Napoleon: A Biography

army. Napoleon now set to work to devise a master plan that would suddenly unite the two wings of his army in a lightning stroke ...

onslaught from the Grande Armee to come on their own left, where they kept their reserves. Battle commenced on 20 May. After a c ...

The struggle in the centre was bloody and protracted and the Emperor was again cast down by the fanatical fighting spirit of bot ...

It may well be that the balance of his mind at this juncture affected the entire course of the 1813 campaign, for the grief-stri ...

famous meetings in history took place in the map room of the Mercolini palace (Elsterwiese Castle) in Dresden on z6 June, where ...

come with genuine offers of mediation but simply to hold a gun to his head, the Emperor became more and more angry, and it is in ...

there was nothing to talk about. Angrily Napoleon flashed at him: 'Ah, you persist, you still want to dictate to me. All right t ...

As expected, Wellington advanced on Salamanca in May. Concentrat­ ing his forces to meet him, Joseph discovered to his alarm tha ...

the state of the road led Wellington to call off the pursuit up the Pamplona track after five miles. The panic-stricken French d ...

foreseeing the outcome if he had to fight all three great European powers, but that he was overwhelmed by the sheer malice of hi ...

Prussian territory for the King of Saxony, the partition of the Duchy of Warsaw and for Hamburg and Trieste. He told Caulaincour ...

Dispersing his corps like this seemed an obvious mistake, not only because it vitiated the doctrine of concentration of force, b ...

to make the most of it and break off the action, in accordance with the general policy. It was the other two Emperors who insist ...

He opted for the Prussian capital but was unable to progress towards his objective because of constant Allied probes towards Dre ...

150,000 men and 300 cannon, and there were a further so,ooo on the sick list. Food supplies were running out, and the whole of G ...

disparity, since he could fight with Leipzig at his back while the Allies had to enter combat on a wider front. Four rivers meet ...

Napoleon's idea was to fight a holding action in the north, using III, IV, VI and VII Corps, while the garrison troops of Leipzi ...

worked against him. Once again Ney proved the French nemesis by his supreme idiocy: he continually recalled and re-recalled two ...

respectively. With six centripetal attacks planned for the 18th, it seemed that the Allies were preparing to crack him like a nu ...

the newest marshal, Prince Poniatowski. The Pole, who had been rewarded with a marshal's baton for his conspicuous gallantry the ...