoleon at Vienna -- The German
Risings Demoralized -- Discrimination of the People -- Napoleon's
Unsuccessful Appeal to Hungary -- Pius VII Loses his Secular
Power -- Napoleon's Activity -- Charles's Sluggishness -- Plans
of Both Generals -- Napoleon on the Lobau.
It was Napoleon's pride that in his campaigns no enemy should lay down
the law to him. He did not ask, How will my foe behave? What must I do
to thwart him?--that was defensive warfare. For his purposes he must
ask, Whence can I best strike? This question he now answered by
selecting the valley of the Danube as his line of approach, and
Ratisbon as his headquarters. He had before him the most difficult
task he had so far undertaken. The concentration and sustenance of his
troops must be made along the line of very least resistance. Davout
had four divisions--one each in Magdeburg, Hanover, Stettin, and
Bayreuth; he was also in command of the Poles and Saxons. Bernadotte
had two divisions distributed in Hamburg, Bremen, and Luebeck; Oudinot
had one in Hanau; the soldiers of the Rhine Confederation were
scattered in all its towns. Two other divisions were just starting for
Spain. In the beginning of March Berthier was again appointed chief of
staff, and the Emperor's orders were issued. They were as clear,
concise, and adequate as any of his best; he was once more on familiar
ground, under ordinary conditions, facing a well-known foe, whose
strength was greater than ever before, but whose identity was still
the same. Davout was to collect his troops at Bamberg, the Poles were
to remain in Warsaw, the Saxons in Dresden. To the latter capital
Bernadotte should lead his army and then assume command. Oudinot was
ordered to Augsburg, where he was to be reinforced. The departing
divisions were brought to a halt and sent back to Ulm for Massena's
command, while two fresh ones were gathered in France and sent to
Strasburg. The Rhine princes were to have their contingents ready and
await orders.
A glance at the map will show that, as Napoleon said, he could then in
an emergency reach Munich like lightning. But he expected no move from
his enemy before the middle of April. By that time he hoped to have
his German army gathered, equipped, and ready; in the interval the
forces already on the ground could hold Charles in check; by the end
of March there would be a hundred thousand French in Bamberg, Ulm, and
Augsburg, with thirty thousand Bavarians under Lefebvre about Munich;
before the outbreak of hostilities he hoped to have a total of two
hundred thousand available fighting troops. "Should the Austrians
attack before April tenth," were the orders given on March
twenty-eighth, "the army shall be collected behind the Lech, the right
occupying Augsburg, the left resting on the right bank of the Danube
at Donauwoerth." Then followed the most minute instructions to
Berthier, explaining every move, and setting forth the reasons why
Ratisbon had been chosen as headquarters. This would assure control of
the Danube, keep open a line of communication, and enable the writer
so to control space and time that he could open the campaign much as
he chose.
These dispositions had already compelled another change of plan by the
Austrians. They had expected a repetition of Moreau's advance by
Munich; instead, they were called on to defend their capital a second
time. Two divisions were left to watch the Bohemian Forest; the rest
of the army, with Charles at its head, set out, by the circuitous
route through Linz, to join Hiller and assume the offensive in the
Danube valley. In case of a battle the two divisions were to come up
by the short, direct route through Ratisbon, and add their strength to
the main army. On the declaration of hostilities the Austrians at once
crossed the Inn and began their march; it was the sixteenth before
they reached the line of the Isar. Had the Archduke not been so
sparing of his troops, wearied as they were by the circuit through
Linz, he might have changed the course of history. Napoleon had not
yet arrived, and Berthier, who was but human, had proved unequal to
the execution of his commander's orders.
It had been the object of Napoleon to gather his army on a certain
definite, well-connected line, and thence use it as necessity
demanded. Instead of obeying the letter of his instructions, Berthier
had struggled to obey their spirit, and had failed. The command on the
left bank had been assigned to Davout; that of all the troops on the
other side had been given to Massena; the latter was to concentrate on
the Lech, the former at Ingolstadt. So far all was good; then Berthier
lost his head (the critics say he never could have learned strategy,
if he had had ten lives), and, swerving from the clear letter of
Napoleon's orders, he attempted a more rapid combination--not that
behind the Lech, but one directly at Ratisbon. Davout was to march
thither and remain there; the other divisions were successively to
join him. The result was that three days elapsed before any army was
gathered at all; the two portions, one at Ratisbon, the other at
Augsburg, being for that time widely separated, and each exposed to
the separate attack of an enemy without possibility of cooeperation by
the other half.
When the Archduke Charles learned the general situation of his enemy
he determined to do exactly this thing--that is, to attack and
overwhelm each portion of the French army separately. For this purpose
he crossed the Isar, and, turning to the right, marched directly on
Ratisbon to attack Davout's command with his superior force before
Massena's scattered divisions could reach the positions assigned to
them. But he was too late. The semaphore telegraph then in use had
flashed from station to station its signals of the declaration of war
and of the enemy's advance over the Inn, until the news reached
Napoleon in Paris on the twelfth. On the sixteenth, after four days'
almost unbroken travel, he reached Donauwoerth. The confusion into
which Berthier's orders had thrown his carefully arranged plans
infuriated him; but when he heard, as he descended from his
traveling-carriage, where the enemy was, he could not believe his
ears. When assured of the truth he seemed, as eye-witnesses declared,
to grow taller, his eyes began to sparkle, and with every indication
of delight he cried: "Then I have him! That's a lost army! In one
month we are in Vienna!" The enemy's first decisive blunder was the
march by Linz; the second was yet to be made.
Napoleon's strategy during the following days was, both in his own
opinion and in that of his military commentators, the greatest of his
life. Such had been Berthier's indecision when he saw his blunder that
one general at least--to wit, Pelet--charged him with being a traitor.
In twenty-four hours his puzzled humor and conflicting orders had more
or less demoralized the whole army. But Napoleon's presence inspired
every one with new vigor, from the division commanders to the men in
the ranks. Promptly on the seventeenth the order went forth for Davout
to leave Ratisbon and challenge the enemy to battle by a flank march
up the right bank of the Danube to Ingolstadt in his very face.
Lefebvre was to cover the movement, and Wrede, with one Bavarian
division, was held ready to strengthen any weak spot in case of
battle. Next day Massena was ordered to set out from Augsburg for the
same point, "to unite with the army, catch the enemy at work, and
destroy his columns." To this end he was to march eastward by
Pfaffenhofen. In a twinkling the scattered French army seemed already
concentrated, while scouts came one after the other to announce that
the Austrians were separating.
The Austrians had crossed the Isar in good order, Charles himself at
Landshut. If they had kept directly onward they might have still
wedged themselves between Davout and Lefebvre. But the Archduke grew
timid at the prospect of swamps and wooded hills before him; uncertain
of his enemy's exact position, he threw forward three separate columns
by as many different roads, and thus lengthened his line enormously,
the right wing being at Essenbach, the center advanced before Landshut
to Hohen-Thann, the left at Morsbach. At four in the morning of the
eighteenth Lefebvre received orders to fall on the Austrian left,
while flying messengers followed each other in quick succession to
spur on Massena with urgent pleas of immediate necessity. It was hoped
that he might come up to join an attack which, though intended mainly
to divert the Austrians from Davout, could by his help be turned into
an important victory.
The Archduke during the day collected sixty-six thousand men at Rohr
for his onset, and thirty-five thousand men at Ludmannsdorf to cover
his flank, leaving twenty-five thousand at Moosburg. That night
Davout's last corps, that of Friant, came in, and he began his march.
Massena, who had collected his army and was coming from Augsburg, was
ordered to turn, either left toward Abensberg, in order to join
Davout, or right toward Landshut, to attack Charles's rear, as
circumstances should determine. Lefebvre was now commanded to assume
the defensive and await events at Abensberg. Throughout the morning of
the nineteenth Davout and Charles continued their march, drawing ever
closer to each other. At eleven the French van and the Austrian left
collided. The latter made a firm stand, but were driven in with great
slaughter.
A considerable force which had been sent to strike Davout on the flank
at Abensberg was also defeated by Lefebvre. Before evening the entire
French army was united and in hand. Davout was on the left toward the
river Laber, Lefebvre, with the Bavarians and several French
divisions, was in the center beyond the river Aben, while Massena had
reached a point beyond Moosburg. Within sixty hours Napoleon had
conceived and completed three separate strategic movements: the
withdrawal of the whole army toward Ingolstadt, the advance of his
right to strengthen the incoming left, and the rearrangement of his
entire line with the right on his enemy's base of operations.
"In war you see your own troubles; those of the enemy you cannot see.
You must show confidence," wrote the French emperor about this time to
Eugene. How true it was of his own course! On the morning of the
twenty-first he declared that the enemy was in full retreat. This was
over-confidence on his part, and not true; but it might as well have
been. As a result of the preceding day's skirmishing and
countermarching the Austrian army was almost cut in two; one division,
the right, under Charles, was pressing on to Ratisbon, while the
other, under Hiller, was marching aimlessly behind in a general
northwesterly direction, and the whole straggling line was not less
than twenty miles in length. Lannes, the sturdiest, most
rough-and-ready of all the marshals, had arrived from Spain the night
before. His presence increased the army's confidence that they would
win, and next day he commanded a division formed from the corps of
Morand, Gudin, and Nansouty. Davout received orders to hold the enemy
in front; Massena was to spread out along their rear from Moosburg
down the Isar, ready to harass either flank or rear with half his
strength, and to send the rest, under Oudinot, to Abensberg.
On the morning of the twentieth the Emperor himself, with Lannes and
Wrede, set out to sever the enemy's line. They had little difficulty.
The thin column dispersed before them to the north and south. Hiller
was driven back to Landshut, whence he fled to Neumarkt, leaving the
Isar in possession of the French. Davout advanced simultaneously
against the Archduke's army, which, although very much stronger than
Hiller's division, nevertheless retired and occupied Eckmuehl, standing
drawn up on the highroad toward Ratisbon. At Landshut the Emperor
became aware that the mass of the Austrian army was not before him,
but before Davout. Leaving Bessieres and two divisions of infantry,
with a body of cavalry, to continue the pursuit of Hiller, he turned
back toward Eckmuehl at three in the morning of the twenty-second.
Here, again, a great resolve was taken in the very nick of time and in
the presence of the enemy. With the same iron will and burning genius,
the same endurance and pertinacity, as of old, he pressed on at the
head of his soldiers. It was one o'clock when the eighteen-mile march
was accomplished and the enemy's outposts before Eckmuehl were reached.
Meantime one of the Austrian divisions left in Bohemia had arrived at
Ratisbon. Charles, strengthened by this reinforcement, had determined
to take the offensive, and at noon his advance began. Vandamme seemed
destined to bear the force of the onset, but in the moment before the
shock would have occurred, appeared Napoleon's van. Advancing rapidly
with Lannes, the Emperor rode to the top of a slight rise, and,
scanning the coming Austrians, suddenly ordered Vandamme to seize
Eckmuehl, and then despatched Lannes to cross the Laber and circumvent
the enemy. Davout, having learned the direction of the Austrian
charge, threw himself against the hostile columns on their right, and
after a stubborn resistance began to push back the dogged foe. In less
than two hours the French right, left, and center were all advancing,
and the enemy were steadily retreating, but fighting fiercely as they
withdrew. This continued until seven in the evening, when Lannes
finally accomplished his task.
This destroyed all resistance. The Emperor weakly yielded to his
generals' remonstrance that the troops were exhausted, and did not
order a pursuit. Charles withdrew into Ratisbon. During the night and
early morning he threw a pontoon bridge across the stream, which was
already spanned by a stone one, and next day, after a skirmish in
which his outposts were driven into the town, he crossed the Danube;
three days later he effected a junction with his second division, left
in the Bohemian Forest, and stood at Cham with an effective fighting
force of eighty thousand men. The result proved that Napoleon's
judgment had been unerring; had he pursued, in spite of all
remonstrance and in disregard of the fatigue of his men, he would have
had no mighty foe to fight a few weeks later at Wagram. Some time
thereafter he told an Austrian general that he had deliberated long,
and had refrained from following Charles into Bohemia for fear the
Northern powers would rise and come to the assistance of Austria. "Had
I pursued immediately," he said at St. Helena, "as the Prussians did
after Waterloo, the hostile army crowded on to the Danube would have
been in the last extremity."
"Labor is my element," he remarked on the same dreary isle almost amid
the pangs of dissolution. "I have found the limit of my strength in
eye and limb; I have never found the limit of my capacity for work."
This was certainly true of this five days' fight. "His Majesty is
well," wrote Berthier on the twenty-fourth, "and endures according to
his general habit the exertion of mind and body." Once more his enemy
was not annihilated, but this contentment and high spirits seem
natural to common minds, which recall that in a week he had evolved
order from chaos, and had stricken a powerful, united foe, cutting his
line in two, and sending one portion to the right-about in utter
confusion. To the end of his life Napoleon regarded the strategic
operations culminating at Eckmuehl as his masterpiece in that
particular line. Jomini, his able critic, remained always of the same
opinion. French history knows this conflict as the Battle of Five
Days; Thann, Abensberg, Landshut, Eckmuehl, and Ratisbon being the
places in or near which on each day a skirmish or combat occurred to
mark the successive stages of French victory.
The results were of the most important kind. In the first place,
Austria's pride and confidence were gone. She had lost fifty thousand
men, and her warfare was no longer offensive, but defensive. Charles
called for peace, but the Emperor would not listen. The Archduke John,
moreover, was compelled to abandon the Tyrol, and when he found
himself again in Italy, he was no longer confronted by Eugene alone,
that excellent youth but feeble general, whom he had so easily
defeated: Macdonald was associated with the viceroy in the command. In
Poland, also, Ferdinand's easy successes had carried him too far in
pursuit of Poniatowski, and he began to retreat. Lefebvre with the
Bavarians was stationed at Salzburg to prevent an irruption of the
Tyrolean mountaineers toward the north; all the rest of the Emperor's
army was immediately ordered to march on the Austrian capital.
The advance was scarcely contested. Hiller, commanding Charles's left
wing, had paused in his retreat, and crossing the Inn with his thirty
thousand men, had successfully attacked Wrede at Erding. He had
probably heard that Charles was marching to Passau, but the news was
false. Learning the truth, he turned again and recrossed the Inn;
thence he continued to withdraw, stopping an instant at the Traun to
avail himself of a strong position and hold the line if Charles were
perchance coming thither to join him. At Ebelsberg, on May third, he
made a splendid and momentarily successful resistance, but was
overwhelmed by superior numbers. Hearing of his leader's slow advance,
and being himself in despair, on the seventh he led his army at
Mautern across to the left bank of the Danube in order to effect a
junction with the disheartened Archduke, and then destroyed the bridge
behind him. The forces of Charles and Hiller met and halted on the
slopes of the great hill known as the Bisamberg, which overlooks
Vienna from the north shore, and commands the fertile plains through
which the great river rolls past the Austrian capital.
[Illustration: Battle of Eckmuehl 22 April 1809.]
Day after day, with unimportant interruptions but no real check, the
French ranks marched down the right bank of the stream. On May tenth
they appeared before Vienna. Then, as now, it had no efficient
fortifications, and its garrison consisted of a citizen militia,
strengthened by a small detachment which Hiller had sent forward to
reinforce and encourage them. The defenders were commanded by the
Archduke Maximilian. There was a brave show of resistance; all the
suburbs were evacuated, and the populace gathered behind the old brick
walls which had been erected two centuries before against the Turks.
At first Napoleon thought there would be a second instance of such
embittered and desperate resistance as he had encountered at Madrid.
But a feint of the French to cut off the communication of the town
with the river, together with a few cannon-balls, quickly brought the
unhappy capital to terms; Maximilian marched out at midnight on the
eleventh, and on the twelfth Napoleon returned to the neighboring
palace of Schoenbrunn, where he had already established his
headquarters. The news which arrived from day to day was most
encouraging. Poniatowski was again in possession of Warsaw, which the
Archduke Ferdinand had evacuated in order to rejoin his brother
Charles. The Archduke John, flying before Macdonald, had passed the
Carinthian mountains into Hungary, where the liberal movement
threatened Austrian rule. The Bavarians, after desperate fighting
under Lefebvre, had driven the Tyrolese rebels from Innsbruck. It
seemed a proper time to complete, if possible, the demoralization of
the whole Austrian empire before crossing the Danube to annihilate its
military force. Francis had sown the wind in his declaration of war:
he must reap the whirlwind.
From the beginning Napoleon had made the most of his enemy's being the
aggressor. There were no terms too harsh for the "Moniteur" to apply
when speaking of the hostile court and the resisting populations. The
Emperor's proclamations reveled in abuse of the Tyrolese and of
Schill. The latter was a Prussian partizan who, having distinguished
himself after Jena, was now striving to use the Austrian war in order
to arouse the North Germans. He had already gathered a few desperate
patriots, and in open hostility was defying constituted authority with
the intention of calling his country to arms. The news of Eckmuehl had
destroyed his chances of success, and he was soon to end his gallant
but ill-starred career in a final stand at Stralsund, whither he had
retreated. He was stigmatized by Napoleon as a "sort of robber, who
had covered himself with crimes in the last Prussian campaign." In
repeated public utterances the Emperor of Austria was characterized as
cowardly, thankless, and perjured, while the Viennese were addressed
as "good people, abandoned and widowed." The last acts of their flying
rulers had been murder and arson; "like Medea, they had with their own
hands strangled their own children."
This policy of wooing the people while abusing their rulers had been
successfully undertaken in Italy, and continued with varying results
from that day. No more effective revolutionary engine could have been
devised for Europe in Napoleon's age. The specious statements of the
Emperor were based on truth, and while the idea they expressed was
distorted and reiterated until its exaggeration became falsehood, yet
France and the Napoleonic soldiers appeared to fight and suffer
enthusiastically for what they still considered a great cause. Even
the dull boors, whose intelligence had been nearly quenched by
centuries of oppression, felt stirrings of manhood as they listened to
the Emperor's fiery words; the middle classes, though not deceived,
had no power to refute such language from such a man; and among the
few truly enlightened men of each nation who were aware of their
country's abasement under dynastic absolutism, a tremendous impression
was often created, at least temporarily.
This fact had already been well illustrated in Poland. Austria had
another appanage whose people cared little for the prestige of their
foreign kings and much for their own liberties. The Hungarians were a
conservative, capable race; many of them were ardent Protestants, well
educated and well informed, successfully combining in their
institutions the best elements of both civic and patriarchal life. To
them Napoleon issued a proclamation on May fifteenth which was a
masterpiece of its kind. It set forth that the Emperor Leopold II in
his short reign had acknowledged their rights and confirmed their
liberties; that Francis I had sworn to maintain their laws and
constitution, but had never convoked their estates except to demand
money for his wars; that in view of such treatment, Hungary should now
rise and secure national independence. The proclamation produced some
effect, but as a whole the Hungarians stood fast in their allegiance.
Four years earlier Napoleon's proclamation declaring that the Bourbons
of Naples had ceased to reign was launched from Schoenbrunn. Now
another, to which reference has already been made, equally famous,
was dictated within its walls, though dated, May seventeenth, from the
"Imperial Camp at Vienna." It was a document even abler than that
addressed to the Hungarians. Citing the abuses which had from
immemorial times resulted from the confusion of temporal with
spiritual power in the papacy, it revoked the donation of Charles the
Great to Hadrian I (made a thousand years before!), declared that Pius
VII had ceased to reign, and that, as an indemnity for the loss of his
secular power, he was to receive an annual increase of income
amounting to two million francs. In time of peace this decree would
have produced throughout Europe a tremendous stir; but in the interval
between the two acts of a great campaign, men were much more occupied
with speculations about the decision of arms than with a change which
was, after all, only another phase of a protracted, tiresome struggle
in which the papacy had long since fallen from its pinnacle. It was,
however, an element of terrific demoralization in the house of
Austria, which thus saw the consolidation of Italy under the Napoleon
family complete, and their last hope to regain their European
influence by enlargement in that peninsula extinguished.
Such was the scenic diversion provided for the great world in the
pause of a few days after the occupation of Vienna. These moments were
likewise occupied by the greatest military activity. Morning, noon,
and night secretaries wrote and messengers ran; the roads of central
Europe resounded beneath the feet of tramping infantry and the hoofs
of horses which were dragging provision-trains and artillery
carriages, or bearing despatches to distant points.
The Archduke Charles was a fine strategic theorist, in his age second
only to Napoleon. After the fatal division of his army before
Landshut, he had wonderfully retrieved his strength in seizing
Ratisbon, crossing the Danube, and standing at Cham eighty thousand
strong, as he did after his reinforcement by the division which he
called in from the Bohemian Forest. But again he became the victim of
indecision. Calling for peace negotiations, he loitered long at
Budweis, failed to join Hiller so as to throw their united force
across the French advance to Vienna, and when at last he brought up on
the slopes of the Bisamberg he seemed for an instant aimless. Thus can
the hope of peace paralyze a great general's activity. But when,
having offered to open negotiations with his adversary, he received no
answer, when he learned that the Austrian ministry also was determined
to fight the struggle out, he was himself again. His plan was the
greatest perhaps ever devised by him: so great, indeed, that four
years later Napoleon made it his own at Dresden. It was to free Vienna
by threatening the French communications.
The idea was old enough; the novelty lay in the details. Kollowrath
was to detach twenty-five thousand men from his own force, and to
seize Linz with its bridge; the Archduke John was to join the Army of
the Tyrol, which had retreated to the head waters of the Enns, and
then march with fifty thousand men to the same point. But Massena was
already master of the Enns valley, and Bernadotte was sent to assist
Vandamme at Linz. The Emperor had already divined the plan, and
thwarted it by the rapidity with which his orders were transmitted and
distant divisions summoned. The communications were threatened, but
not broken, and Napoleon gave his whole attention to the problem of
crossing a great river in the face of an enemy. He had done it before,
but never under circumstances so peculiar as these which confronted
him in the size of the Danube and the strength of his foe.
The mighty stream follows for the most part a single channel until it
enters the plains which face Vienna on the north, where, at intervals,
it divides into several arms, inclosing numerous islands. These
branches are nearly all substantial streams; many of them are
navigable. It was determined to choose two such points, one above and
the other below the town, to build bridges at both, and to select
whichever one should prove more feasible when the task was done. The
enterprise above the town failed entirely through the vigilance of the
Austrians. Massena had better success at the other end, and succeeded
in gathering sufficient material without great difficulty; his bridges
between the two shores by the island of Lobau were ready on May
twentieth. In this interval Charles advanced, and occupied a line
farther forward in the great plain, stretching from hamlet to
hamlet--from Korneuburg, Enzersfeld, and Gross-Ebersdorf to
Strebersdorf. Eugene and Macdonald had reached Villach, whence they
could march direct to Vienna; the Archduke John was at Voelkermarkt, on
his way down the Drave toward Hungary. Two days before, eight hundred
French soldiers had crossed into the island of Lobau to drive out the
Austrian scouts; on the nineteenth Napoleon arrived, and the necessary
fortifications were constructed; on the twentieth the passage began,
and Massena, with Lannes's light cavalry, was sent out to reconnoiter.