Warriors
Max Hastings

Copyright

William Collins

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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Copyright © Max Hastings 2005

Max Hastings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007198856

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Praise

From the reviews of Warriors:

‘Brimming with great anecdotes…Hastings’s wonderfully readable book is going to make a lot of armchair soldiers very, very, happy. A damn good war story is always worth repeating, and few tell them better than Hastings’

Daily Mail

‘Hastings combines his consummate skill as a writer with passages of descriptive brilliance to provide a book for the ordinary citizen. His warriors are a mixed bag of unlikely combat survivors, their deeds graphically portrayed and their character flaws vividly described. He captures the commitment of the fighting servicemen and women, loyally executing the policy of the government of the day, in language that is powerful yet eminently comprehensible. This is a book to entertain’

Sunday Times

‘A marvellous book. Wry, perceptive and engaging, it lays bare the curious mix of character traits – good and bad – that a successful warrior requires’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Hastings has distilled more than 40 years of study and personal observation into 15 illustrative portraits…This is an “entertaining rather than academic story”; the aim is to “amuse as much as to inform”. As ever, Hastings does both’

Guardian

‘Clear, decisive, forceful…Bristling with action and laconic dialogue, Warriors…will enthral’

Daily Telegraph

‘With this collection, Hastings is back on home territory, where he can bring his unique blend of skills as war reporter, and social as well as military historian to bear…This is one of the best and most diverting of his shorter pieces’

Evening Standard

‘All [of the stories] are corking…Opinions are stated firmly and with big bold swings of the pendulum. His virtues are clarity and decisiveness – greatly to be admired when it comes to making clear, for the lay reader, roughly what is going on in the fiendishly complex and bloody engagements he describes’

Spectator

‘Warriors is a timely reminder of how magnificently people can behave in war. I hope that not only will it become required reading in our military academies but that it will be found by our bedsides for many years to come’

The Field

Dedication

For Professor Sir Michael Howard, CH, MC,

sometime warrior, evergreen teacher.

With affection and admiration, as always

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Introduction

1 Bonaparte’s Blessed Fool

2 Harry and Juana

3 Professor of Arms

4 The Lazy Engineer

5 Colonel Fred

6 Gentleman-of-War

7 Most Private Soldier

8 The Killer

9 An Indian Odyssey

10 The Dam Buster

11 Hollywood Hero

12 Slim Jim

13 The White Mouse

14 Freedom’s Young Apostle

Epic on the Golan

Keep Reading

Afterword

Sources and References

Index

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

THIS IS AN old-fashioned book, or at least a book about old-fashioned conflicts, because it concerns people rather than ‘platforms’, that unlovable contemporary synonym for tanks, ships, planes. It addresses the experience of some remarkable characters who made their marks upon the wars of the past two centuries. Like the rest of us, they were variously good, bad, ugly, charming and disagreeable. This study will be of no interest to such modern warlords as US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because it addresses aspects of conflict they do not comprehend, creatures of flesh and blood rather than systems of steel and electronics.

In civil life, people with a penchant for fighting are deemed at best an embarrassment, at worst a menace. Warriors are unfashionable people in democratic societies during periods of peace, as Kipling frequently remarked. Nelson liked to quote the seventeenth-century poet and pamphleteer Thomas Jordan’s epigram:

Our God and sailor we adore,

In time of danger, not before;

The danger past, both are alike requited,

God is forgotten, and the sailor slighted.

Yet all nations need warriors to pursue their national interests in conflict, to create disciplined violence within the harness of uniform. In times of war, fighting men are suddenly cherished and become celebrities – or at least did so until very recently. Few of those who experience battle emerge as heroes. Most, even if they have volunteered for military service, discover amid mortal peril that they prefer to act in a fashion likely to enable them to see home again, rather than to perform the sort of feats which win medals. This does not mean they are cowards. The majority do their duty conscientiously. They are reluctant, however, to take those strides beyond duty which mark out the men who win battles for their countries.

One of my favourite stories of the Second World War concerns a sergeant-major of the Green Howards, Stan Hollis. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, and in the battles that followed, three times Hollis attacked German positions which were holding up his battalion’s advance. He charged them alone, with sten gun and grenades, and killed or took prisoner the defenders. Many years later, his commanding officer reflected in my hearing upon the sergeant-major who, miraculously, lived to receive a Victoria Cross and keep a Yorkshire pub in his old age. The colonel said: ‘I think Hollis was the only man I met between 1939 and 1945 who felt that winning the war was his personal responsibility. Everybody else, when they heard there was a bloody awful job on, used to mutter: “Please God some other poor sod can be found to do it!”’

Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of people like Sergeant-Major Hollis, capable of courage, initiative or leadership beyond the norm. What is the norm? It has changed through the course of history, dramatically so since the mid-twentieth century, with the advance of what passes for civilisation. Western democracies have not become more merciful towards enemies. Indeed, they use ever more terrible weapons to encompass their destruction. Western warriors, however, have become progressively more sensitive to risk and hardship, in a fashion which reflects sentiment in the societies from which they are drawn. A Greek or Roman soldier was required to engage in hours of close-quarter combat with edged weapons which hacked through flesh, muscle, bone and entrails. Modern firearms inflict equally terrible wounds, but by a much less intimate process. ‘Was this fighting?’ mused a First World War fighter pilot, V.M. Yeates. ‘There was no anger, no red lust, no struggle, no straining muscles and sobbing breath; only the slight movement of levers and rattle of machine-guns.’

The absence of physical exertion in the business of killing, which Yeates remarked as a novelty in 1918, has become more emphatic, indeed almost universal, for twenty-first-century warriors of the Western democracies, saving only some combat infantrymen. In the past, a soldier’s belief in the nobility of his calling stemmed in part from his acceptance of the risk of losing his own life while taking those of others. It would be wrong to overstate the degree of chivalry involved, for of course every warrior aspired to kill his enemy while he himself survived. But the acceptance of possible death – of a multitude of deaths on one’s own side, win or lose – was part of the contract, in a fashion that has vanished today. Low-intensity engagement with guerrillas continues to inflict painful losses on Western armies. If matters go to plan in such heavyweight operations as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq or the bombing of Kosovo, however, military objectives are achieved at negligible cost to the technological master power. Losses are substantial among the vanquished primitives, but questions are asked in Congress or the House of Commons if there are significant casualties among the victors. Any assumption of parity of human risk is long gone. We have returned to the rules of engagement which prevailed in nineteenth-century colonial conflicts: ‘We have got the Maxim gun and they have not’; or, in a twenty-first-century context, ‘We possess body armour impervious to small arms and tanks invulnerable to low-technology weapons.’

In the battles of Bonaparte’s era, an infantryman was expected, as a matter of course, to stand firm at his place in the square, line or column, loading and aiming his musket usually without the protection of trench or earthwork, while the enemy delivered volley fire against himself and his comrades from a range of thirty or forty yards. There was seldom any tactical provision for an individual to evade danger. When Wellington ordered his infantry to lie down during enemy bombardments, this was perceived as a controversial, possibly pernicious, innovation. For an individual combatant to earn from his peers the reputation of a brave man, he was obliged to exceed a norm which modern soldiers would consider intolerable. And since the wars of Bonaparte persisted for the best part of twenty years, many veterans were called upon to display a willingness to defy the terrors of the battlefield thirty, forty, fifty times in separate engagements.

The American Civil War required from combatants the same submission to massed fire as Bonaparte’s and Wellington’s soldiers experienced, the ordeals of Gettysburg and the Wilderness being rendered more terrible by improvements in weapon technology in the intervening fifty years. Although the clash of the states was much shorter in duration than the European wars earlier in the nineteenth century, it exacted by far the highest casualties of any conflict in the history of the United States, albeit many of them by disease.

The end of the nineteenth century marked the passing of a warrior ethic which had prevailed since earliest history, whereby war was deemed a proper source of amusement for the leisured classes, as well as of employment for the impoverished ones. As a war correspondent, the young Winston Churchill sounded a last hurrah for the gentleman adventurer in a characteristically exuberant despatch from Buller’s South African army in February 1900:

The soldier, who fares simply, sleeps soundly and rises with the morning star, wakes in an elation of body and spirit without an effort and with scarcely a yawn. There is no more delicious moment in the day than this, while we light the fire and, while the kettle boils, watch the dark shadow of the hills take form, perspective and finally colour, knowing that there is another whole day begun, bright with chance and interest, and free from all cares. All cares are banished – for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night? Such a one was with us yesterday – see, there is a spare mug for coffee in the mess – but now gone for ever. And so it may be with us tomorrow. What does it matter that this or that is misunderstood or perverted; that So-and-so is envious and spiteful; that heavy difficulties obstruct the larger schemes of life, clogging nimble aspiration with the mud of matters of fact? Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of a bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard. The bright butterfly flutters in the sunshine, the expression of the philosophy of Omar Khayyam, without the potations.

A relatively small number of people enjoyed the conflicts of the twentieth century as much as Churchill had revelled in his adventures with, for instance, the Malakand Field Force on India’s North-West Frontier in 1897. World wars inflicted such horrors upon mankind that it became unacceptable for even the most enthusiastic warrior to avow them as entertainments, even if professional soldiers, sailors and airmen still welcomed the opportunities which they offered for swift advancement. A career officer whose progress from lieutenant to colonel might take twenty years of peacetime service could achieve the same leap in a couple of campaigns, given luck and ability. However, the majority of participants were unwilling civilians, conscripted into uniform to endure experiences they found uncongenial, even if they accepted a duty to endure them. Few citizen soldiers wrote home from North Africa or the Pacific with Churchill’s exuberant delight.

The most dramatic foreshortening of Western democratic man’s assumed quotient of courage, his expected tolerance of the circumstances of conflict, took place between the two world wars. In the 1914-18 encounter, infantrymen of all the combatant powers were required to accept a level of sacrifice Bonaparte’s or Grant’s soldiers would have acknowledged with respect. A generation later, in 1939-45, a consensus evolved among Anglo-American commanders that it was impossible again to make such demands upon their men. The manner in which campaigns were conducted, especially in north-west Europe, reflected an Allied preference for firepower rather than human endeavour, a tolerance of ‘combat fatigue’ or ‘battle exhaustion’ as a recognised medical condition, and a reluctance to persist with any course of action that entailed heavy loss.

However ghastly were some individual Western Allied experiences of the Second World War, only in the Japanese, Russian and German armies were demands routinely made upon the soldier comparable with those of earlier centuries. It might be observed that ‘fanatical’ enemy behaviour which roused the dismay, even revulsion, of 1939-45 American and British soldiers was no more than had been asked as a commonplace of their own forebears: a willingness to carry out orders likely to precipitate their own deaths. After 1918, the soldiers of the Western democracies in the Second World War were deemed to have grown more ‘civilised’, a cause of lamentation among their commanders. Senior American and British officers such as Patton, Brooke and Alexander, not to mention Winston Churchill, bewailed the fact that the men whom they led possessed less capacity for suffering than their fathers who bore arms in the Kaiser’s war. The norm had changed.

Yet in every society on earth, the most durable convention from ancient times until very recently was that which held physical courage to be the highest human attribute. For thousands of years, in societies dominated by the warrior ethic, this quality was valued more highly than intellectual achievement or moral worth. A.E.W. Mason’s classic adventure story The Four Feathers (1902), set in 1898, concerns a sensitive young army officer who resigns his commission because he prefers to stay in England enjoying country life with an adored fiancée, rather than accompany his regiment up the Nile to slaughter Dervishes. His girl joins brother officers in offering him a white feather for his ‘cowardice’. He is obliged to perform extraordinary feats of derring-do in order to recover her esteem. The story has always seemed to me flawed, because it requires the hero eventually to marry this foolish creature, who surely proved her unfitness as a partner for life by placing so high a premium upon brawn over brains, preferring to see her loved one immolate himself on a battlefield rather than indulge his poetic nature.

But The Four Feathers vividly reflected the values of its period. One consequence of mankind’s exaggerated regard for ‘pluck’ is that some remarkably stupid men, their only virtue a willingness to expose their own persons to risk, have been granted positions of responsibility on the battlefield, where their follies have cost lives. Bonaparte often over-promoted officers of high courage and small intelligence, whose headlong assaults upon the enemy cost the imperial army gratuitous slaughter. General Sir Harold Alexander’s gallantry, patrician manners and dashing appearance made him Winston Churchill’s favourite general. ‘Alex’ looked the ideal of a warrior. The prime minister was content to overlook the hero’s notorious laziness and lack of intellect.

A less exalted officer who showed himself ‘brave as a lion’, to quote a comrade, leading a battalion in north-west Europe in 1944-45 had to be relieved of a brigade command in Korea in 1951. His subordinates formally protested to the divisional commander when this committed warrior, adorned with two DSOs, proposed to launch his men in a frontal assault upon the Chinese. He failed to comprehend the new terms of limited war. The American writer Ambrose Bierce a century ago advised the ambitious professional soldier: ‘Always try to get yourself killed.’ Many of those who display a willingness to pursue this objective are, however, fools by the normal yardsticks of humanity. Courage is a desirable asset in a commander, but is usually fatal to the interests of his soldiers unless accompanied by some intellectual powers. British cavalry and its senior officers were flawed through most of their history, up to and including the Second World War, by an obsessive compulsion to charge. No warrior should be promoted to higher command merely because he is brave. A skilled and eager fighter is best rewarded by decorations rather than promotion. He should be retained in a role in which he can make himself useful in personal combat, rather than advanced beyond the merits of the rather limited gift – even for a soldier – of being good at killing people.

Yet it is hard to exaggerate the influence that displays of battlefield prowess have always exercised upon others, especially adolescents who are least equipped to perceive the worth of other virtues. As a schoolboy I read a book written in the 1920s, entitled Stirring Deeds of the Great War. Works of this nature were published in great numbers from Victorian times until, say, the 1960s. They depicted war as an extension of school sports, a grander and more splendid House Final, in which young men possessed of the right stuff could win their colours on a national pitch. They were designed to inspire new generations of Englishmen and Americans to emulate the feats of their forefathers, and often they succeeded. The illustrations in Stirring Deeds left a lasting impression upon the impressionable. I remember one captioned ‘Lieutenant Smyth’s terrible journey with the bombs’. It depicted a young officer lugging a box of grenades across no man’s land amid a storm of shot and shell, an episode following which he was awarded a Victoria Cross. In those days, the public perception of heroism was almost entirely related to feats of military prowess. Until at least the 1960s, warriors who had displayed conspicuous courage in one or other of the twentieth century’s notable bouts with the Germans were treated with high respect, even if their cheques bounced.

It may be argued that portrayals of war as ‘the great game’ prostituted courage for dubious nationalistic purposes, and so they did. Yet over the past thirty years or so, the word ‘hero’, surely one of the most precious in the language, has become debased in a different way. Public admiration once reserved for warriors has been transferred to sports stars and celebrities, many of negligible attainment. Martial courage has become far less esteemed in Western societies. In part, happily, this is because the need for it in wars of national survival has vanished. Less happily, however, it is because some people in the twenty-first century recoil from any celebration of military achievement.

In the tranquil times in which we are fortunate enough to live – with or without Al Q’aeda, our ancestors would consider our era uniquely privileged – there is a public yearning to make life safe. A corollary of this is a diminution of enthusiasm for those who embrace risk. Most of the people whose stories feature in this book would find our society’s quest for an existence without peril incomprehensible, unmanly, absurd. They would be amazed by the childlike and increasingly widespread belief that if governments do their business properly, even a soldier in war can be protected from harm.

It is welcome that popular perceptions of courage no longer embrace only, or even chiefly, achievement in battle. But it seems dismaying that the media, and thus the public, today blur the distinction between a victim, who suffers terrible experiences, and a hero. To any thoughtful person, a hero must be someone who consciously consents to risk or sacrifice his or her life for a higher purpose. The media, for instance, will describe a pilot who safely lands a crippled plane laden with passengers as ‘a hero’. A party trapped for hours in a cable car who return to terra firma without betraying visible moral collapse may well be dubbed heroic. In truth, of course, these people are merely passive victims of misfortune. If they behave well, they are doing so to save their own skins, and only incidentally those of other people. Anyone who has served in a theatre of war, even in a non-combatant capacity and even in as perfunctory an affair – from the Allied viewpoint – as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is likely to be described in any subsequent media report of a divorce, car crash or fatality as a ‘war hero’. This is a travesty. Such a word as ‘hero’ deserves to be cherished as carefully as any other endangered species. Physical bravery is found more often than the spiritual variety. Moral courage is rare, and perhaps more common among women than among men. A willingness to defy peril comes remarkably easily to some young people. For millennia, this trait was systematically nurtured in them through ‘risk’ sports, with the implicit or explicit purpose of fitting them for war. Foxhunting, for instance, which requires high courage from a ‘thruster’, created the ethos of Wellington’s army much more than did the playing fields of Eton. Such a young man as Harry Smith of the Rifle Brigade joined the British Peninsular army having already tested his own courage over a thousand fences in the hunting field. This did not make him a better or more intelligent person, but it sent him to serve Wellington as a demonstrably brave one. It is no coincidence that today, when we no longer feel threatened by foreign enemies who must be confronted in battle, English socialists are spitefully committed to banning English foxhunting. The sport reflects a culture which they despise. The virtues which hunting has fostered for centuries seem to them redundant as well as barbaric.

The warrior deserving of the highest praise is he who demonstrates fortitude alone, without the stimulus of comradeship. C.S. Forester wrote a wry little novel entitled Brown on Resolution (1929). It tells the story of a British sailor in the First World War, sole unwounded survivor of a cruiser sunk in the Pacific by a German raider. Brown escapes from captivity with a rifle onto an uninhabited volcanic island, Resolution, where the German ship has put in for repairs. This stolid young man, schooled all his life to a simple concept of duty, knows that the consequence of his actions must be death, but accepts his fate unquestioningly. By harassing the warship from the shore, the lone sailor delays its departure just long enough for a British squadron to engage and sink it with all hands. Brown himself is left mortally wounded, dying alone on his barren rock. For our purposes the key element in Forester’s story is that no one afterwards knows what Brown did, or what his lonely sacrifice achieved. This is a cautionary tale for warriors. The highest form of courage is that of a man who surrenders his life for others without hope of recognition. There have been innumerable such instances throughout history, which by their nature are unknown to us.

By contrast many acts of heroism, some recorded in this book, have been committed in the active hope of advancement or glory. Eager warriors, aspiring heroes, ‘gong chasers’, are generally disliked and mistrusted by those of more commonplace disposition who are obliged to serve with them. Many soldiers display a baleful attitude towards officers who are perceived to be excessively aggressive. ‘It’s all right for him if he wants to win a VC or a Congressional Medal,’ they mutter, ‘but what about us?’ The leaders most readily admired are those who seem committed to do their duty, and also to bring every possible man home alive. The rank and file recoil from officers who seem indifferent to the ‘butcher’s bill’ for their actions. The British colonel most respected by his men in the Falklands campaign, for instance, was by no means the most celebrated. Instead, he was an officer who gained his combat objectives by meticulous planning and diversionary fire, followed up by a dashing flank assault, which achieved success with minimal casualties.

Many celebrated warriors are detested by their comrades. I grew up to idolise Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, who led the 1943 RAF dam-breaking raid on the Ruhr. When researching the bomber offensive for a book, it was a shock for me to discover how much Gibson was disliked by some of those who served under him. ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you your buttons were undone,’ said a gunner in 1978, his resentment undimmed by the passage of thirty-five years. The courage of Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Jones, commanding 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands in May 1982, undoubtedly merited the posthumous Victoria Cross which he received. But more than a few of his comrades in the British army argued that his action in charging personally at the Argentine positions was the negation of the role of a battalion commander, and reflected the fact that he had lost control of the battle. ‘H’ Jones was a fiercely emotional man, fired by a heroic vision which he yearned to fulfil. Many soldiers prefer to be led against the enemy by cooler and more cautious spirits.

A cynic might suggest that some eager warriors are exhibitionists of an extreme kind. A cynic would be right. This does not diminish warriors’ claims upon our regard, but may make us a trifle more sceptical about their motives. Adventure has always been a selfish business,’ author and traveller Peter Fleming once observed. ‘The desire to benefit the community is never [adventurers’] principal motive…They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea.’ The same can be said of eager warriors. A relative of an officer who was responsible for an exceptionally brave action in North Africa in the Second World War once related a story which the family hero possessed enough self-knowledge to tell against himself. Soon after the North African battle took place, the young man went to his colonel and complained that while several fellow officers had received Military Crosses, he himself had got nothing. He felt hard done by. The colonel did not reveal to his young lieutenant that he had been recommended for a Victoria Cross, which was gazetted shortly afterwards. This anecdote emphasises the fact that some men commit brave acts not spontaneously, but in conscious pursuit of recognition.

All armies seek to create an ethos in which such ambitions prosper. Only where at least a handful of soldiers possess either an exceptional sense of duty – like Sergeant-Major Hollis – or an extravagant hunger for fame – like the VC winner mentioned above – can the cause of their nation in arms flourish. A small minority of natural warriors is almost invariably fighting alongside a majority of other soldiers who threaten their army’s prospects of operational success by their eagerness to preserve their own lives. Macaulay’s Horatius demanded:

How can man die better than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?

From a Western commander’s viewpoint, however, a distressingly small number of men share this sanguine view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behaviour in battle by foes such as the wartime Japanese and Germans, and even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behaviour in action which was more likely than not to result in the death of the warrior concerned. It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behaviour than their own. This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism, merely to recognise our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his actions would have won warm Western applause if performed sixty years ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in two world wars included the approving words: ‘with absolute disregard for his own safety’.

The currency in which a notable warrior has been rewarded in modern times is, of course, an intrinsically worthless disc or cross of metal, which society has successfully promoted as desirable. The United States and Britain have customarily awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross – both mid-nineteenth-century creations – for single acts of bravery, episodes which lasted only a matter of minutes. Remarkably few of these supreme national tokens have been given for displays of courage sustained over months or years, such as were demanded as a commonplace from soldiers of earlier centuries. Indeed, the first VC was awarded for an act many people would consider a mere impulsive gesture of self-preservation: during the Crimean War a British sailor picked up a live shell which landed on the deck of his ship, and threw it overboard. In a rash moment, Congress once awarded its Medal of Honor to every member of a Civil War regiment, until wiser counsels prevailed and this largesse was retracted.

A friend who served as an infantry officer in Italy in the Second World War once observed to me that when one is twenty years old, the prospect of a ‘gong’ can incite some men to remarkable exertions. The possibility of recognition through medals has prompted many warriors to try harder, and thus caused battles to be won. The warrior’s cliché is correct, that ‘the only one who knows what a medal is worth is the man who won it’. All veterans perceive a distinction between a ‘good’ Silver Star or DSO or Croix de Guerre – gained for courage and leadership – and the other kind which ‘comes up with the rations’, not infrequently as a gesture to a career officer with influential connections. The courage of General George Patton was undisputed, but posterity is entitled to recoil from the shamelessness with which in both world wars he solicited medals from friends in high places – and received them. Likewise, I recall the rancour of an RAF veteran as he described his 1943 squadron commander. Many aircrew considered this officer a coward. He relaxed sufficiently one night in the mess to avow without embarrassment: ‘I am a career airman. I intend to survive the war.’ So he did, taking considerable care of his own safety. But the fellowship of the RAF hierarchy ensured that he got his ‘gong’ when he relinquished his squadron. Few people whom the wing-commander met in later life can have possessed any notion how relatively easily his DSO was earned. In the eyes of a new generation ignorant of the nuances of the warrior culture, the mere fact of an officer’s operational service admitted him to the ranks of ‘war heroes’.

One of the more notable follies committed during the premiership of John Major was his 1994 ‘reform’ of military decorations. Historically, only the Victoria Cross was open to all ranks. Commissioned officers and private soldiers were otherwise eligible for separate awards. Major’s new approach reflected a drowning politician’s quest for populist favour by introducing so-called ‘classless’ medals. His policy ignored the reality recognised by every fighting soldier: qualities demanded of officers and men on the battlefield are equally precious, but different in kind. Many British rankers who held the Distinguished Conduct Medal or Military Medal, abolished in the Major reforms, were dismayed. Here was a civilian politician who had never borne arms, trampling clumsily upon the recognition of battlefield achievement, and thoroughly upsetting those ‘at the sharp end’.

Many decorations are awarded for spectacular acts of courage. But others are issued cynically, because commanders deem it morally necessary to console a vanquished army, or to inspire men to try harder by giving awards for feats which are, in truth, no more than many of their comrades perform. For instance, some wartime heavy bomber pilots were decorated – several posthumously – for efforts to keep crippled aircraft aloft at the risk of their own lives, enabling the rest of their crews to bale out. This was a relatively commonplace manifestation of courage, but it was rewarded with decorations, to encourage emulation.

Official recognition of warriors’ deeds is often arbitrary, not least because it requires the survival of credible witnesses, almost invariably officers, to submit citations. Here we are back to Brown on Resolution. Every army in modern times has operated a more or less crude rationing system in apportioning decorations between units. This creates injustices both of omission and commission, well understood by fighting men. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who famously despised soldiers and sailors, once scornfully rehearsed to me the extravagant list of ‘gongs’ awarded after the Royal Navy’s bloody 1918 raid on the German submarine base at Zeebrugge, to make survivors feel better. If warriors cannot always be successful, their commanders find it expedient at least to convince them that some of their number have been brave enough to sustain collective honour.

What makes some warriors perform exceptional deeds? Charles Wilson, Churchill’s personal doctor during his premiership, served in France as an army doctor in the First World War, and afterwards wrote The Anatomy of Courage. Wilson, who became Lord Moran, rejected the view that courage is simply a quality possessed by some men and not by others. Nor, he argued, is it a constant, like income; rather, it is a capital sum of which each man possesses a variable amount. In all cases, such capital is eventually exhausted. There seems considerable evidence to support Moran’s thesis. In World War II, it was accepted that most fighting units advanced from amateur status in their first actions to much greater professionalism after some battle experience; thereafter, however, among the Western Allies at least, the aggressiveness and usefulness of a given formation declined, as it became not ‘battle-hardened’ – an absurd cliché - but tired and wary of risk. A veteran of Normandy once observed to me: ‘You fight a damn sight better when you don’t know where it hurts.’ In other words, the less battle-experienced soldier, the novice, sometimes performs feats from which a veteran would flinch.

The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic, others painfully melancholy. Some of those portrayed were notably successful in their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of scepticism does these remarkable men – and two women – no disservice, nor does an acknowledgement that few were people with whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.

When I began writing, I intended to include figures as far back in history as the periods of Leonidas, Hannibal, Saladin. Yet sifting the evidence about such people, I came to believe that it was too doubtful and fragmentary to form a basis for convincing character studies. The distinguished historian of the Hundred Years War Jonathan Sumption notes that Walter Mannay, one of the foremost among King Edward Ill’s knights, paid Froissart cash for a fulsome testimonial in his Chronicles. The historical evidence about the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae may be summarised thus: Leonidas probably existed, and probably died in a battle there. That is all, and not enough for the book which I wanted to write.

My own stories are confined, therefore, to modern times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They concern characters about whom we know enough to construct credible and, I hope, entertaining portraits. The selection is whimsical. The range of personalities is designed to illustrate different aspects of the experience of war on land, at sea and in the air over the past two centuries. Several are national icons, while others have lost their lustre, and fallen into an obscurity from which 1 hope this book will help to rescue them. Some may seem unsympathetic, and some were failures. The characters and fates of warriors are as diverse as those of people who follow any other calling.

Most of these tales concern soldiers, but I have included one remarkable sailor, and two airmen who seem archetypes of the twentieth-century warrior. My collection – which of course is only a modest assay of a seam overflowing with riches – also favours those who left behind autobiographies, diaries or other writings, that provide insights into their thoughts as well as their deeds. The balance is thus unjustly loaded towards officers at the expense of those whom they commanded, and towards the articulate at the expense of the illiterate, not all of the latter members of the Brigade of Guards. Aficionados of naval history may justly complain that seamen are under-represented, but this is a portrait of human behaviour rather than a historical narrative balanced between the three dimensions of modern warfare.

If successful warriors have often been vain and uncultured men, their nations in hours of need have had cause to be profoundly grateful for their virtues, even if they have sometimes been injured by their excesses. Today, we recognise that other forms of courage are as worthy of respect as that which is shown on the battlefield. But this should not cause us to steal from the legends of former times their due as pillars of history. How far have we come, how sadly has Britain changed, when the Mayor of London proposes the removal from their plinths in Trafalgar Square of statues of British military commanders! He declares that prowess in war, especially colonial war, is no longer a fitting object for admiration. True, it is a strange quirk of fate that causes bronze images of two of the less admirable military leaders in British history, Earl Haig and the Duke of Cambridge, to dominate Whitehall. Yet it seems grotesque to seek to erase from our consciousness, in a shamelessly Stalinist spirit, a great military heritage.

This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.

MAX HASTINGS

Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya

November 2004

1 Bonaparte’s Blessed Fool

THE WARS OF NAPOLEON produced a flowering of memoirs, both English and French, of extraordinary quality. Each writer’s work reflects in full measure his national characteristics. None but a Frenchman, surely, could have written the following lines about his experience of conflict: ‘I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will add that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services prove, I think, sufficiently.’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot was the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Brigadier Gerard: brave, swashbuckling, incapable of introspection, glorying without inhibition in the experience of campaigning from Portugal to Russia in the service of his emperor. Marbot was the most eager of warriors, who shared with many of his French contemporaries a belief that there could be no higher calling than to follow Bonaparte to glory. Few modern readers could fail to respect the courage of a soldier who so often faced the fire of the enemy, through an active service career spanning more than forty years. And no Anglo-Saxon could withhold laughter at the peacock vanity and chauvinism of the hussar’s account of the experience, rich in anecdotage and comedy, the latter often unintended.

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot was born in 1782 at Beaulieu in the Corrèze, son of a country gentleman of liberal inclinations who became a general in France’s revolutionary army. With his round face and snub nose, the child Marcellin was known to his family as ‘the kitten’, and for some years during the nation’s revolutionary disorders attended a local girls’ school. He was originally destined for a naval career, but a friend urged his father that life aboard a warship mouldering in some seaport under British blockade was no prospect for an ambitious youth. Instead, in 1799 a vacancy was procured for him in the hussars. The seventeen-year-old boy was delighted, and from the outset gloried in his new uniform. His father, however, was uneasy about his shyness, and for some time was prone to refer to his son in company as ‘Mademoiselle Marcellin’ – rich pickings there for a modern psychologist. In those days when every hussar was expected to display a moustache as part of his service dress, the beardless teenager at first painted whiskers on his face.

Marbot met Bonaparte for the first time when accompanying his father to take up a posting with the army in Italy. They were amazed to encounter the hero of the Pyramids at Lyons, on his way back to Paris from Egypt, having abandoned his army to seek a throne, a quest to which General Marbot, a committed republican, declined to give his assistance. In Italy, young Marcellin won his spurs. Despatched with a patrol to seize Austrian prisoners, the sergeant in command professed sudden illness. The boy seized the opportunity and assumed leadership of the troop: ‘When…I took command of the fifty men who had come under my orders in such unusual circumstances, a mere trooper as I was and seventeen years old, I resolved to show my comrades that if I had not yet much experience or military talent, I at least possessed pluck. So I resolutely put myself at their head and marched on in what we knew was the direction of the enemy.’

Marbot’s patrol surprised an Austrian unit, took the necessary prisoners, and returned in triumph to the French lines where their self-appointed commander was rewarded with promotion to sergeant, followed soon afterwards by a commission. He survived the terrible siege of Genoa, where his father died in his arms following a wound received on the battlefield. Soon afterwards the young man was posted to the 25th Chasseurs. In 1801 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to that hoary old hero Marshal Augereau, with whom he travelled for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula.

By 1805, already a veteran, Marbot was an eager young officer with Bonaparte’s Grand Army, ready for a summer of campaigning against the Austrians and Russians. ‘I had three excellent horses,’ he enthused, adding bathetically, ‘and a servant of moderate quality.’ The duties of aides-de-camp were among the most perilous in any army of the time. It was their business to convey their masters’ wishes and tidings not only across the battlefield, but from end to end of Europe, often in the teeth of the enemy. In the period that followed, writes Marbot, ‘constantly sent from north to south, and from south to north, wherever there was fighting going on, I did not pass one of these ten years without coming under fire, or without shedding my blood on the soil of some part of Europe.’ It is striking to notice that, until the twentieth century, every enthusiastic warrior regarded it as a mark of virility to have been wounded in action, if possible frequently. A soldier who avoided shedding his own blood, far from being congratulated on luck and skill, was more likely to be suspected of shyness.

Marbot began the 1805 campaigning season by carrying despatches from the emperor to Marshal Masséna in Italy, through the Alpine passes. Then he took his place beside Augereau for what became the Austerlitz campaign. ‘Never had France possessed an army so well-trained,’ he exulted, ‘of such good material, so eager for fighting and fame…Bonaparte…accepted the war with joy, so certain was he of victory…He knew how the chivalrous spirit of Frenchmen has in all ages been influenced by the enthusiasm of military glory.’ Seldom has there been an era of warfare in which officers and soldiers alike strove so ardently for distinction. If there were young blades in Bonaparte’s army who confined themselves to doing their duty, history knows nothing of them. In the world of France’s marshals and their subordinates, there was a relentless contest for each to outdo the others in braving peril with insouciance. Its spirit was supremely captured by the tale of Ney, after the battle of Lutzen, encountering the emperor. ‘My dear cousin! But you are covered in blood!’ exclaimed Bonaparte in alarm. ‘It isn’t mine, Sire,’ responded the marshal complacently, ‘except where that damned bullet passed through my leg!’

Having survived the carnage at Austerlitz, Marbot found himself among a throng of French officers sitting their horses around Bonaparte on the day after the battle, gazing out on the broken ice of the Satschan Lake, strewn with debris and corpses. Amidst it all, a hundred yards from the shore they beheld a Russian sergeant, shot through the thigh and clinging to an ice floe deeply stained with his blood. The wounded man, spying the glittering assembly, raised himself and cried out in Russian, ‘All men become brothers once battle is done.’ He begged his life from the emperor of the French. The entreaty was translated. Bonaparte, in a characteristic impulse of imperial condescension, told his entourage to do whatever was necessary to save the Russian. A handful of men plunged into the icy water, seized floating baulks of timber, and sought to paddle themselves out to the floe. Within seconds they became clumsy prisoners of their frozen clothing. They abandoned efforts to save the enemy soldier, and struggled ashore to save themselves.

Marbot, a spectator, declared that their error had been to brave the water fully clad. Bonaparte nodded assent. The would-be rescuers had shown more zeal than discretion, observed the emperor dryly. The hussar now felt obliged to put his own counsel into practice. Leaping from his horse, he tore off his clothes and sprang into the lake. He acknowledged the shock of the deadly cold, but ‘the emperor’s presence encouraged me, and I struck out towards the Russian sergeant. At the same time my example, and probably the praise given me by the emperor, determined a lieutenant of artillery…to imitate me.’ As he struggled painfully amid the great daggers of ice, Marbot was dismayed to find his rival catching him up. Yet he was obliged to admit that alone, he could never have succeeded in his attempt. Together, and with immense labour, the two Frenchmen pushed the wounded Russian on his crumbling floe towards the shore, battering a path through the jumble of ice before them. At last they came close enough for onlookers to throw out lifelines. The two swimmers seized the ropes and passed them around the wounded man, enabling him to be dragged to safety. They themselves, at their last gasp, bleeding and torn, staggered ashore to receive their laurels. Bonaparte called his mameluke Roustan to bring them a glass of rum apiece. He gave gold to the wounded soldier, who proved to be Lithuanian. Once recovered, the man became a devoted follower of the emperor, a sergeant in his Polish lancers. Marbot’s companion in mercy, the lieutenant of artillery, was so weakened by his experience that after months in hospital, Marbot recorded pityingly that he had to be invalided out of the service. The hussar, of course, was back on duty next day.

Marbot saw as much of Bonaparte as any man of his rank through the years that followed. In July 1806 he carried despatches to the French embassy in Berlin, and returned to report to the emperor in Paris that he had seen Prussian officers defiantly sharpening sabres on the embassy steps. ‘The insolent braggarts shall soon learn that our weapons need no sharpening!’ exclaimed Bonaparte. We may suspect that the emperor viewed Marbot just as his fictional self viewed Gerard in Conan Doyle’s tales – as a wonderfully loyal, courageous, unthinking instrument with less guile than a gundog. Marbot himself tells several stories of how he was duped by treacherous foreigners with no understanding of the nobility and dignity of war. Indeed, his contempt for the lack of chivalry displayed by Englishmen, Russians, Austrians and suchlike is matched only by his disdain for their military incompetence. On those freakish occasions when he is forced to acknowledge that lesser breeds prevailed on the battlefield, such misfortunes are invariably attributed either to the enemy’s superior numbers or to the folly of some French subordinate commander. Bonaparte’s soldiers, in Marbot’s eyes, were paragons of courage and honour. We learn little from his narrative of the trail of devastation they wreaked across occupied Europe. To the gallant young officer, as to most of his comrades, Bonaparte was an idol, rather than the ruthless despot who brought misery to millions. Marcellin says nothing in his memoirs of his elder brother Antoine-Adolphe, also a soldier, who was arrested in 1802 for an alleged plot against the ruler of France in favour of a republic.

Marbot fretted about receiving less than his share of glory at Jena in October 1806, but a few months later, at the age of twenty-four, he gained his coveted captaincy. It was in this rank that he served at Eylau in February 1807. The battle prompted one of his most remarkable stories, which sounds more like an experience of Baron Munchausen than that of a French cavalry officer. Marbot was riding a mare named Lisette, whose naturally vicious temperament he had with difficulty suppressed. First his servant, then the captain himself, forced sizzling joints of hot mutton into the horse’s mouth when she sought to attack them. Since these salutory experiences, Lisette had been a model mount. In the midst of the great engagement at Eylau, in which Augereau’s corps suffered severely, Bonaparte sent word to the marshal that he should try to save the 14th Infantry, whose dwindling band of survivors held a hillock in the path of the Russian advance. Two aides spurred forth, to be swallowed up in the chaos and never seen again. Marbot stood next in line. ‘Seeing the son of his old friend, and I venture to say his favourite aide de camp, come up, the kind marshal’s face changed, and his eyes filled with tears, for he could not hide from himself that he was sending me to almost certain death. But the emperor must be obeyed.’

Marbot dashed away. Lisette, ‘lighter than a swallow and flying rather than running, devoured the intervening space, leaping the piles of dead men and horses, the ditches, the broken gun carriages, and the half-extinguished bivouac fires’. Cossacks turned to pursue Marbot like beaters driving a hare, yet none could catch his racing steed. He reached the frail square formed by the survivors of the 14th, surrounded by dead Russian dragoons and their horses. Amid a hail of fire, the aide passed the order to withdraw. The commanding major shrugged that retreat was impossible. A fresh Russian column was even now a mere hundred paces away. ‘I see no means of saving the regiment,’ said the major. ‘Return to the emperor, bid him farewell from the 14th of the line, which has faithfully executed his orders, and bear to him the eagle which he gave us and which we can defend no longer.’

Here, couched in language worthy of Macaulay, is the very stuff of the legend of Bonaparte’s army, which Marbot did as much as any man to enshrine for posterity. A Russian cannonball tore through the aide’s hat as he seized the regiment’s eagle and strove to break off its staff, the more readily to bear it to safety. He was so badly concussed by the impact that blood poured from his nose and ears. As the enemy’s infantry closed upon them, doomed soldiers cried out ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Several Frenchmen set their backs against Lisette’s flanks, crowding the mare so tightly than Marbot could not spur her away. A wounded French quartermaster-sergeant fell under her legs, and a Russian grenadier sought to bayonet the man where he lay. The attacker, drunk as Russians always were on battlefields depicted by Marbot, missed his aim. One thrust struck the cavalryman’s arm, another pierced his mount’s flank. Lisette’s latent savagery reawakened, ‘she sprang at the Russian, and at one mouthful tore off his nose, lips, eyebrows and all the skin of his face, making of him a living death’s head, dripping with blood’. Then the mare surged out of the mêlée, kicking and biting as she went, seizing one Russian officer bodily and eviscerating him. She bolted at full gallop, not checking until she reached Eylau cemetery, where she collapsed from loss of blood. Marbot, himself fainting with pain, slid into unconsciousness.

When the battle was done, he was saved by the merest chance from the mound of snow and corpses in which he lay, incapable of movement. A servant of Augereau saw a looter carrying a pelisse which he recognised as that of the general’s aide, and induced the man to lead him to the spot where he had found it. Both mare and rider survived. Marbot wrote archly: ‘Nowadays, when promotions and decorations are bestowed so lavishly, some reward would certainly be given to an officer who had braved danger as I had done in reaching the 14th Regiment; but under the Empire, for a devoted act of that kind I did not receive the cross [of the Legion of Honour] nor did it ever occur me to ask for it.’ Poor man, he was in truth obsessed with promotions and medals. He rejoiced mightily when at last he received the cross from his emperor two years later, at the age of twenty-six.

Marshal Augereau was so badly wounded at Eylau that it was years before he was again fit to take the field. Marbot found himself temporarily unemployed. After two months’ convalescence in Paris, however, he was attached to the staff of Marshal Lannes, with whom he served at the battle of Friedland in June 1807. He witnessed the meeting of Bonaparte and the Tsar at Tilsit, and was then sent with the emperor’s despatches to Dresden. There and afterwards in Paris he briefly savoured the delights of a full purse, his status as one of the emperor’s favoured champions, and the tender care of his mother, whom he adored. The only other female object of affection who earns a brief mention in Marbot’s memoirs is the wife whom he married in 1811. Women otherwise have no place in his tale, and perhaps little even in his career as a soldier. Many men such as Marbot became so absorbed in the business of war that they perceived women merely as a source of amusement during leaves, and as childbearers when duty granted an officer leisure to think of such marginal matters as procreation.

The year 1808 found the hussar despatched among the staff of the emperor’s brother-in-law Prince Murat to Spain, where Bonaparte was bent upon overturning the monarchy in favour of his own nominee. Murat aspired to the crown for himself. To his chagrin, however, he was obliged to content himself with the throne of Naples, while that of Spain was given to Bonaparte’s elder brother Joseph. Even the insensitive Marbot, billeted in Madrid when the Spaniards rose in revolt against the French despot and his occupying army, recognised the folly of Bonaparte’s Spanish adventure: ‘this war…seemed to me wicked, but I was a soldier and I must march or be charged with cowardice’. He was appalled by the savagery of the Spanish guerrillos, which bore especially hard on aides, who had to travel far and alone. Once, on a mission bearing despatches, he found the body of a young chasseur officer nailed by his hands and feet to a barn door, under which a fire had been lighted. The Frenchman was still bleeding, and Marbot soon afterwards found himself in a bloody confrontation with the killers, which cost him another wound. The package which he bore was finally carried to Bonaparte by another officer, proudly stained with Marbot’s blood.

In the spring of 1809, the French army in Spain was battling to seize Saragossa, which the Spanish were defending stubbornly. Assault after assault was beaten back. Marbot was ordered to lead a fresh attack, and was reconnoitring the ground when he felt himself pushed sharply backwards, and collapsed to the ground. A Spanish bullet had struck him beside the heart. The after-effects of this wound caused him much discomfort in the saddle after the fall of Saragossa, when he had to travel back to Paris with Marshal Lannes, and thence onwards for the next of Bonaparte’s German campaigns. At the battle of Eckmuhl, Marbot’s worst inconvenience was to have his horse shot under him. A few days later, on 23 April, he was in mortal danger again. At the assault on Ratisbon, Lannes was so frustrated by the failure of his men to scale the walls under heavy fire that he seized a ladder himself, exclaiming: ‘I will let you see that I was a grenadier before I was a marshal, and still am one.’ Marbot tore the ladder from his mentor by main force, and with a comrade holding the other end, dashed for the walls. Though scores of French soldiers were falling around them, Marbot and his companion claimed the honour of reaching the summit of the walls first among Bonaparte’s army. He then persuaded the Austrian officer defending the gate to surrender.

On the banks of the swollen Danube on 7 May, Bonaparte sent for Marbot. He wanted an officer to cross the flood and take a prisoner. ‘Take notice,’ said the emperor, ‘1 am not giving you an order; I am only expressing a wish. I am aware that the enterprise is as dangerous as it can be, and you can decline it without any fear of displeasing me.’ Here Marbot, in his own account, almost bursts with righteous conceit: ‘I had broken out all over in a cold sweat; but at the same moment a feeling…in which a love of glory and of my country was mingled perhaps with a noble pride, raised my ardour to the highest point and I said to myself: “The emperor has here an army of 150,000 devoted warriors, besides 25,000 men of his guard, all selected from the bravest. He is surrounded with aides-de-camp and orderly officers, and yet when an expedition is on foot, requiring intelligence no less than boldness, it is I whom the Emperor and Marshal Lannes choose.” “I will go, sir!”, I cried without hesitation; “I will go; and if I perish, I leave my mother to your Majesty’s care.” The emperor pulled my ear to mark his satisfaction. The marshal shook my hand.’

This is one of the most enchanting passages in Marbot’s narrative, inseparably linked to its time, nation and personalities. Conveyed by local boatmen, he braved the Danube torrent, secured three Austrian prisoners, and returned in triumph. He received the embrace of Lannes, an invitation to breakfast with the emperor, and his coveted promotion to major. A fortnight later, after innumerable adventures at Essling and Aspern, he carried the mortally wounded Lannes off the field. Marbot himself had lost a piece of flesh, torn from his thigh by a grapeshot, but carelessly ignored it. Bonaparte noticed the major’s bloody breeches and observed laconically: ‘Your turn comes around pretty often!’ It was a measure of the limitations of nineteenth-century weapons that any man could so often be injured by them, yet survive to fight again.

At Wagram in July 1809, Marbot suffered a serious falling-out with Marshal Masséna, on whose staff he was serving. The corn that covered much of the battlefield was set ablaze by smouldering cannon wadding. Men and horses suffered terribly, fighting amid the fires. Marbot’s mount was already scorched and exhausted when Masséna sought an aide to check the rout of a division broken by Austrian cavalry, and to direct the fugitives to the island of Löbau on the Danube. First in line for duty was Prosper, Masséna’s own son. Yet the marshal could not bring himself to despatch his offspring into the midst of the slaughter. He appealed to Marbot: ‘You understand, my friend, why I do not send my son, although it’s his turn; I am afraid of getting him killed. You understand? You understand?’ Marbot, disgusted, claims to have answered: ‘Marshal, I was going under the impression that I was about to fulfil a duty; I am sorry that you have corrected my mistake, for now I understand perfectly that, being obliged to send one of your aides-de-camp to almost certain death, you would rather it should be me rather than your son.’ He set off full-tilt across the murderous plain, only to find after a few minutes that Prosper Masséna, shamed by his father’s behaviour, had followed him. The two young men became friends thereafter, but the marshal never again addressed Marbot by the intimate ‘tu’.

A few days later, at Znaym, the rival armies were once more deploying for battle when an armistice was agreed between the French and the Austrians. Marbot was among a cluster of aides hastily despatched to intervene between the combatants. He raced in front of the advancing infantry, who were already crying ‘Vive l’empereur!’ as their bayonets and those of the Austrians ranged within a hundred paces of each other. A bullet struck the aide’s wrist, inflicting an injury that cost him six months in a sling. He charged on, crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ and holding up his uninjured hand to arrest the French advance. An Austrian officer attempting to convey the same message in front of his own ranks was hit in the shoulder before he and Marbot met and embraced, in a gesture unmistakable to both sides.

In April 1810, after more months of convalescence, Marbot set forth from his mother’s house in Paris to travel ahead of Masséna and prepare for the marshal’s arrival to command the Peninsular army. The major’s passage was enlivened by fever and a brush with Spanish guerrillas. Once he was on the battlefield with Masséna, his memoirs provide one of the most vivid, if absurdly prejudiced, French narratives of the Peninsula experience. He tells of actions and skirmishes innumerable, of ‘Marshal Stockpot’, the French deserter who established himself at the head of a band of French, Portuguese, Spanish and English deserters, living as bandits until Masséna disposed of them. He inflates the toll of English casualties in every encounter. He castigates Masséna for his failure to anticipate and frustrate Wellington’s retreat behind the lines of Torres Vedras – and for his folly in bringing his mistress on campaign.

One of Marbot’s best stories, whether accepted at face value or no, concerns a duel with a British light cavalry officer who trotted forward from Wellington’s lines one morning in March 1811 to challenge him: ‘Stop Mr Frenchman; I should like to have a little fight with you!’ Marbot professed to have treated this nonsense with disdain until the man shouted: ‘I can see by your uniform that you are on the staff of a marshal, and I shall put in the London papers that the sight of me was enough to frighten away one of Masséna’s or Ney’s cowardly aides-de-camp.’ This roused our hero to fury. He turned and charged towards the British officer, only to hear a rustling from nearby woodland, and perceive two English hussars dashing to cut off his retreat. ‘Only a most energetic defence could save me from the disgrace of being taken prisoner, through my own fault, in sight of the whole French army.’

He flew at the English officer, running him through the throat: ‘the wretch fell from his horse to the ground, which he bit in his rage’. Meanwhile, however, the two hussars were slashing Marbot’s shako, wallet and pelisse to ribbons. A thrust from the older soldier pierced the Frenchman’s side an inch deep. Marbot countered with a cut through the man’s jaw which slit his mouth from side to side, arresting his stricken cry of agony and causing him to decamp. The younger English soldier hesitated for a moment before likewise turning to flee, only to receive a thrust in the shoulder to hasten him on his way. Marbot cantered triumphantly back to the French lines, to receive the congratulations of Masséna and Ney, together with the plaudits of the army. As for the price, ‘the wound in my cheek was not important; in a month’s time it had healed over and you can scarcely see the mark of it alongside my left whisker. But the thrust in my right side was dangerous, especially in the middle of a long retreat, in which I was compelled to travel on horseback…Such, my children, was the result of my fight or, if you like, my prank at Miranda de Corvo. You have still got the shako which I wore, and the numerous notches with which the English sabres have adorned it prove that the two hussars did not let me off. I brought away the wallet also, the sling of which was cut in three places, but it has been mislaid.’

Marbot’s own account of himself is inimitable. Here was a soldier of the same mettle as the knights of fourteenth-century Europe, men for whom fighting was both their business and their pleasure. They cared little for softer pleasures or gentler virtues. A prig might say – and many prigs did – that they were a menace to civilisation, for peace was anathema to them. The major returned to France in July 1811, when Masséna was recalled by Bonaparte after his Peninsula disasters. Marbot himself attributed Bonaparte’s fall to his failure to finish the Spanish war before he set forth for Russia. He also acknowledged the quality and marksmanship of British infantry, even if he could never bring himself to think much of Wellington.

Marbot passed the summer and autumn in Paris, and finds a few words in his own tale to mention his marriage, to a certain Mademoiselle Desbrières, of whose character and appearance he says less than about those of his favourite chargers. He was now appointed senior major – and in his own eyes effective commander, given the age and infirmity of his colonel – in the 23rd Chasseurs, a light cavalry regiment. It was at the head of the 23rd, about whose prowess he writes with glowing pride, that he advanced across the Niemen in June 1812, amid the Grand Army bound for Moscow. His regiment served in the corps of Oudinot, for whose incompetence Marbot nursed a hearty contempt. Through the weeks that followed he led his men in action after action, until a brush with Russian infantry on the last day of July cost him a bullet in the shoulder. He frankly admits that he would have accepted evacuation to the rear had not he yearned so desperately for his colonelcy. Bonaparte promoted no man in his absence from the field.

Thus Marbot soldiered on despite the pain of his wound, which was so great that when he led his regiment into action at Polotsk two weeks later he was unable to draw a sword. The 23rd Chasseurs were left at Polotsk with St Cyr’s corps through the two months that followed, while the rest of the Grand Army advanced to Moscow and disaster. To his immense joy, on 15 November Marbot received news of his colonelcy, the letter marked with a scribbled line from Bonaparte: ‘I am discharging an old debt.’

Marbot proudly describes the ingenuity with which he equipped his own regiment to play its part when it was at last summoned to join the Grand Army on the retreat from Moscow. He ensured that the men of the 23rd were provided with winter clothing. Those whose horses died were sent back to Germany, to remove useless mouths. A regimental cattle herd was established and mills commandeered to grind corn for the men, when other units were starving.

In the last days of November, the chasseurs found themselves committed to the terrible action at the crossing of the Beresina, which made an end of so many Frenchmen. On 2 December, in twenty-five degrees of frost, Marbot received a lance thrust in the knee during a mêlée with cossacks, as he strove to turn aside their points with his bare hand in order to reach them with his sabre. Here, indeed, was the bloody intimacy of war as it had been waged since earliest times. The Frenchman was enraged a moment later to feel the pressure of a muzzle against his cheek, and to hear a double report as a cossack fired ‘treacherously’ upon him from behind with a double-barrelled pistol. One bullet passed through the colonel’s cloak, the other killed a French officer. Marbot turned on the Russian in a rage as he took aim with a second pistol. The man suddenly cried out in good French: ‘Oh God! I see death in your eyes! I see death in your eyes!’ Marbot responded furiously: ‘Ay, scoundrel, and you see right!’

Curiously enough, such dialogues were not uncommon in the midst of combat, in an age when many of Bonaparte’s foes spoke French. The Russian fell to his sabre. Marbot then turned on another young Russian, and was raising his weapon when an elderly cossack threw himself across the Frenchman’s horse’s neck, beseeching him: ‘For your mother’s sake spare this one, who has done nothing!’ Marbot claims that on hearing his revered parent invoked, he thought he heard her own voice cry out ‘Pardon! Pardon!’ and stayed his hand. His sword point dropped.

Marbot came out of Russia in terrible pain from his wound, icicles hanging from his horse’s bit, most of his troopers dismounted by the starvation of their mounts, the wounded borne on sledges. Yet his regiment fared vastly better than most. In the 23rd, 698 men returned out of 1,048 who had crossed the Niemen eastwards a few months earlier. Bonaparte complimented Marbot on his achievement in saving so many, though his troopers had missed the worst of the campaign.

The colonel was occupied at the regimental depot at Mons, training replacements, until June 1813 when he resumed command of his active squadrons on the Oder. The highlight of his service at Leipzig was an attempt to encircle and capture the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia as they reconnoitred the French positions on 13 October before battle was joined. Marbot had almost completed a manoeuvre to cut off the glittering array of majesties from their own lines when a careless Frenchman dropped his carbine, which went off, betraying the presence of the chasseurs. The throng of enemy commanders and their staffs hastily turned and galloped away. If only his ploy had succeeded, lamented the colonel, ‘the destinies of Europe would have been changed’. As it was, he could only withdraw his men to the French line and share the army’s fate – decisive defeat. He himself was wounded, bizarrely, by an arrow in the thigh, fired by a Bashkir tribesman in the ranks of the Russians.

Marbot fought on with his regiment through the last bitter battles of the war. At Hanau, the regiment charged five times. Again and again it fought fierce actions to cover the retreat of the shrinking French army. In the winter of 1814, back at his depot in Belgium, which Bonaparte had claimed as French soil, Marbot found local people increasingly hostile and alienated. He fought one of his last little clashes in Mons itself, against Prussian cossacks.

After Bonaparte’s first abdication, Marbot was retained in the Bourbon army, and appointed to command the 7th Hussars. Inevitably, on the return of his idol from Elba he led his regiment to join the emperor’s colours. In the first surge of enthusiasm in April 1815 he perceived a chance that the English, and the rest of Europe, might acquiesce peacefully in the restoration of Bonaparte’s rule. He was swiftly disabused. On 17 June, after the action at Quatre Bras, Marbot was promoted major-general, though his appointment never took effect. He spent most of the day of Waterloo fuming in frustration on the French right wing, waiting to take to Bonaparte news of Grouchy’s arrival with his corps, which was expected hourly.

‘I cannot get over our defeat,’ he wrote in a letter shortly afterwards. ‘We were manoeuvred like so many pumpkins.’ He spent much of the afternoon pushing pickets forward in search of Grouchy. These men instead found themselves skirmishing with Blücher’s vanguard on the Wavre road. When Marbot sent gallopers to inform Bonaparte that strong Prussian columns were advancing upon Mont St Jean, the reply came back that he must be mistaken, these were surely Grouchy’s regiments. Marbot’s few hundred horsemen were driven relentlessly back upon the crumbling imperial army, and soon found themselves receiving the attentions of the British left. The colonel of the 7th Hussars received yet another wound – an English lance thrust in the side. He wrote in a letter soon afterwards: ‘It is pretty severe, but I thought I would stay to set a good example. If everyone had done the same, we might yet get along…No food is sent to us, and so the soldiers pillage our poor France as if they were in Russia. I am at the outposts, before Laon; we have been made to promise not to fire, and all is quiet.’ For Marbot, Bonaparte’s final exile to St Helena prompted despair, and political ruin. He himself, one among so many traitors to the Bourbons, was obliged to quit France for three years of exile in Germany.

To the end of his days, the proud veteran used his pen to defend his beloved emperor and the soldiers of the imperial army against all criticism of their strategy and tactics, and to celebrate their chivalry and courage. Bonaparte read one of Marbot’s works in the last year of his life on St Helena. In appreciation, he added to his will a legacy of 100,000 francs for his former officer, writing: ‘I bid Colonel Marbot continue to write in defence of the glories of the French armies, and to the confusion of calumniators and apostates.’ So indeed the colonel did. On his return from exile he became once more a serving soldier, in 1829 taking command of the 8th Chasseurs. He served as aide de camp to the Duke of Orleans in the following year, and at the age of nearly sixty received yet one more wound, as a general during the Medeah expedition in Algiers. A bullet struck him in the left knee. As he was being carried to the rear, he remarked to the Duke with a smile: ‘This is your fault, sir.’ The Duke demanded: ‘How so?’ Marbot answered: ‘Did I not hear you say, before the fighting began, that if any of your staff got wounded, you could bet it would be Marbot?’ He finally retired in 1848, and died in 1854.

Few warriors in history have taken part in so many of the great battles of their age as did Marbot. Even if a stiff deduction is made from his own account for Gallic extravagance, his courage seems as remarkable as his survival. He performed fifty deeds which, in the wars of the twentieth century, would have been deemed worthy of the highest decorations. Far more astonishingly, he lived to tell the tale. His gifts as a warrior might be described as those of the blessed fool, of whom every army needs a complement in order to prevail on the battlefield, and with which Bonaparte’s armies were exceptionally well-endowed. A century later, Marshal Lyautey declared gaiety to be the most important attribute of a soldier. This Marbot possessed in bountiful measure. He was too humble a servant of the emperor to receive much space in the histories of the period, yet his memoirs render him wonderfully accessible to posterity. Without them, he would remain a mere name, a moustache and pelisse among the glittering throng of bold spirits who surrounded the tyrant of France through the years of his wars. As it is, Marbot created one of the most enchanting contemporary portraits of the life of an officer of Bonaparte. If an Anglo-Saxon cannot suppress laughter at the Frenchman’s awesome conceit, nor can most of us withhold admiration from his boundless appetite for glory. He and his kind perceived the wars which ravaged Europe through their lifetimes merely as wondrous adventures.

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