North and, together with an expeditionary fo rce sent from Britain under
Sir Thomas Graham, would occupy Holland and Belgium before moving
into northern France; the other half of the Army of the North, under
Bernadotte and Bennigsen, would divert to besiege Hamburg and
Magdeburg. Meanwhile Blucher would cross the Rhine with 1oo,ooo
men of the Army of Silesia on a broad front between Coblenz and
Mannheim and try to pin Napoleon frontally; and Schwarzenberg and
the three emperors would advance via Kolmar with 2oo,ooo men of the
Army of Bohemia, fa ll on the French right and, depending on their
progress, either make contact with the Austrians from Italy advancing
from Lyons or with Wellington coming up from the Pyrenees. By
February the Allies hoped to have 40o,ooo troops on French soil.
Schwarzenberg began by advancing cautiously to the Langres plateau
where he waited until 23 January, having heard that new peace overtures
were afoot. On 22 January Blucher crossed the Meuse, and advanced
seventy miles into France; his vanguard established a bridgehead over the
Marne. Napoleon made the salvation of Paris his prime aim in the 1814
campaign; to do this he had to prevent a junction of the two main Allied
armies. Hearing that Blucher and Schwarzenberg were only two days
march apart, he left Paris on 25 January and next day took up station at
Chiilons-sur-Marne, ready to occupy the 'centre' position and keep the
two armies divided.
Since the area to the east of Paris is crisscrossed with numerous rivers
and roads and Napoleon knew the geography intimately, he planned to
fight an unorthodox campaign based on the advantage this gave him. His
mode of fighting would be somewhere between regular and irregular
fighting, as he could not afford the casualties he would sustain even in a
victorious pitched battle. But he was gradually forced into orthodox
warfare when the apathetic peasantry refused to heed the exhortation to
take up arms against the fo reign invader. Once again we may discern the
level of cant in all the talk about a 'people's war'. The lesson of 1812 was
that peasants would take up arms only when the enemy was already
defeated or in fu ll retreat. The obvious solution fo r Napoleon was to
declare a levee-en-masse, as in 1793, and this was in fa ct what the Allies
most feared. Although he toyed with the idea, he rejected it decisively, as
it would transfer power to local Jacobin leaders. Napoleon was never
more the man of the Right than when he declared: 'If fall I must, I will
not bequeath France to the revolutionaries, from whom I have delivered
her.'
First blood in the campaign was drawn by Mortier, with whom
Blucher fought a sanguinary but indecisive battle at Bar-sur-Aube on 24
marcin
(Marcin)
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