Masters of War

Masters of War: Louis-Nicolas Davout, The Iron Marshal On the morning of 14 October 1806, Louis-Nicolas Davout marched his corps of twenty-six thousand men into the path of the main Prussian army, sixty thousand soldiers under the Duke of Brunswick, at the village of Hassenhausen. He had no orders to fight a general engagement. He had no prospect of reinforcement. He had no reason, by any calculation of military probability, to believe he could win. Eight hours later, the Prussian army had ceased to exist as a fighting force. Brunswick lay dying. The road to Berlin was open. And Davout stood on a field of battle he had no business winning, having won it entirely on his own. He is the only marshal of the Napoleonic Empire who was never defeated in independent command. Not once. Not in twenty years of the most ferocious warfare Europe had ever seen. Born into the provincial nobility of Burgundy in 1770, Davout rose from a cavalry subaltern to Prince of Eckmühl and Duke of Auerstaedt through the sheer, systematic force of his professional qualities: iron discipline, logistical genius, absolute honesty with his superior, and a personal courage that never required an audience. He held the line at Austerlitz when the French plan depended on it. He enveloped the Austrian army at Eckmühl and Wagram with the patience of a commander who had learned that method outlasts inspiration. He commanded the rearguard of the Russian retreat through the December snows with the same professional completeness he had brought to every other task his career had placed before him. And he held Hamburg for ten months after Napoleon had abdicated, the last marshal in the field, surrendering only when the legitimate authority that had placed him there formally and verifiably released him from his orders. This book is his full story, from the schoolboy at the Écoles Militaires who sat beside the young Napoleon Bonaparte, to the old soldier dying in Paris in 1823 with his name already carved in stone on the Arc de Triomphe. It is the account of a man who defined excellence not through the brilliant gesture but through the sustained, daily, uncompromising application of every quality the military art demands, and who left behind him a record that two centuries have not diminished and the most searching examination has never found wanting.