Napoleon: A Biography

plaudits: 'I would sooner have given 300 millions from my treasury than lose such a man,' he said. Ney's totally unlooked-for ar ...

But how to build the bridges? At this point it transpired that a certain General Eble had taken the forethought the Emperor shou ...

men fought valiantly and repelled attack after attack, so that the crossings went on without interruption until the afternoon's ...

but most of them in the river as the bridges sank under the waters of the Beresina, with a hiss like that of a gigantic ingot st ...

reduced to a single corps. He also feared that if he tarried in Poland, Austria and Prussia would declare war and bar his passag ...

Army's ordeal was not over. The force that entered Vilna on 8 December in temperatures of -z6° F was no better than a ra bble, a ...

in his sledge only Caulaincourt as company and a small escort, for they were now in supposedly friendly territory. The temperatu ...

which shows the Emperor unsurprised by anything, a man always ready for anything, however improbable, to happen. They proceeded ...

response on his return was to make Marie-Louise regent (with an advisory council of princes of the blood and grand dignitaries) ...

Russia, he proved the truth of Clausewitz's observation that to advance deep into enemy country is itself a kind of defeat. By t ...

burnt, the Emperor Alexander would have been forced to make peace (how?); if winter cold had not set in fifteen days earlier tha ...

CHAPTER TWENTY -FOUR Napoleon's first military concern on return fr om the Russian fiasco was the war in Spain. From this theatr ...

berserk, burning, looting and raping wherever they went. It took until the morning after the siege for order to be restored but ...

Andalucia and bring his Army of the South to central Spain. Wellington entered Valladolid on 30 July. Worried about a long suppl ...

After an acrimonious meeting Napoleon banished his uncle from Paris and confined him to his see. At his Archbishop's Palace in L ...

recession meant the peasants had no money with which to buy it. As for the notables, the last straw for them was the senatus con ...

men blistered themselves and then dressed the sores with water and arsenic to make them incurable; others gave themselves hernia ...

fumbling. He sent word to Eugene that Hamburg was more important than Dresden, so Eugene pulled out and occupied Magdeburg inste ...

culminating in a French victory at Weissenfeld on I May, in which Marshal Bessieres was killed. This was a severe blow to the Em ...

salvaged the Emperor's reputation. The battle revealed him at the top of his form, brilliant in foresight and anticipation of en ...