Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [181]
‘His Majesty is coming’, said our colonel at the moment of a review. ‘I hope he will not be received as he was last time, and that the soldiers will cry “Vive l’empereur!”. Look to it gentlemen: I shall hold you responsible if every man does not shout lustily.’ We returned to our companies, paraphrasing the colonel’s harangue, and the following were among the murmurs that we heard in the ranks. ‘Let him give me my discharge and I’ll shout as loud as they please . . . We have no bread: I can’t shout on an empty stomach . . . We are owed six months’ pay: why don’t we get it?’ The emperor arrived: the colonel and some of the officers shouted as though they would split their throats; the rest were silent.45
In private Napoleon was well aware of the desperate straits to which the grande armée had been reduced. As he wrote to Joseph Bonaparte:
Staff officers, regimental commanders, subalterns, nobody has had the clothes off their backs for the past two months, and some of them for the past four (I myself went for fifteen days without taking off my boots), and all this in the midst of snow and mud. There has been no bread, no wine and no brandy, and we have lived off potatoes and meat alone. Making long marches and countermarches without the slightest luxury, we have frequently had to fight at the point of a bayonet under a hail of canister, while the wounded have had to be evacuated in open carts over distances of up to fifty leagues . . . We have had to wage war with all its force and all its vigour.46
After spending some days making ostentatious efforts to succour the wounded, Napoleon pulled his men back and allowed them to take shelter in the towns and villages of a swathe of territory stretching as far back as the river Vistula, his own headquarters being established at the town of Finkenstein. Not surprisingly, there also followed talk of peace. Even before Eylau, the rigours of winter campaigning in the wastes of East Prussia and Poland had shaken the emperor’s self-confidence sufficiently to attempt to isolate Russia to persuade her to make peace. On 29 January Frederick William had been offered peace in exchange for an alliance and, in particular, a Prussian guarantee of the Ottoman Empire. However, this overture was ignored - Frederick William could stomach the fresh war against Russia that it implied even less than the continued struggle with France - and in the wake of Eylau General Bertrand was therefore dispatched to the Prussian court with the offer of an immediate peace settlement. To secure this goal, Napoleon was prepared to drop the idea of a Franco-Prussian alliance, but, convinced by Hardenberg and others that the peace offer was almost certain to prove a trap, Frederick William stood firm, and the most that Bertrand could obtain was a promise to inform the Russians of Napoleon’s desire for peace. Behind the scenes Frederick William did his utmost to persuade Alexander to take the French ruler at his word, while he also sent an emissary to Finkenstein in the person of General von Kleist on the pretext of arranging an exchange of prisoners. Such was Napoleon’s despondency and state of nervous exhaustion - in his discussions with von Kleist he displayed considerable agitation and constant mood swings - that he even resurrected the notion of a general peace conference. The price of such a conference, however, would be an armistice, and this alone was sufficient for Alexander to veto the idea when the plan reached him, for it was quite clear this would benefit the French more than the Russians. Beyond this, however, there was still no sign of any moderation on the part of Napoleon: Prussia, it seemed, was only to be restored in exchange for the surrender of Britain’s colonial conquests. With the Russian forces still strong, it seemed preferable to fight on, leaving the wretched Frederick William no option but to tag along. As for Napoleon,