The tragic fate of Marshal Ney

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Thomas Gray,

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Michel Ney, one of Napoleon ’ s original marshals, was renowned for his extraordinary courage in battle. One historian declared that Ney, who did not fear death, “ had no use for money or ambition or politics or anything except military glory. Yet his career ended in defeat at Waterloo, his life in disgrace and execution. The rise and fall of a tragic hero, noble in battle but flawed in political judgment, inspired various nineteenth-century novelists and his story continued to fascinate writers in the twentieth century.

The son of a humble barrel-maker, Ney (1769-1815, pictured below) was born in a French enclave in the German Saarland and was bilingual. After leading the French army to victory in many great battles, he commanded the rearguard in the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and was known as the last Frenchman to leave Russian soil. In 1814 he pressured Napoleon to abdicate and accept exile on Elba, and was rewarded when the Bourbons regained the throne. When Napoleon escaped and returned to France in 1815, Ney promised to capture him and bring him back alive in an iron cage. Instead, believing that Napoleon could regain power, he joined him and fought under him at Waterloo, twelve miles south of Brussels.

Ney ’ s cavalry overran the British cannons but, without infantry or artillery support, repeatedly failed to break the well-armed square-formations. His men were slaughtered as they tried to advance through the valley of death in the worst carnage Ney had ever seen. He led the charge over and over again and had five horses killed under him, but his reckless assaults were partly responsible for the French defeat in June 1815. Waterloo, the final battle of the Napoleonic wars, decided the fate of Europe.

One of the greatest soldiers in French history, Ney had survived every major campaign. When Napoleon was exiled for the second time, on St Helena, Ney – who had changed sides once too often – was tried for treason by the Royalists. In an act of judicial murder in December 1815, he was sentenced to execution by firing squad. Courageous to the end, Ney refused to wear a blindfold and was allowed to give his final order. He continued to justify himself and shouted: “ Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her. . . . Soldiers, fire!”

Napoleon had called Ney “ the bravest of the brave” and given him command at Waterloo. But on St Helena he was embittered by Ney ’ s first betrayal and their disastrous last battle. He declared, despite Ney ’ s formidable achievements, that he was “ brave and nothing more . . . good at leading 10,000 men into battle, but other than that a real blockhead.”

Ney ’ s extraordinary exploits and cruel fate fascinated and inspired Stendhal, Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy. Ney became a character in their novels and added a realistic element. Hemingway included both Stendhal ’ s long description of the battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and Victor Hugo ’ s account in Les Miserables (1862) in his propagandistic military anthology Men at War (1942).

Stendhal portrays Ney through the eyes of the young Fabrizio, who is thrilled to catch sight of his glorious hero, the ruddy-complexioned Ney. He briefly joins Ney ’ s escort, manages to identify and scrutinise him, sees him severely rebuke a subordinate, is overwhelmed by his reputation and dreams of achieving military glory:

[His horse dashed off] to join the escort that was following the generals. Fabrizio counted four gold-laced hats. A quarter of an hour later, from a few words said by one hussar to the next, Fabrizio gathered that one of these generals was the famous Marshal Ney. His happiness knew no bounds; only he had no way of telling which of the four generals was Marshal Ney; he would have given everything in the world to know. . .

He noticed the biggest of these generals who was speaking to his neighbour, a general also, in a tone of authority and almost of reprimand; he was swearing. . .

“ Who is that general who is chewing up the one next to him?”

“ Gad, it ’ s the Marshal.”

“ What Marshal?”

“ Marshal Ney, you fool! I say, where have you been serving?”

Fabrizio, although highly susceptible, had no thought of resenting this insult; he was studying, lost in childish admiration, the famous Prince de la Moskowa, the “ Bravest of the Brave”.

Stendhal contrasts the bewildered but idealistic young Fabrizio with the authoritative commands of Marshal Ney; Hugo includes an omniscient historian ’ s account of Waterloo in the midst of his novel. To maintain Ney ’ s heroic stature, neither Stendhal nor Hugo describes his fatal cavalry charges. Hugo ’ s viewpoint is more critical and incisive than that of Stendhal ’ s young soldier Fabrizio. Stendhal gives brief glimpses of Ney advising the high-spirited and self-confident Napoleon, and appearing in battle, before finally summing up his reckless character:

[The rains] did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, “ We have ninety chances out of a hundred.” . . . The Emperor jested with Ney, who had said, “ Wellington will not be so simple as to wait for Your Majesty.” . . . Wellington held the village and the plain; Ney had only the crest and the slope. . . . [Desperate for help,] Ney demanded infantry from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, “ Infantry! Where does he expect me to get it? Does he think I can make it?”

Hugo portrays Ney after Waterloo as a disarmed, slashed, wounded, half-mad and suicidal warrior who wants to die in combat. In an overheated operatic passage, Hugo writes:

Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foam on his lips, with uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a sword-stroke from the horse-guard, his plaque with the great eagle dented by a bullet; bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said, “ Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of battle!” But in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At [Marshal] Drouet d ’ Erlon he hurled this question, “ Are you not going to get yourself killed?” In the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men, he shouted: “ So there is nothing for me! Oh! I should like to have all these English bullets enter my chest!”

Hugo then alludes to the irony of Ney ’ s tragic execution: “ Unhappy man, thou wert reserved for French bullets!”

In a final heroic gesture Ney, stripped of his Marshal ’ s insignia, tries and fails to rouse his retreating army, who can offer only vocal support: “ The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword, dashes across the Brussels road, stopping both English and French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he insults it, he clings to the route. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly from him, shouting, ‘ Long live Marshal Ney!’”

Though Ney did not value the lives of his men, nor even his own, they continued to worship him. Robert Browning ’ s Incident of the French Camp (1845) reveals the sacrifice Napoleon ’ s soldiers were willing to make for their charismatic leaders. When a rider arrives to announce the capture of Ratisbon, Napoleon exclaims:

“ You ’ re wounded!”—“Nay,” the soldier ’ s pride

Touched to the quick, he said:

“ I ’ m killed, Sire! ” And his chief beside,

Smiling the boy fell dead.

In War and Peace (1867) Tolstoy describes the Russian victory in the 1812 battle of Borodino and shows how the decisions of the commanders affect the lives of his fictional characters. When one general proposed “ to lead his division through the forest, Napoleon signified assent,” but Ney, in a cautious but shrewd assessment, “ ventured to observe that to move troops through woodland is risky”. Tolstoy writes that all immediate decisions about cannons, infantry and cavalry were made on the spot “ by the nearest officers in the ranks, without reference to Ney, Davoust, and Murat, far less to Napoleon himself”. But he also notes that these commanders risked their lives by leading great numbers of troops into combat: “ Napoleon ’ s generals, Davoust, Ney, and Murat, who were close to that region of fire, and sometimes even rode into it, several times led immense masses of orderly troops into that region.”

These great novels kept the figure of Ney alive in the literary imagination. Sixty years later Ford Madox Ford also thought Ney was a promising subject and describes a proposed collaboration with Conrad in his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924). Their hero “ Assheton Smith was to have been the central figure of our novel about the [attempt to prevent the execution] of Ney – the Milord with the spleen intervening nearly successfully to save the beau sabreur ” – the dashing adventurer. They also planned to describe the imaginary role played by the Tsar (hated by Conrad), who demanded the execution of the enemy who had devastated his country.

Like Ford, Robert Lowell focuses on Ney ’ s death. Lowell ’ s memoir “ 91 Revere Street” in Life Studies recalls playing, as a boy, with tall, hand-painted lead soldiers, “ recognisable replicas of mounted Napoleonic captains: Kleber, Marshal Ney.” His poem “ Leaving Home, Marshal Ney” ( History , 1973) echoes King Lear ’ s lamentation for the dead Cordelia: “ Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” and mourns Ney ’ s unjust execution: “ a Marshal of France, and shot for too much courage— / why should shark be eaten when bait swim free?”

Ernest Hemingway, an expert on military history, had a dozen books on Napoleon in his library. He idolised his military heroes and friends, Dorman-Smith and Buck Lanham, and identified with the courageous but tragic Marshal. Hemingway paid tribute to him in letters of April 1945 and July 1948, and wrote, “ Been re-reading about Mike Ney. . .  He was not only a terrible [i.e., frightening] fighting man – he was a very good man.” He also described, with some exaggeration, “ Michel Ney the cooper ’ s son who fought some 200 rear-guard actions covering the retreat of the army from Moscow.”

Ney ’ s statue (pictured below) stood near the Paris flat where Hemingway lived in the early 1920s and in front of his favourite caf é , La Closerie des Lilas (the small lilac garden). In a richly compressed paragraph in A Moveable Feast (1964) he refers to him affectionately, as if his old companion were still alive, as Marshal Ney, Ney and, more familiarly, Mike Ney. He mentions but doesn ’ t describe Ney ’ s disastrous charges at Waterloo, alludes to the “ Lost Generation” epigraph of The Sun Also Rises  and makes Ney represent all the doomed heroes in history. Hemingway admires the beauty of the fierce statue and nostalgically recalls “ the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him [in Moscow] and what a fiasco he ’ d made of Waterloo. I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company . . . watching the statue and remembering how many days Ney had fought, personally, with the rear-guard on the retreat from Moscow that Napoleon had ridden away from in the coach with Caulaincourt.” General Armand de Caulaincourt ’ s memoir With Napoleon in Russia recalls that “ We set out at exactly ten o ’ clock in the evening of December 5, 1812. The Emperor and I were in his sleeping coach.” As Napoleon rode comfortably away, Ney remained behind to cover the retreat.

Four decades after Ney ’ s death the Bourbons had left the scene and the French began to revalue his military career.During the dynastic reign of Napoleon III the heroic bronze statue of Marshal Ney by François Rude (1853) was placed on a high plinth on the Avenue de l ’ Observatoire , near the place where he was executed. Ney triumphantly raises his sword in his right hand as if leading a cavalry charge and places his left hand on his scabbard. He looks to the left with an open mouth and seems to be defiantly shouting an order. He wears a bicorn hat, epaulets, decorations on his tunic, Marshal ’ s sash across his chest and high riding boots with spurs, and has a cannon at his feet. Ney ’ s rehabilitation continued fifteen years later in 1868 when Jean-L é on Ger ôme painted The Execution of Marshal Ney . On a misty morning the officer and firing squad, their work finished, stand at ease on the left. Ney ’ s bullet-ridden body lies face down on the ground before a yellow, pock-marked wall, with the dome of the Paris Observatory in the background.

Ney had turned against Napoleon and joined the Royalists, left the Royalists and rejoined Napoleon, then behaved recklessly and was defeated at Waterloo. Both sides were furious with him and saw him as a turncoat. But the heartfelt tributes of leading artists and writers from Stendhal to Hemingway contrasted Ney ’ s military triumphs with his involvement in politics and saw him as the embodiment of heroism betrayed by those in power. They all kept Ney ’ s memory alive and redeemed their hero ’ s honour and reputation.

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