Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [251]
Nor was Austrian withdrawal from the scene the only damage done to the cause of resistance to Napoleon. In Germany there were plenty of patriots who were ready to attribute the miserable failure of their hopes to want of British assistance. To quote the words of an officer fighting in the British army as part of the so-called King’s German Legion:
From these heroic and loyal efforts of Schill and Dornberg, and from insurrections like that organized in the name of the Duke of Brunswick . . . it may clearly be seen that, if an English force of only 4,000 men had been landed on the banks of the Elbe, and about 10,000 in East Friesland, all Westphalia and Hanover and East Friesland would directly have taken up arms to protect their country, and to regain their liberty. One Hanoverian general, with a sufficient supply of money and arms, would certainly have collected in a short space of time 80,000 men, and the bad success of all the insurrections is to be attributed to the want of the authority and sanction of England.45
Just as bad, perhaps, was the manner in which Napoleon had posed as the defender of the states of southern Germany against Austrian aggression. Prior to one battle, for example, the French ruler assembled the commanders of the Bavarian troops attached to his forces and delivered a stirring harangue:
Bavarian soldiers! I stand before you not as emperor of France, but as the protector of your country and of the Rheinbund. Bavarians! Today you fight alone against the Austrians. Not a single Frenchman is in the first line . . . I have complete faith in your bravery. I have already expanded the borders of your land: I see now that I have not gone far enough. I will make you so great that you will not need my protection in any future war with Austria . . . We will march to Vienna, where we will punish Austria for all the evil it has caused your fatherland!46
In one respect only was there any reason to take heart. The Austrian army of 1809 was very clearly not the Austrian army of 1805, and had meted out severe punishment to the French. At Aspern-Essling and Wagram imperial losses had amounted to over 50,000 men. The reason this was so was not because the soldiers of the Habsburg empire had been inspired by the appeal to German nationalism which had accompanied the campaign, but rather that the Archduke Charles had given the Austrian army the corps system. Hitherto used only by the French, this had been a key part in their ability to win decisive victories. Armies thus organized could operate on a broad front and thereby envelop their opponents, while on the battlefield they were infinitely more flexible in terms of their capacity to mass overwhelming numbers against one section of the enemy line or respond to attacks on their own. Broken down into the self-sufficient (and extremely substantial) sections represented by the corps d’armée, they were also much harder to smash: one corps or another might be broken but the rest of the army could go on fighting unimpaired. In consequence, battles between two such armies were likely to be long struggles of attrition from which neither side would emerge triumphant unless they could manoeuvre themselves into a position from which they could attack the enemy from all sides - something which was now likely to become much harder. Significantly, in 1806 Prussia did not have the corps system at all, while in 1807 Russia was only groping towards it. When he next faced them, however, Napoleon was to find that both armies, like that of the Austrians, had moved on: hence the fact that the war of 1809 was the last conflict in which he would triumph.
The scales of conflict, then, were tilting against Napoleon, but this was also true in another sense. Four years of incessant campaigning had cost the French and their allies hundreds of thousands of