You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [32]
Unlike Ney, Louis-Nicholas Davout was born into a Burgundian family whose nobility and tradition of military service went back to the Crusades. The young Davout was accepted into the prestigious Royal Champagne Cavalry Regiment, where he proceeded to immediately get into trouble for supporting the Revolution that had begun to sweep across France. He was even imprisoned for attending a revolutionary meeting in Paris without bothering to ask for a leave. After being freed the young man found he had little to do, not being trusted by his royalist superiors, and with good reason. He married during this period of enforced boredom. (It was a disaster, but that was a purely personal blunder.)
Finally, the Revolution began forming its own cavalry units, and his jail time and reputation protected the young Davout from the shortening by a head that most of the ancien régime officers who stayed in France were subjected to. He rose quickly from being elected to commanding a battalion to general of the brigade within a year. Under Napoleon, Louis Davout commanded the Third Corps, the largest corp in the army, for almost a decade. He was a hard taskmaster, not so much loved as respected, but his Third Corps twice (Ausdadt and Austerlitz) fought to a standstill Allied armies that greatly outnumbered them.
So now fast-forward to 1812.
Wars have been won and lost. The impetuous Ney is a marshal of France sworn to serve the king and Davout is a prisoner of war. Napoleon escapes from Elba and lands in France. Davout, now freed, hurries to his side. Ney, in the court of Louis XVIII, promises to bring his former emperor to the king in a “cage.” By the time his infantry division faces Napoleon, Ney has had a change of heart, and probably realizes that all his soldiers were likely to go over to Napoleon in any case. All of those sent with earlier generals had. On bended knee, and to the cheers of the army, he asks Napoleon to forgive and accept him. As charismatic and popular as ever, Ney enters Paris, the king long gone, at Napoleon’s side a few days later.
So here was the choice: the popular hero or the respected and loyal taskmaster?
There are two key positions the returned emperor has to fill with a marshal. One is commander of the army, his number two in effect. The other is to command Paris and its garrison. Controlling Paris meant ruling France, and losing Paris would mean he had lost control of the bureaucracy who controlled little things like money, food, and recruits. He had to have a trusted and competent man to run Paris, and over Davout’s protests, Napoleon put Davout in command of the city, not the army. Command of the Reinstituted Grand Army went to Marshal Ney, whose popularity would help sway any units still unsure whom to support. In effect he took the most popular man, who was a worn but competent corp commander, and left behind in Paris the man most proven in battle against all odds and who was the only other man in France who had commanded anywhere near the size of the army they were fielding. Napoleon had a plan that would have worked. If Napoleon had been fully capable of commanding the army, it did not matter who passed in his orders. But as it turned out, he wasn’t.
Louis-Nicholas Davout said it himself. He warned Napoleon that if he was victorious, Paris would be his, but if the emperor was defeated, no man could hold the city for him. Napoleon ignored the advice and marched to, well, his Waterloo. Ney was brave and his personal courage inspired the French cavalry to attack the British squares for literally hours, ignoring severe casualties until they could no longer even move toward the squares of bristling bayonets at a slow walk. Then again Ney ordered that first charge by all the cavalry in the army, to Napoleon’s recorded dismay, when he mistook the withdrawal of a few British battalions back over a hill for the start of a full retreat. Still, even then it almost worked.