You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [31]
There are endless books about the marshals and debates over how competent or incompetent they were. Here we are concerned with the two men Napoleon considered to command France’s only real field army under him. This is important because of a mundane and almost humorous (unless you have had them) ailment that Napoleon suffered from — piles, or, in the modern medical terminology, hemorrhoids. He spent a good deal of the battle of Waterloo sitting in pain, likely less than clearheaded and not very mobile, which makes his decision as to whom to appoint to actually command the army at Waterloo most important. More so when you realize how close the French came to winning that battle, which Wellington described as “a near run thing.”
The two men Napoleon says he considered for the field command were Marshal Joachim Ney, “the Bravest of the Brave,” and Louis-Nicholas Davout, known as the Iron Marshal. These were two very different men, who fought in very different ways.
Joachim Ney was born in 1769 and was the second son of a barrel cooper (his father made barrels; remember this is France and wine is fermented in barrels). His father had fought in the Seven Years War but had returned to Lorraine near the border with the German states to raise a family afterward. Ney was educated to become a notary, which in those times enabled him to advance, after many years, to the not very august position of very minor bureaucrat overseeing forges and mines. Two years before the Revolution (France’s, not the U.S. colonial one) the young man looked at what his future would hold and enlisted as a hussar in the Royal Cavalry. Being of common birth, there was little chance he could advance far in the ranks. It took him four more years to gain his first promotion to corporal. Then came the Revolution and birth ceased to control rank. Three years later Joachim Ney was a lieutenant and aide-de-camp for a series of generals. He was favored by one man who was the Revolution’s most successful early general, Jean-Victor Moreau. Fortunately for Ney this friendship faded due to distance and the press of war. Moreau was never convicted — due to his prestige a public trial was out of the question — but it is known that he was part of a plot to assassinate Napoleon during his 1804 inauguration. Moving up in the ranks because of the large numbers of officers lost, many to the guillotine rather than enemy action, the young officer Ney married the daughter of a rich official who was the protégé of Napoleon’s future empress, Josephine.
His close personal relationship with Josephine helped, along with a good reputation and popularity among the men he commanded, to gain Ney a position under Napoleon commanding the Sixth Corps, who were assembled on the coast in preparation for the invasion of England, which the Battle of Trafalgar made impossible. From 1805 to 1811 Ney served with courage, if occasional lassitude, in moving his corp throughout central Europe. He continued to command during Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. This was a life-changing event for the still-young marshal. The winter retreat was epic and disastrous, with much of the core of Napoleon’s Grand Army being lost. Ney commanded the rear guard, and did so magnificently. His command started with several thousand men, and when it was the last of the army to cross the Vistula back into Poland, the hundreds remaining were still forming their ranks and marching as a unit when virtually all of the rest of the survivors of the retreat had degenerated into a formless mob of fugitives. During this retreat the strain was so great that the marshal