to send him Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the other leaders of the Polish
independence movement.
On 8 November Magdeburg capitulated and Murat wrote in triumph:
'Sire, the war is over owing to the lack of combatants.' But Murat was
jumping the gun. Paradoxically, after a great military triumph Napoleon
was on the defensive. As he saw it, a Russian counter-offensive could
coincide with a British landing somewhere in Europe, and meanwhile the
gold of London might have persuaded Austria to rise on his southern
flank. Worst of all was the news from Paris. Where the French people
had greeted Austerlitz with joy, they reacted to news of Jena with gloom;
they wanted peace not a protracted struggle with Russia. But Napoleon
refused to bow to public opinion. When the Senate sent a deputation to
Berlin to urge him to make peace, he received it coldly and told the
senators he would make peace only when Russia joined him in the great
global fight against England.
He took vigorous action to make sure he retained the initiative. A
judicious mixture of stick and carrot kept Austria quiet, so that the
potential threat from the south never materialized during the 1807
campaign. He struck at England by announcing an economic blockade in
his Berlin decree of 21 November 1806. And he headed off trouble in the
army by ordering a cash bonus, doubling the commissariat supply, and
issuing each soldier with a brand new set of clothes and several pairs of
shoes. The more hardheaded and obdurate he was in military and
political affairs, the more philosophical and detached from the world he
seemed in his letters to Josephine. In a classic of compensation he wrote
to her: 'Everything in this world must come to an end, wit, sentiment, the
sun itself, but that which has no end is the happiness I have found with
you - in the unending goodness and sweetness of my Josephine.'
Napoleon's analysis of the Russian army was that it was a very mixed
bag. The infantry was usually poorly armed, trained and equipped,
consisting of uneducated and unpaid peasantry, but it could fight with
great stubbornness when cornered. If the rank and file were tough and
brave, the officers were of very poor quality, often military dilettantes or
men whose only professionalism was in gambling; and there were few
generals of any calibre. The Russian army was hidebound by bureaucracy
and suffocated by red tape, but could still not supply its fighting men
adequately. On the other hand, its artillery was excellent in both quantity
and quality, and the cavalry, especially the Cossacks, were as good as the
French, if not better. Napoleon was under no illusions about the
difficulty of the coming campaign.
The one card he could play was to win over Polish support by
marcin
(Marcin)
#1