Masters of War

He was the son of a barrel-maker from a garrison town on the Franco-German frontier. He became, in Napoleon’s own words, le plus brave des braves, the bravest of the brave. Between these two facts lies one of the most extraordinary military careers in recorded history. Michel Ney rose through the armies of revolutionary France on the strength of nothing but his own extraordinary nature, from common hussar to Marshal of the Empire, earning his baton on the battlefields of Hohenlinden, Elchingen, Jena, Eylau, and Friedland. He commanded the rearguard of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1812, keeping it together across a thousand miles of frozen catastrophe, refusing surrender when surrounded by fifty thousand Russians at Krasnoi, crossing the frozen Dnieper in the dark with three thousand survivors, and arriving, against every calculation of the possible, at the army that had given him up for lost. At Waterloo, his last battle, he rode five horses into the British squares and was the last officer of senior rank to leave the field. I have three hundred million in my treasury, but I could not make another Ney. - NAPOLEON BONAPARTE This volume in the Masters of War series presents a complete, neutral, and unflinching account of Ney’s life and military career. It does not judge him by the side he fought on or the empire he served, but by what he was as a soldier, a leader of men, and a human being under the most extreme demands that any life can impose. It is a story of genius and limitation, of magnificent courage and imperfect command, of a man most completely himself in the moments of greatest danger, and of the loyalty he inspired in soldiers who followed him into the impossible, again and again, because they had seen him go there first.