The Illustrious Dead Read Online Free Page B

of the men wanted to have an adventure, to squeeze some loot out of their enemies, to honor France or their own brief lives, or to write their name in glory on the battlefield. Napoleon guaranteed that one could burst from the ranks and become an officer for a single act of bravery, and that spoke to many of his soldiers.
    The Grande Armée was divided into three components. The 250,000-strong First Army Group was made up of three battalions, along with the Imperial Guard and the cavalry. The Second and Third Army groups, totaling 315,000 men, would play a mainly supporting role, guarding supply lines, patrolling the rear, and being called on to reinforce depleted battalions.
    Napoleon led the Imperial Guard of 50,000 handpicked troops known as the “immortals.” These were the reserves, to be utilized to tilt a battle at the crucial moment. The Imperial Guard, essential to the outcome of so many battles past and to come, were Napoleon’s elite: Each had to be able to read and write and stand above five foot six (in a time when most Frenchmen were closer to five feet). Each had served in at least three campaigns and bore the scars of at least two wounds. They looked the part of the military beau ideal in their two-foot shakos: mustached, young, and strapping.
    If you wanted to find living, breathing examples of what changes Napoleon had wrought, you could do worse than look to the ranks of this army, especially the men who led them, his marshals. They were the new aristocracy. The title of “marshal” had existed before the Revolution as part of the vast system of favor currying and court intrigue that had so depressed the young Napoleon and his peers, but the emperor refashioned it into an order of real accomplishment, open to anyone. He named twenty-six marshals between 1804 and 1815. In Louis XVI’s time, many of them would have toiled away in obscurity. Under Napoleon, they made his army even more formidable. Among them, Davout, Murat, and Ney, along with General Junot, stand out.
    Louis-Nicolas Davout was the exception among the four: he would most likely have played a leading role in the French army if Napoleon had never been born. A strict taskmaster and disciplinarian, he was descended from a blue-blooded line of patrician warriors that extended back to the Crusades. Known as the “Iron Marshal,” the balding general was the archetype of the committed professional soldier that forms the backbone of any great army. Many commanders envied him, as Davout had been the first among them to achieve fame in France. He was as hated for his perfectionism and his temper as he was admired, but his troops knew at least that he would see to their every need and would suffer every hardship they suffered. He commanded I Corps.
    Joachim Murat was a different kind of personality entirely. He had grown up around horses, working in the stables of his father, a country innkeeper, until he was sent away to join the priesthood, a perfectly respectable career. But it was the wrong one for Murat, who with his almost feminine good looks and thirst for fame wanted a career in the cavalry. Murat ran away to join the King’s Chasseurs at the age of twenty and became Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Italian campaign. Dressed in his trademark outré costumes—scarlet thigh-high leather boots, a tunic made of cloth of gold, a sky blue jacket, and a sword belt crusted with diamonds was a typical combination—he consistently matched his daring on the field with an instinctive flair for tactics, especially in a brilliant flanking maneuver in Egypt that won him his own division. Napoleon once snapped at the young general, “You look like a clown,” but he favored boldness in his generals and Murat exemplified it.
    Murat did lack Davout’s almost genetic loyalty to his leader. He had flirted with Josephine, and he was thrown into a fit of depression and jealousy when Napoleon failed to name him king of Spain, instead awarding him Naples. The