• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2541 0

model of procrastination, indecision and cowardice, he had been arrested and replaced by a substitute chosen from the ranks of such military talent as was available at Buenos Aires. Nor had resistance led to chaos: improvising an army on the basis of the cadres provided by the militias which had been the sole garrison of the Virreinato de la Plata, the criollos not only marched to victory, but found that pardos, mestizos and Negroes alike had all responded to their call. The masses, then, did not necessarily have to be fought, but could rather be co-opted, and the criollos further discovered that building an army was a wonderful means of cementing their social superiority: who else were the officers of the regiments that defeated the British if not the sons of the local elite? Even now revolt was not inevitable, but an important corner had been turned.

What of events in Europe? Here the campaign that followed Prussia’s decision to join the war was dramatic indeed. Left all but unsuccoured, the Prussians would have done best to mass their army behind the river Elbe, but, exactly like the Austrians a year earlier, they elected to move forward and marched south-westwards into Thuringia. Invading Saxony in his turn, Napoleon got around their eastern flank and threatened their communications with Berlin. Desperate to escape the trap, the Prussians fled north-eastwards, only to collide with the grande armée along the river Saale. While Napoleon himself surprised a Prussian flank-guard that had been detached to watch the Saale at Jena, the corps of Marshal Davout, which was far out on the French right, suddenly found itself confronted with the main Prussian column under the Duke of Brunswick near Auerstädt. Faced by overwhelming odds, Davout pulled off one of the most extraordinary feats of the Napoleonic Wars. Feeding his three tired divisions - they had been marching all night - into line as they arrived, the marshal first checked the Prussian advance, and then launched a ferocious counter-attack that caused the increasingly demoralized enemy to disintegrate altogether. At Jena, meanwhile, Napoleon had been having a much easier time of it. Increasingly outnumbering the Prussians as the day went on, he first pressed the enemy back and then crushed them altogether by means of a great turning movement that overran their left flank and laid them open to a massed cavalry charge. A last-ditch counter-attack by a fresh corps that had just come up from the west made little difference and by dusk on 14 October the entire Prussian army had been beaten. ‘The struggle was keen, the resistance desperate, above all in the villages and copses,’ wrote one officer, ‘but once all our cavalry had arrived at the front and was able to manoeuvre, there was nothing but disaster; the retreat became a flight, and the rout was general.’20 As at Austerlitz, the emperor seized the moment to endear himself to his troops and refurbish the legend that he was but one more soldier. During the night before the battle he spent much time personally supervising the construction of a rough track that would allow the French to get artillery up onto the summit of the plateau on which the battle was fought before grabbing a little sleep in the midst of the imperial guard. All this is recalled by a then private of the imperial guard named Jean-Roche Coignet: ‘The emperor was there, directing the engineers; he did not leave till the road was finished, and the first piece of cannon . . . had passed in front of him . . . The emperor placed himself in the middle of his square, and allowed [the soldiers] to kindle two or three fires for each company . . . Twenty from each company were sere sent off in search of provisions . . . We found everything we needed . . . Seeing us all so happy put the emperor in a good mood. He mounted his horse before day and went the rounds.’21

In view of the great debate that was precipitated by these events, it is worth pointing out that the Prussians were not defeated by either lack of enthusiasm among their soldiers or the supposed inferiority