with a viscous, oozy mud. Worst of all, he had somehow to repair the
damage to his personal prestige and to silence the 'I told you so' voices of
the Talleyrands, who had warned of the hidden dangers of expansion into
Germany. Jena was a great victory, but it did not knock out the Prussians,
and Eylau seemed to be the end of the road. It was an object lesson
against doubling one's stake.
Napoleon the military leader scarcely emerges with credit fr om the
Eylau campaign and the myth of his invincibility was plain to see. To an
extent the near disaster of the campaign was a testament to the
breakdown of the French military machine. From top to bottom it had
been inadequate, with marshals disobeying orders and rankers maraud
ing, looting, indisciplined or deserting. Yet Napoleon could not put all
the blame on the shortcomings of his collaborators and underlings. He
broke his own rule that corps must always be within one to two days'
march of each other, and he was much too slow to order up Ney's army,
which should have received its instructions on the evening of the 7th, not
the morning of the 8th. Beyond that, Napoleon blundered into a battle he
had not expected and nearly brought disaster on his own head by being
short of soldiers on the morning of the 8th. Once again he scrambled out
of the jaws of defeat by a lucky gamble with Murat's charge; had that
failed, his centre would surely have buckled.
The truth is that at Eylau Napoleon was saved more by his opponent's
errors than his own skill. Bennigsen's cardinal error was to hesitate when
Soult was repulsed instead of pressing on. When Davout appeared, he
called off the attack against Soult but made poor use of his own right.
Also, a determined attack against an exhausted French army at around
4 p.m., three hours before Ney arrived, would surely have brought
victory. Until Eylau Napoleon had rarely put a foot wrong on a
battlefield. After it, with some rare and brilliant exceptions, his touch was
much less sure. It was a worried man who returned to the arms of Marie
Walewska.
Napoleon moved his headquarters to the sumptuous Schloss Finkenstein
in East Prussia, where Marie joined him for the resumption of an idyll
cut short by the Eylau campaign. She was deeply in love with him,
though aware that his attention span for women was not great, and
therefore fearful that the affair would not last long. He certainly
appreciated her more than any of his other mistresses: she seemed to have
all Josephine's virtues plus special ones of her own. Where Josephine was
silly, trivial and spendthrift, Marie was serious, bookish and frugal; she
dismayed her lover by consistently turning down his offers of lavish