his only remaining card and sent in the Russian Imperial Guard; these in
turn were rapidly 'eaten up' by Ney's and Dupont's men.
By 8.30 p.m. Napoleon was in possession of Friedland. The Russian
tactic of gutting the town literally misfired when the flames spread to the
pontoon bridges and cut off fu rther large numbers of Russian troops.
Seeing that north of the millstream a series of desperate Russian attacks
had been beaten off by Oudinot's and Verdier's corps, Bennigsen had to
extricate his men fast or face total disaster. With three out of the four
bridges destroyed, it was touch and go fo r a while but at last the Russians
found a usable ford. This was the time when Napoleon to achieve total
victory needed to unleash the forty cavalry squadrons on his extreme left.
The ill-starred Grouchy, alas, was no Murat and muffe d his chance.
None the less nightfall did not slacken the French pursuit, which
continued until well past 1 I p.m.
For 8,ooo casualties Napoleon gained a decisive victory, inflicted
zo,ooo casualties on the Russians and took eighty guns. It had been a
grim six-month slog, but at last the French Emperor had the result he
wanted. This was one of his great battlefield achievements, second only to
Austerlitz, and there was some justification for the words he wrote to
Josephine: 'My love, I can only write you a word because I am really tired
... My children have worthily celebrated the battle of Marengo; the
battle of Friedland will be just as famous and just as glorious to my
people ... It is a worthy sister of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena.' On the
other hand, Napoleon in this battle was not an initiator: he simply reacted
to Bennigsen's moves. Bennigsen made many bad mistakes on 14 June
1807, of which two stand out: he should not have allowed the two sectors
of his army to be bisected by an unbridged stream, and he should have
worked out that in the event of a Russian retreat there would probably be
only one bridge left over the Alle.
Friedland was in many ways the apotheosis of the Grande Armee. For
once the marshalate had come up to Napoleon's expectations. General
Victor won his baton as the nineteenth marshal after his brilliant
showing; Ney had his finest hour in the battle; Oudinot, the most
obviously rising star in the Bonapartist entourage, received an annual
pension of 33,000 francs for his performance and was marked down by
the Emperor as 'one to note'.
Yet for more thoughtful military observers there were some worrying
omens and not just the fact that the Emperor, a notoriously bad
horseman, had fa llen from his horse no fewer than three times during the
Friedland campaign. Napoleon, it was clear, habitually placed too much
emphasis on the offensive. Clausewitz, the great Prussian military theorist
marcin
(Marcin)
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