Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
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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.
The colonel was occupied at the regimental depot at Mons, training replacements, until June 1813 when he resumed command of his active squadrons on the Oder. The highlight of his service at Leipzig was an attempt to encircle and capture the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia as they reconnoitred the French positions on 13 October before battle was joined. Marbot had almost completed a manoeuvre to cut off the glittering array of majesties from their own lines when a careless Frenchman dropped his carbine, which went off, betraying the presence of the chasseurs. The throng of enemy commanders and their staffs hastily turned and galloped away. If only his ploy had succeeded, lamented the colonel, ‘the destinies of Europe would have been changed’. As it was, he could only withdraw his men to the French line and share the army’s fate – decisive defeat. He himself was wounded, bizarrely, by an arrow in the thigh, fired by a Bashkir tribesman in the ranks of the Russians.
Marbot fought on with his regiment through the last bitter battles of the war. At Hanau, the regiment charged five times. Again and again it fought fierce actions to cover the retreat of the shrinking French army. In the winter of 1814, back at his depot in Belgium, which Bonaparte had claimed as French soil, Marbot found local people increasingly hostile and alienated. He fought one of his last little clashes in Mons itself, against Prussian cossacks.
After Bonaparte’s first abdication, Marbot was retained in the Bourbon army, and appointed to command the 7th Hussars. Inevitably, on the return of his idol from Elba he led his regiment to join the emperor’s colours. In the first surge of enthusiasm in April 1815 he perceived a chance that the English, and the rest of Europe, might acquiesce peacefully in the restoration of Bonaparte’s rule. He was swiftly disabused. On 17 June, after the action at Quatre Bras, Marbot was promoted major-general, though his appointment never took effect. He spent most of the day of Waterloo fuming in frustration on the French right wing, waiting to take to Bonaparte news of Grouchy’s arrival with his corps, which was expected hourly.
‘I cannot get over our defeat,’ he wrote in a letter shortly afterwards. ‘We were manoeuvred like so many pumpkins.’ He spent much of the afternoon pushing pickets forward in search of Grouchy. These men instead found themselves skirmishing with Blücher’s vanguard on the Wavre road. When Marbot sent gallopers to inform Bonaparte that strong Prussian columns were advancing upon Mont St Jean, the reply came back that he must be mistaken, these were surely Grouchy’s regiments. Marbot’s few hundred horsemen were driven relentlessly back upon the crumbling imperial army, and soon found themselves receiving the attentions of the British left. The colonel of the 7th Hussars received yet another wound – an English lance thrust in the side. He wrote in a letter soon afterwards: ‘It is pretty severe, but I thought I would stay to set a good example. If everyone had done the same, we might yet get along…No food is sent to us, and so the soldiers pillage our poor France as if they were in Russia. I am at the outposts, before Laon; we have been made to promise not to fire, and all is quiet.’ For Marbot, Bonaparte’s final exile to St Helena prompted despair, and political ruin. He himself, one among so many traitors to the Bourbons, was obliged to quit France for three years of exile in Germany.
To the end of his days, the proud veteran used his pen to defend his beloved emperor and the soldiers of the imperial army against all criticism of their strategy and tactics, and to celebrate their chivalry and courage. Bonaparte read one of Marbot’s works in the last year of his life on St Helena. In appreciation, he added to his will a legacy of 100,000 francs for his former officer, writing: ‘I bid Colonel Marbot continue to write in defence of the glories of the French armies, and to the confusion of calumniators and apostates.’ So indeed the colonel did. On his return from exile he became once more a serving soldier, in 1829 taking command of the 8th Chasseurs. He served as aide de camp to the Duke of Orleans in the following year, and at the age of nearly sixty received yet one more wound, as a general during the Medeah expedition in Algiers. A bullet struck him in the left knee. As he was being carried to the rear, he remarked to the Duke with a smile: ‘This is your fault, sir.’ The Duke demanded: ‘How so?’ Marbot answered: ‘Did I not hear you say, before the fighting began, that if any of your staff got wounded, you could bet it would be Marbot?’ He finally retired in 1848, and died in 1854.
Few warriors in history have taken part in so many of the great battles of their age as did Marbot. Even if a stiff deduction is made from his own account for Gallic extravagance, his courage seems as remarkable as his survival. He performed fifty deeds which, in the wars of the twentieth century, would have been deemed worthy of the highest decorations. Far more astonishingly, he lived to tell the tale. His gifts as a warrior might be described as those of the blessed fool, of whom every army needs a complement in order to prevail on the battlefield, and with which Bonaparte’s armies were exceptionally well-endowed. A century later, Marshal Lyautey declared gaiety to be the most important attribute of a soldier. This Marbot possessed in bountiful measure. He was too humble a servant