Michel Ney

But then Tennyson's In Memoriam, as Napoleon approaches the end of his life, you've got this echo from...

Tennyson's great poem Mourning His Friend Hallam and there are references to Hopkins poems just because he's Burgess's favourite poet I suppose and later on you get parodies of Henry James and Walter Scott and everybody else but just to give you an example of the quality of the poetry there's a section where there's a kind of ballad about Marshall Ney who's one of the characters and He's trying to sort of tell you a song, as it says, about Marshall Ney.

And this strikes me as a sort of parody of the worst bits of Thomas Hardy's big Napoleonic book, which is called The Dynasts.

And it goes like this.

I'll sing you a song of Marshall Ney, whose fame will live for many a day, the scourge of Austria and Prussia.

and The Last Man Out of Russia.

And this is supposed to be doggerel, I think, but it's kind of scrolling things forward and giving you some information.

It's all there, the potentiality.

About two months ago in a junk shop in Bangay, which is the nearest small town to where I live, I fished out of a box of cheap prints a little card which had a lichen on it, a dried lichen, and underneath it said in very neat handwriting, gathered from the tomb of Marshal Ney, Paris, 7th of July, 1833.

And something like this, totally, you know, valueless as such somehow gets me going.

Hearing Max's

That's right.

Of the 26, you have Marshal Murat, who's the son of an innkeeper, Marshal Ney, who's the son of a barrel cooper, the sons of peasants and domestic servants and so on, all the way up to five or six of them who were aristocrats, including Alexandre Berthier and Louis Davout.

Actually, it's six if you include Marshal Sérurier, whose father was the royal mole catcher.

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The plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen, really admirable.

The battle once begun, its very various changes, the resistance of Hougoumont, the tenacity of La Haie Sainte, the killing of Baudoin, the disabling of Foy, the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was shattered, Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder-sacks, the miring of the batteries, the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge, the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud so that the canister was turned into a splash, the uselessness of Pire's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons almost exterminated, the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into, Ney's strange mistake in massing instead of echeloning the four divisions of the First Corps, men delivered over to grapeshot arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred, the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls, attacking columns disorganized, the side battery suddenly unmasked on their flank, Bourgeois, Donzelot and Durutte compromised, Kio repulsed, Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercule graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door of La Haie Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels, Marconnier's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby, his battery of seven pieces spiked, the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding in spite of the Comte d'Erlon both Frichemont and Smain, the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured, that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit, the alarming things that had been said by prisoners, Grouchy's delay, fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougoumont in less than an hour, eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La Haie Sainte, all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty.

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war.

He never added up the heart-rending details cipher by cipher.

That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at nine o'clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing, let us watch o'er the safety of the empire, they had come in a solid column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left Kellerman's cuirassiers, and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the emperor's orders.

Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head.

The enormous squadrons were set in motion.

By June, Napoleon had amassed an army of 300,000 men, and divided the group into three, although only around 72,000 would participate in the Battle of Waterloo.

The left wing was commanded by Marshal Michel Ney, while the right was commanded by Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy.

In the following days, Napoleon moved across Belgium, overrunning coalition outposts and establishing his position between the armies of Gebhard von Blücher, the commander of the Prussian army, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington and the commander of the Anglo-allied army.

Napoleon sought to take on these armies separately by preventing them from joining together.

In the early hours of June 16th, Wellesley received word that Napoleon was in the city of Charleroi, and ordered that his men concentrate on a hamlet named Quatre Braches, a position that the Prince of Orange, who later became the King of the Netherlands, was holding alongside Prince Carl Bernard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who was also a colonel.

The troops were able to hold the crossroads at Quatre Braches, in part thanks to the support of one of the Dutch divisions, the leader of which disobeyed order from Wellesley, that would have sent him and his men to the city of Nivelles.

The small band of troops operating under the command of the Prince of Orange was initially able to fend off the incoming onslaught by the left wing of the French army, but since they had the greater numbers, Marshal Ney's men were eventually able to push back the opposing troops.

The ensuing conflict is now known as the Battle of Quatre Braches, and ultimately led to an Anglo-allied victory, after Wellesley and his men arrived at the scene and helped to drive away the French.

There were several who came from the working classes.

Marshal Ney was the son of a barrel cooper.

Marshal Murat was the son of an innkeeper.

There were sons of Pierre Augereau's father, a domestic servant, and there were others who were...

and expected from that their loyalty and their love and devotion.

By 1813, those marshals wanted to enjoy all those things, and they wanted to spend a bit of time with their families, and they thought 21 years of constant warfare was too much.

They pretty much, by 1814, led by Marshal Ney at Fontainebleau, basically forced Napoleon to abdicate.

Did he encourage them to be rivals with each other? I mean, there are some spectacular rivalries.

Some were virtually illiterate.

Um, uh, Marshal Ney left school at the age of 12.

Others, uh, were, were highly educated.

They came from completely different class backgrounds as well.

Um, some of them were, like Marshal Ney, who's the son of a, um, barrel cooper.

Um, Murat was the son of an innkeeper.

Augereau was the son of a domestic servant.

Uh, um, because he was miles away from where he wanted to land, which was Naples itself, because he believed that he had a popular following i- amongst the working classes of, of Naples, probably wrongly.

Then there were some aristocrats like Davout and Berthier.

And so, um, with educational, um, qualifications, there's everything from Marshal Ney, who, who was virtually illiterate, hardly went to school at all, to some really highly intelligent, um, people who were very good writers like Marmont, Davout.

And, um- And so you have this really broad spectrum, but they did have, they all have one thing in common, which was extraordinary, raw courage.

The 26 of them added together suffered no fewer than 94 wounds in [laughs] their lives.

And these are people going into Russia rather than coming out.

Mm.

You know, once you've, uh, once you're coming out, then, uh, Marshal Ney, who's in charge of the rearguard, uh, who's nicknamed the Bravest of the Brave, uh, is tremendously, extraordinarily, um, brave, but he's unable really to save, uh, many more than a few thousand.

And in all, of the 615,000 that go into Russia, only 93,000 come back.